A forgotten essay by Fritz Rougemont on Warburg and the use of “bibliophily” as a scientific tool (1930), with a Preliminary Note by M. Centanni

The name of Fritz Rougemont (1904-1941) is known to Warburg scholars because he appears as a co-editor, together with Gertrud Bing, of the edition of Aby Warburg’s Gesamellte Schriften, published in Leipzig by the publisher Teubner in 1932. Since 1927 Rougemont had actively collaborated with the Kulturwissenschaft Bibliothek Warburg, but later his biographical events, and in particular his adhesion to Nazism, caused a definitive damnatio memoriae of his figure, also erasing the traces of his scholarly activity almost completely. We present here an important contribution of his published in 1930 in the first volume of “Imprimatur”, the Annuary of the “Gesellschaft der Bücherfreunde zu Hamburg”. The essay, hitherto neglected in the extensive literature of Warburgian studies, is presented in a new edition of the original German version of 1930, and in the first English and Italian translations. Rougemont’s contribution represents a primary testimony of the specifically scientific meaning of Warburg’s “bibliophily”, which originally illuminates his unprecedented method of study, the analysis of the mechanisms of the Classical tradition, and the innovative trajectory of his research with respect to his contemporary, and dominant, disciplinary dictates.