Italian Convent Research Articles

Lavish sounds of early modern Italy

In the present time, when everything seems to have been discovered, researched and revisited, it seems difficult to find a ‘first’. Yet this batch of recordings presents six firsts for early modern Italian sacred vocal polyphonic music. A collection of representative mid-17th-century small-scale sacred monodies by Carlo Filago and Leonardo Leo’s responsories are recorded in their entirety for the first time. The first two albums of Giovanni Legrenzi’s collected liturgical music revisit the late 17th-century composer’s opus, in line with the performers’ goal to record his complete works. Similarly, another in a line of first recordings of Melchior Vulpius’s liturgical output is added to the project, slowly working towards the completion of this composer’s oeuvre on disc. Lastly, late 15th- and early 16th-century music from Italian convents reaches us for the first time. Performed by Italian ensemble Les Nations, Carlo Filago: Sacri concerti a voce sola, 1642 (Tactus tc 580610, issued 2022) is a first in the row of firsts: a first almost complete recording of the composer’s last collection, missing only two out of 16 original compositions. In the context of the rest of his opus—two collections of polyphonic motets (1611 and 1619) and a lost collection of Sacrae cantiones (1611)—this collection presents a genre typical of the period. Sacred monody was an effective and popular tool in devotion and was well known by the mid 17th century. In the liner notes, musicologist Mariarosa Pollastri points out that the collection is directly connected to a Polish nun Maria Felice Sbarasca (active in the convent of St Marco and St Andrea in Murano), as well as Filago’s afterword. There, he uncovers his dissatisfaction with ‘the modern way of singing and composing’, in which he ‘condemns decidedly the excesses of the virtuosi that sing in the church as if they were in a theatre’.

A Tale of Three Rusalkas: Krasnopol’sky, Pushkin, and Dargomyzhsky

Conventional histories of Russian opera mark Mikhail Glinka’s 1836 opera Zhizn’ za tsarya (A Life for the Tsar) as the point of origin for Russian nationalist opera that quickly burst into full bloom, yet by the middle of the century homegrown opera had fallen out of performance repertory in favor of Western European and particularly Italian imports. It was around this time that a group of amateur composers later known as the kuchka (the “Mighty Handful” or “Mighty Five”) re-ignited the debate around creating a uniquely Russian genre of opera; however, their efforts only obscured Russian opera’s European roots rather than establish a completely separate genre. Yet their critical campaign proved successful, and the idea of Russian opera as a uniquely nationalist genre remains especially prevalent. This article examines Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka (1856), one of the earliest examples of this new type of Russian nationalist opera, and how it responds to the dominance of Italian opera in Russia during the mid-century by embedding Italian operatic conventions into the score itself. Rusalka also inaugurated the operatic trend of adapting literary works by Aleksandr Pushkin, the writer often cited as the father of Russian literature. This article illustrates how both Pushkin’s dramatic Rusalka and Dargomyzhsky’s operatic adaptation of it a generation later imitated Western European literary and theatrical conventions. Paradoxically, the ways in which Pushkin and Dargomyzhsky would conceal these Western parallelisms would later be hailed as markers of a uniquely “Russian” literary and operatic style in a critical campaign designed to erase Russia’s long history of artistic dialogue with the wider Continent.

Durata ed efficienza dei procedimenti penali italiani. Riflessioni e proposte alla luce delle risultanze numeriche

Italian Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights provide for the reasonable length of proceedings, although they use different expressions. First of all the Author examines this principle as objective and subjective guarantee, as well as its relations with the other constitutional guarantees of fair trial. Then he analyses the main difficulties of the current legislation to realize a speedy and fair justice, by means of official data about number and duration of criminal proceedings. In light of the practical situation, the Author formulates some reform proposals.

Translating (im)personalisation in corporate discourse. A corpus-based analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility reports in English and Italian

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports constitute a relatively new form of corporate disclosure used by companies to present their values and philosophy with respect to socially relevant themes on which they may have an impact, mainly the environment, the community and employees. Companies thus publish CSR reports to communicate with a variety of stakeholders and provide information about their sustainability initiatives, with the ultimate aim of building, reinforcing, and promoting their corporate image. Personalisation plays an important role in the discursive construction of identity and in the definition of relationships between social actors. The personification of the company – obtained through 1 st person plural deixis within corporate reports – is a very powerful rhetorical tool to convey a collective subject which takes responsibility for the actions and results it is giving account of, indicating and enacting a specific relationship with the reader. As a sociopragmatic item, however, it is largely language/culture-dependent, and thus represents an interesting locus to observe the impact of translation strategies on the meaning conveyed to the target audience. This paper sets out to analyse how CSR reports translated into English from Italian compare – as regards personalisation – with reports originally produced in English, in order to detect differences in the way corporate identity is construed and conveyed. The study is based on a bilingual corpus which includes translated English reports and their Italian source texts, as well as comparable originals in English and Italian. Corroborating previous research conducted on similar genres, the study shows that (im)personalisation patterns are considerably different in original and translated English CSR reports, largely due to a tendency for the latter to reproduce Italian conventions in this form of specialised discourse.

A Facebook Page Created Soon After the Amatrice Earthquake for Deaf Adults and Children, Families, and Caregivers Provides an Easy Communication Tool and Social Satisfaction in Maxi-Emergencies.

Although international and Italian conventions have issued numerous communication protocols to assist people with disabilities during earthquakes or other maxi-emergencies, no tailored strategies exist to create and disseminate information online to deaf people. On August 24, 2016, a devastating earthquake destroyed Amatrice in Central Italy. This natural disaster underlined the lack of information on disabled people possibly involved and the lack of tailored, online communication tools. Having various registries listing disabled residents in the earthquake area might have benefitted emergency procedures. To access information easily and expedite risk management, the authors developed an online information tool for deaf persons, their families, and caregivers. Within hours after the earthquake, they published a Facebook page (Facebook, Inc.; Menlo Park, California USA) including a video provided with subtitles, Italian sign language, and service numbers. Those who accessed the Facebook page spread the information to other social media. Although no registry yet specifies figures, the annual incidence of approximately three to five/1,000 new deaf persons diagnosed in Italy implies that around 5.4% of the total 43,507 Italian deaf people live in the earthquake territory, and presumably 1.3% are younger than 18 years of age. The Facebook page obtained unexpectedly numerous accesses and satisfaction from deaf adults and families with deaf children, as well as hearing family relatives and caregivers. A total of 60% deaf and 10% hearing people asked for more information. Despite limitations, the effort to develop a page for deaf people and their families, via a world-wide social media, permits fast access, outlines safety precautions during maxi-emergencies, and disseminates essential information designed for deaf people on civil protection services. The Facebook page provides a replicable example for developing similar, user-friendly, online tools for disabled groups to disseminate important safety information after earthquakes or other maxi-emergencies.Rotondi L, Zuddas M, Marsella P, Rosati P. A Facebook page created soon after the Amatrice Earthquake for deaf adults and children, families, and caregivers provides an easy communication tool and social satisfaction in maxi-emergencies. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2019;34(2):137-141.

The Proceedings of the 16th Italian Convention of Investigators in Cystic Fibrosis

Every year, the Italian Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation (FFC) brings together all its funded researchers from across Italy and beyond, in a Convention where results from FFC projects are shared and debated. These projects are either newly funded, on-going or recently concluded research. The Proceedings of the 16th Convention of Italian Investigators in Cystic Fibrosis is a supplement of Multidisciplinary Respiratory Medicine reporting results of completed projects which were presented at the FFC 2018 Convention.

The Proceedings of the 16th Italian Convention of Investigators in Cystic Fibrosis

Verona, Italy. 22-24 November 2018Every year, the Italian Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation (FFC) brings together all its funded researchers from across Italy and beyond, in a Convention where results from FFC projects are shared and debated. These projects are either newly funded, on-going or recently concluded research. The Proceedings of the 16th Convention of Italian Investigators in Cystic Fibrosis is a supplement of Multidisciplinary Respiratory Medicine reporting results of completed projects which were presented at the FFC 2018 Convention.

The Proceedings of the 16th Italian Convention of Investigators in Cystic Fibrosis

The Proceedings of the 16th Italian Convention of Investigators in Cystic Fibrosis

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth‐Century Italian Convent. By Jeffrey R.Watt. Pp. xii, 300, Rochester, NY, University of Rochester Press, 2009, $19.99.

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth‐Century Italian Convent. By Jeffrey R.Watt. Pp. xii, 300, Rochester, NY, University of Rochester Press, 2009, $19.99.

The performance of polyphony in early 16th-century Italian convents

This article explores evidence for polyphonic music in Italian convents during the first half of the 16th century. It presents a summary of documentary evidence relating to conventual music in the pre-Tridentine era, alongside practical evidence from contemporary treatises regarding methods by which convent choirs could develop a polyphonic repertory from existing music. It revisits claims for mandatory downwards transposition of music written in high clefs, and considers two manuscripts—Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, Ms.761 and Brussels Bibliotheque du Conservatoire Royal de Musique, Ms.27766—in the light of this investigation. The article aims to open up a conversation regarding the status of convent polyphony in the early 16th century, shedding new light on its importance and advocating a fresh approach to the possibility of female performance for the Franco-Flemish repertory of the great papal and ducal chapels.

Convent Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Vienna.By Janet K. Page

Serious and sustained research on nuns and music in the early modern period began in earnest in the mid-1990s with the publication of two ground-breaking books: Craig A. Monson’s Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995) and Robert L. Kendrick’s Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996). Those monographs set the standard in the field and inspired subsequent investigations of seventeenth-century convent music in other Italian cities as well as in Spain and New Spain. Relatively little scholarship, however, has been directed at the activities of holy women in German-speaking lands, perhaps because the Reformation had such a devastating effect on convents in those regions. Janet Page’s new monograph on the nunneries of Vienna during the period of their revival in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is thus significant because it broadens the geographical sphere and widens the time period of current literature on monastic musical culture.

L’esthétique de Nietzsche. Au croisement de l’identité allemande

In this paper, Rony Klein aims to inscribe Nietzsche’s Aesthetics in the German tradition, constituted by the names of Martin Luther and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and through his relation to Wagner. In that purpose, he begins with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as born from Wagnerism. In 1870, Wagner praises Beethoven, in his book of this title, as a “German hero” who liberated German music from its “decline” in French and Italian conventions. Wagner designates music as the German art, i.e. a protestant art, rooted in interiority. In The Birth of Tragedy, two years later, Nietzsche himself affirms with pride that German music, from Luther’s Choral through Bach and Beethoven and until Wagner, is the rebirth of Greek Dionysian spirit. This thesis is paradoxical in that sense that Luther seems to Nietzsche more “Greek” than Winckelmann, the father of German Hellenism, accused of having misunderstood the Tragic Greek culture. Thus, according to this idea, the modern German music inherits the Dionysian Greeks. The whole argument is totally reversed by Nietzsche after Human All-Too Human, which marks a turning-point in his Aesthetics. Schopenhauer and Wagner are abandoned, as well as the ancient Metaphysics of music, in which music was the privileged art. Nietzsche now opposes Romantic and Greek Aesthetics one to each other, and his new approval of Greek Art and Culture signifies now the systematic rejection of German Aesthetics represented by the “Romantic” Wagner. German art, especially music, accused of ignoring style, i.e. clarity, grace and elegance, is opposed to Greek sense of limits and love of forms. In Modern Times, French Culture is praised as the incarnation of style and art of writing. Nietzsche also praises classic music as the capacity to make us dance, i.e. to move with grace and elegance, whereas with Wagner’s music, we only “float and swim”. In this sense, the opposition of Carmen, Bizet’s opera, to Wagner operas, is the last word of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics, and the total reversion of his first German Aesthetics.

Women on the Edge: Madness, Possession, and Suicide in Early Modern Convents

This essay examines suicidal behaviors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic convents in light of the new attitudes toward voluntary death emerging across Europe between 1500 and 1700. Focusing on Italy, which housed the greatest number of enclosed religious women on the Continent, the essay probes the causal links between mental anguish, suicide, and forced professions. Despite challenges in quantifying convent suicide cases, it is clear that suicidal behaviors were not uncommon in Italian convents. Much was at stake from both a social and salvific standpoint when a “bride of Christ” killed herself or threatened to do so. Such willful deaths not only contravened basic religious precepts but also reneged on the promise to sacrifice oneself continuously for God, city, and family. Motivations for self-harm ranged from deep despair with convent life to madness and demonic possession, all of which were expressed in similar ways. Nuns also used suicide threats instrumentally to further their claims as spiritual aspirants singled out by the devil. Enlarging the scope of inquiry beyond Protestant Europe, the essay demonstrates the constitutive role Catholic nuns played in constructing new understandings of suicide in the early modern period.

Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Convent Theatrical Texts and Contexts. Elissa B. Weaver, ed.

<i>Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Convent Theatrical Texts and Contexts</i>. Elissa B. Weaver, ed.

‘A face, a name, a story’: Women's identities as life stories in Alina Marazzi's cinema

ABSTRACTAlina Marazzi is a young Italian director who is charting a new trajectory for Italian documentaries. In Un'ora sola ti vorrei/For One More Hour with You (2002) Marazzi reconstructs—through family home videos, letters, diaries and medical reports—the fragile figure of her mother, who committed suicide when Alina was 7. Marazzi's work of mourning recomposes the fragments of a life into a cathartic ensemble. In her second documentary, Per Sempre/Forever (2005), the director depicts the faith and the doubts of the monastic vocation through her portraits of nuns and novices enclosed in various Italian convents. Finally, in the last chapter of her trilogy, Vogliamo anche le rose/We Want Roses Too (2007), Marazzi recreates a map—from the 1950s to the 1970s—of the previous generations of Italian women, facing new roles, new rights (abortion, divorce) and the discovery of sexuality. Focusing on inner psychic landscapes as well as on the public sphere, Marazzi composes a cinematic collage of words and images, private, public and ‘found’ footage, collective outcries and life stories. She reconstructs the condition of women in Italy, from the old to the new generations: who they were, who they are and who they may become in the light of Arendt's ‘spectacular ontology’.

&lt;i&gt;Bringing Travel Home to England: Tourism, Gender, and Imaginative Literature in the Eighteenth Century&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Bringing Travel Home to England: Tourism, Gender, and Imaginative Literature in the Eighteenth Century Elizabeth A. Bohls Susan Lamb. Bringing Travel Home to England: Tourism, Gender, and Imaginative Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Newark: Delaware, 2009. Pp. 433. $87.50. Ms. Lamb’s sprawling study yields rich insight into the importance of tourism to eighteenth-century British culture, which involved not just those who toured (in the British Isles or abroad), but also those at home—the audience for the performance [End Page 96] of travel. Tourism is stylized, institutionalized, scripted travel; its conventions and expectations are familiar. As well as a valuable source of knowledge about the foreign—knowledge used to regulate and discipline the home culture—it could also be an important social credential. The success of elite educational tours, it was believed, served the interest of the home population at large by helping create ideal gentlemen like Richardson’s returned tourist, Sir Charles Grandison. Ms. Lamb pays special attention to gender: not women travelers (though these are present), but women as tourist attractions. Females embodied the sites in ways no longer readily accessible. Actual and fictional women, from Sterne’s Maria to Wordsworth’s Maid of Buttermere, and female communities, from Italian convents to the Ladies of Llangolen, became touchstones for British cultural preoccupations and anxieties. The chapter on A Sentimental Journey, read in the context of contemporary anxieties about male tourists’ interactions with women on the Continent, has changed the way I read and teach this influential travel novel. Before it came out, tourists’ ability to write for publication about the women they met abroad was restricted. Everyone assumed male Grand Tourists interacted with women, but in ways not fit for print, and Sterne wrote “in response to contemporary sex tourism.” Ms. Lamb’s discussion untangles the ways in which the Maria episodes in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey revisit and rework longstanding satirical connections among sex tourism, madhouse tourism, and love madness. Transforming travel writing, Sterne’s deft, witty ambiguities offered “a polite and publishable alternative” to less decent tourist practices (which of course still went on). Subsequent chapters treat actual women who achieved fame—or notoriety—as attractions. Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to Naples in the 1780s, became known for her “Attitudes”: poses imitating persons, paintings, and statues from classical and contemporary art. A former painters’ model and kept woman, who combined great beauty with a talent for expressive mimicry, she drew praise and controversy. Grand Tourists went out of their way to enjoy the risqué spectacle, which her husband promoted: “she could be publicly displayed as long as her distance from England and the fiction of privacy and sexual inaccessibility was maintained.” A very different kind of tourist attraction, embodying the unspoiled pastoral charm of the Lake District, Mary of Buttermere waited tables at the Fish Inn. First noticed in print at age fourteen by the travel writer Joseph Budworth in 1792, Mary Robinson served as a patriotic icon, framed by quoting Thomson’s celebration of the rural landscape. “Happy BRITANNIA!” In Book 7 of the 1805 Prelude, Wordsworth describes a London spectacle, the Sadler’s Wells play about the Maid of Buttermere that the poet did not actually see, but heard about from his sister. The sentimental female tourist attraction protected Wordsworth “from shameful contact with London.” Even more intriguing, the Prelude follows the Maid with a very different female spectacle—the London prostitute, with “the same outward shape” as a virtuous woman, but lacking her human essence. Sir Charles Grandison surmounts the moral hazards of the Tour, though his love for a Catholic Italian woman drives the novel’s plot. Astonishingly, critics had not tackled Grandison’s dependence on tourism “for theme, characterization, event, detail, and story line.” Lovelace is of course another Grand Tourist, driven [End Page 97] abroad by his misdeeds (fleeing the relatives of a woman he had raped), and going abroad again at the end of the novel, only to encounter Clarissa’s most dangerous relation, Colonel Morden. But Ms. Lamb’s most interesting insights concern Pamela. Richardson, of course, did not himself travel. But the idea for Pamela came from...

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent. By Jeffrey R. Watt (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. xii plus 300 pp. $75.00)

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent. By Jeffrey R. Watt (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. xii plus 300 pp. $75.00)

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth‐Century Italian Convent – By Jeffrey R. Watt

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth‐Century Italian Convent – By Jeffrey R. Watt

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent, by Jeffrey R. Watt

The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent, by Jeffrey R. Watt