Cynthia Pyle, born in New York City, New York, USA, in 1940. Ph.D. from Columbia University, New york City. Visiting Scholar at New York University.
Fellow (1 September 2002 – 30 June 2003)
The year was spent most agreeably and most profitably reading, thinking and drafting the early portions of my book, Early Modern Developments in European Humanism, Art and Thought and their Analogies with Science (working title). The book described in the original proposal will now exist as two separate books. The first deals with the detailed presentation of my philosophical and historical arguments concerning the development of historiographical, artistic and scientific methods in Early Modern Europe (especially the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries). The second deals with the history of natural history itself in the sixteenth century, seen from the points of view presented in the first book. Both are aimed at a wider public than my previous work has addressed; the second book will be richly illustrated.
I was invited to speak at the Universities of Groningen (February), Amsterdam (April) and Leiden (May), giving three different versions of a lecture developed on the basis of my research and writing at NIAS, which will be published in the Acts of the Groningen Workshop (Peter Lang). The ideas in this lecture will be reworked for submission to a scholarly journal by late July. I also spoke at the Workshop on Machiavelli at NIAS in June.
I attended four conferences: the NIKI symposium, “Italy and the Low Countries – Artistic Relations: Prints and Printmaking”, at the University of Utrecht on Monday, November 18, 2002 (brought to my attention by the Rector of NIAS, Prof. Wim Blockmans); “Mémoire et subjectivité à la Renaissance: ou l’entrelacement de memoria, fama et historia”, Journée d’Etude sur la Renaissance – Ecole des Chartes, Paris, on Friday, April 4, 2003; “Vreemd en Eigen”, organised by Robert Stein in collaboration with Arjo Vanderjagt, in particular the address by Professor Anne-Marie Legaré of the University of Lille (“Cherchez la Femme: Iconographic Aspects” of the depiction of women in Medieval manuscript illumination), and the NWO multi-disciplinary symposium on the evolution of language organised by the Dutch National Cognition Programme, “Connecting People: From Animal Grunts to Human Language”, at the Trippenhuis, Amsterdam, Friday, June 27, 2003.