First-year graduate student Tommaso de Robertis has won the Giuseppe Velli Prize, awarded by the American Boccaccio Association to the best essay on Boccaccio made by a graduate student in any American or Canadian University. The winning essay will also be automatically considered for publication in Heliotropia, the American Boccaccio Association journal, and Tommaso's essay will appear in the next issue of the journal.
Tommaso’s essay ("A possible new source for Boccaccio’s concept of fortune. The pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de bona fortuna") sheds new light on Giovanni Boccaccio’s concept of fortune by connecting it to a previously unexplored source, the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de bona fortuna, a Latin compilation of the chapters on fortune taken from the Magna Moralia and the Eudemian Ethics that was made in Paris between 1263 and 1265. By focusing on some specific passages of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (mid-1350s-1373), Tommaso’s paper shows that Boccaccio’s association of fortune with the notion of impetus is a clear witness to his use of the Liber, where fortune is systematically described as an impetus naturae (an impetus of nature). By working on a fifteenth-century Florentine inventory, Tommaso also found out that a copy of the Liber was available in the Convent library of Santo Spirito in Florence, that is where Boccaccio brought his De casibus to final fruition in 1373.
Congratulations Tommaso!