Dr. Marcello Cattaneo
Areas of specialization:
Early modern philology; Early modern theology; Satire and polemics.
Areas of competence:
History of humanism; History of theology; English and comparative literature; Bibliography.
I was trained as a literary scholar in Oxford (BA, DPhil) and Cambridge (MPhil), where my interests came to focus on early modern intellectual and religious cultures, and especially on the intersection of humanist philology, theological polemics, and satire. At the core of my work is a desire to study how disparate texts travel across linguistic, religious, cultural, and temporal boundaries––how they are reinvented, serve different purposes, and form new knowledge. My work is ‘literary’ in this expanded sense.
I began by studying the use of satire in scholarly and theological polemics around the turn of the eighteenth century, particularly through the prism of the early writings of Jonathan Swift and the European dimensions of his intellectual background and reception (the latter especially in eighteenth-century Germany).
My more recent research concerns biblical philology and the place of Hebrew and Jewish sources in Christian scholarship and theology, especially in Latin-writing Europe north of the Alps. At the Polonsky Academy my project explores the use of Jewish “mystical” texts in Reformed and Lutheran erudition between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.
Before coming to Jerusalem, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. I have also held short visiting positions at the Descartes Centre (University of Utrecht), the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Marsh’s Library, Dublin.
Publications:
“From Opaque Mysteries to Lucid Lenses: The “Witness of the Kabbalists” in Reformed Scholarship”, in Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture (forthcoming in print in 2025), online first (pp. 1-27): https://doi.org/10.1163/18750214-02101003
“Die Satire im Spiegel: Jonathan Swift im Denken, Schreiben und Empfinden Johann Gottfried Herders. Mit zwei Transkriptionen unveröffentlichter Texte aus dem Nachlass Herders im Anhang”, in Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook 17 (2024), pp. 87-123.
“Like a Cypress among Pliant Shrubs: Kabbalah and Reformed Orthodoxy in the Philologia Sacra of Jacob Rhenferd (1654-1712)”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 86 (2023), pp. 261-292.
“Between Law and Antiquarianism: The Christian Study of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah in Late Seventeenth-Century Europe”, in K. Macfarlane, P. van Boxel, and J. Weinberg (eds.), The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 237-254.
“Between Antiquarianism and Satire: Tertullian’s De Pallio in the Age of Confessions, c. 1590-1630”, in Erudition and the Republic of Letters 5/2 (2020), pp. 117-162.
“Traditions of Learning around the English Battle of the Books”, in The Seventeenth Century 33/1 (2018), pp. 87-112.
“On Similitudes: Montaigne in Matthew Prior’s Alma and the Late Dialogues of the Dead”, in Philological Quarterly 95/2 (2016), pp. 227-241.