Eduardo Fernández
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apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Eduardo Fernández
@apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
1.3K followers 1.4K following 140 posts
historian working on early modern prophecies, belief and reading practices | «Τὸ 'χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά' δοκῶ μοι εἰδέναι».
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9864-8734
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apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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)
November 26, 2025 at 9:10 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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
November 20, 2025 at 11:53 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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?
November 9, 2025 at 6:27 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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.
November 2, 2025 at 6:43 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Newly digitised Gəʽəz manuscript just dropped
October 5, 2025 at 3:50 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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.
September 14, 2025 at 10:12 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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.
July 23, 2025 at 6:17 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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"
Entrance to the Warburg Institute
July 23, 2025 at 6:17 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Erri De Luca but it could be Alda Merini
July 20, 2025 at 11:06 AM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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
July 18, 2025 at 10:22 AM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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.
July 7, 2025 at 2:36 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Re-reading Papadiamantis and, while not moved to tears like the first time, the katharevousa and the story is still so moving
June 12, 2025 at 8:49 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Thinking again of Balthazar Korab and Florence
June 1, 2025 at 9:12 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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
May 26, 2025 at 5:55 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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)
May 24, 2025 at 12:15 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
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
May 23, 2025 at 8:32 AM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Mood
A page with the text THE WASTE LAND 1922 Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα Τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανείν θέλω.'
May 21, 2025 at 3:06 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Cristina Campo y José Manuel Caballero Bonald, eadem sed aliter
May 14, 2025 at 2:44 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Reminds me of these herrings!
May 13, 2025 at 11:36 AM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Blas de Otero (en opinión de Dámaso Alonso):
"Un mundo como un árbol desgajado.
Una generación desarraigada.
Unos hombres sin más destino que
apuntalar las ruinas"
April 20, 2025 at 9:40 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
It's a small achievement, I know, but I got my first web-based virtual machine running to turn the scans of some old Italian religious history journals into searchable PDFs: much faster and entirely in the cloud! 🦾
Old interface showing the scans of the Italian journal Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni Files console of Pythonanywhere showing some ocr'ed pdfs
April 17, 2025 at 8:06 AM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Going through old pictures from April 2020
A photograph of a book page featuring a quote at the top and body text below. Concorre alla custodia e alla purezza del cuore la lettura dei libri spirituali perché, come dice san Bernardo, il nostro cuore è come un mulino che non si ferma mai e sempre macina quello che vi si mette dentro, se è grano, grano, e se è orzo, orzo. Luis de Granada, Libro de la oración y meditación (1554)
April 11, 2025 at 4:46 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Y uno se pone a leer a Szymborska en Nowa Provincja cual grupi en peregrinación, leyendo todas las veces que tártaros suecos y otros animales han destrozado la ciudad.
Poster de Szymborska en el café Nowa Provincja de Cracovia
April 6, 2025 at 11:07 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
Just noticed the verses here. Of all possible praise for Góis, that Arias Montano wanted to focus on his writings on Ethiopia (and call them a history!) despite having been Portugal's chronicler over a decade at the time really says something about how he was perceived among early modern humanists.
Portrait of Goes with dystichs Gentis Thucydides enarrat gesta Pelasgae, Romana claret Livius in historia. Hic alia ut taceam sera data scripta senecta, Ætiopum accepit nomen ab historia.
March 26, 2025 at 5:48 PM
apocalypsisnova.bsky.social
I always cite the Gramsci dictum "optimism of the will (against the) pessimism of intelligence" but I had never seen it context
"Ogni collasso porta con sé disordine intellettuale e morale. Bisogna creare gente sobria, paziente, che non disperi dinanzi ai peggiori orrori e non si esalti a ogni sciocchezza. Pessimismo dell'intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà."
March 26, 2025 at 10:44 AM