Shah Isma‘il’s Poetry in the Silsilat al-Nasab-i Safawiyya

This article examines the four poems attributed to Shah Isma‘il Safavi that are included in the seventeenth-century genealogy of the Safavid dynasty, the Silsilat al-Nasab-i Safawiyya. The article includes translations and commentary on the four poems, offering insight into the religiosity and concerns both of Shah Isma‘il and the Silsilat's author, Husayn ibn Shaykh Abdal-i Zahidi.     

‘Con il volere di Dio’: Bernardo Provenzano and religious symbolic ritual

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the symbolic religious language utilised by mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano in his social interactions with the lower echelons of the Sicilian mafia. When Provenzano assumed control of Cosa Nostra in the 1990s, he inherited an organisation severely diminished by a decade of internal conflicts, violence and the arrest of numerous leaders. The article argues that religious performative behaviour and language were used by the mafia boss to establish his leadership over Cosa Nostra, reshape its internal structure, and thereby revitalise an organisation in apparent terminal decline.     

e家——新生活

网络在真真切切地改变我们的生活,不仅带给我们年轻、时尚、方便、快捷的生活方式,更带给我们平等自由、积极向上的精神理念。网络承载着我们真实的生活,现代人一天也离不开网络,幸福生活从“我的e家”开始。     

The role of T.A. Smiddy in Fianna Fáil economic policy-making 1932–45

Professor Timothy Aloysius (T.A.) Smiddy was economic advisor to Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Eamon de Valera between 1932 and 1945. Notwithstanding a distinguished public service career, Smiddy’s role as the first independent economic advisor to an Irish political leader post-1922 has escaped examination in the existing literature. This research identifies that Smiddy had a real and prolonged influence on the banking and monetary policies pursued by de Valera during the 1932–45 period. Ultimately, however, the often progressive nature of his proposals was circumscribed by de Valera’s reluctance to supersede the more traditional views of the Department of Finance and the Currency Commission. This paper also identifies that de Valera took a keener interest in economic matters than has been generally assumed. However, such an interest did not result in a coherent, or consistent, Fianna Fáil banking and currency policy in the 1930s and early 1940s.     

Italy’s unification and its discontents: Giovanni Verga’s Cos’è il Re?

ABSTRACT

The article, ‘Italy’s Unification and its Discontents: Verga’s Cos’è il Re, focuses on the mental confusion of the protagonist, Cosimo, which becomes symptomatic of the southern rural masses’ disenfranchisement from the unification process. Verga’s political disillusion with the new state, for which he fought, comes to the fore, underlining how the Savoy kingdom’s constitution was no guarantee of a real improvement for the rural masses. Verga’s story contrasts the Savoy king, whose power is limited by the constitution, with the Bourbon Monarch’s Corpus Mysticum, as described by Ernest Kantorowicz, whose power is absolute, like that of Jesus Christ. The story denounces, then, the paradox that the Bourbon monarch, in his paternalistic governance, was better for the impoverished rural masses than the constitutional Savoy king. Moreover, Italy’s unification under the Savoy sovereign further developed a national discourse that systematically racialized Southerners because of their subaltern position within the nation.     

Conference report: 'L'età dei totalitarismi. Silone e la cultura letteraria e politica degli anni venti-trenta'

Giovannino Guareschi, author of the immensely popular Don Camillo stories and editor of the weekly newspaper Candido, spent 14 months in a Parma prison from 1954 to 1955 for having libelled the former Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi. To this day, he is the only Italian journalist since the founding of the Republic ever to have served actual, behind-bars jail time for libel. This study examines several aspects of Guareschi's life in prison – the ways he coped with boredom and loneliness, the attempts he made to understand his fellow inmates and how he defiantly tried to buoy his spirits. In particular, it focuses on both his correspondence with his wife Ennia, a collection of 44 letters, and his personal musings kept in two prison diaries – all documents that have never been published. The analysis rectifies common misinterpretations as to why Guareschi purposely refused to appeal his guilty verdict and chose to go to jail, considers how Guareschi presented himself in his writings and contemplates Guareschi's place in the history of Italian prison writing.     

On Will and Reason in L'astrée

This article sheds light on the technique of amplificatio by which Boccaccio expands the stories of famous women he finds in Valerius Maximus's De fide uxorium. Boccaccio's work on famous women situates itself between the genres of fiction and the historical treatise. It analyzes in philological detail Boccaccio's citation technique and his elaboration of the ancient model, showing how the greatest narrator of the Italian Middle Ages revitalizes and actualizes it and crafts an original literary product.     

The Search for A,otonatendïe

Abstract

Equivocal clues in the Jesuit Relations and the few other historical documents relating to A,otonatendie, an important, but short-lived, mid-17th-century, inter-tribal, anti-Iroquois coalition beyond “the Great Lake of the Hurons,” are now supplemented by archaeological evidence at Rock Island at the mouth of Green Bay in Door County, Wisconsin, suggesting a positive resolution to uncertainty about its location.