Dr. Hanna Gentili
Photo: Hanna Gentili
Research Associate (Postdoc)
Institute for Jewish Studies
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Key aspects of activity
- Medieval and Renaissance Jewish philosophy
- Interaction between philosophy and mysticism (15th–16th century)
- History of reading and learning practices
- History of the Hebrew book
In a Nutshell
My main research project within the HEPMASITE framework is dedicated to Jewish natural philosophy, in addition to smaller projects on the Hebrew manuscript transmission of Aristotle’s Ethics and Economics. The main line of research is dedicated to the collections of treatises known as Averroes’s Questions in Physics and De substantia orbis, which consist of treatises of natural philosophy that were central to the study of Aristotelian physics in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. The project aims at reassessing the origins and scope of these collections and at providing a new and comprehensive portrait of the role of these collections in the premodern study of natural philosophy, fresh insights into the role of the fourteenth-century Jewish commentator Moshe Narboni in the reception and transmission of Averroes, and a better understanding of similarities and differences in the reception of Averroes in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin worlds.
From the point of view of methodology, I am working towards a definition of the cataloguing and description criteria of Hebrew philosophical manuscripts and contributing to the efforts to consolidate a full corpus of premodern Hebrew philosophical works.