Philosophy, Sciences and Arts at the Court of Robert of Anjou, ed. Irene Caiazzo and Antonella Sannino

This volume contains seventeen contributions representing the proceedings of the conference I saperi della corte di Roberto d’Angiò, VIII Conférence Transculturelle de l’Union Académique Internationale, held at the University of Naples L’Orientale on 13 and 14 September 2021.

Despite the number of the articles and authors, as well as essays in three languages, the volume as a whole is remarkably coherent, highlighting how the Angevin court of Naples in the first half of the fourteenth century was a cultural centre of great importance with King Robert of Anjou (1309–1343) as its lodestar. The scholastic philosophers, the translators from Arabic and Greek, the professors of medicine, the astronomers and alchemists, the jurists and historiographers at court all contributed with their intellectual productions to forging and spreading the image of King Robert as a wise, cultured, prudent ruler, philosopher-king, theologian-king and healer-king of the soul and body, who could find his only counterpart in the biblical monarch Solomon.

It was primarily King Robert himself who fuelled his own fame via his personal production of homilies, theological treatises and correspondence, as well as with the formation of his rich library and, indirectly, by inspiring many authors to dedicate their works to him (Irene Caiazzo, ‘Rex Robertus’). On the more strictly political side, the Angevin sovereign had a chancellery and an elite of officials assigned to the administration of the Kingdom who were experienced and aware of the necessity of making instrumental use of history and law to build and consolidate a pro-Angevin and anti-imperial public opinion, inside and outside the Kingdom (Claudia Villa, ‘Un progetto di regno’). This state bureaucracy, which drew its members from the feudal nobility and the city patriciate, was celebrated in the homiletic production of Robert of Anjou and by some high officials who in sermons and funeral orations praised and encouraged it to serve the Crown, because ‘service rendered to the king makes one worthy of Paradise’ (Jean-Paul Boyer, ‘Science et conscience’). The Kingdom of Naples, on the other hand, was at the service of the Church, which had allowed the rise of the ruling Anjou dynasty, so that, in turn, the dynasty recognised the Church as the main source of its legitimacy. It is in this context that we must understand the importance of Robert of Anjou’s stay at the papal court in Avignon from 1319 to 1324, a period in which he met a selected array of churchmen, members of mendicant orders and accomplished scholastic theologians who had studied principally in Naples and Paris. Later, with the approval of Pope John XXII, these figures were assigned episcopal seats or entrusted with carrying out important tasks in the Kingdom of Naples (Patrick Nold, ‘Servants of Two Masters’; Kirsten Schut, ‘John of Naples and Pastoral Care for the Dead and Dying’; William Duba and Chris Schabel, ‘Three Protégés of Robert the Wise’).

Robert was a theologian and preacher king with a priestly aura, consecrated, at the time of his coronation, not only with the anointing of the head, but also of the hands, more sacerdotum. Tellingly, in the miniatures of the Malines Bible, today held in Leuven, he is depicted as a preaching priest-king (Maria Rosaria Marchionibus, ‘Nel solco della dinastia di Cristo’; Serena Pilato, ‘La Cappella reale d’Angiò’). The comparison of Robert with Solomon for his wisdom and kingship in the Old Testament style was then taken up by Jewish intellectuals and translators who were either active at his court or translated on Angevin commission, in particular Qalonymos ben Qalonymos (1286–after 1328), who translated the Tahāfut al-Tahāfut by Averroes from Arabic into Latin for the king (Marienza Benedetto, ‘“Come Salomone”’; Giovanna Murano, ‘Il Tahāfut al-Tahāfut di Averroè’). For Greek medical texts (Hippocrates, Galen, Pseudo-Galen, Oribasius), King Robert favoured translating directly from the Greek, rather than through Arabic translations, and the greatest of the Angevin translators from Greek was Niccolò da Reggio (Danielle Jacquart, ‘De l’arabe au grec à la cour angevine’; Stefania Fortuna, ‘Niccolò da Reggio e il Vat. gr. 283’).

Robert of Anjou also had the reputation of being an expert in medical sciences, and several physicians dedicated their works to him. Most notably, Dino del Garbo dedicated his commentary on the second book of the Canon by Avicenna (1325) to Robert and Matteo Silvatico his treatise entitled Liber pandectarum medicinae (1332), both texts that exalted the king’s medical expertise. The importance and status of physicians and university professors of medicine under Robert of Anjou are demonstrated by the fact that the teaching physicians at the Studium of Naples were, ipso facto, dignitaries of the Neapolitan Angevin court, often referred to as familiares et fideles of the king. Medical science in the Kingdom of Naples, in its content, did not differ from what was taught in the universities of northern Italy, but it offered a privileged, exclusive position in society to its adepts, as shown by the career of Francesco da Piedimonte, the king’s fidelis familiaris, in charge of issuing licences for medical and surgical practice throughout the Kingdom (J. Chandelier, ‘Dino del Garbo, Francesco da Piedimonte’). Even the study of astrology, alchemy and organic magic was the object of cultural patronage by the Angevin court in Naples, reflected in the dedications of works to King Robert (Antonella Sannino, ‘Il De essentiis essentiarum’; Fabio Seller, ‘Andalò Di Negro, astronomo/astrologo’). In these fields, however, there were serious risks for the authors in the reception and diffusion of their texts, as demonstrated by the case of the astronomer-astrologer Francesco Stabili (aka Cecco d’Ascoli) who, although initially in the retinue of Charles, duke of Calabria, son of King Robert, was accused of heresy by the bishop of Aversa and burned at the stake, along with his books, in Florence in 1327.

From reading this collection of articles, we thus obtain an image of the court of King Robert in Naples as a great cultural centre where scholastic philosophy, law, history and geography (Michelina Di Cesare, ‘Geografia, cartografia e storiografia’), as well as more ‘technical’ sciences, such as medicine and alchemy, flourished with the protection and, in some cases, the direct participation and contribution of the king. The image is of a centre that reflects the peak of the Middle Ages and its culture before the great crisis of the mid-fourteenth century. There is no sign of incipient humanism in the volume, due in part to the fact that poetry and literature are not among the fields of cultural production examined in it; the reason for their exclusion might be that they were less representative of the Neapolitan Angevin court’s patronage under King Robert.