A close reading of Paolini’s Hebdomades
This notebook accompanies a long study of Fabio Paolini’s Hebdomades. The Hebdomades is a vast treatise, printed in Venice in 1589 and built on the number seven: seven books of seven chapters, written as a commentary on a single line of Virgil. The reading proceeds in measured phases. This site keeps the shape of the whole in view.
The fortnightly entries, the occasional essays, and the reading notes live on the notebook itself, at notes.digited.net. This page is the map by which they can be read.
Seven books, three of them substantial
Of the seven books, three carry the argument: Book IV on the body, Book VI on nature, and Book VII on the divine. Read together, they articulate what I take to be an integral anthropology, in which body, nature, and the divine are held in relation without being collapsed into one another.
Three phases, one long reading
Paolini’s Hebdomades
The treatise, the neglected books, and the question that organises the reading.
The working bibliography
Primary sources and the secondary literature read alongside the project.
Fortnightly, on Saturdays
Logs, essays, and reading notes as the work is done.