Peter Mack on the Warburg Institute

Peter Mack, Director and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, gave  a presentation on ‘The Library and Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute as Research Instruments’ (9 February). Professor Mack’s publications include Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (1993), Renaissance Rhetoric (1994), Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (2002), Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (2010) and A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (2011). He extended an invitation to all researchers with interests in cultural and intellectual history, history of art and the relations between cultures to visit the library and the photographic collection (further details, opening hours and entry conditions here).  He gave a short history of the Institute, which began as the Art Historian Aby Warburg’s private library and left Hamburg for London in 1933 to escape the Nazis (a remarkable image of this intellectual emigration can be seen here.) The Institute has a unique standing as a witness to twentieth-century developments in cultural history as well as a rich repository of texts and images; the  unique arrangment of this open stack library can be explored further here. The website also gives details of the programme of lectures and conferences at the Institute.