Zimmermann, T.C. Price 1934-

PERSONAL:

Born 1934. Education: Williams College, B.A; Oxford University, B.A., M.A.; Harvard University, A.M., Ph.D.

CAREER:

Davidson College, Davidson, NC, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty emeritus, and Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of History, 1999.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Helen and Howard Marraro Prize, American Historical Association, 1996, and Presidential Book Award, American Association of Italian Studies, 1997, for Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy.

WRITINGS:

Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1995.

SIDELIGHTS:

In Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy, T.C. Price Zimmermann examines the life and achievements of a Renaissance scholar who influenced the development of humanist thought. Paolo Giovio (1486-1552) was an Italian physician, historian, and bishop who wrote Histories of His Own Times, a standard historical text for more than two hundred years. Knowledgeable about literature and the arts as well as medicine and geography, Giovio drew on his extensive personal contacts to shape his accounts of historic events and of the lives of important individuals. Though modern scholars have questioned Giovio's objectivity because of his alliances with powerful figures of his day, Zimmermann shows him to have been a careful and independent-minded scholar who was the first to credit the contributions of Muslim nations to European culture.

Scholars welcomed Paolo Giovio as an important and timely work. Reviewer Gary Ianziti, writing in the Journal of Modern History, described the book as a "meticulously crafted" biography in which Zimmermann "skillfully weaves the tale of his subject's life into the fabric of a troubled period in Italian history." The critic praised Zimmermann's evenhandedness in dealing with the weaknesses and faults attributed to Giovio, including his apparent willingness to portray his sponsors in more flattering ways than they necessarily deserved. The book, in Ianziti's view, presents a "complex portrait that illuminates both the genius and the inadequacies of one of the most controversial figures of the age." Burlington Magazine critic Linda S. Aleci hailed the biography as an "indispensable foundation for future scholarship."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Burlington Magazine, July, 1997, Linda S. Aleci, review of Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy, p. 487.

Journal of Modern History, March 1, 1998, Gary Ianziti, review of Paolo Giovio, p. 206.

Sixteenth Century Journal, autumn, 1996, Bonner Mitchell, review of Paolo Giovio, pp. 912-914.