Completing doctorate by research (PhD) From father to son: interpreting the text and illustration of an early fourteenth century Latin compilation on the seven capital vices

Commencement date: 11 February 2002 (Part-time enrolment)

Supervisors
Professor Emeritus Margaret M. Manion, Art History Discipline, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne and Professor Rodney M. Thomson, Senior Research Fellow, The School Of History and Classics, The University Of Tasmania

Topic outline
This thesis presents and analyses a now fragmentary and unbound manuscript (dispersed over several British, European and American collections) on the seven capital vices dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century that can be localized in Northern Italy, probably at Genoa. While this genre of literature is characteristically didactic, the Cocharellus treatise in addition is unexpectedly personal, being styled in the form of a dialogue between a parent and child. The author, who identifies himself as a member of the Cocharellus family of Genoa, states his objective is to instruct his children, in particular one son named John. He provides illustrative exempla lessons to be learned from, drawn from multiple sources including his own grandfather`s apparently first hand account of events that transpired in the Levant at the close of the thirteenth century. In addition, the manuscript presents a carefully conceived programme of decoration that is remarkable both because no page is left untouched by the team of illuminators, and also because the fullness of the iconographic scheme is virtually without precedent, illustration being uncommon in the corpus of literature concerning the virtues and vices. The thesis examines how the pictorial programme interacts with the text to shape interpretation of the moral and cultural values that are promoted as shaping the conduct of a medieval man of virtue.

Contact
60 Bendigo Street Canberra ACT 2611
Ph. 02-61613563
rozazor@gmail.com 

Links
http://academiccentre.stmarys.newman.unimelb.edu.au/manuscriptstudies/index.htm