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There is a prehistory of the adultery novel, which became a pan-European literary paradigm in the second half of the 19th century. In the wake of the French Revolution, secular marriage legislation emerges, producing a metaphorical surplus that is still effective today. Using legal history and canonical literary texts from Rousseau to Goethe and Manzoni to Hugo and Flaubert, this book traces how marriage around 1800 became a figure of reflection for the modern nation-state. In the process, original contributions to the philology of the individual texts emerge. At the same time, law and literature are made fruitful for a historical semantics of society and community. This book is a translation of an original German 1st edition “Ehe als Nationalfiktion” by Dagmar Stöferle, published by J.B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). The author (with the support of Chris Owain Carter) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.
In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughtersÕ memoirs, which record the Òall-too-humanÓ qualities of those who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, show that the Holocaust cannot be used to neatly segregate lives into the categories of before and after. ClementiÕs discussions of differences in social status, along with the persistence of antisemitism and patriarchal structures, support this point strongly, demonstrating the tenacity of traumaÑindividual, familial, and collectiveÑamong Jews in twentieth-century Europe.
In her award-winning, critically acclaimed Women's Writing in Italy, 1400--1650, Virginia Cox chronicles the history of women writers in early modern Italy -- who they were, what they wrote, where they fit in society, and how their status changed during this period. In this book, Cox examines more closely one particular moment in this history, in many ways the most remarkable for the richness and range of women's literary output. A widespread critical notion sees Italian women's writing as a phenomenon specific to the peculiar literary environment of the mid-sixteenth century, and most scholars assume that a reactionary movement such as the Counter-Reformation was unlikely to spur its develo...
Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives--including a vast cache of merchants' letters written between 1704 and 1746--reveals a more nuanced view of the business relations between Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, and the Indian Ocean than ever before. The book argues that cross-cultural trade was predicated on and generated familiarity among strangers, but could coexist easily with religious prejudice. It analyzes instances in which business cooperation among coreligionists and between strangers relied on language, customary norms, and social networks more than the progressive rise of state and legal institutions.
This book explores the variety of social and political phenomena that combined to the make the First World War a key turning point in the Jewish experience of the twentieth century. Just decades after the experience of intense persecution and struggle for recognition that marked the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish men and women across the globe found themselves drawn into a conflict of unprecedented violence and destruction. The frenzied military, social, and cultural mobilisation of European societies between 1914 and 1918, along with the outbreak of revolution in Russia and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East had a profound impact on Jewish communities worldwide. The First World War thus constitutes a seminal but surprisingly under-researched moment in the evolution of modern Jewish history. The essays gathered together in this ground-breaking volume explore the ways in which Jewish communities across Europe and the wider world experienced, interpreted and remembered the ‘war to end all wars’.
This book uses the stories of early modern women in the Mediterranean who left their birthplaces, families, and religions to reveal the complex space women of the period occupied socially and politically. In the narrow sense, the word “renegade” as used in the early modern Mediterranean referred to a Christian who had abandoned his or her religion to become a Muslim. With Renegade Women, Eric R Dursteler deftly redefines and broadens the term to include anyone who crossed the era’s and region’s religious, political, social, and gender boundaries. Drawing on archival research, he relates three tales of women whose lives afford great insight into both the specific experiences and condi...
This collection of thirteen essays brings together Italian and American scholars to present a cooperative analysis of the Italian short story, beginning in the fourteenth century with Giovanni Boccaccio and arriving at the twentieth century with Alberto Moravia and Anna Maria Ortese. Throughout the book, the contributors carefully and intentionally unpack and explain the development of the short story genre and demonstrate the breadth of themes – cultural, historical and linguistic – detailed in these narratives. Dedicated to a genre “devoted to lightness and flexibility, as well as quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity,” this collection paints a careful and exacting picture of an important part of both Italian and literary history.
In this book, twelve scholars of early modern history analyse various categories and cases of deception and false identity in the age of geographical discoveries and of forced conversions: from two-faced conversos to serial converts, from demoniacs to stigmatics, and from self-appointed ambassadors to lying cosmographer.
Women writers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy reinvigorated the modern epistolary novel through their re-fashioning of the genre as a tool for examining women's roles and experiences. Addressing the Letter argues that many epistolary novels purposely tie narrative structure to thematic content, creating in the process powerful texts that reflect and challenge literary and socio-cultural norms. Through the lens of the genre, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Oriana Fallaci highlight such issues as love, the loss of ideals, lack of communication and connection, and feminist ideology. She also analyses what may be the first woman-authored Italian example of epistolary fiction: Orintia Romagnuoli Sacrati's Lettere di Giulia Willet (1818). In their reworking of the epistolary narrative form, Italian women writers challenged dominant assumptions about female behaviours, roles, relationships, and sexuality in modern Italy.
The Republic of Venice was the only Catholic territory in which an Anabaptist community formed in the 16th century. The history of Venetian Anabaptism, hitherto little known in Reformation Studies, is the focus of this book. Using a large quantity of archival material and rare printed sources Riccarda Suitner reconstructs the lives of the Republic's Anabaptists and the inquisitorial repression they suffered, and analyses the doctrinal specificities of the Radical Reformation in this area. This story represents a fundamental stage in the relations between German, central-European and Italian culture in the early modern period. Events in Venice are presented within a broader comparative framework, paying particular attention to the German states, Switzerland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, Moravia, Tyrol, and the Kingdom of Naples. It will emerge that its Venetian history cannot be ignored if we are to gain a true understanding of the European Reformation.