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  A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini

  Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Valerio Cappozzo

  This book centers on a fascinating woman, Clare of Rimini (c. 1260 to c. 1324–29), whose story is preserved in a fascinating text. Composed by an anonymous Franciscan, the Life of the Blessed Clare of Rimini is the earliest known saint’s life originally written in Italian, and one of the few such lives to be written while its subject was still living. It tells the story of a controversial woman, set against the background of her roiling city, her star-crossed family, and the tumultuous political and religious landscape of her age. Twice married, twice widowed, and twice exiled, Clare established herself as a penitent living in a roofless cell in the ruins of the Roman walls of Rimini. She sought a life of solitary self-denial, but was denounced as a demonic danger by local churchmen. Yet she also gained important and influential supporters, allowing her to establish a fledgling community of like-minded sisters. She traveled to Assisi, Urbino, and Venice, spoke out as a teacher and preacher, but also suffered a revolt by her spiritual daughters. A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy presents the text of the Life in English translation for the first time, bringing modern readers into Clare’s world in all its excitement and complexity. Each chapter opens a different window into medieval society, exploring topics from political power to marriage and sexuality, gender roles to religious change, pilgrimage to urban structures, sanctity to heresy. Through the expert guidance of scholars and translators Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Valerio Cappozzo, Clare’s life and context become a springboard for readers to discover what life was like in a medieval Italian city.

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  Love, Magic, and Control in Pre-Modern Iberian Literature

  Veronica Menaldi

  This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic—which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters—Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

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  Dal particolare all'universale. I libri de poesia di Giorgio Bassani.

  Valerio Cappozzo

  Giorgio Bassani si definiva prima di tutto poeta. Pur se il corpus narrativo è prevalente nella sua opera, l’attività poetica è inscindibile da quella che ha di volta in volta preso forma nei racconti delle Storie ferraresi e nei suoi romanzi. Sin dalle prime poesie, tra il 1942 e il 1951, raccolte nei volumi Storie dei poveri amanti e altri versi (1945 e 1946), Te lucis ante (1947) e Un’altra libertà (1951), alcune poi riproposte in L’alba ai vetri (1963), sono espressi in nuce tutti gli elementi che verranno sviluppati nelle opere narrative: l’amore per la propria terra, l’esclusione, la lontananza, la solitudine, il senso della morte e la memoria. Le due sillogi successive, Epitaffio (1974) e In gran segreto (1978), raccolgono e accompagnano quasi tutti i motivi ispiratori del romanziere Bassani, ma rivelano un “di più” rispetto alle poesie del passato, con un’attenzione a volte ironica, a volte amara, nei confronti del presente. Questo è il primo studio sistematico sulla poesia di Giorgio Bassani, con saggi innovativi che partendo dagli archivi, dai carteggi inediti dello scrittore, dalle frequentazioni con i maestri e amici di una vita, riflettono sulla relazione tra Bassani-poeta e Bassani-narratore, essenziale per inquadrare la sua figura nel Nove­cento letterario.

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  Amazonian Spanish

  Stephen Fafulas

  Amazonian Spanish: Language contact and evolution explores the unique origins, linguistic features, and geo-political situation of the Spanish that has emerged in the Amazon. While this region boasts much linguistic diversity, many of the indigenous languages found within its limits are now being replaced by Spanish. This situation of language expansion, contact, and bilingualism is reshaping the sociolinguistic landscape of the Amazon by creating a number of Spanish varieties with innovative linguistic features that require closer scholarly attention. The current book documents this situation in detail. The chapters in this volume include work on distinct geographical regions of the Amazon, with primary data collected using different methodologies and language contact situations. The scholars in this volume specialize in an array of fields, including anthropological linguistics, bilingualism, language contact, dialectology, and language acquisition. Their work represents both formal and functional approaches to linguistics.

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  Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media

  Heather J. Allen and Andrew R. Reynolds

  Textuality is the condition in which a text is created, edited, archived, published, disseminated, and consumed. “Texts,” therefore, encompass a broad variety of artifacts: traditional printed matter such as grammar books and newspaper articles; phonographs; graphic novels; ephemera such as fashion illustrations, catalogs, and postcards; and even virtual databases and cataloging systems. Latin American Textualities is a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at textual history, textual artifacts, and digital textualities across Latin America from the colonial era to the present. Editors Heather J. Allen and Andrew R. Reynolds gather a wide range of scholars to investigate the region’s textual scholarship. Contributors offer engaging examples of not just artifacts but also the contexts in which the texts are used. Topics include Guamán Poma’s library, the effect of sound recordings on writing in Argentina, Sudamericana Publishing House’s contribution to the Latin American literary boom, and Argentine science fiction. Latin American Textualities provides new paths to reading Latin American history, culture, and literatures.

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  Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe

  Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu

  During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post–Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

  The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

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  Language and Classification: Meaning-Making in the Classification and Categorization of Ceramics

  Allison Burkette

  This volume adopts a practice-based approach to examine the different ways in which classification is communicated and negotiated in different environments within archaeology. The book looks specifically at the archaeological classification of ceramics as a lens through which to examine the discursive and social practices inherent in the classification and categorization process, with perspectives from such areas as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology forming the foundation of the book’s theoretical framework. The volume then looks at the process of classification in practice in a variety of settings, including a university course on ceramics classification, an archaeological field school, an intensive petrography course, and archaeometry laboratory at a nuclear research reactor, and highlights participant observation and audiovisual data taken from fieldwork practice completed in these environments. This volume offers a valuable contribution to the growing literature on language and material culture, making this a key resource for students and scholars in sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistics, archaeology, discourse analysis, and anthropology.

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  Exploring Linguistic Science: Language Use, Complexity, and Interaction

  Allison Burkette and William A. Kretzschmar Jr.

  Exploring Linguistic Science introduces students to the basic principles of complexity theory and then applies these principles to the scientific study of language. It demonstrates how, at every level of linguistic study, we find evidence of language as a complex system. Designed for undergraduate courses in language and linguistics, this essential textbook brings cutting-edge concepts to bear on the traditional components of general introductions to the study of language, such as phonetics, morphology and grammar. The authors maintain a narrative thread throughout the book of 'interaction and emergence', both of which are key terms from the study of complex systems, a new science currently useful in physics, genetics, evolutionary biology, and economics, but also a perfect fit for the humanities. The application of complexity to language highlights the fact that language is an ever-changing, ever-varied product of human behavior.

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  Thibaut de Champagne. Les Chansons. Textes et mélodies.

  Christopher Callahan, Marie-Genviève Grossel, and Daniel E. O'Sullivan

  Pour la première fois, l'édition bilingue des poésies et la transcription des mélodies musicales d'un des plus grands trouvères du Moyen Age ! Thibaut IV, comte de Champagne et de Brie et roi de Navarre, dit " Thibaut le chansonnier ", compte parmi les trouvères les plus originaux et les plus prolifiques. Célébré par Dante, ce poète et mélodiste de talent s'avère un maître avisé de tous les genres lyriques pratiqués à son époque. Cette nouvelle édition présente les textes accompagnés de leur mélodie et d'une traduction en français moderne, et note non seulement les variantes des mélodies concordantes mais aussi les mélodies isolées. Cet ouvrage reflète ainsi les fruits des décennies de travaux philologiques et musicologiques.

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  Dizionario dei sogni nel medioevo: Il somniale Danielis in manoscritti letterari

  Valerio Cappozzo

  The Medieval Dream Dictionary is composed of entries coming from Latin and vernacular Italian versions of the Somniale Danielis – known as The Dreambook of Daniel the Prophet – which range from the ninth century to the first printed editions through 1550. This manual illustrates more than 3200 years of the history of dream interpretation from Ancient Egypt to today’s web pages. The Dictionary, which gathers this material for the first time, provides not only a better understanding of the medieval and Renaissance oneiric imaginary, but will also allow a practical introduction to the study of literary and artistic dream symbolism.

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  Il canto della ragione: 19 domande su Francesco De Sanctis

  Valerio Cappozzo

  Intervista a Valerio Cappozzo A cura di Valeria Noli "Un uccello, capace di volare come la fantasia, è posato su un ramo, solido come la realtà. L’immagine sulla copertina di questo libretto è metaforica: da un lato la natura, dall’altro il mondo delle idee. Con un analogoUn uccello, capace di volare come la fantasia, è posato su un ramo, solido come la realtà. L’immagine sulla copertina di questo libretto è metaforica: da un lato la natura, dall’altro il mondo delle idee. Con un analogo approccio dialettico, ispirato alla concretezza, Francesco De Sanctis mette diversi elementi nella sua concezione filosofica e storica. Questa fu influenzata anche dal lascito di Giambattista Vico, ben presente alla cultura napoletana del tempo. La degnità LXIV della sua Scienza nuova recita infatti: “L’ordine dell’idee dee procedere secondo l’ordine delle cose”. Un ottimo punto di partenza per lavorare sul rapporto tra letteratura e vita nazionale negli anni attorno all’Unità d’Italia. L’identità italiana era ancora un frutto acerbo e il critico riteneva fosse presto per scrivere unastoria della cultura nazionale. Credeva che ci volesse almeno un’altra generazione per approfondirne i molteplici aspetti. Qualcosa, però, gli fece cambiare idea: il primo volume della Storia della letteratura italiana uscìinfatti nel 1870, il secondo nel 1871. Certamente i tempi rendevano urgente una storia delle idee su cui costruire un’identità nazionale. De Sanctis si rivolgeva agli studenti con un analogo atteggiamento dialettico: erano al contempo destinatari e protagonisti degli appunti che dettava loro.". [dalla Prefazione di Valeria Noli]

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  Agencia, historia y el empoderamiento femenino

  Diane Marting, Eva Paris-Huesca, and Yamile Silva

  Queremos remarcar que la esencia de este volumen lo constituyen unos trabajos de enorme calidad, de investigadoras de larga y reconocida trayectoria y otras más jóvenes que están iniciando o comenzado a consolidar su carrera académica. El proyecto cuenta con un conjunto muy amplio y variado de trabajos académicos y creativos que incluyen una polifonía de voces e identidades y recogen una multiplicidad de abordajes teóricos posibles. Es por ello que decidimos estructurarlo de acuerdo a cuatro ejes temáticos. El presente volumen recoge un total de 22 ensayos que incluyen estudios sobre autoras de Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, España, México, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico y la República Dominicana.

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  Italiano, siciliano e arabo in contatto. Profilo sociolinguistico della communità tunisiana di Mazara del Vallo

  Luca D'Anna

  Mazara del Vallo, che ospita nella sua Kasbah la comunità tunisina più antica d'Italia, è un laboratorio linguistico di straordinario interesse. Arrivati alla fine degli anni Sessanta per lavorare nel settore della pesca, gli immigrati tunisini condividono da mezzo secolo, in terra e in mare, il proprio spazio vitale con la popolazione di Mazara del Vallo, in una coesistenza pacifica, sebbene non esente da problemi. Questo volume ripercorre, in un viaggio fra i vicoli densi di storia del centro storico, le trame linguistiche nate da questo contatto ormai cinquantennale. Il dialetto tunisino e quello siciliano si intrecciano, insieme all'italiano e al francese, nella produzione linguistica dei parlanti, che attraverso questo complesso repertorio danno voce a una identità polifonica, capace di abbracciare le due sponde del Mediterraneo e di evocarne la straordinaria ricchezza storica e culturale.

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  Lezioni americane di Giorgio Bassani

  Valerio Cappozzo

  Fra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta Giorgio Bassani si è recato molte volte negli Stati Uniti: prima come presidente dell’asso­ciazione Italia Nostra, per presentare la mostra “Italia da salvare”, poi per la pubblicazione delle traduzioni in inglese dei suoi libri, e infine per tenere corsi di letteratura italiana nelle università americane della California, Illinois e Indiana. Ripensando a quei viaggi, in una lettera del 1976 Bassani scrive che il ricordo si colora della luce del mito fino a sembrargli uno dei periodi più felici della sua vita – un periodo che gli ispirerà, tra l’altro, alcuni dei componimenti più belli della raccolta In gran segreto, quasi un diario di viaggio americano in forma poetica. È proprio di questo segreto, biografico e letterario, che si sono occupati gli autori dei saggi qui raccolti: Roberta Antognini, Valerio Cappozzo, Alessandro Giardino, Sergio Parussa, con un ricordo del prof. Edoardo Lèbano che invitò Bassani all’Indiana University, e di una sua studentessa, Linda Nemerow Ulman. Le lezioni del titolo non sono da intendersi solo come una riflessione su quel che Bassani poteva insegnare all’America – le mostre, i corsi universitari, le conferenze – ma anche come uno studio di quel che l’America poteva dare a Bassani: la lezione letteraria e morale appresa dallo scrittore ferrarese durante i suoi brevi ma intensi soggiorni oltreoceano.

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  Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns

  Daniel E. O'Sullivan and Laine E. Doggett

  Feminist discourses have called into question axiomatic world views and shown how gender and sexuality inevitably shape our perceptions, both historically and in the present moment. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies advances that critical endeavour with new questions and insights relating to gender and queer studies, sexualities, the subaltern, margins, and blurred boundaries. The volume's contributions, from French literary studies as well as German, English, history and art history, evince a variety of modes of feminist analysis, primarily in medieval studies but with extensions into early modernism. Several interrogate the ethics of feminist hermeneutics, the function of women characters in various literary genres, and so-called "natural" binaries - sex/gender, male/female, East/West, etc. - that undergird our vision of the world. Others investigate learned women and notions of female readership, authorship, and patronage in the production and reception of texts and manuscripts. Still others look at bodies - male male, female, neither, and both - and how clothes cover and socially encode them. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies is a tribute to E. Jane Burns, whose important work has proven foundational to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Old French feminist studies. Through her scholarship, teaching, and leadership in co-founding the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, Burns has inspired a new generation of feminist scholars.

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  Quantifying Expressions in the History of German: Syntactic Reanalysis and Morphological Change

  Dorian Roehrs and Christopher Sapp

  This study describes the 1200-year history of German quantifying expressions like nîoman anderro > niemand anderer ‘nobody else’, analyzing the morpho-syntactic developments within the generative framework. The quantifiers examined arose from various lexical sources/categories (nouns, adjectives, and pronouns) but all changed to adjectival quantifiers. These changes are interpreted as a novel type of upward reanalysis from head to specifier, which we associate with degrammaticalization driven by analogy. As for the quantified phrases, most appeared in the genitive in Old High German, indicating a bi-nominal structure. During the Early New High German period, most quantified nouns and adjectives changed to agreement with the quantifier. By Modern German, only quantified DPs and pronouns remain in the genitive. These changes involve downward reanalysis of the quantified elements, being integrated into the matrix nominal depending on the structural size of the quantified phrase. Overall, we conclude that diachronically quantifying expressions may have different syntactic analyses.

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  Language and Material Culture

  Allison Paige Burkette

  This innovative and provocative work introduces complexity theory and its application to both the study of language and the study of material culture. The book begins with a wide-ranging theoretical background, covering the areas of dialect geography, the anthropological study of material culture, and a general introduction to the study of complex adaptive systems. Following this general introduction, the principles of complexity theory are demonstrated in data drawn from linguistics and material culture studies. Language and Material Culture further highlights the principles of complexity through a series of case studies, using data from the Linguistic Atlas, colonial American inventories and the Historic American Building Survey. LMC shows that language and material culture are intertwined as they interact within the same cultural complex system. The book is designed for students in courses that focus on language variation, American English and material culture, in addition to general courses on applications of complex systems.

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  European Treasure: A. H. Reed's French and Italian Autograph Letters

  Valerio Cappozzo

  This catalogue, published in conjunction with the exhibition “European Treasure: A. H. Reed’s French and Italian Autograph Letters,”aims to create a meaningful connection among disparate handwritings, which guide us through troubled times in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe, among two nations in search of their national identities. It includes letters by people who helped to make France and Italy the modern states they are today. Of particular interest are letters by Italy’s ‘father of the nation’ Giuseppe Garibaldi, which exemplify the rebellious spirit agitating European nations in search of stability, identity and peace. Certain letters evoke cultural aspects, such as Jules Verne’s letter responding to a literary admirer who had evidently written to him in praise. Personal letters to friends convey a more human side and give us a glimpse into some private and daily aspects of the lives of those writers. Alfred Hamish Reed’s letter collecting is itself a subject of focus, with displays of his meticulously organised albums of letters, to which he habitually added portraits of authors or significant persons, a typed copy of the letter text, supplemented with biographical notes, and embellished with fancy lettering and illuminated in colour. The Barham scrapbook, recently discovered at a bookstore in Canada, contains the correspondence of Mr. and Mrs. Barham with Mr. Reed during his final years, and reveals their fascination with his character. Mr. Reed began collecting autograph letters in 1907, laying the foundation of a huge collection. He appreciated a letter for its uniqueness, retaining something of the individuality of the author, and sometimes the personality of the recipient. These rare and precious items offer an exceptional opportunity to glimpse the personalities of various French and Italian historical and cultural figures – and of Mr. Reed himself.

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  Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

  Daniel E. O'Sullivan and Laurie Shephard

  The concept of courtliness forms the theme of this collection of essays. Focused on works written in the Francophone world between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, they examine courtliness as both an historical privilege and a literary ideal, and as a concept that operated on and was informed by complex social and economic realities. Several essays reveal how courtliness is subject to satire or is the subject of exhortation in works intended for noblemen and women, not to mention ambitious bourgeois. Others, more strictly literary in their focus, explore the witty, thoughtful and innovative responses of writers engaged in the conscious process of elevating the new vernacular culture through the articulation of its complexities and contradictions. The volume as a whole, uniting philosophical, theoretical, philological, and cultural approaches, demonstrates that medieval "courtliness" is an ideal that fascinates us to this day. It is thus a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, in its exploration of the prrofound and wide-ranging ideas that define her contribution to the field.

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  The Verbal Complex in Subordinate Clauses from Medieval to Modern German

  Christopher D. Sapp

  This research monograph is an empirical and theoretical study of clause-final verbal complexes in the history of German. The book presents corpus studies of Middle High German and Early New High German and surveys of contemporary varieties of German. These investigations of the verbal complex address not only the frequencies of the word orders, but also the linguistic factors that influence them. On that empirical basis, the analysis adopted is the classic verb-final approach, with alternative orders derived by Verb (Projection) Raising. Verb Raising in these historical and modern varieties is subject to morphological, prosodic, and sociolinguistic restrictions, suggesting that the orders in question are not driven by narrow syntax but by their effects at the interface with phonology. This study will be of interest to students and scholars studying the diachronic syntax of German, West Germanic dialect syntax, and the relationship between prosody and word order.