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A crucial question throughout the Middle Ages, the relationship between body and spirit cannot be understood without an interdisciplinary approach – combining literature, philosophy and medicine. Gathering contributions by leading international scholars from these disciplines, the collected volume explores themes such as lovesickness, the five senses, the role of memory and passions, in order to shed new light on the complex nature of the medieval Self.
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Marginal Revolution Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year A Seminary Co-op Notable Book of the Year A Times Higher Education Book of the Week A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Marco Santagata’s Dante: The Story of His Life illuminates one of the world’s supreme poets from many angles—writer, philosopher, father, courtier, political partisan. Santagata brings together a vast body of Italian scholarship on Dante’s medieval world, untangles a complex web of family and political relationships for English readers, and shows how the composition of the Commedia was influenced by local and regional politics. “Reading Marco Santagataâ...
This collection of essays investigates the multifarious meanings of the Great War considered from a multifaceted perspective as the event that opens up the cultural history of the 20th century. After an introduction delineating ‘unrepresentability’, the core methodological issue of the book, the volume brings together many different strands of analysis and is divided into two main sections: the first provides a cultural and philosophical framework while the second explores specific linguistic and literary issues. Given the variety of perspectives and methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, the volume offers original and useful insights into WWI. The underlying rationale of the book, remaining faithful to the catastrophe of the war, without transforming it into a mere object of scientific investigation or ideological interpretation, helps to shed light on contemporary scenarios.
This book explores the linguistic expression of identity, intended as the social positioning of self and others, by focusing mostly on a scenario of prolonged language contact, namely the ancient Mediterranean area. The volume includes studies on language contact and on identity strategies developed at different levels of analysis, from phonetics to pragmatics, in, among others, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, (Cypriot) Arabic, Medieval Sardinian.
This volume explores linguistic diversity and complexity in different urban contexts, many of which have never been subject to significant sociolinguistic inquiry. A novel mixture of cities of varying size from around the world is studied, from megacities to smaller cities on the national periphery. All chapters discuss either the multilingualism or the pluricentric aspect of the linguistic diversity in urban areas, most focussing on one urban centre. The book showcases multiple approaches ranging from a quantitative investigation based partly on census data, to qualitative studies flowing, for example, from extensive ethnographic work or discourse analysis. The diverse theoretical backgrounds and methodological approaches in the individual chapters are complemented by two chapters outlining the current trends and debates in the sociolinguistic research on urban multilingualism and pluricentricity and suggesting some possible directions for future investigations in this field.The book thus provides a broad overview of sociolinguistic research of multilingual places and pluricentric languages.
Federico Dal Bo examines the design of early Hebrew books from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, focusing not only on the words in these early books but also on how they were arranged on the page. He follows in the tradition of scholars such as Christopher de Hamel, Marvin J. Heller, and David Stern, who have explored the importance of these Hebrew books in influencing Jewish learning and attracting the interest of Christians. The author discusses important prints, such as the first Talmud and rabbinical bibles, which marked a shift from being for Jewish readers only to being for both Jews and Christians. The collaboration between Jewish editors and Christian printers changed the w...
Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.
Transnational Italian Studies is specifically targeted at a student audience and is designed to be used as a key text when approaching the disciplinary field of Italian studies. It allows the study of Italian culture to be construed and practised not simply as the inquiry into a national tradition but as the study of the interaction of cultural practices both within Italy itself and in those parts of the world that have witnessed the extent of Italian mobility. The text argues that Italian culture needs to be considered in a transnational/transcultural perspective and that an understanding of linguistic and cultural translation underlies all approaches to the study of Italian culture in a gl...
Language standardization is an ongoing process based on the notions of linguistic correctness and models. This manual contains thirty-six chapters that deal with the theories of linguistic norms and give a comprehensive up-to-date description and analysis of the standardization processes in the Romance languages. The first section presents the essential approaches to the concept of linguistic norm ranging from antiquity to the present, and includes individual chapters on the notion of linguistic norms and correctness in classical grammar and rhetoric, in the Prague School, in the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, in sociolinguistics as well as in pragmatics, cognitive and discourse lingu...
In Dynamics of Morphological Productivity, Francesco Gardani explores the evolution of the productivity of the noun inflectional classes of Latin and Old Italian, covering a span of almost 2,000 years – an absolute novelty for the theory of diachrony and for Latin and Italo-Romance linguistics. By providing an original set of criteria for measuring productivity, based on the investigation of loanword integration, conversions, and class shift, Gardani provides a substantial contribution to the theory of inflection, as well as to the study of the morphological integration of loanwords. The result is a wealth of empirical facts, including data from the contact languages Etruscan, Ancient Greek, Germanic, Arabic, Byzantine Greek, Old French and Provençal, accompanied by brilliant and groundbreaking analyses.