Reading versus Seeing? Winckelmann's Excerpting Practice and the Genealogy of Art History

From his arrival in Italy in 1755, Winckelmann's work is infused throughout by a fundamental antinomy: reading versus seeing. This antinomy possesses for him a decidedly epistemological significance: it allows him to present himself as the father of a discipline deserving of its name, i.e., the history of art. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), he claims to break with a long tradition of art discourse which had been primarily supported by ancient texts, basing his book instead on the direct observation of the artworks. The aim of this paper is to critically examine this antinomy. How does seeing relate to reading in his working method? What relationship does art history, in the empirical dimension Winckelmann wanted to give it, have to book knowledge? Winckelmann's excerpts collection provides valuable answers to these questions. Following an old scholarly tradition, Winckelmann used to write down passages of his readings, constituting a vast handwritten library of excerpts which never left him. The result of this intense excerpting practice consists in some 7,500 pages, which allow to better define the share of empirical observation and book-based knowledge in his approach to ancient art.     

Sender,those who have not returned: Carlo Salsa and his ‘Trenches’

Abstract

Carlo Salsa’s book ‘Trenches: A foot-soldier’s tales’ (Trincee. Confidenze di un fante, 1924) was one of many published in Italy after the end of the First World War. It describes the facts of the war as they were lived by officers and soldiers on the Italian front line. The article tries to compare the book with the contemporary war literature in Italy and in Europe, without forgetting the use of the international historiography on the matter. Thus, it is analysed the way an Italian author described to his readers the brutal carnage of the war in years when Fascism was the rising star in Italian policy and the censorship was becoming the more and more a thornily factor for every writer of those days. From this analysis it is possible to note the quality of the volume both from the literary point of view, and its historical value as a reliable testimony of the facts, stepping up our knowledge of what the war literature was for the Italian public opinion after the 1918. As it is possible to note, the book puts under test our notions of the role played by this kind of literature in shaping the Italian political life at the end of the 1910s and at the start of 1920s, when Italy was becoming a country lead by the Fascist regime.     

Foucault and the French tradition of historical epistemology

A recently published volume – edited by Walter Tega and Luigi Turco – celebrates the Italian historian of philosophy Antonio Santucci. One of the founders of the neoilluminismo (new-Enlightenment), Santucci blended strong civil commitment with rigorous textual analysis and contributed to the popularisation of British and American philosophy in Italy. The book describes Santucci's contribution to the historical research on empiricism and stimulates a reappraisal of the heated cultural debate which flourished in Italy after the Second World War.     

《语石》标点错误举例

《语石》是中国古代石刻学的集大成之作,在今天仍具有十分重要的学术价值,1994年4月中华书局出版了《语石·语石异同评》,在叶昌炽原书各条目之下,系以柯昌泗之评,是《语石》问世后增补内容最丰富的一个本子,但是遗憾的是有一些标点错误影响了对文意的理解。本文站在致误原因的角度,从未细审文意、对石刻学及相关知识了解不深、校勘不精三个方面列举实例,试图对此书的标点做点补充,也希望能够为读者的阅读做些扫除工作。     

Colonial Geography and Masculinity in Eric Dutton's Kenya Mountain

Eric Dutton's Kenya Mountain, (1929) tells the story of an unsuccessful attempt to climb Mount Kenya in the 1920s. In this article, the author concentrates on a close, contextualized reading of the book as a contribution to critical feminist geographical understanding of colonial discourse at a later point in the colonial timeline than has been commonly analyzed in studies of British colonial geographies and travel literature. Dutton's discursive tactics in the text reveal the inextricable relations between a gendered and enframed sense of landscape and colonial rule. The book also is a window onto the ambivalences and contradictions within British colonial ideology in Africa in the interwar years. In particular, Dutton's struggle with hegemonic masculinity and his complex relationships with the African men on the climb are interrogated as manifestations of broader ambiguities in Britain's African empire. These points of emphasis in this reading of the book emerge from recent feminist and progressive analyses of gender, colonial geography and adventure writing.     

日本学界的《文明论概略》解读

福泽谕吉的《文明论概略》成书于明治八年（1875）,该书言简意赅,极具包容性和思想张力,被视为了解日本近代文化必读的经典。日本学界百余年间见仁见智的评价、研究历史已经形成了一个复杂的知识谱系。综述学界的百年阅读史,探寻争论焦点背后潜藏的种种隐喻,可为我国学界的相关研究提供重要的学术参考。     

Two new books on Fascism. A review,the authors’ responses and the reviewer's comments

This section contains a review by the Italian historian Emilio Gentile of Paul Corner's new book on the Fascist Party and public opinion, and of Christopher Duggan's intimate history of Mussolini's Italy. The review is followed by responses from Corner and Duggan, and the section concludes with comments by Gentile.     

一本不该被忽视的史著——《马阁老洗冤录》

近人姚大荣所著《马阁老洗冤录》一书,旨在为马士英翻案。囿于成见,学界长期以来忽视其存在,乃至视而不见。笔者仔细研读全书,认为此书亦不乏值得今人学习和借鉴之处。但是它最大的不足就是臆断过多。本文主要介绍该书的内容,讨论其史学价值,以期引起有关治史者的相应注意;同时对书中的一些重要观点予以评析,希望能借此对马士英这一历史人物做出更全面更客观的认识和评价,并推进相关的研究。     

A Conflicted Nation. Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978)

This roundtable assesses the arguments and importance of Guido Formigoni’s book Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978). This book is essentially composed of seven 70–80-page broadly chronological chapters, each of which might almost be expanded into a short book in its own right. The chapters perform the difficult feat of shifting constantly between the foreign policy of the Italian state (which was so often driven by domestic political considerations) and the political consequences of international events on the debates (or polemics) taking place in the Italian polity. There can be few works of international history in which the linkage between the domestic and foreign policy ‘levels’ is so clearly demonstrated. Indeed, one of the key objectives of the book plainly is to show that although there may be countries where foreign policy is carried on with blithe indifference to domestic politics, Italy is certainly not one of them, or was not during the Cold War years. Mark Gilbert introduces the book on which Federico Romero, Maud Bracke and Michele Marchi engage in a detailed commentary, to which the author replies.     

Fixed or free book prices: is a hybrid system superior?

One of the main issues in the literature on the economics of books is whether or not a fixed‐price system is better than a free‐price system in providing a wide variety of cheap books. Although numerous studies have been carried out, this issue remains unresolved. Since 1962 Norway has had a fixed‐price system, regulated by a book trade agreement between the publishers’ and booksellers’ associations. On 1 May 2005, Bokavtalen, a new book trade agreement was introduced, representing a new step in a long‐term trend towards a less regulated book trade, and the price system is now actually a hybrid of fixed and free prices. The evaluation is mainly based on extensive use of multivariate regression analyses. Some of the results suggest that the hybrid price system is superior to the old one with regard to each of price, sales, reading and number of titles.     

新发现的王鹏运早年词稿《四印斋词卷》

国家图书馆所藏《四印斋词卷》为清季词坛领袖王鹏运的早年词稿;该书保存了大量王氏早年词作,但从未进入过研究者视野。据查,该书共录词一百二十九首,其中六十余首未见于王鹏运已刊词集,且有三十六首仅见于此。通过《四印斋词卷》可以更清楚地了解王鹏运的早年学词道路和交游情况;据该书自序可知,王氏词有七稿九集,独缺甲稿,只是因故没有选出而已。     

The first reception of James Steuart in Italy: Giovanni Tamassia and his liberal economic reading of the Principles of Political Economy

This article has two aims. The first is to explore the early reception of James Steuart in Italy, focusing on Giovanni Tamassia’s writings. In his Dello spirito di riforma, written between 1799 and 1800, Tamassia was the first Italian author to assume Steuart as a point of reference in economic analysis. Largely re-proposing Steuart’s considerations on the issues of redistribution of land, of luxury, and of comparison between ancient and modern times, he contributed decisively to the first circulation in Italy of the Principles of Political Economy. The second aim is to shed light on the singular reading given by Tamassia of Steuart’s thought. In his works Lezione di economia politica and Delle scienze e della libertà relativamente al commercio, the Italian author proposed an economic liberal reading of the Principles. Deliberately downplaying the importance attributed by Steuart to protectionist policies, he attempted to demonstrate the compatibility between the economic theories of Steuart and those of Smith in the matter of economic freedom. Rather than being based on the grounds of a rigorous economic analysis, Tamassia’s reading reflected a deliberate attempt to make Steuart’s thought compatible with an economic and political culture centred on the defence of freedom.     

Jean Norton Cru and combatants' literature of the First World War

Using the unpublished archives of Jean Norton Cru, held at the University of Aix-en-Provence, this article provides a new interpretation of Cru's famous book on First World War literature, Témoins, first published in 1929. This work severely criticised a large number of books of soldiers' experiences of combat. Here a new reading of Cru's motives is offered, looking in particular at the author's Protestant background as well as at the links between reading and writing strategies.     

A house of Treasures: The Account of Amaziah in 2 Chronicles 25—Observations and Implications

The account of the reign of Amaziah in 2 Chronicles 25 is a true house of treasures for those studying the book of Chronicles in its historical milieu or reconstructing the intellectual milieu of ancient Yehud. In particular, this study shows how 2 Chronicles 25 calls attention and sheds light on: (1) matters of time construction and periodization; (2) multiple temporal relations within one account in Chronicles and their significance for understanding both reading strategies of the intended and primary readerships and the organization of their memories of the past; (3) chaotic tendencies and their non-random distribution in the past that the readers are asked to remember and vicariously partake through reading and studying; (4) the significance of a memory of the past in which the size of armies diminishes through time; (5) concepts of “otherness” and the remembrance of some concrete constructions of “otherness” through the reading and rereading of the book; (6) otherness and the question of northern Israel; (7) attributes associated (or not) with being a Jerusalemite; and (8) on deontological vs. consequentionalist approaches to evaluate whether actions are to be judged right or wrong and the influence of a continuous remembrance of related events narrated in 2 Chronicles 25.     

The Lost Library of Anne Conway

ABSTRACT

The philosopher Anne Conway (1631-1679) owned a large library, and her reading and book ownership shaped her intellectual life in distinctive ways. Until now, however, almost nothing has been known about the details of her reading or her book collection. Current scholarship assumes that her library, like that of her husband, the third Viscount Conway (c. 1623–1683), was lost or dispersed after her death. This article presents previously unrecognised evidence of Conway’s book ownership, and identifies, for the first time, the only books currently known to survive from her personal library. It traces their path to their current location in the Old Library of Jesus College, Cambridge, through the library of the soldier, book collector, and Cambridge Fellow Francis Sterling (c. 1652-1692). The article demonstrates that the newly identified books reveal previously unknown patterns of intellectual exchange amongst Conway’s family, and argues that they have significant implications for our understanding of her early intellectual development.     

Religion and the Enlightenment: A Review Essay

Recent studies of the Enlightenment suggest that its relationto religion is far more complex than a simple process of increasingsecularization. The book by Sheehan shows, by examining translationsof the Bible into English and German in the Enlightenment, howreligion was reshaped, leading eventually to the dogma-freeChristianity proposed by Matthew Arnold. Israel's book arguesthat alongside the relatively cautious mainstream Enlightenmentthere was always a radical Enlightenment, heavily indebted toSpinoza, that was rationalist, atheist, and libertarian, andanticipated the dominant liberal values of the present day.Neither of these important studies, however, considers two areasthat remain under-researched: the popular Enlightenment (‘Volksaufklärung’),that is to say, the diffusion of Enlightenment thought amonguneducated people; and the Catholic Enlightenment which flourishedparticularly in Italy, Austria, and south Germany.     

学林点校指瑕

王观国所撰《学林》,专门考辨六经史传及其他书中文字的形、音、义,在宋代考据学著作中非常著名。但笔者详阅全书,发现中华书局点校本疏误颇多,本文略举数条加以说明。     

阅读文学的理由——读藤井省三《村上春树心底的中国》

藤井省三《村上春树心底的中国》构建了从鲁迅到村上春树再到王家卫的影响链条,详尽分析概括了村上春树作品在中国的一些规律性阅读现象。如此宽阔的视野与实精神证,对认识当代人阅读文学的缘由、心态和意义极具启发性。文学所关注的乃是人之心灵,所呼唤的是人的自省,正如村上春树的作品虽然常常被消费社会所利用,但其精神实质却依然是生活在消费社会中的人们强大的反思力量。     

Paratexts and pornographic potential in seventeenth-century anatomy books

ABSTRACT

This article discusses paratexts in seventeenth-century anatomy books and their relation to contemporary concerns that these books might be read erotically. Suggesting that discussions of these concerns have hitherto neglected the material object of the book, I argue for the importance of paratexts (illustrations, legends, prefaces, running titles and marginal notes) as sites of negotiation over anatomy books’ pornographic potential. I examine these paratexts both as strategies by which writers and printers carefully and collaboratively attempt to frustrate erotic reading, and as devices that might simultaneously function to facilitate this mode of reading. The centrality of these concerns to the construction of anatomy books indicates, I suggest, a need to augment our characterisation of early modern readers, incorporating wilfully thoughtless and/or excessive reading alongside active and productive reading. My discussion focuses on Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia, and is supplemented with analysis of other English anatomy books published throughout the seventeenth century.