Department of English

• Monday, November 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are thrilled to welcome Francesco Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled “Scribe 106: The Portfolio of a Florentine Humanistic Scribe.”

Professor Aresu writes:

“Scribe 106—so labeled for his rank in Albinia de la Mare’s seminal census of humanistic scribes—designates an anonymous copyist active in Florence during the latter half of the fifteenth century. De la Mare identified approximately twenty manuscripts with this scribe, whose production reveals a marked affinity for the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero and for Francesco Petrarca’s vernacular poetry (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Triumphi). While some of these attributions have since been revised, new witnesses continue to surface—most recently MS Codex 2196 at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries—expanding the known corpus of Scribe 106. This talk explores the scribe’s manuscript production, poetics, and literary culture, as well as his elusive identity. It then turns to his sustained engagement with Petrarca’s vernacular texts, tracing how he negotiated, across multiple copies, both textual and material concerns in response to evolving editorial and aesthetic paradigms in the presentation and transmission of Petrarchan poetry.”

Francesco Marco Aresu is is assistant professor of Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of expertise are Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, medieval and humanistic philology, manuscript studies, literary theory, and Sardinian literature. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press. He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, the manuscript tradition of Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Baroque theater, Folengo’s Baldus, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi. He is editor for the PetrArchive, associate editor for Heliotropia, and editor-in-chief of Bibliotheca Dantesca. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press. Before joining Penn, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.