You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Renowned today for his contribution to the rise of the modern European fairy tale, Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480–c. 1557) is particularly known for his dazzling anthology The Pleasant Nights. Originally published in Venice in 1550 and 1553, this collection features seventy-three folk stories, fables, jests, and pseudo-histories, including nine tales we might now designate for ‘mature readers’ and seventeen proto-fairy tales. Nearly all of these stories, including classics such as ‘Puss in Boots,’ made their first ever appearance in this collection; together, the tales comprise one of the most varied and engaging Renaissance miscellanies ever produced. Its appeal sustained it...
None
None
This book is the first scholarly account of how lost wax casting was forgotten and rediscovered around the world thanks to transmission of know-how by Italian founders in the late nineteenth century. Against this backdrop, Medardo Rosso, an Italian sculptor living in Paris, overturned rules of the technique through creative approaches to serial reproduction. His unusual casts prefigured experiments in casting in the modern era. The volume includes art-historical essays by distinguished scholars on the revival of lost wax casting in different countries and a case study of Rosso’s Bambino ebreo series, including scientific analysis and conservation studies. Podcast interview with Sharon Hecker about this book: #HumanitiesMatter - Remodeling a Lost Wax Technique: The Methods of Medardo Rosso (brill.com).
This full critical edition of The Pleasant Nights presents these stories in English for the first time in over a century. The text takes its inspiration from the celebrated Waters translation, which is entirely revised here to render it both more faithful to the original and more sparkishly idiomatic than ever before. The stories are accompanied by a rich sampling of illustrations, including originals from nineteenth-century English and French versions of the text.
The French missionary-linguist Émile Petitot (1838–1916) spent twenty years near the Arctic Circle in Canada, publishing numerous works on First Nations languages and practices. Over time, however, he descended into delirium and began to summon imaginary persecutions, pen improbable interpretations of his Indigenous hosts, and burst into schizoid fury. Delving into thousands of pages in letters and memoirs that Petitot left behind, Pierre Déléage has reconstructed the missionary’s tragic story. He takes us on a gripping journey into the illogic and hyperlogic of a mind entranced with Indigenous peoples against the backdrop of repressive church policies and the emergent social sciences of the nineteenth century. Apocalyptic visions from the Bible and prophetic movements among First Nations peoples merged in the missionary’s deteriorating psyche, triggering paroxysms of violence against his colleagues and himself. Whoever wishes to understand the contradictions of living between radically different societies will find this anthropological novella hard to put down.