BOB2024MIOT

During the Renaissance, the Arts curriculum in universities was based almost exclusively on the teaching of Aristotle. With the revival of Plato, however, professors of philosophy started to deviate from the official syllabus and teach Plato’s dialogues. This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive overview of Platonic teaching in Italian Renaissance universities, from the establishment of a Platonic professorship at the university of Florence-Pisa in the late 15th century to the introduction of Platonic teaching in the schools and universities of Bologna, Padua, Venice, Pavia and Milan in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays draw from new evidence found in manuscripts and archival material to explore how university professors adapted the format of Plato’s dialogues to suit their audience and defended the idea that Plato could be accommodated to university teaching. They provide significant and fundamental insight into how Platonism spread during the 16th and 17th centuries and how a new interpretation of Plato emerged, distinct from the Neoplatonic tradition revived by Marsilio Ficino.

In the years after 1900 the autonomous activity of the Catholic laity in politics, culture and society was opposed by ‘integralists’ in theological circles, in the laity as well as in the clergy, and last but not least in the Roman Curia. The integralists favoured a strict confessionalism and hierarchical control over all fields of Catholic life. Pope Pius X enforced this position in Italy and in France by solemnly condemning the autonomist Christian Democracy of Romolo Murri and the ‘Sillon’ movement of Marc Sangnier. In Germany, however, compromises with the Roman authorities were possible on all fields of contention: concerning the interdenominational character of the Christian trade unions, the independence of the Centre Party from the hierarchy and also during the controversy over the ‘Catholic belles-lettres’. Finally, in the papal encyclical ‘Singulari quadam’ (1912) the interconfessional Christian trade unions were at least ‘tolerated’. The present volume analyses these struggles in a comparative perspective and, by evaluating the entire accessible archival documentation, it reconstructs for the first time the respective internal decision-making processes of the Roman Curia. The result of this entire research is a profiling of three important European Catholicisms in the controversy over integralism. This conflict had a decisive bearing on the long-term positioning of French, German and Italian Catholicism within their respective national societies.

This volume explores the reception of biblical figures in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with a particular focus on Antiquity and incursions in the Middle Ages and modernity. The contributions included here offer a glimpse of the complexity of the mechanics of transmission to which these figures were subjected in extra-biblical texts, either concentrating on one author or corpus in particular, or broadening the scope across time and cultural contexts. The volume intends to shed light on how these biblical figures and their legacies appear as channels of collective memory and identity; how they became tools for authors to achieve specific goals; how they gained new and powerful authority for communities; and how they transcend traditions and cultural boundaries. As a result, the vitality and fluidity of the developments of traditions become clear and prompt caution when using modern categories.

Le professeur Noël Duval, à la forte personnalité, a marqué le renouveau des études sur l’antiquité tardive. Se consacrant plus particulièrement à l’Afrique romaine et byzantine, il en a étudié l’histoire tardive et l’archéologie, en particulier celle des églises paléochrétiennes. Mais ses intérêts se sont portés aussi sur la Gaule à la fin de l’antiquité, et, plus largement, à l’ensemble du bassin méditerranéen. Sa disparition, en 2018, a été incontestablement une grande perte. Ses amis et ses élèves ont tenu à honorer sa mémoire en rassemblant un recueil de contributions scientifiques sur des sujets sur lesquels il avait travaillé, mais aussi en évoquant sa mémoire et sa personnalité.

Starting from a political reality, which is, at the same time, artistic and cultural, the book Ars Hasburgica aims to review the still so common historiographical conception of the Renaissance that conceives this period from a geographically Italocentric, artistically classicist and politically centered the idea of "national" arts and schools.

But Renaissance is a more global and complex phenomenon. What this book aims to offer is an idea of the art of that period that considers the role played by the Habsburg dynasty and its various courts in this period, trying to verify whether, by applying other historiographic models, and having the art of the Casa de Austria as a focus, traditional ideas can continue to be maintained well into the twenty-first century. We refer to the so-called "Vasari paradigm", on which art history of the sixteenth century has largely been built over the last centuries. It is also intended to structure concepts about the art of the period not so much around nationalist considerations and identities of the arts, but to raise these issues throughout ideas such as that of the court as a political, artistic and cultural sphere, in the wake of the classical studies by Norbert Elias, Amedeo Quondam or Carlo Ossola.

Libraries are an important factor in preserving and transmitting knowledge, thus contributing to historical continuity. The very concept of simultaneous availability of different texts transmitting possibly contradictory ideas, however, implies a great potential for engaging readers in new ways of thinking, thus promoting change. In addition to transmitting texts, historical libraries would often also be perceived as objects of material and spiritual value enhancing the prestige of their owner, e.g. contributing to the image-building of the political entities ruled by emperors, kings and princes. While the history of individual libraries of the Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance have been treated in various detail, no large-scale study of the impact of Late Medieval and Early Modern libraries as knowledge repositories and guardians of tradition, on the one hand, and catalysts of change, on the other, seems to exist. This volume, which is inspired by the outcome of the final colloquium of the Lamemoli project held in Siena in March 2022, explores from the book historical point of view a series of both well-known and severely underexplored Late Medieval and Early Modern book collections in existence between c. 1250 and c. 1650, a period of intense mediatic, cultural, religious and political change in Western Europe. Covering an extensive geographical area from France and Italy to Central and Northern Europe, the collections are examined for both their material characteristics and contents, and their historical formation, in order to assess their roles in preserving and transmitting information as well as generating new ideas.

Human agents might not be the measure of all things. Nonetheless, human bodies, and their bodily dimensions, often are, with size impacting on the ways in which we conceive of, interact with, and relate to the world around us. The scaling up or down of features - magnification and miniaturization - is particularly evident in the creation of anthropogenic items intended for use in religious ritual, and here sizing can be employed as a deliberate strategy to encourage shock and awe, admiration and deterrence, among spectators.

Taking as its starting point the concept of ‘materialities and meanings’, this volume explores how human perceptions and understanding of magnified and miniaturized forms and structures are shaped and changed, both synchronically and diachronically, by our understanding of the human body and its size, and the impact that this has in our relationship with the wider world in the context of ritual practices. The chapters collected here consider a range of questions, from a discussion on the essentials of magnification or miniaturization to an exploration of the impact of such strategies on humans and their wider socio-political ramifications. Together, these chapters contribute to a unique discussion that offers new insights into ‘materialities and meanings’, the creation of items for ritual, and the ways in which they influence human perception and understanding.

The period between the Fall of Rome and the rise of the Carolingians saw a major shift in knowledge production. Learning became monopolised by a Christian intellectual elite in a rapidly developing monastic landscape. This transition and transformation was only fully achieved by the time of Charlemagne, whose reign saw a ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ that re-created links to Late Antiquity and its curriculum, the seven liberal arts. The centuries in between, from the fifth to the eighth, are generally considered a time of stagnation in terms of intellectual achievements, particularly in the quadruvial arts. From Boethius to Alcuin, not a single noteworthy text was produced in the Latin West in astronomy, geometry, arithmetic and music.

This traditional view has been challenged in recent years by highlighting that the artes liberales may not provide the appropriate lens for this time-period, and that it neglects the plentiful anonymous literature. By the seventh century, a decidedly Christian curriculum had developed principally comprising exegesis, grammar, and computus as its three key pillars. Computus (with the calculation of Easter and therewith the mathematical modelling of the course of the sun and the moon at its core) developed out of the Easter controvery into a discipline of monastic learning in its own right. This volume seeks to highlight the vibrancy and regional characteristics of the study of computus and its underlying controversy about the correct calculation of Easter in this transition period from the mid-fifth to the mid-eighth centuries.

In 1617, after seven years of war between Sweden and Russia and talks facilitated by English and Dutch diplomats, the peace treaty of Stolbovo was signed. This important but little-studied document was to form the basis for relationships between Sweden and Russia for the next one hundred years, before it was replaced by the Peace of Nystad in 1721, and it had a huge influence on the lives of the people who lived in the region.

This wide-ranging volume draws together contributions by scholars from Britain, Sweden, Germany, Estonia, Russia, and Finland to offer new insights into, and analysis of this peace treaty and its impact on the wider region during the seventeenth century. Covering disciplines including political and economic history, church history, and Slavonic and Classical philology, the chapters gathered here shed new light on, and provide a new understanding of, the Early Modern period in the Baltic Sea area.

What is technique in the arts? Now widely used to refer to the practical aspects of art making, ‘technique’ was a neologism in the vernacular, and started to appear in treatises on arts and sciences from around 1750. Rooted in the Greek technè, which was translated routinely as ‘art’ until the mid-eighteenth century, technique referred to processes of making or doing and their products. Described previously as ‘art’, ‘methods’, ‘manners’ or ‘mechanics’, techniques were recorded in text with the intention of documenting or transmitting practical skills and knowledge. This book bridges the gap between the changing concept of technique and the practices currently described by it. It explores the linguistic, philosophical, and pedagogic history of technique in the arts, answering the question why the term ‘technique’ first emerged around 1750, and exploring how its meaning to artists, art theorists, and natural philosophers changed until the twentieth century