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This book offers a new view of Italian Renaissance intellectual life, linking philosophy and literature as expressed in both Latin and Italian.
In The Enigma of Art. On the provenance of Artistic Creation Gino Zaccaria offers a meditation on art in light of its ancient Greek sense and of its task inaugurated by “artist-thinkers” like Cézanne, Boccioni and van Gogh.
Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dante's Commedia which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares. Dante's Performance opens a new perspective from which to consider the Commedia: Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same t...
The literary qualities of humanists’ writings convey how play and illusion helped form their ideas about knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics. Timothy Kircher argues for new ways of appreciating Renaissance humanist philosophy.
Connecting to issues in the humanities today, this book shows how the Italian Renaissance influenced and changed Early Modern Europe.
In terms of its popularity, as well as its production, chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain. Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature considers chocolate as an object of collective memory used to bridge the transatlantic gap through Spanish literary works of the early modern period, tracing the mention of chocolate from indigenous legends and early chronicles of the conquistadors to the theatre and literature of Spain. The book considers a variety of perspectives and material cultures, such as the pre-Colombian conception of chocolate, the commercial enterprise surrounding chocolate, and the darker side of chocolate’s connections to witchcraft and sex. Encapsulating both historical and literary interests, Chocolate will appeal to anyone interested in the global history of chocolate.
This book explores the concept of academic freedom from a European vantage point. Drawing on both philosophical and legal perspectives, the editors and contributors analyse the concept of academic freedom within the present institutional setting. Academic freedom has long been considered a natural part of higher education, but as the world enters the digital age, a renewed understanding of its role and the threats it must face is required. The authors question the purpose of science without freedom, and subsequently the purpose of political communities without free science. Although the book uses European case studies to answer these questions, it undoubtedly has global relevance: what would be left of the present notion of the ‘global world’ were we to conceive of its character without modern science? This book calls for a critical re-examination of the academic community and its own understanding of the sources, conditions and aims of scientific practice.
The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante’s vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante’s global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever. A cultural icon no less than a cultural product, Dante’s imaginative universe enjoys a pervasive presence in popular culture. The multiformity of approaches represented in the collection matches the variety of the material that is analyzed. The volume documents Dante’s presence in genres as different as graphic novels and theater productions, children’s literature, advertisements and sci-fi narratives, rock and rap music, video- and boardgames, satirical vignettes and political speeches, school curricula and prison-teaching initiatives. Each chapter combines a focused attention to the specificity of the body of evidence it treats with best analytical practices. The volume invites collective reflection on the many different rules of engagement with Dante’s text.
This book focuses on expressions of the tragic in Spanish cinema. Its main premise is that elements from the classical and modern tragic tradition persist and permeate many of the cultural works created in Spain, especially the films on which the book centers this study. The inscrutability and indolence of the gods, the mutability of fortune, the recurrent narratives of fall and redemption, the unavoidable clash between ethical forces, the tension between free will and fate, the violent resolution of both internal and external conflicts, and the overwhelming feelings of guilt that haunt the tragic heroine/hero are consistent aspects that traverse Spanish cinema as a response to universal queries about human suffering and death.
James Hankins offers the first full-length study of Francesco Patrizi’s life and thought. A key but largely forgotten Renaissance thinker, Patrizi wrote influentially on “virtue politics,” with the goal of nurturing citizens’ character and education so societies could effectively balance demands of liberty, equality, and merit-based leadership.