The Jesuit Claude Buffier (1661–1737), professor of philosophy and theology at Rouen and of literature at the Jesuit College in Paris, also wrote about grammar, history and education. The first edition of his Géographie Universelle, a successful didactic text in which he gave prominence to techniques of memorization, was published in 1715.
He particularly promoted the use of vers artificiels, rhymes created to help memorise events or place names, useful for the study of both geography and history.
The copy donated to the museum is the Italian version by the publisher Desideri (1800, second edition). Unlike in the original, in it vers artificiels are rejected as “barbaric poetry […] burdensome to the youth,” although such rhymes had in fact been included in several earlier Italian editions of the work, often leaning awkwardly on musings from illustrious figures. This is the case with a Veronese edition of 1765 which when speaking of Mantua referenced Dante’s verses: “Là dove il Mincio trovando una lama in quella si distende e la 'mpaluda, siede Città, che Mantova si chiama” (Where the Mincio, finding a plain, in which it spreads itself and makes it marshy, is seated the city known as Mantua). However, the edition retains the structure and the questions and answers of the original text. This too was one of the forms of memorising techniques widespread in various disciplinary fields of schools. In that of geography it was used at least until the beginning of the twentieth century, testifying to the continuation of a predominantly descriptive-enumerative conception of the discipline.
The volume opens with a treatise on the use of the globe and closes with an exposition of the geography of the Holy Scriptures.
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Pages on the Move: Itineraries
An ex libris reveals that in the first half of the nineteenth century the book was part of the private library of the marquise Giuditta Mazzaroni Passari. This enables us to locate it in Altidona in the province of Fermo, where the family had its villa.
