Biography

Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau is Associate Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He holds a PhD from Columbia University and works on Renaissance life-writing, the science of the stars, and historiography. He is the author of Early Modern French Autobiography (2021) and The Astrological Works of Jean Thenaud (2025).

Project Summary

This project examines the extraordinary fortune of Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo’s Supplementum chronicarum (1483), one of the most widely disseminated universal chronicles of the age of print and a major source for the Nuremberg Chronicle. It shows how the chronicle functioned as a reservoir of material that could be adapted to new literary, intellectual, and political contexts. Beginning with two French case studies, Jean Thenaud’s La Margarite de France and Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye, the project traces the chronicle’s reception across a range of milieux, including genealogical writing, mirrors for princes, and the history of science, before situating them within a broader European perspective. It reveals how universal chronicles were mobilized to shape national and regional histories, reframe conceptions of the world, and legitimize contested sciences.