scholarly journals The Vichian Resurrection of Commedia dell’Arte: Michelet, Sand, and De Sanctis

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Rocco Rubini

This essay seeks to reconnect two intellectual events of major import in nineteenth-century France: Jules Michelet’s “rediscovery” of Giambattista Vico as a viable source for a critical review of modernity’s task and the scholarly, artistic, and moral accreditation of commedia dell’arte, something inaugurated by George and Maurice Sand in their landmark Masques at bouffons (1860). Together, I contend, these scholarly events mark turning points in the romantic revision of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment legacies. In the first section of this essay, I examine Michelet’s Vichian obsession, itself so often studied in isolation, to account for its hybridization with a specific brand of Italian Vichianism imported to France by Italian Risorgimento expatriates. As I explore in the second part of the essay, this connection informs the Sands’ recuperation of commedia dell’arte, another important part of Italy’s early modern legacy, as itself a Vichian event mediated by Michelet’s historiography. In conclusion, this rapprochement will allow us to elucidate a larger reciprocation between French and Italian thinkers at the same time that Italians were reckoning with the legacy of the Risorgimento, as we see through the eyes of one of its major proponents, Francesco De Sanctis, who in his influential History of Italian literature (1870–1) reappropriated Vico to argue that the rebirth of Italy may depend on the obliteration of both its Renaissance and comic traditions.

Author(s):  
Yiying Pan

Abstract This article investigates the collective responsibility organizations among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing, when the city became one of the most important metropolises on the southwest Qing frontier. It also introduces two successive turning points in self-organization that were associated with two different classes of boatmen – skippers and sailors. First, in 1803, skippers gained the authority to institutionalize their organizations through their negotiations with the local state regarding official services and service fees. Second, when similar service and fiscal tensions emerged between skippers and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, the skippers facilitated and supervised the institutionalization of collective responsibility organizations that were run by the sailors themselves. By contextualizing this expansion of collective responsibility organizations within the multilayered interactions between skippers and sailors, this article proposes that the perspective of interclass networks is crucial for deepening the study of state−society interactions, the capital−labor relationship, as well as the tension between imperial integration and regional diversity in early modern China.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Keitt

Abstract This essay examines the discourse on medicine and the Inquisition in nineteenth-century Spain. It traces how liberal reformers selectively appropriated aspects of the history of Spanish medicine in the service of their contemporary political and scientific agendas, and how in doing so they contributed to the formation of new professional and national identities.


1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Sussman

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.


2020 ◽  
pp. 162-168
Author(s):  
Kevin Duong

This conclusion reviews the importance of studying redemptive violence in nineteenth century France in light of the political history of the twentieth century. It argues that, despite the increased intensity of violence in the twentieth century, a study of redemptive violence in the nineteenth century is still important for us today. That is because it emphasizes that all democratic revolutions are social revolutions. All democratic revolutions pose the problem of reconstructing democratic social bonds. Redemptive violence’s history underscores that fraternité was always as important as liberty and equality in the French tradition. Critics of fraternité today ignore the importance of democratic solidarity at their peril.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-96
Author(s):  
Markus Messling

Abstract In the New Science (1744), Giambattista Vico defined filologia as “the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice” of the mondo civile. When nineteenth-century European nationalism was on the rise, supported by narratives of cultural homogeneity and specificity, philological comparatism was the state-of-the-art and it, often, legitimated the obsessions with the purity of origins and genealogies. Italy, characterized by internal plurality and its Mediterranean entanglements, is a model case. Whereas many discourses of the Risorgimento aspired to shape a new Italian nation after the classical model, Michele Amari’s History of the Muslims of Sicily (1854–1872) marked an astonishing exception. For him, going back to Islamic-Sicilian history, its literary, rhetorical and linguistic culture, meant to resume, on a higher level of incivilmento (Vico), what had been obscured by cultural decline: the spirit of freedom and equality, which Ibn Khaldūn had attributed to the Bedouins and their dynamics in history.


Reinardus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 81-93
Author(s):  
Wilt L. Idema

Abstract The tale of the war of the mice against the cat has a history of several thousands of years. First known from ancient Egypt, it was wide-spread in Classical antiquity, would remain popular in the Near East until modern times, and also was widely known in Europe in medieval and early modern times in paintings, prints, songs, and mock-epics. In China the most popular tale on the antagonism of mice and cats was the tale of their underworld court case. Starting from the first half of the nineteenth century, some versions of that tale also include an account of the war between the two species. Only one stand-alone treatment of the theme is known from an edition of the 1920s. In Japan the theme of the war of the mice against the cats also makes its first appearance in print in the first half of the nineteenth century. No direct foreign influence can be discerned in the emergence of this theme in either country.


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