Natural encounters: climate,weather and the Italian Renaissance

This paper examines a key issue in the history of the climate in the pre-instrumental period, that is, how to use narrative sources which make frequent references to weather events, but which need contextualised interpretation. The paper follows an argument that climatological techniques for deriving temperature indices from chronicles, though they have become increasingly elaborate and refined, nevertheless leave out much that is of interest to the social historian. This paper explores the area of the what-is-left-behind when chronicle narratives are reduced to numerical indices. Investigating a broad range of Latin and Italian chronicles from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy, the paper draws three main conclusions: that sensitivity to weather events not only varied greatly among writers (as one might expect) but so too did their use of severe weather to serve the purposes of narrative (through sequencing, metaphor and analogy); that sensitivity to meteorological anomaly changed during the period, especially in the fifteenth century with the spread of prognosticating verses; and that the broadening of chroniclers' interests in weather, both ordinary and extraordinary, and in its effects on everyday, material life may allow a connection to and re-evaluation of the Burckhartian idea of the Renaissance ‘discovery of the world’.     

The body speaks Italian: Giuseppe Liceti and the conflict of philosophy and medicine in the Renaissance

Giuseppe Liceti (d. 1599) has been entirely forgotten in the history of philosophy. This article seeks to demonstrate that Liceti’s two vernacular dialogues are crucial sources for understanding the Renaissance debate on the conflict between medicine and philosophy. Liceti’s main dialogue, La nobiltà (1590), stages a contest about the nobility of the main bodily organs, which I discuss by placing it in its medical and literary context. I then proceed to expounding Liceti’s interpretation of the conflict between Galenism and Aristotelianism, and trace the specific topic of the seat of rationality in the body. In the conclusion I claim that the outcome of the contest in La nobiltà is not as obvious as it might seem, and that Liceti implies an alternative conclusion to the “official” one. This opens up a different scenario with regard to the interpretation of human uniqueness from medical and philosophical points of view.     

公民参政思想变化新论——文艺复兴时期人文主义者参政思想浅析

本文旨在探讨文艺复兴时期意大利人文主义者政治思想的变化,折射出不同时期公民参政的目标和要求。通过对但丁、彼特拉克、布鲁尼、马基雅维里政治思想的解读,本文揭示了文艺复兴时期公民参政的目标是建立自由的、充分反映民意的公民国家,对近代政治学的诞生具有重要影响。公民参政要求建立新型的政府,既能为社会提供良好的秩序、又能为民众提供良好的生活。这表明:文艺复兴时期的公民参政已经突破了古代希腊、罗马的模式和中世纪公民参政的传统,发展成为以建立近代政府为目标的、人民的政治运动。     

Cannibalism & politics: The English Renaissance revisited

This article explores how anthropological approaches to Anglo-Native American exchanges in the 16th and 17th centuries – thinking through and beyond terms like ‘cannibal’ – can draw attention to different facets of encounter and shed light on the influence of indigeneity on English heritage. Using the Englishman Anthony Knivet’s travels to Brazil in the 1590s as a case study, what emerges is the importance of interdisciplinary approaches which acknowledge the complicated and at times surprising interactions between representations and lived experience, between rituals and their appropriations. Further, acknowledging the influence of indigenous American people and artefacts on English history has important implications for addressing the legacy of imperialism in cultural institutions, opening up new possibilities for collaboration, display and reconciliation.