Dávid Falvay

Dávid Falvay

Deborah Loeb Brice Fellow
The "Meditationes Vitae Christi" and its Influence on Fourteenth-century Italian Culture
2014-2015
Dávid Falvay

Biography

Dávid Falvay teaches Italian cultural history and literature at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. He specializes in late medieval religious literature, with a special emphasis on the Western cult of Central European saints and Italian hagiographical manuscripts. Recently he has been working with the Italian version of the Miroir des simples âmes and the Meditationes Vitae Christi. His publications, along with a number of articles in Italian and in English, includes a monograph entitled Magyar dinasztikus szentek olasz kódexekben (Hungarian Dynastic Saints in Italian codices) (2013). He has participated at several international conferences in Italy, France, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and the United States.

Project Summary

This project will focus on the Meditationes Vitae Christi – an extremely popular text. However, several problems in this text still remain unresolved. First, the Italian versions are problematic; second, the recently (re)proposed date (the beginning instead of the second part of the fourteenth century) allows us to rethink the relationship of this text with several aspects of fourteenth-century Italian culture.