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A Sudden Frenzy
In Renaissance Italy there existed a rich interplay between two cultural practices frequently regarded as entirely separate and mutually antagonistic: the humanistic study of the ancient world and ancient literature, and the oral and improvisational performance of poetry, which constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment. A Sudden Frenzy explores the development and impact of these Renaissance practices of improvisation and oral poetry. James K. Coleman shows how the confluence of humanist culture and the art of oral poetry resulted in an extraordinary turn toward improvisation and spontaneity that profoundly influenced poetry, music, and politics. By examining the culture of improvisation, this book reveals the ways in which Renaissance thinkers transcended cultural dichotomies, both in theory and in practice. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including letters, poetry, visual art, and philosophical texts, A Sudden Frenzy reveals the far-reaching and sometimes surprising ways that these phenomena shaped cultural developments in the Italian Renaissance and beyond.
Culture, Power and Education
Employing Gramscian conceptions of hegemony, this book demonstrates the inextricable links between politics, education, culture and power. Based upon in-depth analyses of the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Lorenzo Milani, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks among others, this book shows how many hegemonic social relationships are fundamentally educational relationships. In doing so, Mayo demonstrates how popular culture, education, museums, and fine art are both sites of hegemony and contestation. This thought-provoking work will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in sociology of art and culture, sociology of education, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, museum studies and social theory.
2021
This volume explores the fraught relationship between Futurism and the Sacred. Like many fin-de-siècle intellectuals, the Futurists were fascinated by various forms of esotericism such as theosophy and spiritualism and saw art as a privileged means to access states of being beyond the surface of the mundane world. At the same time, they viewed with suspicion organized religions as social institutions hindering modernization and ironically used their symbols. In Italy, the theorization of "Futurist Sacred Art" in the 1930s began a new period of dialogue between Futurism and the Catholic Church. The essays in the volume span the history of Futurism from 1909 to 1944 and consider its different configurations across different disciplines and geographical locations, from Polish and Spanish literature to Italian art and American music.
Brokering Empire
"Explores how diplomatic interpreters, converts, and commercial brokers mediated and helped define political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."--Author's Web site.
A Voice in the Fire
Piero Bigongiari (1914-1997) was among the most prolific and consistent Italian poets of the last century. He was central to the ‘third generation’ of ermetismo – the movement that voiced the mysterious, the hidden and the abstract. Bigongiari was a poet of origins, exploring the grounding of cultures in landscape and myth, the depths and limitations of home, and the symbols and narratives that sustain an individual’s bond to places. His poetic technique was based on the elaboration of motifs, tracing evolving ideas in a web of verbal themes and variations. Bigongiari’s was a voice of memory, dreams and the surprises of the psyche, speaking beyond politics or ideology to express an...
Fairy-Tale Science
Between 1550 and 1650, Europe was swept by a fascination with wondrous accounts of monsters and other marvels - of valiant men slaying dragons, women giving birth to animals, young girls growing penises, and all manner of fantastic phenomena. Known as 'fairy tales,' these stories had many guises and inhabited a variety of literary texts. The first two collections of such fairy tales published on the continent, Giovan Francesco Straparola's Le piacevoli notti and Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti, were greeted with much enthusiasm at home and abroad and essentially established a new literary genre. Contrary to popular thought, Italy, not Germany or France, was the birthplace of the l...
Niccol Di Lorenzo Della Magna and the Social World of Florentine Printing, Ca. 1470Ð1493
A new history of one of the foremost printers of the Renaissance explores how the Age of Print came to Italy. Lorenz Bninger offers a fresh history of the birth of print in Italy through the story of one of its most important figures, Niccol di Lorenzo della Magna. After having worked for several years for a judicial court in Florence, Niccol established his business there and published a number of influential books. Among these were Marsilio FicinoÕs De christiana religione, Leon Battista AlbertiÕs De re aedificatoria, Cristoforo LandinoÕs commentaries on DanteÕs Commedia, and Francesco BerlinghieriÕs Septe giornate della geographia. Many of these books were printed in vernacular...
The World Beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto
This study offers a sustained examination of the presentation of eastern Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa in two of the most important chivalric epics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). Comparing the narratological strategies used to depict non-European characters in these stories, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Boiardo’s cosmopolitan vision of humankind increasingly became replaced by Ariosto’s crusading ideology, which emphasized a binary opposition between Christians and Saracens. Cavallo addresses the poems’ mixing of imaginary sites and the geographical reality of a rapidly expanding globe, contextualizing them against current events and concerns, as well as ancient, medieval, and Renaissance texts influential at the time. As the prize committee for the Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies noted: “This articulate, engaging, and well-documented study represents an important work of scholarship in its cross-cultural considerations of Italian Renaissance epic poetry.”
War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice
Weaving together cultural history and critical imperial studies, Anastasia Stouraiti shows how war and territorial expansion shaped seventeenth-century Venetian culture and society. Using an extensive array of sources, Stouraiti tests conventional assumptions about republicanism, commercial peace and cross-cultural exchange and offers a new approach to the study of the Republic of Venice. By bringing the history of communication in dialogue with empire-building and colonial conquest in the Mediterranean, this book provides an original interpretation of the politics of knowledge in wartime Venice. Stouraiti demonstrates that the Venetian-Ottoman War of the Morea (1684-1699) was mediated through a diverse range of cultural mechanisms of patrician elite domination that orchestrated the production of popular consent. Exploring the militarisation of the public sphere and the orientalist discourse associated with it, Stouraiti exposes the surprising connections between bellicose foreign policies and domestic power politics in a state celebrated as the most serene republic of merchants.
