Preface

Abstract

This monographic issue of the Journal of Maltese Studies is dedicated to Giovanni Francesco Buonamico, the Maltese seventeenth-century intellectual mainly remembered as the author of the second oldest poem in Maltese, Mejju ġie bil-ward u ż-żahar, a work many readers will recall from their early school years, when it would have been learnt by heart. However, this solitary poem in Maltese by Buonamico can hardly be said to do justice to his remarkably broad range of interests. And yet, apart from a pioneering study in 1971 by Giovanni Mangion, very little has been written about this seventeenth-century polymath up to the present publication. It is only recently that his eclectic personality has been revisited through specialised studies. The aim of this publication is to shed further light on the multifaceted scholarly activity of this Maltese doctor, an undertaking that could not have been attempted without the generous offer of Judge Giovanni Bonello to put at the disposal of different scholars the substantial collection of unstudied Buonamico manuscripts, bound in one volume, in his possession.