This book explores Ginzburg’s Jewishness in her autobiographical writings and traces the shift in her self-representation. It brings together substantial historical background on the period surrounding the Racial Laws, when Natalia Ginzburg and other Italian Jews were forced to confront the significance of their Jewishness. It highlights the reactions by Jews and non-Jews to the growing anti-Semitism of the times. In this context, moral identity is also discussed as a facet of Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani’s Jewish identity.

Dantean Dialogues is a collection of essays by some of the world's most outstanding Dante scholars., These essays enter into conversation with the main themes of the scholarship of Amilcare Iannucci (d. 2007), one of the leading researchers on Dante of his generation and arguably Canada's finest scholar of the Italian poet. The essays focus on the major themes of Iannucci's work, including the development of Dante's early poetry, Dante's relation to classical and biblical sources, and Dante's reception. The contributors cover crucial aspects of Dante's work, from the authority of the New Life to the novelty of his early poetry, to key episodes in the Comedy, to the poem's afterlife. Together, the essays show how Iannucci's reading of central cruxes in Dante's texts continues to inspire Dante studies - a testament to his continuing influence and profound intellectual legacy.

Cosmas and Damian were martyred around the year 300 A.D. in what is now Syria. Called the Anargyroi ("without silver") because they charged no fees, they became patrons of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy and the focus of cults ranging across Europe. They were popular in Byzantine and Orthodox traditions and their shrines are numerous in Eastern Europe, southern Italy, and Sicily. The Medici family of Florence viewed the "santi medici" as patrons, and their deeds were illustrated by great Renaissance artists. In medical literature they are now revered as patrons of transplantation. Jacalyn Duffin offers a profound exploration of illness and healing experiences in contemporary society through the veneration of the twin doctors Saints Cosmas and Damian. She also relates a personal journey, from her role as a hematologist who unexpectedly came to serve as an expert witness in the Church's evaluation of a miracle to her research as a historican on the origins, meaning, and functions of saints. Duffin's research, which includes interviews with devotees in both North America and Europe, focuses on how people have taken the saints with them as they moved both within Italy and beyond. She shows that veneration of Cosmas and Damian has spread beyond immigrant traditions to fill important functions in healthcare and healing. Duffin's conclusions provide essential insights into medical history, sociology, anthropology, and popular religion, as well as the current medical debate over spiritual healing. Medical Saints draws on medical history and Roman Catholic traditions, but extends to universal observations about the behaviors of sick people and the formal responses to individual illness from collectivities in religion, medicine, and history.

Concerned that American Catholic theology has struggled to find its own voice for much of its history, William Portier has spent virtually his entire scholarly career recovering a usable past for Catholics on the U.S. landscape. This work of ressourcement has stood at the intersection of several disciplines and has unlocked the beauty of American Catholic life and thought. These essays, which are offered in honor of Portier's life and work, emerge from his vision for American Catholicism, where Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience are distinct, but interwoven and inextricably linked with one another. As this volume details, such a path is not merely about scholarly endeavors but involves the pursuit of holiness in the "real" world.

If among the many truths of Giambattista Vico's New Science there is one that is deepest, it is the truth that language, mind, and society are but three modes of a common reality. In Vico's term, that reality is the monde civile, the world of man. It is a world of many guises and faces. If reflected in a mirror, those faces would reveal an image of the full array of contemporary arts and sciences, all the disciplines of learning and technique by which, so Vico judged, humanity attains its perfection. Humanity in its perfection, however, is so rare a moment, so delicate and subtle a state, that it is never to be found among the nations of the world -- or is found in so fragile a form that it threatens always to crack and fall to the ground. In the West, a persistent line of thinking that has flourished from time to time holds that language is primary in culture, metaphor a necessity, and jurisprudence our highest achievement. This was the position of Vico, who not only received and cherished the tradition, but looked deeply into it, saw what its principles implied, and so made ready for the great social theorists of the nineteenth century. That is the thesis of this work. After an introductory chapter on Vico himself -- in which his intellectual world and his movements within it are sketched -- the work unfolds in three parts. These parts successively treat rhetoric, pedagogy, and culture, each proceeding from a major Vichian text.

This volume addresses one of the most far-reaching aspects of Petrarch research and interpretation: the essential interplay between Petrarch’s texts and their material preparation and reception. The essays look at various facets of the interaction between Petrarchan philology and hermeneutics, working from the premise that in Petrarch’s work philological issues are so authorially driven that we cannot in fact read or interpret him without understanding the relevant philological issues and reapplying them in our critical approach to his works. To read and interpret Petrarch we must come to grips with the fundamentals of Petrarchan philology. This volume aims to show how a Petrarchan hermeneutics must be based on an understanding of Petrarchan philology.

Despite the phenomenal international success that Italian director Lina Wertmüller attained in the 1970s with films such as Swept Away and Seven Beauties, there has been no full length in-depth study of her four major films. This book fills that inexplicable void in the scholarship of Italian cinema.

One of the defining features of modernism lies in its far-reaching rethinking of the relation between the human and the non-human. In the present volume, this crucial aspect of modernism’s legacy is investigated from an authentically transnational perspective, taking an innovative stance on a diverse range of authors – from posthumanist classics such as Beckett and Woolf to Valentine de Saint-Point, Radoje Domanovic and Aldo Palazzeschi among others. On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.