“Reprende […] onde o merece o vício”: A sátira na poesia do Classicismo e do Maneirismo

If, deluded by general literary history, we only value what is ethical and responsible in classical Portuguese satire, forgetting that it can also contain individual arbitrariness aimed at the destruction of an object, we will miss the moments when, as in medieval satire, the factor of constitution seems to be the ruthless and immoral personalization of criticism of persons, institutions, or entities. The aesthetics of moderation ends up promoting a subtly saturated and concrete language that seems to pursue the annulment of the other rather than a corrective social function. In Mannerism we find the most aesthetically elaborate examples of satire that challenges destiny or God in relation to the evils that fall upon an impotent but insubstantial self before such sensitive questions of metaphysical morality, a satire whose classic style gives it an aesthetic dignity and textual model without exception. In this article, we will see the different paths of classic and Mannerist satire, using the works of poets such as Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, Pêro de Andrade Caminha, André Falcão de Resende, and Fernão Rodrigues Lobo Soropita.     

“奉辞伐罪”:伊利里亚战争与罗马东扩

从公元前3世纪晚期至前2世纪中期,地处亚得里亚海东岸的伊利里亚人与罗马多次交战。缕析波利比乌斯等古典史家的记述,交战历程依次为:伊利里亚人劫掠和扩张、罗马商人和伊萨向元老院控诉和求援、罗马遣使交涉、伊利里亚人蛮横回应、罗马出兵讨伐。着眼于史实层面,罗马遣使交涉,基本是其对外扩张中先礼后兵的惯常策略,也是其强化宣战理由的重要环节。而就历史叙事而论,波氏的伊利里亚战争文本,一方面将罗马对伊利里亚的征服呈现为奉辞伐罪、解救他邦的功业;另一方面是论证罗马优良政体及其在罗马统一地中海世界中所发挥的有力作用,在此叙事逻辑指引下,伊利里亚成为罗马需要匡谬正俗的对象。     

Francis Harding’s “In Artem Volandi” (1679) and the early modern art of flying

The article examines a neglected Anglo-Latin poem on flying, entitled “In Artem Volandi” (1679) and penned by Francis Harding, an Oxford student. So far, the poem has neither received any critical attention nor has it ever been translated into English. The article contributes to the Anglophone understanding of the dynamic relationship between Restoration Science and satire by analysing the poem’s complex handling of a range of contemporary concerns. The prospect of human flight and the ideas about future interstellar travel in late seventeenth-century England enabled Harding to explore a host of cultural issues, including witchcraft, atomism, adultery, and colonialism. The article examines the poem’s intertext by relying on three main types of texts: works in English, works in Neo-Latin never before translated into English, and works in Latin for which translations were available. The first-time translation of the poem into English is provided at the end of the article.     

The Tragedy of Politics: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses the story of the two lovers to dramatize the tragedy of politics. The excessive love of self that characterizes the two serves as a metaphor for the larger story of Rome's descent into tyranny. Unless love of country, that is, love of one's fellow-citizens, tempers self-love, a state loses its capacity to sustain even that degree of freedom that belongs to kingly rule. But Shakespeare also depicts the love of Antony and Cleopatra for each other as something noble; there is something worthy of our love that is higher than freedom. The tragedy of politics lies in the opposition of these two loves.     

‘Stronger than men and braver than knights’: women and the pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the later middle ages

Women who participated in the long-distance pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries faced a variety of economic and social barriers. Based upon the pilgrimage narratives of Margery Kempe, Felix Fabri, and others, this article examines the strategies women used to overcome those barriers both before and during the journey. While resistance to women’s pilgrimages was strong, in part, because they did not fit their quotidian roles as caregivers, it was nevertheless to aspects of those same normative roles that women appealed in order to justify their pilgrimages and shield themselves from censure during their journeys.     

A Christian anarchist? Gregory of Nyssa's criticism of political power

The Cappadocian Church father Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395 AD) frequently attacks political power and domination in different forms. He does not present a systematic political philosophy, but there is a range of underlying theological, anthropological and moral philosophical ideas at play in Gregory's criticism. Especially important is Gregory's theological anthropology, and the unity of humankind. In this article it is argued that Gregory's political thinking can be described as “anarchism,” in so far this is defined as the universal rejection of all kinds of domination and the identification of justice with any positive political state of affairs.     

从"蛮族"首领到"圣徒"国王——论克洛维在中世纪法国的形象及其演绎

对于某一特定的历史人物或历史现象来说,随着时间的推移和时代的需要,后人对之描述和诠释往往会呈现出与其原始形象相距甚远的状况,而且这种异化过程又往往是以历史学的名义进行的。在中世纪法国,克洛维的形象便经历了这样一个转变过程。在图尔主教格雷戈里的笔下,克洛维尚是一个充满蛮性的凡人国王;但到了中世纪中后期,在法国王室的推动下并在御用文人的协助下,克洛维却成为一位尽善尽美的“圣徒”国王。对于这种转变的动因和效果以及中世纪历史学在其中所发挥的作用,人们当然应当给予充分的理解。但是,理解并不意味着认可。从维护历史学基本伦理准则角度出发,对于中世纪历史学的形态扭曲必须持批判态度。     

A manuscript of Rochester’s “Upon Nothing” in a newly recovered eighteenth-century miscellany of Restoration verse

In this article, I present a previously unexplored verse miscellany, which contains 18 poems and begins with a copy of the Earl of Rochester’s “Upon Nothing.” The miscellany, held at Staffordshire Record Office, was compiled around 1703 by Sir John Bridgeman, 3rd baronet, a Shropshire gentleman and grandson of the politician Sir Orlando Bridgeman. While many of the contents relate to the political events surrounding the accession to the throne of Queen Anne, the collection reveals a pervasive interest in the turbulent years of the Restoration period. The cultural memory of the Exclusion Crisis casts its shadow over Bridgeman’s collection, and many of the topical poems touch upon the ramifications of an unstable line of royal succession. Tracing the political and scribal communities to which Bridgeman might have belonged, I explore the ways in which Rochester, and the Restoration, were being refigured in the earliest years of the eighteenth century.     

The Episode of the Foundry Workers’ Strike in Hector Berlioz's Opera Benvenuto Cellini

Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly's libretto for Hector Berlioz's 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini contains a work stoppage by the foundry workers who are casting the Italian Renaissance artist's sculpture of Perseus and the slain Medusa. While Cellini describes no such event in his autobiographical Vita, he does recount another story that may have suggested to the librettists their invention of the workers’ strike episode. Contemporary Romantic writers, including Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo, in their theater and verse, treated the themes of the suffering of industrial workers and the insensitivity of industrialists. Barbier published, also in 1838, Lazare, a collection of satiric poems that analyzed the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution in Britain, above all the exploitation and suffering of the working class. The France of the 1830s saw a notable increase in the pace of industrialization, the formation of the proletariat and the manufacturing capitalist class, and the first laborers’ strikes. It is in this historical and literary context that one can best understand the incorporation of the apocryphal and anachronistic work stoppage episode into the opera libretto.     

Gibbon’s second trilogy: an introductory survey

This essay is speculative in character. It is the work of a historian who has completed a study, written on certain principles, of the first three volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and does not intend to advance to a similar study of the second three. He does, however, believe that such a study would differ profoundly from that he has constructed of the first trilogy and wishes to offer hypotheses as to why this should be so. All hypotheses invite falsification, and he will make statements about the second trilogy and its hypothetical construction which invite research with results to which they may or may not stand up. To do this will be an exercise in the history of historiography, a sub-discipline still in progress of establishing itself. It will also give the author the opportunity of extending certain generalizations he was led to advance in writing and completing his study of Gibbon’s first trilogy, and of enquiring whether they remain valid in the light of a study of the second – given that this study is still at a hypothetical stage.     

Marriage by exception: Marriage dispensations and ecclesiastical policies in nineteenth‐century Rome

A set of documents discovered by chance in the Ecclesiastical Archive in Rome, presenting the preliminary steps that set in motion petitions for marriage dispensations in the mid‐nineteenth century, throws light on the systems of marriage formation among the rural poor. These procedures also illustrate how church laws were understood and employed by ecclesiastical functionaries and by the faithful. For less skilled artisans and unskilled workers, second marriage with the brother or sister of a deceased spouse was customary, and made it possible to renew ties between the original couple's families that would otherwise have dissolved. This required a special dispensation, however, and the procedures required to obtain this illustrate the cultural and political stance of the Catholic Church, and in particular that of the ecclesiastical institutions in Rome in the nineteenth century, which conferred an ambiguous but decisive role on premarital sexual relations, while willingness to make exceptions to the law appears as a means of governance.