iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Findings in a secondhand bookshop in Naples

Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Sad I couldn't be there with my convent mates at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane who are celebrating their solemn profession (and yet so happy for them!). Thinking more and more of their cosmopolitanism, their resilience and generosity as they go into the world as friars!

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Playing with comma.inria.fr found this fun variant in Orosius: "Ommitto Aethiopum interfectorem patris" with Aethiopum later corrected in Oedippum.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

My favourite marriage of erudition and theoretical ambition

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Especially because after finding this 18th century catalogue of it at the Archivio di Stato I really want to write an article about it

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

And that's a wrap! My time in Rome ended but before I had a chance to catalogue (with some help) the last 20 books from the library here, in Hebrew for the most part or in Arabic, like this rare sammelband combining rare 16th c prints of the Al-Ājarrūmiyya and the al-Kāfiya. Can't wait to come back!

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The joy of visiting a library in Rome for the first time and the thrill of serendipities behind superficial catalog descriptions

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I'm leaving Rome next week and thinking of Ungaretti's Girogavo from more than a hundred years ago. A ogni nuovo clima che incontro mi trovo languente che una volta già gli ero stato assuefatto E me ne stacco sempre straniero

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Having some neyyappam after my first qurbana in Rome, full of synths, LEDs, and saris.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

A kind of glue? I have worked with some manuscripts in which slips of paper (glued over the marginal notes, I believe) were used to hide a wealth of annotations.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Looking forward to presenting in Madrid this Tuesday a paper titled "Intellectual Genealogies of Marian Mystical Discourse: the Apocalypsis Nova between the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish Americas" (in excellent company! and just in time for San Isidro!)

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Looking forward to this in Rome! "Marc Bloch. Letture dall'Italia" - 20-22 May.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Napoli L'Orientale: small photodump from the Jesuit Missions in Northern Abyssinia conference. So much cool stuff, Psalm 68:31 vibes.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

18-month postdoctoral position in Florence (BNCF & INSR) linked to the curation of the incoming Sensi exhibition. Deadline: May 16 bncf.cultura.gov.it/amministrazi...

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Until the day when God shall deign to reveal and preserve all knowledge for us, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words: scrape and store.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Wish me luck as I climb these once again after 15 years. Hope they have aged less or better than I have!

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

I'll be presenting in two weeks at a conference at L'Orientale that I feel genuinely excited about! Somewhat unexpectedly, I have managed to put something together on Ethiopian and European prophecies, connecting past and current research. Come say hello if you're in Naples this 4-5 May!

Promotional poster for the international conference "Jesuit Missions in Northern Abyssinia (1557–1632): A Comprehensive Approach," held 4–5 May 2026, under the Progetto di Ateneo 2023 JeMiNA

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Coming from Gəʽəz class and wishing there was a Lingua Aethiopica Per Se Illustrata. Verbal morphology of Semitic languages go brrrr.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Biblioteca Angelica photo dump: random sanguigne, a schedone listing Natalie Zemon Davis checking the same ms., and an (to me) unexpected witness of the De hermaphrodito

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

The Jesuit passed some photocopies of it to Jean Aubin, who then passed it to Luís Filipe Thomaz. The Bonn copy, as far as I could is nowhere to be found, unsurprisingly after the closure of the Jesuit library in Bonn.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

They were three before: Leite de Faria writes in 1977 that the director of the Imprensa Nacional, where Graça Barreto worked since age 15(!), destroyed their copy. Again, the Jesuits from the Bibliotheca Missionum register the passing of a copy from typesetter Dias Coelho to p. G. Schurhammer SJ.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

A footnote from La Civiltà Cattolica in 1934 adds context: humidy destroyed all copies but two, which are missing some pages. This becomes more clear in 1951 thanks to the Jesuits from the Bibliotheca Missionum, who not only provide the actual title but the location of the surviving copies!

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

This, informally known as Documenta Habessinica, was Graça Barreto's planned 2,000-document collection on Portuguese-Ethiopian history, from the first Portuguese push into Abyssinia in the 15th century through João V's attempt to restore the patriarchate in the 18th. century. A landmark project.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

After a minute, I realise it's this old volume of sources I had, Graça Barreto's appendix to the Bullario do padroado ultramarino focusing on Ethiopia. But the volume (n.b. Tomus II) does not list documents by number. And it was the first the come out, and in fact the only one.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Reading René Basset's" Deux lettres éthiopiennes du XVIe siècle" (1889) (a French translation of a memoria by Portuguese Ethiopianist Esteves Pereira and I start reading quotes from a collection of sources "Documenta Habessinica"...

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Just learned of the Italian medieval surnames Fottivecchia, Tappaculo or Cacalosso; however, my actual favourite is by far Fotendarnus (fotte indarno)

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Venerdì prossimo a Bologna parlerò della fine del mondo e la Venezia del Cinquecento insieme a Davide Scotto all'interno di un seminario intitolato "Da Acri a Costantinopoli: Riccoldo da Monte di Croce e Paolo Angelo sulla crisi del cristianesimo di fronte all’islam" www.fscire.it/lang/eng/whe...

Poster for a seminar series titled “When Worlds End: Religion and Crisis in Historical Perspective.” The event takes place on March 27, 2026, from 10:30 to 13:00 at Biblioteca G. Dossetti in Bologna and online via Zoom. Speakers include Davide Scotto and Eduardo Fernández Guerrero.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

📚🎒 Back to school! So excited to be in Rome to study Gəʿəz at Sapienza for 3 months supported by a British Academy Talent Development Award! My first Semitic language! And so very grateful to the community of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane for their hospitality, it’s a dream to be back here.

Façade of Sapienza's Filosofia e lettere faculty

Inner courtyard of San Carlo Alle quattro fontane

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

"But I am done with apple-picking now"

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

Stumbled upon this book about Andalusian architecture and what a trove.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

I met my first Phillipps ms., and visited for the first time what I think might be the nicest manuscript reading room I have ever been too (after a slight detour)

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

I'm giving a small presentation tomorrow about early modern gambling and magic in a very informal context and I am particularly happy with this slide

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Reading Auden mostly for the first time and call me affected, but he missed the opportunity to break the line after "narrow".

Part IV

Poems 1931-1936

(TO ERIKA MANN)

Since the external disorder, and extravagant lies, The baroque frontiers, the surrealist police; What can truth treasure, or heart bless, But a narrow strictness?

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

If I had to picture God, I would do it with more of a Mediterranean inclination. However, after coming here I do get the nickname of "God's own country" for Yorkshire.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Newly digitised Gəʽəz manuscript just dropped

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

After the London protests of last Saturday, I find myself thinking of this poem by Joan Margarit: "yet fear has never left me either / for life has shown me the faces / of those who could be my assassins."

Àvila, juliol del trenta-sis:
ell va gravar els seus noms a la muralla.
El cel lluent d’estiu el travessaven
les bales negres de les orenetes
amb les notícies dels primers morts.
És l’èpica que em queda: anys més tard,
sota la por que vaig sentir d’infant,
vaig aprendre a callar i a somiar
sentint aquelles veus: Tindràs la teva guerra.

Ja no queda ningú dels qui m’ho deien.
Mai no he gravat cap nom en una pedra,
però tampoc m’ha abandonat la por,
perquè la vida m’ha mostrat els rostres
dels qui podrien ser els meus assassins.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

I’ll be working on transcontinental knowledge production, focused on early modern Ethiopian and European intellectual collaborations, Ṣägga Zäʾab and Damião de Góis. Really looking forward to connecting with and learning from new colleagues! See you in London!

$Dr Eduardo Fernández Guerrero PFSS25\250045 ‘European Translations of African Christianity: Ethiopian Religion through Humanist Writings’ School of Advanced Study, University of London £292,548.00 This project investigates the production and dissemination of knowledge about African Christianity in Europe during the sixteenth century, focusing on Ethiopian Christianity and its representation by European authors. Central to this research is the examination of texts by African Christians, their European translations and adaptations, and the dynamics of their readership: more especifically, the main case study revolves around the Ethiopian writings by Damião de Góis and Ṣägga Zäᵓab on Ethiopian religious practices as a key site for negotiating early modern genealogies of Christian and European identities. Unlike most previous scholarship, which has often focused on diplomatic and geopolitical aspects or individual Ethiopian figures, this project uses religion and ethnography as lenses to explore the transcontinental co-production of knowledge, particularly in the context of the Protestant Reformation and Iberian colonial expansion, thus aiming to recenter African agency in European early modern intellectual history.$

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

So very happy and excited to share that I’ve been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to join the @warburginstitute.bsky.social for the next three years!🎉I'll be carrying out a project titled "European Translations of African Christianity: Ethiopian Religion through Humanist Writings"

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Erri De Luca but it could be Alda Merini

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Fantastic 8y-year postdoc position in Belgium: HOBBiT – Heritage Old “Belgian” Books in Transition (HOBBiT) : Books and libraries in “Belgian” monasteries of the Windesheim Congregation, 15th – early 16th centuries Deadline: August 15th www.kbr.be/wp-content/u...

Emploi vacant
16 juillet 2025
KBR (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique)
&
l’Université de Namur
RECRUTENT
un(e) docteur(e) dans le domaine de l’histoire des cultures du livre, Moyen Âge – Renaissance
(programme FED-tWIN)
Projet : HOBBiT – Heritage Old “Belgian” Books in Transition (HOBBiT) : Books and libraries in
“Belgian” monasteries of the Windesheim Congregation, 15th – early 16th centuries
Nos descriptions de fonction sont rédigées au masculin uniquement pour des raisons de lisibilité.
Toutes les fonctions s’adressent de manière égale aux femmes et aux hommes.
Nombre de poste(s) : 1

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Yunte Huang, "Living transpacifically", in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, 2014) on geopolitics and intellectual property

Our good fortune in not being captured, electronically or bodily, now seems to have become a misfortune: Unable to find myself in the sea of images, I feel consigned to the oblivion of history. The evidentiary vacuum becomes especially painful for me now that our relationship is falling apart; seeing our faces together in the historical event which once brought us closer would at least provide some however ineffective consolation.

One day, while browsing through the archives in the library, my attention is caught by the following passage in a book:

The occupation of Tiananmen Square in late May 1989 by thousands of Chinese students, workers, and other citizens stirred the imagination of millions throughout the world, but evoked far less response from the U.S. government than did the possibility of successfully concluding discussions then under way with the PRC concerning intellectual property protection. The Bush administration’s professed concern about interfering in China’s internal affairs, which supposedly constrained it from pushing with vigor, either publicly or privately, for a peaceful resolution of the occupation of the square, simply did not carry over to intellectual property. Instead, even as tensions mounted between hunger strikers in the square and elders of the Chinese Communist party, the U.S. government repeatedly threatened the PRC with massive and unprecedented trade sanctions if China did not promise to devise legal protection for computer software to America’s liking. And so it was that as the Chinese government spent May 19 putting the finishing touches to the declaration of martial law that was to signal a tragic end to the Beijing Spring of 1989, American negotiators were busy putting their own finishing touches to a memorandum regarding computer software protection.

A goodly portion of its available diplomatic leverage to securing promises about software, were neither inadvertent nor passing tactical errors.

I would hate to believe that my own fate is somehow inextricably tied up with some shady business interests negotiated between a country that has dashed my hopes and a country that promises to fulfill all of them. But the evidence presented in this book seems undeniable.

If the author’s charge is true—that in 1989 the Bush administration promised to turn a blind eye to the impending massacre on Tiananmen Square on the condition that the Chinese government would yield to the U.S. corporate demand for protections of intellectual property—then in retrospect, I myself may have involuntarily played a small part in these larger events that seem to have sealed my own fate.

During my four years in Beijing, I spent endless hours in bookstores. At many bookstores in China at the time, there was always a room that would look like an inner chamber of a jewelry store where the owner hides rare items of dubious provenance, available for viewing and touching only by his best clients. At the entrance of the room, a sign would be posted: “NO ADMITTANCE TO FOREIGNERS.” Inside that room, beyond the reach of the so-called foreigners, lay a secret world of phantasmagoria: that’s where the pirated editions of Western-language books were sold.

From the viewpoint of Western countries, who have pillaged the world for centuries in the name of progress, religion, or even humanity, this room, with its piles of promiscuously imitated, cheaply reproduced, and clandestinely transacted items of piracy, symbolizes the inexcusable lawlessness and backwardness of Third World countries. But from the standpoint of the latter, piracy is like the revenge of lost innocence, or at least an attempt to chip away slightly the other’s edge and use those scraps to anneal their own blades.

To me, a tiny speck in the uneven flows of global, transpacific cultural cap…

The honored visitor was almost moved to tears when he saw a class of fifty students huddling over half a dozen copies of his book, as if we were a group of starved children in an African village treasuring the only copy of a textbook. Little did he know that the seeming hunger in our look was merely an expression of admiration for the beautiful cover, design, and fine paper of the original edition, which we had never seen, even though many of us had learned the book’s contents almost by heart from its cheap imitation.

After the lecture, the original editions disappeared as mysteriously as they had appeared.

Up to the time of the Tiananmen massacre, the unofficial, routine Chinese response to the Western demand for better protection of intellectual property was this snickering retort: “What intellectual property? We Chinese invented paper, gun powder, compass, printing and whatnot, but we didn’t even get a penny for them.” Apparently, in 1989, the beneficiaries of piracy, the Chinese students who were eager to learn about the West, paid dearly, with their young blood.

When such a cruel irony finally dawns upon me, I can only think of what Milan Kundera once said, “Here the historical situation is not a background, a stage set before which human situations unfold; it is itself a human situation, a growing existential situation.” The pirated editions of those books I have carried with me across the Pacific Ocean, both physically and mentally, seem to have sealed my fate the minute my hand touched them in those clandestine backrooms of Beijing bookstores.

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Re-reading Papadiamantis and, while not moved to tears like the first time, the katharevousa and the story is still so moving

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Thinking again of Balthazar Korab and Florence

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

Surprised (happily!) to find Bergenroth’s manuscripts at the Jagiellonian Library have been digitized. Here's to hoping the British Library and the Public Record Office follow suit soon with theirs! archive.org/search?query...

Screenshot of the Internet Archive search results page for "Bergenroth, Gustav Adolf von." It displays 11 digitized volumes titled Documentos del Archivo General de Simancas

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

I found this Leo thing thanks to you and became very curious about it! I tested it against other tools. While Leo seems to do Latin better than Spanish, strong models in Transkribus seem to outperform it (for 16th c. Spanish at least)

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Eduardo Fernández @apocalypsisnova.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Just learned through a friend of the massive early modern Italian archival collections in St Petersburg.

paragraph from

Bronisław Geremek, Un inventaire soviétique, in «Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales», XV (1960), pp. 764-66

C'est surtout pour l'Italie que ces archives sont très riches. La correspondance
des hommes d'Etat et d'Eglise dans cette section compte
plus de 4.700 lettres, parmi lesquelles nous notons en passant : 43 lettres
de Frédéric I I Gonzague à Antonio Bagarotto sur la situation à Mantoue
en 1529-1531, la correspondance de la famille Veccello, des années 1342-
1610 (122 unités), des Piccolomini (xive-xvie s., 27 unités), des Strozzi
(1463-1745, 111 unités), du cardinal Hippolyte d'Esté, etc. Un des plus
considérables fonds de correspondance est celui du cardinal Giovanni
Morone, qui contient 631 unités, surtout des années 1575-1576 ; la correspondance
du cardinal Prospero Santa Croce, des années 1574-1578
contient 201 unités. Parmi les collections concernant les villes italiennes
notons celle des actes de Crémone (dont une bonne partie fut publiée
en 1937 *) et celle de documents relatifs à l'histoire de Florence, parmi
lesquels les brouillons des listes de contribuables de 1465, les documents
sur la Monte di Sale et la Monte di Pieta, les archives des Uzzano(53 unités)
utilisées par Rutenburg dans ses deux livres et en partie par lui publiées a,
le fonds des Medici (177 unités). La collection concernant Venise contient
des documents très divers, aussi bien sur le commerce et l'industrie, que
sur l'administration de la ville et de la Terre Ferme

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