Dante's Gluttons

Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy explores how in his work medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) uses food to articulate, reinforce, criticize, and correct the social, political, and cultural values of his time. Combining medieval history, food studies, and literary criticism, Dante’s Gluttons historicizes food and eating in Dante, beginning in his earliest collected poetry and arriving at the end of his major work. For Dante, the consumption of food is not a frivolity, but a crux of life in the most profound sense of the term, and gluttony is the abdication of civic and spiritual responsibility and a danger to the individual body and soul as well as to the collective. This book establishes how one of the world’s preeminent authors uses the intimacy and universality of food as a touchstone, communicating through a gastronomic language rooted in the deeply human relationship with material sustenance.

Christian Sources in al-Maqrīzī’s Kitāb al-Ḫiṭaṭ and al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar

It is widely known that al-Maqrīzī relied extensively on the work by the Coptic author Ibn al-ʿAmīd for the chapter on the Copts included in his Kitāb al-Ḫiṭaṭ. Some scholars have assessed that the text known as Kitāb Hurūšiyūš, which was compiled by a Christian from al-Andalus, was also a major source for large fragments of al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫiṭaṭ. More recently, it has been argued that al-Maqrīzī also relied on those two Christian sources for his last major work, al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar. In this article, I intend to offer a more comprehensive survey of the use of both sources by al-Maqrīzī. By providing a good many examples, I aim to demonstrate that al-Maqrīzī built on them entire sections or long passages of his books, but also turned to them frequently to add in short reports, variant versions, a date, a nasab, or any information he considered relevant to his work.

Bartók’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano nos. 1–2: The Compositional Process

In the focus of this paper a survey of the draft score will disclose major corrections of the concept and discuss deleted and rewritten sections in both Sonatas for Violin and Piano no. 1 (1921) and no. 2 (1922). A close study of the unusual-type preliminary sketches of the First Sonata in his so-called Black Pocket-Book (facsimile edition: 1987) already gave insight into Bartók’s atypical composition when he had to work without a piano at hand for shaping and refining a new major work (see Somfai, “‘Written between the Desk and the Piano’: Dating Béla Bartók’s Sketches,” in A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, ed. by Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The two draft scores (no. 1 = 34 pages, no. 2 = 21 pages, including discarded and rewritten sections) open new vistas in understanding the concept of the individual compositions. The next stage of manuscripts provides a significant source: the score and violin part used at the first performances, the latter with fingering and bowing contributed by the hand of Jelly Arányi and Imre Waldbauer in the First Sonata, Waldbauer, Ede Zathureczky, Zoltán Székely, and Jelly Arányi in the Second. A study of the revision of metronome numbers will conclude the investigation.

‘Louis Becke’s Modern Buccaneer: The transformation of William “Bully” Hayes into the first modern literary pirate of the Pacific’

During his career, Louis Becke, the most internationally well-known Australian writer of the South Pacific region at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote a series of novellas, stories, and articles that featured the infamous conman and thief, Captain William ‘Bully’ Hayes, with whom he had sailed through the Pacific Islands for a short period. Influenced by the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and earlier accounts of piracy in the Pacific, Becke’s fictionalized version of Hayes was the original archetypal South Pacific pirate character: a Long John Silver of the South Seas. Beginning with the first major work about Hayes, A Modern Buccaneer, substantially written by Becke although published under Boldrewood’s name, Becke’s re-imagined Hayes became the pervasive Pacific pirate literary trope not only throughout Becke’s books, stories, and articles but also within the work of subsequent writers.

Medicines and life (to the 100th anniversary of Professor Irina Vitalievna Zaikonnikova)

Irina Vitalevna Zaikonnikova is a well-known Soviet pharmacologist, headed the Department of Pharmacology of the Kazan State Medical Institute between 1968 and 1989. The topic of I.V. Zaikonnikovas Ph.D. thesis was The influence of dikain on blood vessels and its relationship with adrenaline. In her dissertation, Irina Vitalievna found that dicaine dilates blood vessels in low concentrations and causes their constriction in high concentrations. The thesis was successfully defended in 1947. In the 50s of the last century in Kazan, for the first time in the Soviet Union, the study of the biological activity of organophosphorus compounds was begun. A large experimental material concerning the correlation between the biological activity and chemical structure of compounds was summarized in his doctoral dissertation Pharmacological characteristics of a number of dialkylphosphinic acid esters, which I.V. Zaikonnikova defended in 1968. At the Department of Pharmacology, which she headed since 1968, a close-knit team was formed, united by a common interest the search and development of new potential drugs. This major work resulted in the creation of cidiphos, glycifon, phosphabenzide, and dimephosphon organophosphorus compounds of a new type, which mechanism of action is not associated with inhibition of the activity of acetylcholinesterase. In addition, drugs that did not belong to organophosphates were created the daytime tranquilizer mebikar, a regeneration stimulator with the immunomodulatory effect of xymedon. At present, the Department of Pharmacology of Kazan State Medical University continues the scientific traditions of our outstanding predecessors.

Der prix de morale der Akademie von Dijon für das Jahr 1750

The article reconsiders Rousseau’s famous Discours sur les sciences et les arts within the medial and institutional context of the prize question (prix de morale) proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the year 1750. To do so, it pays special attention to the contributions submitted by Rousseau’s (thirteen) competitors, which so far have hardly been analysed by historians of literature and philosophy. The paper also expands on the institutional and social structure of the Academy of Dijon as well as the particular profile of its morality prizes organized since 1743. In addition, the article situates the contest of 1750 in the broader context of the concours académique and outlines the evolution of the genre with its specific rhetorical traditions since the end of the seventeenth century. Thus, the crucial question, how the Academy of Dijon came to select Rousseau’s text, can be approached from a different angle. Finally, this perspective also sheds new light upon certain aspects of a major work in the history of philosophy - the Discours sur les sciences et les arts.

A Victory Tower Built by a Slave: The Chand Minar at Daulatabad in Deccan India

The Chand Minar (1446) at Daulatabad Fort is one of the tallest pre-modern stone minarets in the world and has long been recognized as a major work of Indo-Islamic architecture. Yet surprisingly little is known about the building: its iconography and the reason for its construction have not been established; even its height is frequently misreported by half. The present article analyzes the building’s architecture and urban context and critically reads its inscriptions against the Tārīkh-i Firishta (ca. 1610), the main primary text for the history of the medieval Deccan. In so doing, the article demonstrates that issues of race shaped the courtly politics in the Deccan at the time of the minaret’s construction. The Chand Minar was commissioned by Parvez bin Qaranful, an African military slave, who dedicated the building to the Bahmani sultan ʿAla⁠ʾ al-Din Ahmad II (r. 1436–58). The article shows that the building commemorated the role of African and Indian officers in a 1443 military victory of the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1527) against the Vijayanagara empire (1336–1664). The construction of the Chand Minar impressed upon Ahmad II the importance of retaining in his court dark-skinned officers from India and Africa (dakkaniyān) at a time when their standing was threatened by the lighter-skinned gharībān, who had immigrated from the western Islamic regions. The article thus presents a detailed study of an important but neglected monument while shedding new light on racial factionalism in the fifteenth-century Deccan.

The concept of classes in early work of F. Engels

In 2020 the scientific community celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels with numerous publications, conferences, and meetings. But as if by tradition representatives of various social and humanitarian disciplines, including sociologists, were and remain to this day, surprisingly inattentive (or indifferent) to the concepts of classes and class analysis presented by the founder of Marxism in his first book «The Condition of the Working Class in England», published in 1845. Modern life writers of F. Engels usually rank the work as a genre of high-quality journalistic investigations, as an engaged political journalism, as the first publications on the problem of urbanization, and as one of the best examples of a fiction book about the life and customs of the Victorian era. The article substantiates its belonging to the social and humanitarian science in accordance with today’s ideas about the relevance of scientific research. A sociological explication and interpretation of the views on the formation, evolution and prospects for the participation of large groups of people in the process of transforming social orders are proposed. The first part presents the biographical context of Engels’ writing of his first major work, as well as some post-biographical facts about the memory of his stay in Manchester in connection with the living conditions of English workers. The second part lists those conceptual constructs that can be taken for the concept of classes.

Constructing Contrast: Juxtaposition as a tool for formal construction in my own creative practice, explored through the music of Stravinsky and Donatoni

<p>Juxtaposition and Superimposition are two techniques that I have adopted as a core feature of my creative practice. This exegesis examines the origins of these techniques through the analysis of two 20th century works, Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920/1947) and Franco Donatoni’s Tema (1981), examining how the role all musical parameters, including timbre, pitch, rhythm and gesture, combine to create unique and perceptible shapes which can be purposefully juxtaposed, recombined and shuffled to create musical form. The influence and effect of these compositions is then discussed in relation to an analysis of the major work of my accompanying portfolio: Hot Coals for orchestra (2016/2017), demonstrating how ideas taken from the preceding analyses are developed further, and influence not just the resulting aesthetic, but also the construction and process of composition itself.</p>

Ieskats latviešu valodas izloksnēs apzinātajos biezputru nosaukumos

Porridge has long been one of the main dishes in the national diet. In the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, porridges were not only cooked on a daily basis on farms but more often (more frequently barley groats or potato-cooked groats) were associated with folk traditions and cooked at the end of each major work, such as sowing, cuts, threshing, finishing of linen plucking or a larger fabric. The names of some porridges form very broad thematic vocabulary groups. Their characteristic feature is semantic branching, i.e. the use of the same products, similarity in the way of cooking, their external features determine that the same word is used to describe different porridges. In the article, the names of porridge have been examined mainly from the semantic and areal points of view. Insights are provided into names that include a reference to the source product of the food and names that reveal an activity related to the preparation or use of the food. Several of the names considered cover smaller or larger areas (e. g. klecene, studzene, pļepene). The designation of the raw product is usually included in the first component resp. in the first part of the compound name for porridge (for example, miltu biezputra ‘flour porridge’, putraimbiezputra ‘groat porridge’, azbara biezputra ‘id.’). A reference to an activity carried out during the preparation of food may reveal its relationship to the food in question, either directly (e. g. kultene ‘stirred porridge’, karseknis ‘heated porridge’) or indirectly (e. g. šķeterene ‘twisted porridge’). The considered material also provides evidence of porridge names from the word-formational, morphological and phonetical points of view. For example, derivatives with the suffixes -en-, -in-, -nīc- (lecene, pankšene, biezine, kultenīca) are widespread, prefixal derivatives (papļepene, sakratene) and compounds (puspļepene) are found, the stem change (kratene, kratenis) is observed, the interchange of the consonants s and š (studzene, študzene) has been fixed.