Karanos (Dec 2022)
Luisa Prandi
Abstract
Luisa Prandi (born in 1952) has showed a great interest in Classics and the Ancient World even from her earliest age. Her love for the Ancient Greek world arose during her studies at the University of Milan. As a student of distinguished scholars such as Marta Sordi (1925-2009), Luigi F. Pizzolato (1939-), Giuseppe Billanovich (1913-2000) and Orsolina Montevecchi (1911-2009), she learned from each of them a devotion for the study of the ancient sources that have made, with a great merit, that she becomes one of the best and most recognized scholars on the ancient world. She is, also, a main name in the research of the topic of the Historians of Alexander or Alexandrographers. These authors are fundamental for the knowledge of the Macedonian king: as she uses to argue, we cannot write a single word about Alexander overlooking them”. Writing about Alexander is a such a Herculean task, since there is no other figure of whom there are more historians with extreme contradictions among their accounts. It is almost impossible to say something new about Alexander, but to say about his historians, about whom so few fragments are available, is even more difficult. Prof. Luisa Prandi’s brilliant versatility is quite a strange attribute among academics: she has showed many times her abilities to work directly with all kinds of sources (especially papyri), but always with a sober, serious, and noncontroversial approach. Readers will find in her a person of carefully taste concerning what to say and how to stress her opinions and views. That seriousness is reflected and witnessed when she writes, since she belongs to that wonderful school of researchers who are aware that theories will pass but the facts (sources) are the ones that remain. From that humility and that certainty, Luisa Prandi presents herself to our readers of Karanos.
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