We are pleased to welcome Danilo Valentino, who joins Byzantine Studies as a short-term predoctoral resident until the end of September. Danilo is a PhD candidate in Greek studies at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg.
Before beginning his doctorate in 2015, he held a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship for a research stay at the Institute for Byzantine Studies at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, where he began to study under Albrecht Berger, who, along with Christian Brockmann, is his doctoral supervisor. Danilo completed a BA in humanities and an MA in classics at the University of Turin, Italy.
His interest in late Byzantine society and the history of medicine influenced his choice to focus his research topic on iatrosophia, i.e., collections of Greek medical recipes, the use of which was widespread from the fifteenth century. His first monograph, Das Iatrosophion des Cod. Taur. B.VII.18, will appear in the new series Münchner Arbeiten zur Byzantinistik (Munich: Ars Una) and offers for the first time a critical edition with a translation into a modern language of a sample of this kind of Byzantine “practical-use literature,” which has rarely been the object of thorough investigation.