VU Grad Student Published in Italian Journal

Christoforos Sassaris, MA '22, has had a paper published in La Bibliofilía, Italy's oldest and preeminent peer-reviewed journal for bibliography and book history, in an issue dedicated to the memory of book historian Dennis E. Rhodes. You can learn more about the journal on their official site.

Here is the abstract to Christoforos's article:

"Yerasimos Vlachos’ Thesauros Tetraglossos—published in Venice, first in 1659 by Ducali Pinelli and again in 1723 by Antonio Vortoli—is a key text in the histories of modern Greek printing and the NeoHellenic diaspora. The book is a dictionary that contains modern Greek, ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian. Several notable differences exist between the first and second editions, and these differences shed light on the 1723 edition’s relation to the Hellenic community’s identity and its use of the text in the eighteenth century. Following the work of Vasilis Tatakis and others, I argue that the second edition served two main purposes: First, it kept the first major post-Byzantine, diasporic community of Greeks intact by strengthening the community’s sense of Hellenic identity, during a time when most historically Hellenic lands were occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Second, the book served as a tool for upward mobility in the highly cosmopolitan, mercantile society of eighteenth-century Venice, where the understanding of several languages would have been an immensely useful skill."

This article is based upon work that Christoforos did as part of his spring 2020 internship at West Chester University's Special Collections library.

Congratulations, Christoforos!