Comparative Literature

This translation of Tomaso Garzoni's Renaissance "best-seller" provides a rich and revealing window on sixteenth-century views of madness and foolishness, and social deviance. Garzoni's encyclopedic work is perhaps the most important contribution of the last half of the century to the "fools" genre to which Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools also belong. Garzoni provides a spoof of academic writing on madness, with extensive "reviews of the medical literature" on certain types of madness. A final, intriguing section on the varieties of madness to be found in Garzoni's female "patients" reveals much about late-Renaissance attitudes towards women.

The essay focuses on the trial of Paolo Barbieri for the murder of his wife Isabella Caccianemici in Bologna in 1588. Doctors diagnosed the murderer as affected by melancholic humors which apparently made him kill in a fit of madness. During the trial witnesses defined Paolo’s behavior with words ranging from “odd” to “melancholic” to “lunatic”, while the defense lawyers for Paolo’s alleged accomplices presented arguments drawn from legal treatises and consilia dealing with the condition of furor and trying to apply it to Paolo’s alleged “furor”. A comparison of the witness and defendant's depositions and the judge's questioning with the textual tradition found in legal treatises and consilia demonstrate the complex way legal practices in Bologna dealt with matters of madness.

My study analyzes the most common types of illnesses of the head in treatises of medicina practica and in collections of consilia written by leading Bolognese physicians in the second half of the sixteenth century. In this study I offer a partial answer to the question of madness in sixteenth-century Bologna, a university medical center for all of Italy and Europe in the early-modern period. The answer lies, in part, in the learned medical tradition of madness, and in particular, in the ways in which important physicians at the University of Bologna represented madness in relation to gender in two genres: the treatise of medicina practica and the consilium. Though stereotypes of masculine and feminine behavior shaped the way these two genres viewed mental illnesses, they played a lesser role in the consilia.

In this essay I analyze the development of the genre of the consilium at the end of the sixteenth century based on recent scholarship regarding the genres of early modern medical consilia and observationes. It is my conviction that for some late sixteenth-century physicians the consilium was becoming a hybrid genre in which elements of the already existing observatio were inserted into the structure of the consilium. To prove this point, I will consider the consilia of three physicians—Giambattista Da Monte, Girolamo Capivacci and Cristoforo Guarinoni--and a specific illness, melancholy. I intend to show that while the diagnosis of symptoms, signs and causes of melancholy did not change for them, the attitude of these physicians toward the patient altered in the direction of a larger interest in the individual.

This is the introduction to the book _Emblems of Death in the Early Modern Period_ that Peter Daly and I co-edited and that came out with Droz in October 2014. This document gives you an idea of the main theme of the book, the perspectives from which the editors and contributors interpreted this theme, and the content of each essay included in the book.

In recent years the connection between legal structures, methodologies and actors on the one hand and emotions on the other has gained momentum as disciplinary area linked to the study of the history of emotions, which has produced in the last decade a vast amount of excellent publications, and has created a cluster of inter related fields across disciplines, time periods and geographical areas.  Following in the footsteps of other scholars of the medieval and early modern period, this paper intends to offer an overview into the emotions that were expressed or couched in criminal proceedings and legal documents—mostly wills—produced in early modern Bologna and Rome. It is possible at times to infer the emotional trigger that pushed some individuals to distribute their wealth in their wills in a certain way, besides the economic interest for the family patrimony.  Contrary to the common view that legal courts and justice should be impervious to emotions, this analysis intends to show that interrogations and the actors involved in them and legal decisions expressed some types of emotions, either as a tool to mitigate a court decision, or as a way to substantiate a line of defense or prosecution.

The founders and organizers of Teachers on Teaching, a CUNY-based community supporting world language instruction grades 7-16 and beyond, and the Romance Languages Department at Hunter College are thrilled to invite you to the conference “When History Comes to Life: Experiential Pedagogy in the World Language and Social Sciences Classrooms.” The meeting will take place on November 15, 2019, from 9 AM to 1:15 PM at Hunter College. The conference will offer tested pedagogical tools meant to help instructors create long-term modules (academic semester/academic year) and short-term activities. Topics related to history will serve as the foundation for the development of content-rich material in world languages and social sciences courses at the advanced secondary/college level.
The conference will have six presenters representing the disciplines of History, Italian, and Spanish. The presenters, two secondary educators, and four college instructors with many years of teaching experience will offer teaching strategies and learning goals for introducing and weaving historical topics into a class curriculum. The talks, divided into two sessions, will be followed by a one-hour demonstration given by historians Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen (York University, Toronto, Canada).

The first goal of this essay is to show that the teaching of literary works is instrumental in classes designed to improve students’ reading and writing skills in Italian. The second goal is to demonstrate that using literary texts paired with artistic works can 1. stimulate students to produce their creative works, and 2. provide them with pedagogical tools they can adapt to their needs when teaching languages. The ultimate goal is to study the emotions that artworks express, and to connect literary texts to paintings.

Rf,c:[-.\si()\i to rethink Dc Sica along a varÌL'l\-of lines: the relation between the filmmaker and Za\attiiii; the signifvinu; practices of De Sica's films before, during, and after neorealism; De Sica and the Americanization of Italian film and culture; and so on. In short, the volume mav well serve to spark a renewal in the study of De Sica, leading to more comprehensive contemporary insight into his work. I'or this reason, as well as for all the good things noted above in individual essays, the volume is a welcome addition to the Uni\ersity of Toronto series and to the literature of Italian film history and criticism. I'RANK Bl RKF. {Oiteen's L'nircrsity) Zsusanna Rozsnyói. Dopo Ariosto. Tecniche narrative e discorsive nei poemi postariosteschi. Ravenna: Longo Ed., 2000. 161 pp. IL 25,000. Rozsnyói's study, Dopo Ariosto. Tecniche narrative e discorsive nei poemi postariosteschi, is a well-researched exploradon of little-smdied texts published in the three decades between the prindng of the third edition of Ludovico Ariosto 's Orlando Furioso (1532) and the publication of Torquato Tasso's Rinaldo (1562). Rozsnyói focuses on the notion of hybridization between epic and chivalric traditions and on the resulting mutual "interference" between theoretical discourse and literary practice (7). Rozsnyói recognizes the canonical status of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and its vast influence over the thematic and structural organization of later poems, as well as the importance of contemporary scholarly elaborations of Aristode's Poetics, newly translated in Latin and Italian (24). She focuses on issues of narrative and discursive technique. Her research is solidly based on historical material and on mostly Italian critical works published in the last cenmry. Rozsnyói exhibits a thorough knowledge of the content and narrative structure of the texts and the debate over the theory of genre. She espouses Bakhtin's idea that literary genres derive from the constant reproduction of other genres and observes that the chivalric romance has constandy absorbed minor genres, thus becoming a very flexible and open structure (89). Rozsnyói considers Giorgio Trissino's F'ltalia liberata dai Goti, (1547-1548), Luigi Alamanni's Girone il cortese (1548) and Avarchide (1560), Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio's Dell'Hercole, (1557) Bernardo Tasso's Amadigi di Gaula, (1560) and Francesco Bolognetti's Costante (1565-1566). She briefly considers Tullia d'Aragona's Meschino detto il Guerrino (1560), an epic poem addressed to a female audience; Ludovico Dolce's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in octave (1570) and his poem Achille ed Enea, (1 570)both examples of experimentation with the classical tradition. For Rozsnyói, these texts express new relationships of author and text and author and literary tradition. They are also the objects of multiple reproductions among various social strata thanks to the market of the printed book. The first two chapters analyze the constant interconnection bet\veen Ut