English Editions and Works by English-Speaking Authors in Sigismund Zois's Library

摘要

Baron Sigismund Zois (1747-1819) was an entrepreneur, a natural scientist, an inventor, a book collector, a patron of the arts and sciences, a philologist, the wealthiest person in eighteenth-century Carniola, and one of the key figures of the Enlightenment period. Born to a merchant's family in Trieste, he received his primary and secondary education in Reggio Emilia. He moved to Ljubljana in 1765, where he began studying natural and applied sciences with the Jesuits, Gabriel Gruber (1740-1805) and Joseph Maffei de Glatfort (1742-c. 1807). He eventually took over the family trading company, as well as several estates, ironworks, and workshops. He was actively engaged in the time's vivacious intellectual movement, which coincided with enlightened reforms of the Hapsburgs, as well as with some of his contemporaries' agendas for improvements in education, culture, and science in Carniola.