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Noble Amhara
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An Abysinnian Scholar in Tridentine Rome: Täsfa Ṣeyon and the Birth of Orientalism

Post by Noble Amhara » 18 Jun 2021, 10:40

Cambridge University
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... B8CAF22D90
Either informant could have shaped Giovio's descriptions of topics such as Emperor Lebnä Dengel's life and daily routine, but only Täsfa Ṣeyon could have provided the prelate with such a convincingly laudatory overview of his homeland of Šäwa (Pronounced: Seywa Area: Semien Shewa Zones) on the basis of which Giovio boldly asserted that the Šäwans “preceded all Abyssinians in astuteness, ingenuity, sobriety, customs and good-living,” and “rule no different than Venetian gentlemen!”72
Giovio's accumulative Ethiopian pastiche and panoptic historiographical fusion of European and non-European knowledge exemplify a larger sixteenth-century shift from universal to world historiography.73 At a time when most local historians wrote dynastic histories based on archival sources and official chronicles, and when universal historians conceptualised world history from the perspective of an outward-looking home society, Giovio instead exploited Rome's emerging role as a cosmopolitan crossroads to synthesise and aggregate the testimonies of foreign visitors and the products of the expanding Vatican information network. Yet this distinctive historical method also set Giovio apart from the growing number of sixteenth-century orientalists whose principal concern was the mastery of Semitic languages in order to deepen scriptural understanding. In contrast to the latter, Giovio purported to be motivated by a more worldly simple curiosity, adding that he described Ethiopia so as to distract readers from “so many bloody wars and sad events.”74 In short, if his study in many respects typified the innovative world historiography of the era, his references to medieval lore about Ethiopia and Africa failed to account for the most recent reports from the Horn as well as the developing European understanding of Eastern Christian traditions.
In this, he differed from his contemporary Beccadelli. A Bolognese erudite famed for his literary accomplishments and remarkable ecclesiastical career, Beccadelli joined Giovio at the Bologna hearing as secretary to Cardinal Gasparo Contarini. The latter was a leading member of the spirituali, a circle of lay and ordained figures committed to humanism, ecumenism, and church reform, and whose broad intellectual interests and personal quest for transcendence and salvation have led to their characterisation as a “religious republic of letters.”75 The spirituali critiqued the state of the Church and sought accommodation with the Protestants, and this drew some of them towards the concept of union with Eastern Christianity.76 They were opposed by the zelanti, who rejected such accommodation and championed strict Catholic orthodoxy. For his part, Contarini saw Eastern Christianity as a model for Protestant reconciliation, and shortly before his death, this question led him to summon abba Yoḥannes, an Ethiopian cleric then residing in Venice.77 While the motives for this invitation are unclear, they can plausibly be interpreted as a reflection of Contarini's favourable orientation towards Orthodox Christianity.