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When, why and how was it first believed that the corpse could reveal ‘signs’ useful for understanding the causes of death and eventually identifying those responsible for it? The Body of Evidence. Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine, edited by Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, shows how in the late Middle Ages the dead body, which had previously rarely been questioned, became a specific object of investigation by doctors, philosophers, theologians and jurists. The volume sheds new light on the elements of continuity, but also on the effort made to liberate the semantization of the corpse from what were, broadly speaking, necromantic practices, which would eventually merge into forensic medicine.
In the spring of 1757, the Augustinian friar Leopoldo di San Pasquale was tried in Naples by the hierarchies of his own religious order on charges of financial fraud, heresy, and sexual immorality. He responded by accusing the heads of the convent of subjecting him to a series of inhuman cruelties, claiming to have been "buried alive". While waiting for a final judgment (it was pronounced seven years later, in 1764), the trial of Leopoldo di San Pasquale became a cultural phenomenon unlike any witnessed before in Naples. Cumulatively, reactions to the trial, both during and after it, broke the boundaries separating chronicle and literary fiction, engaged people’s faculties of reason and em...
This book reflects on the significant and highly original scientific contributions of Hans Primas. A professor of chemistry at ETH Zurich from 1962 to 1995, Primas continued his research activities until his death in 2014. Over these 50 years and more, he worked on the foundations of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, contributed to a number of significant issues in theoretical chemistry, helped to clarify central topics in quantum theory and the philosophy of physics, suggested innovative ways of addressing interlevel relations in the philosophy of science, and introduced cutting-edge approaches in the flourishing young field of scientific studies of consciousness. His work in these areas of research and its continuing impact is described by noted experts, colleagues, and collaborators of Primas. All authors contextualize their contributions to facilitate the mutual dialog between these fields.
Nicola Salvi's thesis offers a remarkably cogent view of highly sophisticated NMR methods. Salvi developed these methods in order to characterize the amplitudes and frequency ranges of local motions in biomolecules such as proteins. These local motions play an essential role since they can explain many of the remarkable properties of proteins and enable them to carry out all sorts of vital functions, from enzymatic catalysis to intermolecular recognition and signalling in cells. Salvi's work has led to numerous publications in high-impact journals.
For decades historians argued for the downfall of communication, when early modern societies were hit by a natural disaster. After all, earthquakes caused the destruction of infrastructure, which hindered the spread of news. Instead, the last investigations opened a new point of view about the political communication: every crisis was a catalyst for news. The book widens this reading through a comparative analysis of several earthquakes in the Hispanic Monarchy territories, from Asia to America. However, the examination of communications provided in this volume is not an end in itself but is offered as a basis for reflection and to propose the notion that earthquakes trigger change in social...
In this volume you will find stories about hyperactive relics, ghosts in spiritual or bodily form, as well as accounts of the dead being conjured, resurrected, and brought back to life from decomposing matter. This is not so much for the purpose of assembling a kind of Neapolitan Wunderkammer, but rather to allow these bodies – in physical or spiritual form, or sometimes both at the same time – to speak as protagonists, and to offer their own contribution to the historical anthropology of the Kingdom of Naples. This volume explores the boundaries between body and spirit, life and death, as well as the natural, preternatural, and supernatural in the long early modern era in southern Italy.
In the nineteenth century, new cemeteries were built in many Italian cities that were unique in scale and grandeur, and which became destinations on the Grand Tour. From the Middle Ages, the dead had been buried in churches and urban graveyards but, in the 1740s, a radical reform across Europe prohibited burial inside cities and led to the creation of suburban burial grounds. Italy’s nineteenth-century cemeteries were distinctive as monumental or architectural structures, rather than landscaped gardens. They represented a new building type that emerged in response to momentous changes in Italian politics, tied to the fight for independence and the creation of the nation-state. As the first...
Professor Joseph J. Duggan, emeritus professor at the University of California (Berkeley) is an eminent scholar of Medieval Studies who has written seminal works on Romance Literatures (and Old French epics in particular). His work ranges from editions of medieval classics such as the Chanson de Roland to articles about troubadours’ lyrics and a monograph on Chrétien de Troyes. Here, fifteen contributions from his former students and colleagues offer literary, narratological, philological, and contextual studies of the texts he has taught and researched over his long and prestigious career.
The principal theme of this volume is the importance of the public use of human remains in a historical perspective. The book presents a series of case studies aimed at offering historiographical and methodological reflections and providing interpretative approaches highlighting how, through the ages and with a succession of complex practices and uses, human remains have been imbued with a plurality of meanings. Covering a period running from late antiquity to the present day, the contributions are the combined results of multidisciplinary research pertaining to the realities of the Italian peninsula, hitherto not investigated with a long-term and multidisciplinary historical perspective. Fr...
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