Summary: “Historia monasticа” is the most important literary work of the Benedictine monk Pietro Calzolai († 1580), first printed in Florence in 1561 by the famous printing house of Lorenzo Torrentino. The author’s aim was to present the contributions of men and women who, by their sanctity, pious and humble lives, contributed to the glory of the Roman Catholic Church. These included popes, cardinals, and other representatives of the church hierarchy, as well as emperors and empresses, kings and queens, and other noble and non-noble people, whose pious lives are described in short stories. Following the compositional and linguistic models of Giovanni Boccaccio, the book is a kind of variation of the traditional universal chronicles, and includes episodes from Bulgarian medieval history such as the conversion to Christianity, Tsar Simeon the Great, and brief notes on the Bulgarian-Byzantine wars in some biographies of Byzantine emperors. They have been analyzed with regard to their contribution to the dissemination of knowledge about medieval Bulgarian history among the Italian public in the age of the Counter-Reformation. Translations of these episodes into Bulgarian are presented in the appendices.
Keywords: 16th–17th century Italian historiography, Pietro Calzolai, medieval Bulgarian history, Tsar Simeon the Great
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