Contextualizing marriage: conjugality and Christian life in Jonas of Orléans' De institutione laicali

The De institutione laicali by Jonas of Orléans has frequently been examined as a source for conjugal life in the Carolingian period, but rarely analysed in its entirety. In this article I propose an overall reading of the text, based on the version addressed to Count Matfrid before 828, in order to place the chapters about marriage in their context. I will formulate new interpretations of its purposes – arguing that Book II was configured as a speculum comitale – and of Jonas's view of marriage. The De institutione laicali will therefore be shown to have served the needs of Carolingian representations of society and public power.     

Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni

The article studies trasformismo (party-switching) in Italian regional councils, examining Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, and Puglia from 1970 to 2010. Although lato sensutrasformismo – enrollment in the mixed group and party switches among the electoral lists – also has empirical relevance at regional level, stricto sensutrasformismo – the transition from the majority to the opposition, or vice versa – was quantitatively negligible. In the transition from the first to the second phase of the Italian Republic (after 1994), the regional system was reorganized according to a government model in which there is a clear distinction between the roles of the majority and the opposition, by virtue of the direct election of presidents from 1995 onwards. Thus, the thesis formulated by Giovanni Sabbatucci is confirmed: trasformismo is a pattern of government from the ‘center’ of the political space, which is a very different option from the adversarial model of democracy which has emerged in the regions over the last two decades. As a result, this also seems to confirm the neo-institutionalistic thesis expressed by Robert D. Putnam in his classic Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), according to which ‘institutions shape politics’ and the behavior of its actors.