Gasparino Barzizza's Commentaries on Seneca's Letters

Traditio ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 297-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Letizia A. Panizza

Gasparino Barzizza of Bergamo, a humanist educator and university professor of rhetoric at Padua and Milan in the early fifteenth century, has come down to us chiefly as a pioneer expounder of Ciceronian eloquence, the man to whom the precious old manuscript of Cicero's complete rhetorical works was confided in 1421 for transcription and divulgation. For centuries, however, his considerable contribution to Seneca studies made before this date has been almost totally neglected. But for a few excerpts from his commentary on Seneca's Letter 1 to Lucilius, tucked away in Francesco Novati's footnotes to a letter of Coluccio Salutati, nothing substantial from these commentaries and their introductory material has to my knowledge ever been printed. Judging from the scanty literature on Barzizza, one is forced to conclude that the content of these commentaries has not even been examined. Still worse, the only biography of Barzizza written in the twentieth century says they are lost. Yet Gasparino Barzizza emerges from these commentaries as a leading Seneca scholar of early fifteenth-century Italian humanism. He was the central figure of Seneca studies while at Padua, a university town with a tradition of interest in Seneca stretching back to Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato and the revival of Senecan tragedy, and continuing with Sicco Polenton and his Life of Seneca. As part of the introductory material to his Seneca commentaries, Barzizza wrote the first humanist Latin biography of Seneca using Tacitus, and developed more fully than anyone before him the image of Seneca as a religious dissimulator, calling him for the first time a ‘Nicodemus.’ In a sadly mutilated and anonymous form, it can now be shown, Barzizza's life of Seneca was the only one printed in several early editions of Seneca's works, including the 1515 and 1529 ones edited by Erasmus, and later mistakenly attributed to Sicco Polenton. Erasmus' caustic prefatory remarks on deformers of Seneca that characterize his 1529 edition are aimed, it can also be shown, at Barzizza. Barzizza's lengthy commentary on the controversial opening of Seneca's Letter 1 to Lucilius, a set piece in its own right, stands at the centre of a dispute very much alive in his own time, in which Petrarch and Salutati participated before him, and Pier Candido Decembrio, his brother Angelo, and Leonello d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, participated after him, not to mention Erasmus himself.

Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.


1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annegret Fauser

In 1903, one hundred years after the Prix de Rome had been created in music composition, women were allowed to participate in the competition for the first time. In 1913, Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the prize, crowning the efforts of three others-Juliette Toutain, Hélène Fleury, and Nadia Boulanger-to achieve this goal. Their stories are fascinating case studies of the strategies women employed to achieve success and public recognition within the complex framework of French cultural politics at the beginning of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Inna N. Mamkina ◽  

The article draws attention to the sociocultural aspect of the Siberian Railway Committee's activities in the early twentieth century. Historiographic analysis showed a research interest in the status of the Committee in the context of the organization of management of the Russian Empire's Eastern outskirts. Taking into account the broad powers of the Siberian Railway Committee, the author notes isolated studies of the social aspect in its activities. The aim of this publication is an attempt to create a holistic view of the activities of the Committee for the implementation of social tasks aimed at improving the life of railway employees at the TransBaikal section of the railway in the early twentieth century. The study was conducted on the basis of the documentation of the Siberian Railway Committee. A number of documents are introduced into scholarly discourse for the first time. Based on the structural and functional approach, using a set of historical research methods, it has been revealed that, after the commissioning of the Trans-Baikal section of the Siberian Railway, considerable attention was paid to solve sociocultural problems aimed at improving the life of railway employees. The preparatory commission chaired by A.N. Kulomzina and the Main School Committee implemented social programs. The author has defined the procedure for the formation of the committee, its structure, and principles of its activity. For the first time, personal data of the school committee's members elected on the Trans-Baikal Railway are introduced into scholarly discourse. The information of the committee's activities of the opening and maintenance of primary schools at railway stations has been summarized. The obtained statistics convincingly prove the effectiveness of the committee in the field of school education. The author notes that the Siberian Railway Committee achieved a very successful development of the school network by applying administrative and financial efforts. The author, for the first time, provides data on the organization of libraries and public convocations for the employees on the Trans-Baikal Railway. She draws attention to the organization of medical care for the employees; establishes the organization order and types of medical institutions; generalizes information about the staff of hospitals and obstetric centers, and the number of patients. The author concludes that the Siberian Railway Committee had an organized and balanced approach to solving sociocultural problems that occupied an important place in its activities. The Siberian Railway Committee's social programs in a number of areas were ahead of those of other government departments.


Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 257-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza

There are many still unstudied aspects of the cultural history of early Quattrocento Rome, especially if we consider the years before 1443, the date of the more or less permanent re-entry into the civitas aeterna of Pope Eugenius IV. The nexus between the still ephemeral papacy and the emerging intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism is one of these aspects. It is hoped that this study will shed some light on this problem by presenting a document that has hitherto not been completely edited: the original will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini. As we shall see, this important witness to the fifteenth century provides valuable information on many fronts, even on the structure of the old basilica of Saint Peter. The short introduction is in three parts. The first has a discussion of the cardinal's cultural milieu with a focus on the only contemporary treatise specifically about curial culture, Lapo da Castiglionchio's De curiae commodis. The second part addresses the textual history of the will as well as some misconceptions which have surrounded it. The third part contains a discussion of the will itself, along with some preliminary observations about what can be learned from the critical edition of the text here presented for the first time.


2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Hall

AbstractSoutheast Asian sources that report regional connection with the Majapahit and Angkor polities reflect upon a rapidly changing fourteenth and fifteenth century world order, the result of new trading opportunities as Europeans were becoming more direct participants in affairs beyond their Western home-lands. In the face of the individualistic and destructive tendencies of the wider global community circa 1500, in the Strait of Melaka region there was less dislocation and isolation than is supposed by many twentieth century scholars. Despite the number of political and religious transitions underway, in the Southeast Asian archipelago and mainland there was a sense of regional self-confidence and progress among societies who had enjoyed over two hundred years of widespread socio-economic success. These successes were the product of the functional international, regional, and local networks of communication, as well as a common heritage that had developed in the Strait of Melaka region during the pre-1500 era. This study not only addresses the role of Majapahit and Angkor in the shaping of regional inclusiveness circa 1500, but also explores the enduring (and often exclusive) legacy of these two early cultural centers among Southeast Asia's twentieth century polities.


Author(s):  
Oleksandr Antonenko ◽  
Margaryta Antonenko

The purpose of the article is to study the activities of festivals of spiritual songs in the context of the development of the musical culture of Ukraine in the late twentieth – early twentieth century. The methodology is based on historical and culturological approaches. A systematic method is also used to characterize festivals of the Orthodox music tradition in their connection with other components of culture; socio-cultural method – in the study of socio-cultural components of the artistic phenomenon of the festival. The scientific novelty of the work is that for the first time the activity of festivals of Orthodox sacred music as a new phenomenon in the musical culture of Ukraine is comprehensively analyzed. Conclusions. The emergence and active functioning of festivals of spiritual songs is one of the leading trends in the development of Orthodox musical culture in Ukraine. The ideological direction of the festivals is primarily of religious content, and, in addition to overcoming the negative trends in the field of culture, their leading function is the revival of orthodox traditions. Festivals of sacred music in Ukraine currently perform two main functions: educational and cultural. They contribute to the revival of the traditions of orthodox musical culture; demonstrate the traditions of orthodoxy in modern socio-cultural conditions; revive centuries-old traditions of spiritual choral singing of Ukraine; revive centuries-old traditions of spiritual choral singing of Ukraine.


Author(s):  
E.A. Radaeva ◽  

The purpose of this study is to present a model for the development of the expressionist method in the genre of the novel using the example of the evolution of the novelistic work of the Austrian writer of the early twentieth century L. Perutz. The results obtained: the creative method of the Austrian writer is moving from scientific knowledge to mysticism; in the center of all novels created with a large interval, there is always a confused hero, broken by what is happening (in other words, the absurdity of the world), whose state is often conveyed through gestures; the author finally moves away from linear narration to dividing the plot into almost autonomous stories, thematically gravitating more and more to the distant historical past. Scientific novelty: the novels of L. Perutz are for the first time examined in relative detail through the prism of the aesthetics of expressionism.


1989 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Beaumont James ◽  
Anne M. James

This volume gives an account of all the excavations undertaken at Clarendon in the twentieth century, including those of 1933–9 led by John Charlton and Tancred Borenius and the excavations by Elizabeth Eames and John Musty in the 1950s and 1960s. The history, archaeology and finds are examined together for the first time to present a detailed picture of palace life.


Author(s):  
Nancy Stalker

Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, was first systematized in the fifteenth century, when it was limited to elite male practitioners. It was first widely practiced by women in the early twentieth century, but did not reach mass popularity until the 1950s and 1960s, with an estimated ten million students, over 99 percent of whom were female. While it was still considered by many to be a domestic skill for upper-middle-class housewives, it increasingly offered employment for postwar Japanese women as teachers and even as headmasters (iemoto) of their own schools, allowing women to engage in paid labor without violating traditional gender norms. This chapter traces the trajectory of job opportunities for women in ikebana, examining how educational reforms in the Meiji and postwar periods provided chances to study and obtain teaching licenses in ikebana and how the three largest schools—Ikenobo, Ohara, and Sogetsu—increasingly professionalized their corps of teachers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-102
Author(s):  
Walid A. Saleh

The Qur'an commentary Anwār al-tanzīl of al-Bayḍāwī (d. 719/1319) was one of the most important works of the Islamic religious tradition. As a universally adopted Sunni text for teaching tafsīr, it was ubiquitous, read even in Safavid Iran. This was a work used by all Sunni schools, and as such was beyond the legal divisions of madhāhib. The history of this work is, however, uncharted. This article follows the trajectory of this work and traces the history of its rise to predominance, when and why it was adopted, and how the new significance it gained after the ninth/fifteenth century was projected back to the period it was written. It explores how the Anwār replaced al-Zamakhsharī's (d. 538/1144) al-Kashshāf in scholarly circles in Cairo before going on to gain universalised authority in the Ottoman realms. Following this, I address the deep-rooted connections that existed between the scholars of Cairo and Istanbul, and how late Mamluk developments in Cairo came to full fruition in Istanbul. The eclipse of the Anwār by the Qur'an commentary of Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1372) in the twentieth century is also outlined, and a list of the published glosses of Anwār is supplied in an appendix.


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