scholarly journals The Reception of Petrarch’s Africa in Fascist Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Asad Abijuwa Agbamu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Second Punic War ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

AbstractIn his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

The Bashmurite Revolts in the Delta and the ‘Bashmuric Dialect’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Feder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Population

This chapter examines the history of the famous Bashmuric revolts and introduces the so-called Bashmuric dialect of Coptic. The Bashmuric revolts were recorded by Coptic and Arabic medieval historians and became known to European scholars as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the population of the Delta revolted very successfully for a longer period against the Arab rule and administration. Historians and the History of the Patriarchs attributed the revolts to the insupportable fiscal demands and unjust treatment of the Christian population by the Muslim governors (walis). The appearance of the Bashmuric dialect is first noted in the description of Athanasius of Qus (fourteenth century) in his Coptic grammar written in Arabic. Early scholars (beginning in the seventeenth century) studying Coptic manuscripts then tried to apply Athanasius' division of the Coptic language to the Coptic texts.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-Norman studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Rothwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThroughout the present century the nature of Anglo-Norman and its role in the history of both French and English has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the endless repetition at second hand of views that have their origin in the nineteenth–century ‘reconstructionist’ movement in French philology. Evidence readily available from original sources of many kinds shows that the French used in England between the Conquest and the end of the fourteenth century is at once a more complex and far more important phenomenon than current writing on the subject would suggest, especially as regards the history of the English language.

Beyond control: Orientalist tensions and the history of the “upas tree” myth

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-189
Author(s):  
Tim Hannigan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Surrounding Atmosphere ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

The “upas tree” is one of the most enduring European myths about Southeast Asia. Accounts of a tree so toxic that it renders the surrounding atmosphere deadly can first be identified in fourteenth-century journey narratives covering what is now Indonesia. But while most other such apocrypha vanished from later European accounts of the region, the upas myth remained prominent and in fact became progressively more elaborate and fantastical, culminating in a notorious hoax: the 1783 account of J. N. Foersch. This article examines the history of the development of the upas myth, and considers the divergent responses to Foersch’s hoax amongst scientists and colonial administrators on the one hand, and poets, playwrights, and artists on the other. In this it reveals a significant tension within the emerging “Orientalist” discourse about Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth century.

Modern Arabic Literature as Seen in the Late Nineteenth Century: Jurji Murqus’s Contribution to Korsh and Kirpichnikov’s Vseobshchaya Istoriya Literatury*

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Kilpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Modern Arabic

This chapter discusses modern Arabic literature as seen in the late nineteenth century by focusing on Jurji Ibrahim Murqus's contribution to Vseobshchaya Istoriya literatury (Universal History of Literature), edited by V. F. Korsh and A. I. Kirpichnikov. Murqus was a Syrian academic migrant who left Damascus in 1860. He studied at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the University of St Petersburg and taught Arabic at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow. This chapter presents a slightly abridged rendering of Murqus's text, which concentrates on the evolution of the Arabic language, on prose writers and on translators. It also considers Murqus's position where prose genres are concerned, with particular emphasis on his recognition of the significance of travel writing, as well as his views on translation. Finally, it suggests that Mustafa Badawi would have disputed some of Murqus's statements on sound scholarly grounds.

Humanism and Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
City States ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Political Conviction

For more than a century, scholars have believed that Italian humanism was predominantly ‘civic’ in outlook. Often serving in communal government, fourteenth-century humanists like Albertino Mussato and Coluccio Salutati are said to have derived from their reading of the Latin classics a rhetoric of republican liberty that was opposed to the ‘tyranny’ of neighbouring signori and of the German emperors. In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Lee challenges this long-held belief. From the death of Frederick II in 1250 to the failure of Rupert of the Palatinate’s ill-fated expedition in 1402, Lee argues, the humanists nurtured a consistent and powerful affection for the Holy Roman Empire. Though this was articulated in a variety of different ways, it was nevertheless driven more by political conviction than by cultural concerns. Surrounded by endless conflict—both within and between city states—the humanists eagerly embraced the Empire as the surest guarantee of peace and liberty, and lost no opportunity to invoke its protection. Indeed, as Lee shows, the most ardent appeals to imperial authority were made not by ‘signorial’ humanists, but by humanists in the service of communal regimes. The first comprehensive, synoptic study of humanistic ideas of Empire in the period c.1250–1402, this volume offers a radically new interpretation of fourteenth-century political thought, and raises wide-ranging questions about the foundations of modern constitutional ideas. As such, it is essential reading not just for students of Renaissance Italy and the history of political thought, but for all those interested in understanding the origins of liberty.

Islam in the History of Early Europe

Itinerario ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
European History ◽  
Mediterranean Islands ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Land Mass ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean

Virtually every account of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire identifies ‘Europe’ with Christian civilisation, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the universalist claims of the Byzantine emperors, the popes and the western Roman emperors. Yet it is also the case that Islam possessed a European presence from the eighth century onwards, first of all in Spain and the Mediterranean islands, and later, from the mid-fourteenth century, in the Balkans, where the Turks were able rapidly to establish an empire which directly threatened Hungary and Austria. The lands ruled by Islam on the European land mass have tended to be treated by historians as European only in geographical identity, but in human terms part of a victorious and alien ‘oriental’ civilisation, of which they were provincial dependencies, and from which medieval Spanish Christians or modern Greeks and Slavs had to liberate themselves. Yet this view is fallacious for several reasons. In the first place, there is a valid question about our use of the term ‘civilisation’, which Fred Halliday has expressed as follows:‘Civilisations’ are like nations, traditions, communities – terms that claim a reality and authority which is itself open to question, and appeal to a tradition that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a contemporary creation.

Edward Lear

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
Marco Graziosi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comic Art ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Picture Stories

Edward Lear has secured a prominent position in the history of literature and travel writing thanks to his nonsense books and his journals; he is considered one of the most innovative zoological illustrators of the nineteenth century and is being rediscovered as a landscape painter in watercolour and oil. This article argues that he also deserves to be remembered among the precursors of modern comic art. His picture stories, though never published in his lifetime, represent an early instance of autobiographical graphic narrative, while his limericks, never out of print since 1861, introduced a radically innovative caricatural style and a conception of the relationship between pictures and text that strongly influenced modern comic artists.

scholarly journals Editorial Strategies of Hungarian Women Editors in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Bozsoki
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Group ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Group Consciousness ◽  
Women Editors ◽  
Significant Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Journalism ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Editorial Strategies

While significant research has been done on periodicals for women readers published in Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century, little is known about the editors of these periodicals. This article offers a brief discussion of how Hungarian women’s editorial strategies differed from those adopted by their male colleagues. It argues that although periodicals edited by women tended to feature more female literary authors than those edited by men, they generally had no aim of creating a female group consciousness. The essay then goes on to focus on one significant exception, the first periodical edited by a woman in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Emília Kánya's (1828–1905) Családi Kör [Family Circle] (1860–80), which, on the contrary, connected its marketing strategy with female community building. The analysis draws on insights from the fields of women’s studies, history of literature, and history of journalism.

Personen, grenzen en politieke eenheden in de veertiende eeuw

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-602
Author(s):  
Aart Noordzij
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Composite Nature ◽  
Political Units

Abstract Personal agency, borders and political units in the fourteenth century. The duchy of Guelders and the history of international relationsTheories that offer a historicized account of international relations often consider the late middle ages as a period of fundamental change. Territorial political units, geographically defined borders, and distinctions between internal and external gradually developed and became increasingly important. As a result international relations were not only governed by competition between individual lords, by feudal networks, or by imperial and papal universalism, but also by the agency of newly developing geopolitical units, such as kingdoms, territories, towns, and local lordships. On the basis of the Guelders War of Succession (1371-1379) this paper offers a snapshot of this process of transition, demonstrating the dense and composite nature of international relations during the fourteenth century in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire.

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