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Sotto questo titolo è apparsa nell'autunno del 1999 un'antologia curata dai quattro editori,. contenente 29 brani ( ad opera dei curatori e altri collaboratori). Le linee direttrici sono esposte nella prefazione (Preface, 2 pagine introduttive fuori paginazione). La base è l'antologia Early Romance Texts: An Anthology (1980) di Rodney Sampson, definita invaluable, ma ormai di difficile accesso. Perciò, con la presente scelta di testi si cerca di ovviare a questa situazione. Ci sono però determinati limiti: infatti, sono stati tralasciati i testi più noti, canonici, già bene studiati, ma nel contempo si è desistito anche dall'includere soltanto testi finora non pubblicati. In tal modo si è scelta una via di mezzo, includendo i testi meno noti e meno discussi, tutti pubblicati, è vero, già prima ma in places now considered relatively obscure e parecchio tempo (perfino tutto un secolo) fa. La struttura di tutti i contributi è identica: ad una succinta introduzione (dati essenziali sul relativo testo) seguono il brano, i commenti, la bibliografia e la traduzione inglese. In tal modo l'antologia è coerente, di facile orientamento ed altrettanto facili confronti tra i singoli testi, il che è di notevole importanza scientifica e pedagogica. Infine, i curatori fanno risaltare il ruolo delle ricerche filologiche negli studi più propriamente linguistici.

The subsequent three papers in the present volume (viz. Snedec', Teržan's, and Trobevšek-Drobnak's) have arisen from the research in historical syritax conducted since 1986 by us in the Department for Germanic Languages and Literatures of the University of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, under the advisorship of J. Orešnik.

The horrific scenes of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), which left the country in ruins, had a traumatic effect on the entire nation particularly the Lebanese author, Hanan al-Shaykh who was haunted by the nightmarish war memories until she managed to overcome them by reliving the whole experience through the events of her remarkable novel The Story of Zahra. Disillusioned by the political scene during the war and exasperated with the traditional artistic themes advocated by previous generations of war writers, al-Shaykh rejected the linear development of character, the sense of order and progression integral to the war literature in the Arab world. Instead, she captures the atrocities of war by creating a unique novel, giving the Lebanese tragedy mythic proportions and turning it into more than a historical event. In light of this background and within the context of contemporary war fiction studies, the paper critically examines al-Shaykh’s novel in order to explore the deadly impact of war, which uproots the foundations of a civilized country turning it into a wasteland. The paper argues that the author creates a multi-layered narrative, which reflects the collapse of the moral and political structure of a patriarchal society paralyzed by coercive masculinity and devastated by sectarian violence. Navigating the protagonist’s journey of suffering and pain during the brutal civil conflict, the paper uncovers the underpinnings of war interpreting the novel as a gendered reflection of a divided country. The paper also emphasizes that the author presents a counter-narrative exposing the ugly side of war and revealing how war catastrophically damages the social fabric of the nation.

This paper considers Early Modern English urban administration in light of the developing supralocal/standard variety. Previously, research scrutinising the language of administration has focused on Middle English rather than on Early Modern English, where studies have thus far mostly focused on private correspondence and printed texts. To shed more light on the language of this under-investigated text type for this period, in this paper I investigate a collection of indentured texts written in Coventry between 1499 and 1600 and explore its language. More specifically, I analyse the use of periphrastic DO, which I subsequently contextualise both in Coventry’s local civic history – focusing on the people involved in creating the documents, e.g. the town clerk and his team of scribes – as well as in the general development of periphrastic DO with regard to the emerging supralocal/standard variety of English. The analysis reveals that periphrastic DO was used to a different extent compared to other text types from the period, most notably that it did not show a decline in the second half of the sixteenth century after what can be described as a ‘slow start’ in the first half. This change in use can be tentatively attributed to a variety of factors in Coventry’s civic history, particularly in the 1570s, but more data from other urban centres is needed to better contextualise this.

In this paper, we discuss the remarkable decrease in the use of French-origin loanwords and loan suffixes in Late Modern Dutch. We consider both changes to be lexical changes since the decrease in loan suffixes such as the verbal suffix -eren appears to result from a shift in certain lexical choices as well (Rutten/Vosters/van der Wal 2015). Our data come from the newly compiled Language of Leiden Corpus (LOL Corpus), developed at Leiden University in the context of a project on the historical Dutch-French contact situation. The main aim of the project is to assess empirically the supposed ‘Frenchification’ of Dutch in the Early Modern period (Frijhoff 2015). The LOL Corpus comprises data from seven social domains (Academy, Charity, Economy, Literature, Private life, Public opinion, Religion) significant in the history of the city Leiden from 1500 to 1899. Leiden was chosen as it was one of the important urban centers in Holland, attracting many migrants, including French-speaking labor migrants and Huguenots. The results for both words and suffixes borrowed from French show a gradual increase from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and a remarkable decrease from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The results partially confirm the ongoing and intensifying influence of French on Dutch in the Early Modern period, depending strongly however on the social domain involved (Assendelft/Rutten/van der Wal 2023a). At the same time, the results also show an unanticipated ‘Dutchification’ in more recent times. We relate these ‘Dutchifying’ lexical changes to the national language planning efforts emerging in the eighteenth century, following the rise of the standard language ideology from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. These language planning efforts led to the official codification of Dutch in 1804/1805, which targeted spelling and grammar. Previous research has shown the significant influence of the officialization of Dutch, both on the field of education and on language use (Rutten 2019). In this paper, we argue that the successful language policy had the surprising side effect of inspiring language users to exchange sometimes long-established loans for originally Dutch words.

The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the cultural contact between the Italian and German vernacular debates in the 17th century, and to show how this cultural contact introduced new legitimising arguments in favour of the vernacular in the German-speaking context while also providing a renovating impulse to German literary style. The paper investigates one exemplary case of such cultural contact: Prince Ludwig von Anhalt-Köthen’s Anmutige Gespräch (1619), the translation of Giovan Battista Gelli’s dialogue Capricci del Bottaio (1546). Gelli was an influential member of the Accademia Fiorentina, a 16th century Florentine language academy. In his Capricci, Gelli debates the legitimacy of the Florentine vernacular as a scientific and literary language. Through an analysis of Prince Ludwig’s commentaries to his translation of the Capricci, the paper shows how Prince Ludwig applied Gelli’s arguments in favour of the vernacular to the German context, and how these arguments resonated even years later in the writings of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, a German language academy led by Prince Ludwig from 1617 to 1650. As translation was seen as a form of ‘language work’ both by the Accademia Fiorentina and by the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the most salient linguistic features of Ludwig’s translation is analysed in the paper in order to show how the theoretical discussion on translation was implemented in the translation process. This investigation shows how translating from Italian promoted a more conversational literary style that distanced itself from the pompous, formulaic chancery language that was still seen as exemplary of good language use in 17th century Germany.

An Irish translation of the New Testament was published in Dublin in 1602. This publication, and the translation work which underlay it, did not appear in a vacuum: two earlier printed books in Irish had paved the way, viz. John Carswell’s translation of Knox’s Forme of Prayer and Ministrations of the Sacraments, published in Edinburgh in 1567, and Seaán Ó Cearnaigh’s primer of the Irish language and catechism translation, published in Dublin in 1571. This paper seeks to shed light on the process by which an appropriate register was arrived at for Protestant printing in Irish, and in particular for the New Testament, through an examination of some of the linguistic and stylistic features of these texts, with regard both to decisions made by the individual translators and to sociolinguistic factors which may have limited their room to manoeuvre. These factors include contemporary conceptions of and attitudes to different language varieties, the lack of alternative models, and the nature and level of education received by individual translators. This paper builds upon the pioneering research of Ailbhe Ó Corráin (2013) to show that linguistically that portion of the Irish New Testament completed after 1597 has a more colloquial and dialectal quality than that which preceded it. This is tentatively connected with specific changes in the team responsible.

The article discusses Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a disruptive power, i.e., a power that – as the dictionary SSKJ states – “because of its otherness, its visionary conception in relation to the status quo, acts boldly and unexpectedly”. At the beginning of the paper, the theoretical background of AI tools is presented, along with some examples of the potential and problems of their use in foreign language teaching. The use of AI-powered tools in foreign language teaching must be thoroughly considered, researched, and regulated at national and supranational levels – e.g., the ethical aspects of using AI in teaching, intellectual property, data protection, and the actual impact of AI-assisted learning. Beyond these challenges, it is worth highlighting, exploring, and, above all, exploiting the potential of AI-based tools and the potential and constructive use of these tools in and for foreign language teaching. In the second part of the paper, the selected AI-based tools suitable for foreign language teaching are briefly presented and analysed through a use case. The advantages and disadvantages of these tools and their use for language learning, chatbots (including ChatGPT), AI-based tools for writing and text proofreading (grammar and spelling), and machine translation tools are illustrated using examples. Despite the advantages, disadvantages, and problems that the use of AI-powered tools entails, the paper aims to highlight their benefits and potential with regard to optimizing users’ — i.e., teachers and learners – time, and, above all, we want to encourage their constructive use.

Everyday aesthetics, at its core, is based on the supposed dichotomy between art and life, considering life as something routine-like, and art as the breaking of the routine, something charismatic. Different authors of everyday aesthetics use different words to describe this dichotomy. For example, in his article “What is ‘Everyday’ in Everyday Aesthetics?”, Ossi Naukkarinen simply uses everydayness and non-everyday-like, while Arto Haapala, in his “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday: Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place” uses the terms familiarity and strangeness. The authors also propose different ways of bridging this dichotomy. However, as the paper shows, the real question is not how to bridge the dichotomy itself but rather whether the dichotomy exists in the first place. Moreover, the paper suggests a change of direction in future investigations of everyday aesthetics, and focusing on the nuances that exist on the routine-charisma and charismatic-routine spectrum, supported by academic research and the personal account of the paper’s author art project. Moreover, the implications of this shift extend beyond the boundaries of everyday aesthetics.

Building on the ongoing debates surrounding the archaeological application of New Materialism, posthumanism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and the anthropological ontological turn, this paper examines sexual interactions between deities and humans, as well as among deities represented as statues in ancient Egypt. Acknowledging the existence of such sexual encounters and providing detailed descriptions of the involved entities alone does not fully recognize the underlying gender and class structures. This paper argues that these analysed sexual encounters were shaped by gender and class-based power asymmetries, revealing that the ancient Egyptians and contemporary perspectives are not as distinct as they might seem.

In the national archaeologies formed after the dissolution of Yugoslavia there emerged new reflections of old archaeological ideas, especially about the ethnogenesis and identity of the Illyrians, topics which dominated Yugoslav archaeology. The new ideas varied from those which continued and reaffirmed older theories to those which attempted to deconstruct them, among which the most influential was that of Danijel Džino. The topic of our paper – how the initial archaeological knowledge about the Illyrians was created – adds another component in deconstructing of Illyrians. The paper analyses the first and most massive excavations at Glasinac in the 19th century which served as an empirical base for creating the narrative of the Illyrian Glasinac and Illyrians in Yugoslav archaeology in the 1950s and 1960s.

The paper focuses on heritage value systems, particularly investigating the archaeological understanding of heritage values and evaluation. The literature review shows that the postmodern archaeological paradigm predominantly covers the topic, while the perspective of the intrinsic value is less explored. The starting point of our research is the thesis that archaeological paradigms obstruct better public support if they refrain from using axiological considerations. By archaeological paradigm, we refer to the processual and post-processual ones (the latter focusing on understanding past social phenomena). Axiology, as the theory of values, developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its approach is now used in many areas of social sciences (for example, education and medical care). Public archaeology is more open to societal needs than processual and post-processual archaeology but has yet to apply a values-based approach consistently. To clarify our thesis, we analyse the theoretical and practical considerations on the values of (archaeological) heritage, including the issues of the categorization of values, reflection on who assigns values to heritage and how this affects the reception of archaeological knowledge in society. The paper addresses some critical aspects of the evaluation in archaeological heritage conservation, management and building alliances with locals and communities who identify with heritage. I outline a comprehensive archaeological evaluation system considering systemic, extrinsic and intrinsic archaeological values in the conclusions.

L'Università Autonoma di Barcellona ha inserito fra le sue Publicacions del Departament de Filologia Hispànica il volume che reca il titolo citato e che è desti­ nato ad avere carattere periodico (p. 6). Nel Prologo (pp. 5-6) i curatori affermano che fino agli anni 70 la linguistica «en aquest nostre país» non era arrivata al grado di maturità che permettesse la formazione di una scuola né di un sufficiente numero di ricercatori. Dall'inizio della scorsa decade le cose sono cominciate ad andare me­ glio: nel giugno del 1983 è stato spedito un invito a collaborare al volume miscella­ neo (qui recensito) e a Sitges è stato o ganizzato un colloquio internazionale dedica­ to ai problemi di linguistica teorica e agli aspetti (sincronici e diacronici) della lingui­ stica romanza che presentano interesse teorico. Il volume recensito raccoglie tredici contributi, di cui sei sono stati presentati al colloquio citato. Con le parole dei cura­ tori (collaboratori dell'Università Autonoma di Barcelona /U. A. B./: Joan Masca­ ró, Anna Bartra, Josep M. Brucart, Josep M. Nadal e Gemma Rigau): «d'aquesta manera volem fer plataforma que contribueixi a la consolidació, al nostre país, d'aquella pràctica científica "normal" que esmentàvem abans» (p. 6). Insomma, si cerca, e si riesce, a portare la linguistica catalana ed ispanica ad un livello internazionale e nel contempo si presentano i suoi risultati al pubblico linguistico mondiale.

The paper presents the multifaceted identity of the Hindu goddess Mahādevī, the dynamic feminine absolute of the religious tradition Śāktism, whose philosophical foundations have shaken several assumptions of established religious and social norms. Śāktism remains an integral part of the philosophical-religious landscape of the complex totality of Hinduism, while also stretching beyond narrow religious contexts and critically examines normative patterns of patriarchal social reality. In the first chapter, the paper outlines the origins of the formation of the goddess cult, from the earliest period of Indian civilization to the Purāṇas, and then introduces the key ideas of the goddess myth in the Devīmāhātmya, where, for the first time in the spiritual history of India, a goddess is defined as the Supreme Reality, who reconciles all opposites within herself. The interpretation of the most significant segments of the goddess myth is built on the basis of an analysis of the changes in metaphysics, specifically the transition from the pre-Tantric dualistic metaphysical system to the non-dualistic one in Tantra. This is followed by an outline of the two branches of Śāktism that were formed out of the two seemingly incompatible poles of the identity of the Supreme Goddess: on the one hand, as a benevolent mother and obedient wife, and on the other as a fierce, ruthless and independent female, which is discussed in more detail in the last chapter through a case study of two goddesses, Lakṣmī and Kālī.

The Current European Digital Competence Framework for Lifelong Learning (DigComp 2.2) includes five areas with 21 sub-competences, and most of them are included in the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) 2009-2022 frameworks. Which of these will be included in the curricula depends on the level of the study program (BA or MA) and the needs of the students, who we tend to believe are digital nomads. In the educational context of our study various areas of digital competences (DC) are developed implicitly as part of translation assignments and are not specifically acknowledged and assessed. In this paper we investigate how the students perceive their DC and whether this is connected to the number and type of translation courses taken and their view of themselves as future translators. The data was collected via an online questionnaire. The informants (N=58) assessed 25 statements on a five-point Likert scale, thereby reporting how skilled they believed they were with respect to various digital practices. The data was coded and analysed with the SPSS software package. The statistical tests include descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation, a one-way ANOVA and a two-way ANOVA. The results show that the students have a high perception of their DC, but no significant connection can be established between the pedagogical input and the students’ perception in this regard. The paper ends with the analysis of the pedagogical implications of this finding for teachers and course developers.

Language maps, which reflect linguistic pluralism, multilingualism and the spread of languages across countries and empires were part of an evolving human history. Historically, language came under the impact of geography, political conflicts and colonization. Due to these factors, languages penetrate borders or ended up in isolation or even in extinction. In this context, the paper investigates selected language maps of many African, Asian, European and South American countries in order to underline the connections between language, politics, immigration, war and other related elements. The paper argues that current language maps in some geographical regions are similar to the political maps of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because colonial languages continued to exist in these countries even after the departure of the colonizers. Further, the paper explores the spread of a variety of languages and their penetration in some countries, which constituted a great part of the European Union, in order to examine the impact of geo-politics on the changing status of language maps in Europe.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the efforts to renew an interest in the poetry of Weldon Kees, a more or less forgotten American poet of late modernism. The main argument of this paper is that Weldon Kees, while a belated poet of modernism, successfully swerved away from the earlier poetics of modernism and proved capable of constructing a unique poetics of despair and alienation. In many ways, an heir of Hart Crane’s tragic sense of life, Kees’ misreading of Hart Crane was highly fertile and crucially conducive to the creation of his own visionary poetics. In the first part of our discussion, a more generalized overview of Kees’ poetry is developed, while in the second part, we analyze the four Robinson poems which constitute the nucleus of Kees’ existential aesthetics. Notwithstanding the fact that despair is a ubiquitous presence in Kees’ poetry, it does not manifest itself as an inhibiting force; on the contrary, while despair is inextricably linked to his tragic fate, it also acts as a major creative impetus, which helped Kees express his relationship to the world and, consequently, his place in it.

In the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, the vernacular prose romance became popular throughout Europe. This new genre brought about the functional expansion of vernacular languages into the realm of prose, which had previously been primarily the preserve of Latin. This paper discusses coherence-making strategies in prose romances from a diachronic perspective. In a case study of the Renaut de Montauban, also called The Four Sons of Aymon, we explore a number of linguistic devices used to convey narrative coherence in the chanson de geste tradition and what happens to these patterns when the matter is transposed from verse into prose and across languages, from French into English. We focus on copula constructions with initial intensifiers, the discourse markers lors, adonc, or and si (and their English counterparts), as well as the narrative formula commonly referred to as entrelacement or interlacement. By combining linguistic observations with a narratological framework borrowed from literary analysis, we aim to shed light on further research possibilities into the realm of comparative medieval literature which considers new generic (prose), material (print), and linguistic (French-English) contexts. Our results show that the change in form from verse to prose causes word order patterns with sentence-initial intensifiers to decline in favour of a general preference for discourse markers. These became the preferred way of establishing coherence in long prose texts. Their varied use in French and the English translation of the Renaut show a definite awareness of the significance of this resource for plot progression and the management of shifts between narrative levels. Furthermore, the combination of discourse markers with other narrative formulae, like interlacement, and typographical features underscore the deliberate use of these linguistic features as coherence-making elements in the prose Renaut tradition.

The influence of Latin, since the Middle Ages, in shaping Romance languages as vehicles for the expression of discourse traditions characteristic of conceptual scripturality (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 1990 [2011]) has been analysed from different perspectives by Romance Linguistics scholars. Elaboration processes (Ausbau in German, cf. Kloss 1978) are responsible for the development of the mechanisms needed in vernacular languages to access the domain of communicative distance, which remained for many centuries exclusively reserved for Latin. During the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the use of Latin became increasingly restricted and was already limited in the 16th century mainly to liturgical manifestations, science, learned literature and international diplomacy. As Latin was excluded from oral communicative interactions, Erasmus’ Christian humanism advocated the recovery of Latin as an effective instrument of communication among Europe’s cultivated youth. The author’s most famous work during his lifetime, the Colloquia familiaria, was conceived as a manual of conversational formulas and motifs to encourage the use of Latin among the European cultured elite of the early 16th century. Although the Erasmian endeavour did not succeed, the influence of the Dutch scholar on vernacular literatures propitiated the triumph of strategies suitable for the textualisation of orality based on the Erasmian Latin model, which led to a manifestation of the ideal of ‘natural style’ (cf. Del Rey 2015b) that is common to numerous European Renaissance authors. In this paper, we reflect on the importance of Erasmus’ influence on the shaping of literary dialogue in the Romance languages of the Early Modern Period (cf. Burke 1989). Important metalinguistic reflections of some of the most relevant authors of the time, such as Baldassare Castiglione and Juan de Valdés (cf. Gauger 1996, Bustos 2011), are also considered with the aim of understanding the influence of Erasmus on their writing and, consequently, the importance of the Dutch author in the evolution of style in vernacular languages in Early Modern Period Europe.

The paper is a narratological study that problematizes the graphic or textual demarcation between the preface to the novel as a secondary text and the novel as a primary text. Methodologically, it draws on the study Thresholds (Seuils, 1987) and attempts to explain Genette’s structural and functional definition of prefaces, especially those that the French structuralist labels as pseudo-editorial, through more recent studies on the frame narrative (e.g. Abbot 2004, Fludernik 2009, Wolf 2006). On one hand, it outlines the possibilities of the above-mentioned structural categories coinciding, while on the other hand it points to the presence of an independent, broader fabula in both the preface and the frame narrative. In particular, it focuses on the problem of the functional image of certain prefaces in the Enlightenment novel, analysing the prefaces to Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and Marivaux’s The Life of Marianne, while taking Cervantes’s Don Quixote as a historical starting point. The chosen examples demonstrate how and why the boundary between the preface and the novel became blurred in the 18th century, a time when the novel as a narrative genre was articulated and established. One of the main, if not the only, functions of the pseudo-editorial preface, which is per definitionem fictional, is to create the impression of authenticity, with the preface-writer most often using the topos of a found manuscript. However, it turns out that its “dramatization” goes beyond the textual boundaries of the preface and continues in the novel itself, proving that the graphic image of the preface as a paratext no longer corresponds to its functional image. Even if we can trace a similar narrative strategy in both Baroque and Enlightenment novels, it is necessary to distinguish between the reasons for it application. Don Quixote is an example of artful, dynamic, “ingenious” composition and parodies the preface as a rhetorical convention. The fictional nature of the Enlightenment novel, however, inevitably rests on an impression of verisimilitude, and consequently the preface, the privileged place where these two characteristics meet, becomes a full-fledged literary component of the narrative work.

There is an ever-growing “trend” of bilingualism, and bilingual individuals long ago outnumbered monolinguals, which has led to different discussions and debates. This paper studies the impact of bilingualism on the well-being and cognitive abilities of Kosovan adolescents. A sample of 200 Kosovan adolescents was assessed using the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q), Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ), and The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS). Data were collected through the physical administration of questionnaires in schools. Of the 200 participants (age: 13-18), 82 (41%) were males and 118 were females (59%). The results confirm that bilinguals had better cognitive abilities, fewer cognitive failures, and better mental well-being. Moreover, the level of proficiency in the second language was positively correlated with mental well-being and negatively correlated with cognitive failures. Both of these relationships were statistically significant. Strengths, limitations, and future research directions are also discussed.

This paper explores the relationship between the disciplines of archaeology and history through the lens of historical archaeology. This is not a unified subdiscipline and has indeed been defined in various ways. Here, the term will be used as a shorthand for (later) medieval, post-medieval and contemporary archaeologies. Historical archaeology is first and foremost archaeology focusing on material remains and producing knowledge claims about the past (history) from things. But it can complement and confront the data gleaned from the material sources with other types of evidence (textual, pictorial, oral), so it is an archaeology with texts. This represents a methodological and epistemological challenge. An uncritical reliance on textual information over the material has often been warned against as “the tyranny of the historical record”. Many (historical) archaeologists have been inspired by various historiographical concepts and approaches, such as cultural history, the Annales school of social and economic history, Braudel’s concept of the longue-durée, the history of the everyday (Alltagsgeschichte), and microhistory. Conversely, the knowledge produced by archaeologists tends to be disregarded by most historians. This is unfortunate, as the material evidence offers important insights into past lifeworlds and should not be ignored.

In the relatively abundant bibliography on archaeological theory and epistemology the impact of archaeological practice on archaeological epistemology has remained somehow less explored despite the fact that in the last three decades archaeology has undergone radical changes in practice. We would like to point to three interconnected trends: an exceptional increase in the amount of archaeological fieldwork, the fact that probably more than 90% of all field projects are in the domain of heritage protection, and that archaeology has become a data-driven discipline, producing new circumstances which challenge the traditional epistemological views and require social epistemological rethinking. This paper aims to explore some social epistemological aspects in current archaeological practice in Slovenia where two rather distinctive groups of archaeological researchers emerged, academic archaeologists and field professionals. The distinction between the two groups has grown since the late 1990s with the introduction of preventive archaeology, changes in legislation in heritage protection, and the development of the commercial sector in archaeology. These changes opened a series of questions on epistemic effects in new circumstances, e.g. how these two groups contribute to archaeological knowledge, how their modes of obtaining knowledge are structured and organized, what social factors condition these modes, and, least but not last, the question of forms of epistemic asymmetries.

The paper presents a short overview of the concepts used to observe the changes in epistemic standards of a discipline and its future potential, in respect to archaeology. The shortcomings are outlined of the common practice of structuring the theoretical approaches in archaeology into distinct, mutually exclusive modes of reasoning, implying three distinct phases, inspired by Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. The concept of a research programme, introduced by the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, is suggested as the more productive mode of assessing the multitude of approaches present in archaeology. In this manner, it is possible to retain the diversity of epistemic proposals and to meet the challenges immanent in the character of archaeological evidence.

Tituba, a supporting character in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, can be associated with the concept of otherness in several respects. For one, she is not free like the rest of the population of Salem, Massachusetts, where the play is set, but was brought to the community from the island of Barbados by Reverend Parris as an enslaved woman. Being of Caribbean origin, she is also not an English Protestant like the rest of the village, and despite having accepted her master’s church, as was common for the enslaved throughout the British colonial period, Protestantism is not her first religion. Finally, the two most evident and immediately perceivable characteristics placing her in the category of the Other are her skin colour and her language, which also seem to be the main reasons that she was the first person to be accused of witchcraft in Salem. This paper focuses on Tituba’s speech, particularly from the point of view of the possibilities as well as difficulties of translating her utterances into Slovene. The contrastive analysis includes Miller’s original play, its two Slovene translations, Lov na čarovnice, the published one (1964) and the unpublished theatre translation (1997/2019), as well as a brief insight into two theatre productions of the play at the Maribor National Theatre.

The paper focuses on two literary periods located at opposite ends of the twentieth century and examines the relationship between utopian ideas of Victorian fin de siècle and the re-emergence of utopian desires within a metamodernist context. The two periods discussed, while separated by a century of what is typically understood as progress, are both permeated by impending change and in dire need of alternatives to their respective forms of capitalism, making the appearance of utopian discourse almost inevitable. While their understanding of utopia certainly differs in many aspects, I will argue that they both recognize its oscillatory potential and neither focuses on bare facilitation of escapism or provision of blueprints, instead consciously employing hope-based utopian impulses as a method and a process by means of which various alternatives can be continuously investigated.

Et dukkehjem (A Dolls’ House) by Henrik Ibsen is one of the most central texts of world theatre and literature, but at the same time, it is also a text written by an author coming from a relatively peripheral source language and culture. Nevertheless, soon after her entrance to the European stages Ibsen’s Nora found her way to the Slovenian theatres, albeit via German translations more often than not. This paper will show how the fact that the translations were done between two peripheral languages has affected all existing Slovenian translations, direct or indirect.

In Slovenia, surtitles are increasingly used to facilitate access to the textual content of a play when it is performed for an international audience. The process of creating a translation in the format of surtitles is characterized by complexity and hybridity, as a translation of a theatre text, even when available, needs to be adapted for a different medium. This paper examines how English surtitles for the Slovenian play Pavla nad prepadom / Pavla above the Precipice were created by comparing four versions of the text of the performance.

The paper uses keyword analysis as the empirical basis for the characterization of Shakespeare’s character Iago from Othello, the Moor of Venice. The aim of the paper is to determine how Iago’s manner of speech reflects his deceitful and manipulative nature and how it differs from the speech-styles of non-deceitful prominent characters: Othello, Cassio, Roderigo, Desdemona and Emilia. Keywords for the chosen characters are based on the corpora of character speech and the Sketch Engine tool is used to process the data. The results are then interpreted and discussed on the basis of six interconnected points of discussion: focus, adjectives, use of the expression Moor, references to the handkerchief, poisoning-the-ears technique, and pronouns, all of which confirm that Iago’s manipulative nature is indeed evident in his speech and that there is a clear difference between his speech-style and the speech-styles of other, non-deceitful, prominent characters.

The paper reveals the moral code, extolled in the renowned Kipling’s poem “If” by means of cognitive interpretation. The author’s message containing his idea of moral code is unraveled in minimum meaningful spaces of the poem (usually one or two lines), which are analyzed in depth. Each space highlights the trajector features of character and the corresponding reference frames (domains), which serve as background for their understanding. The peculiarity of moral concepts consists in the fact that they are based on the evaluative component and therefore they form binary oppositions. The antagonist for the moral concept within such opposition serves as its benchmark, since the essence of a moral value is revealed only when it is contrasted to its opposite, therefore the paper makes an attempt of alignment trajector domains with the benchmarks. In order to delve into the Kipling’s understanding of moral code the distinguished ethical values were arranged in the form of field model. The nucleus of the model comprises most frequently actualized values from the moral code, while periphery includes values with lower rate of actualization. Along with cognitive analyses of Kipling’s moral doctrine the paper highlights the peculiarities of poetic narration, which include abstract dictum, use of subjunctive mood and symbolism. Particular attention is also paid to the use of personification and metaphor.

This paper is an attempt to develop a design-oriented approach to ELT coursebook evaluation, with a particular focus on the internal organization of coursebook units at both intra-unit and inter-unit levels. We believe that looking at coursebooks from the position of the materials designer sheds some additional light on ELT coursebook evaluation. The design-oriented approach to ELT coursebook assessment proposed in the paper goes well beyond the immediate, and often superficial, ‘check-list’ methods commonly used to help teachers select coursebooks. In other words, the design-oriented approach to ELT coursebook assessment enables teachers an insight into ‘the architecture’ of textbooks. On this ‘journey to the centre of ELT textbooks’, we try to highlight how language teaching materials have been resolving the conundrum of the dynamic combination of the What (content), and the How (pedagogy/methodology). In presenting a materials design process, we start off with the assumption that there has always been a broad basis of theoretical and pedagogical notions that can inform the content and organization of ELT coursebooks, and upon which coursebook writers can build when designing instructional materials. The article then discusses three stages of the design process, offering a more detailed analysis of the complex issue of unit structure at intra- and inter-unit levels. We explore different formats of unit structure, its components, ways of creating coherence throughout the unit, and its underlying methodology/pedagogy. The last point prompts the conclusion that today’s ELT materials are produced in response to a perceived market demand that is often at variance with the latest theoretical developments in ELT.

This paper analyses morpho-syntactic interference errors committed by learners of French as a foreign language in four Tanzanian universities: UDSM, UDOM, DUCE and Makumira. The paper has three specific objectives: (i) to identify morpho-syntactic interference errors, (ii) to account for their sources and (iii) to recommend a corrective treatment. The study included a total of 61 respondents. The data was collected through learners’ written texts in French from which a corpus was developed. The study was guided by the interlanguage theory and the error analysis approach. Data analysis was qualitative. The findings reveal that errors included the use of nouns with English origins (18.87%), omission of prepositions (36.79%) and absence of determiners (44.34%). The findings further show that these errors are due to previously acquired or learned languages: Swahili, ethnic community languages and English. Different recommendations are given following the findings. As regards the use of definite and indefinite articles in French, teachers should provide a guided reading of different French texts through which learners will be able to understand how articles are used. To master the use of prepositions, teachers should encourage learners to read a variety of texts in French as this can make them understand and internalize the different prepositions. Moreover, through regular exercises on word formation in French, learners may be able to familiarize themselves with French nouns, hence internalizing their forms. Finally, the learning of French nouns should be done in context.

Literature is an open concept and a creative art which expresses human history, experiences, imagination, observations, predictions and suggestions at a particular time in a given society. Either as fiction or non-fiction, literature can be rendered in both spoken and written words. It is often argued whether literature is for itself or the development of the society that produces it. This study, therefore, interrogates how the selected Francophone African novels, namely Sembène Ousmane’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu, Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, Ferdinand Oyono’s Le vieux nègre et la médaille, Aminata Sow Fall’s La grève des bàttu, Patrick Ilboudo’s Les vertiges du trône and Fatou Keïta’s Rebelle, depict the function of literature. The novelists are selected because of their inclination towards the social transformation paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to raise people’s awareness and mobilize them towards positive change. Based on close reading, the paper is built around Marxist theory which is interested in the class struggle as demonstrated in a literary text, with a view to deconstructing the existing capitalist tendencies in a given society. The findings reveal that the selected novels are focused on the poor conditions socio-politically, economically, culturally and psychologically that exist both during and after the colonial era. The paper concludes that literature helps readers to cope with the socio-cultural, political, economic, religious and other challenges of their immediate as well as remote environments through the process of self-discovery. As such, positive social change is possible through literature.

The paper gives a comprehensive insight into the peculiarities of concept profiling through defining the related etymological domains. The aim of the paper is to reveal the peculiarities of the profiling of the concepts GOOD / EVIL and JUSTICE through elucidating their source domains from an etymological perspective. The choice of the analysed ethical concepts is stipulated by their higher contextual actualization frequency, as compared with the other ethical concepts, according to the data obtained from British National Corpus. The research method of trajector / landmark alignment used in this work is based on R. Langacker’s views on the profiling of concepts in language utterances and on the tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The novelty of this approach consists in the fact that it was elaborated and tailored for the analysis and explanation of the onomasiological principles of ‘wrapping’ abstract ethical concepts into the language form. The underlying idea is that abstract categories were conceptualized on the basis of background central life experience and knowledge of concrete things. It is argued that such things were the source domains in ontological cross-domain mappings for the target ethical concepts. The current research into the source domain etymons of the ethical categories made it possible to determine the underlying images, which are the core for drawing metaphorical correspondences between source and target concepts. The etymological layer of source domain lexicalizers revealed the intrinsic psychological mechanisms of human cognition and perception of the world, which consist in the inherent proclivity of the human mind to make metaphorical parallels in the direction from daily, central experience to complex abstract ideas and notions. The results made it possible to develop the matrix model of the analysed concepts, which was further developed into a ‘conceptual edifice’ multi-layer model, which reveals the conceptualization paths along which the human mind classifies and categorizes abstract ethical ideas.

Dealing with interpretation, we first revisited the theoretical models of hermeneutics (hermeneutical cycle), semantics (triangle) and information sciences, as well as the model of heritage interpretation pedagogy. To design a more appropriate heritage interpretation model that meets the requirements of full public participation, we defined the key concepts (on top of heritage interpretation itself): memory, knowledge and values. The arguments for such a choice have been expounded from three viewpoints: semantics (defining their current meaning and etymology of terms), neuroscience and heritage studies (in Slovenia and some other countries, we use the term ‘heritology’ – denoting the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies). The paper concludes by outlining the heritage interpretation model, graphically presented in two diagrams: the structural one in the form of a three-circle Venn diagram with the corresponding matrix and the process diagram following the adaptive management pattern. The discussion presents critical issues of the model and points out some advantages of its practical implementation.

The discipline of Translation Studies has been criticized for being limited to only Euro-American perspectives and cultures, and thus scholars have called for expanding the scope of study beyond the Western conceptualizations of translation. This paper attempts to fill that void in the knowledge of the translation archaeology of Arabic novels translated into English. It creates an up-to-date bibliography of Arabic novels translated into English published worldwide across three decades (1988–2018) by consulting the US Library of Congress global union library catalogue and Good­reads. The collected materials are presented across two major historical periods: the post-Nobel Prize phase (1988–August 2001) and the post-9/11 phase (September 2001–2018). The bibliography includes 277 translated Arabic novels. It identifies the main actors involved in the process of translation, namely the authors, translators, and publishers. In addition to the quantitative analysis of this bibliographical data, this study adopts a comprehensive model by Allen (1995) to apply qualitative analysis to identify the topics being selected for translation into English. The study reveals that an increase in the number of translated works does not necessarily correlate with a greater understanding of the source text culture. In fact, increased translation flows can signal a reinforcement of known cultural stereotypes in the target culture.

This paper deals with the question of the formation of Croatian adjectives with the prefix među-. While such adjectives were very rare in late 19th and early 20th century, an analysis of relevant lexicographic works and digital corpora demonstrated that their number started to become larger in later 20th century, culminating in recent decades. Today, the [među-N-Suff]Adj derivational pattern is a productive, accounting for 134 adjectives with a frequency of ten occurrences or more retrieved from the largest extant Croatian web corpus, hrWaC. On the basis of an analysis of available older lexicographic works and digital corpora, it can be concluded that među- prefixed adjectives first entered into Croatian as loan translations (calques) of Latin(ate) and German terms. According to more recent lexicographic works and digital corpora, later on, and especially in recent decades, which coincided with a growing English influence on Croatian, među- prefixed adjectives were probably produced as equivalents of English inter- prefixed adjectives. The number of među- prefixed adjectives, as well as the variety of semantic domains in which they are used, testify to the fact that the [među-N-Suff]Adj pattern is well-established and productive in contemporary Croatian. The analysis of Croatian među- prefixed adjectives in this paper could contribute to shedding more light on the question of morphological borrowing phenomena in general.

The following paper discusses contemporary challenges of providing access to formally accredited higher education programs in the United States of America, and on a smaller scale also in Slovenia. It interprets the recent college admissions scandal within the historical framework of American educational policies, paired with its traditional social practices. In the initial sections, the paper provides a brief historical overview of the development of American (higher) education, the beginnings of which date as far back as the early 17th century. Back then, the very concept of formal and publicly accessible education was in its developmental stages. By focusing on a selection of historical aspects and educational trends within the American national context, the paper unveils the related expectations and attitudes toward acquiring formal education in the past. It lists a number of historically relevant changes, which have been implemented over the past century within the American educational system at state and federal levels. The latter have contributed to the development of contemporary approaches to education and have affected recent attitudes toward formal education in American society. The paper includes statistical data on enrolments and graduation rates in institutions of higher education in the United States and Slovenia, which offers an insight into the rising enrolment and graduation trends, and relates the figures to the importance of accessibility of education as an equalizer that should provide equality of opportunity for all, irrespective of social background or economic power. The accrued data and related research results support a favorable trend in accessibility of formal education in both countries, the US and Slovenia. This is an important finding, particularly in the context of the college tuition scandal, as it might at first sight create the impression that some of the highly valued and formally accredited institutions of higher education were subject to the influence of a powerful elite. The research results therefore support the trend of the educational system and the accrued knowledge assuming the role of the equalizer in leveling out certain aspects of social inequality.

This paper critically examines Theodore Herzl’s canonical Zionist novel, Altneuland /Old New Land as a frontier narrative which depicts the process of Jewish immigration to Palestine as an inevitable historical process aiming to rescue European Jews from persecution and establish a multi-national Utopia on the land of Palestine. Unlike radical Zionist narratives which underlie the necessity of founding a purely Jewish state in the holy land, Altneuland depicts an egalitarian and cosmopolitan community shared by Jews, Arabs and other races. The paper emphasizes that Herzl’s Zionist project in Altneuland is not an extension of western colonialism par excellence. Herzl’s narrative is a pragmatic appropriation of frontier literature depicting Palestine as a new frontier and promoting a construct of mythology about enthusiastic individuals who thrived in the desert while serving the needs of an enterprising and progressive society. Unlike western colonial narratives which necessitate the elimination of the colonized natives, Herzl’s novel assimilates the indigenous population in the emerging frontier community.

This paper focuses on an essentially environmental and recurrent debate about foreign waste imports in Albania. The aim of this paper is to examine the frames that are used by parties in this debate in order to persuade the public in favour of or against importing foreign waste. The representative actors of the foreign waste debate are politicians and environmental activists. Salient fragments of their speeches were collected and divided into two groups (in favour vs. against). Framing analysis is a widely used methodological approach in social sciences, with various conceptualizations in different research fields, such as in communication studies (Entman 1993), linguistics (Fillmore’s semantic frames; critical discourse analysis frames or schemata), psychology (frames in thought), sociology (frames in communication). The theoretical background section of the paper provides an overview of these main approaches in defining, detecting and extracting frames. In the present paper a linguistic approach is employed to detect and reconstruct frames of the debate. Following the methodological technique applied by Touri and Koteyko (2015), the frame packages extracted are: (a) environmental threat/ damage, (b) Albania’s existing problem with its own waste, (c) the Mafia, (d) the European Union, and (e) economic development. The analysis shows that frames are crucial in understanding how an issue is characterized in persuasive discourse when speakers draw attention to certain aspects of reality by dismissing others.

The research behind this paper is set in the context of the 2016 US presidential election that has come to symbolize the post-truth era. We conducted a literature review on the 2016 election, with the aim to better understand the impact of computational propaganda on the election outcome and on the behaviour of voters. The paper opens with a definition of post-truth society and related concepts such as fake news and computational propaganda. It explores the changes of political communication in a digital environment and analyses the role of social media in the 2016 election. It probes into phenomena such as the trivialization of politics and the loss of credibility of political actors, which are both common in post-truth societies. The reviewed literature seems to indicate that social media have become strong actors on the political stage, but so far not the predominant source of political information and influence on the behaviour of voters. The paper makes two important contributions. Firstly, drawing on the concept of post-truth society, it analyses the role of computational propaganda in the 2016 presidential election, and secondly, it attempts to explain the paradox of general political apathy on one hand, and increased political activism on the other. These are some of the challenges we are now facing, and in order to be able to cope with them it is important to acknowledge and understand them.

As a response to recent mass migratory movements, numerous children’s novels about refugees have been published in the last decades. The paper analyses two of these novels, Alan Gratz’s Refugee (2017) and Gillian Cross’s After Tomorrow (2013), and puts them into the context of the ‘transcultural turn’ in cultural studies. The paper also presents the results of a survey among university lecturers of various countries about the benefits, challenges and teaching aims of including migrant and refugee literature into the courses they teach.

Departing from the thesis that literary texts, in addition to their capacity to provide description, also demonstrate potential for construing reality, this paper focuses on the selected narratives, or essayistic and poetological texts written by the canonical Croatian authors August Šenoa and Miroslav Krleža. The paper focuses on the demonstration and literary representation of various border phenomena in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Šenoa) and their gradual change in the post-imperial age following the Great War (Krleža). By challenging the imperial narrative about the Military Frontier, the image of the Ottomans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the associated national and homogenizing discourses infused by the processes of Othering, the article analyses a number of variations in the understanding of the border and their ideological implications with special regard to the thesis that borders are construed as impossible endeavours aiming to separate the Self from the Other.

This paper analyses the grammatical gender errors committed by learners of French as a foreign language in four Tanzanian universities: UDSM, UDOM, DUCE and Makumira (University of Dar es Salaam, University of Dodoma, Dar es Salaam University College of Education and Makumira University). The paper has three specific objectives: (i) to identify grammatical gender errors, (ii) to account for their sources and (iii) to propose a corrective treatment. The study included a total of 61 respondents. The data was collected through learners' written texts in French from which a corpus was developed. The study was guided by the error analysis approach and interlanguage theory. The data was analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings show that grammatical gender errors were found with regard to the masculine definite article (29.73%), the feminine definite article (24.32%), the masculine indefinite article (22.97%), the feminine indefinite article (16.22%) and possessive adjectives (6.76%). These findings show there is a need to help learners of French as a foreign language in the context of Tanzania using the recommended strategies.

This paper investigates transfer in the use of English intensifiers by Croatian students of English. Since transfer is an important factor in second language acquisition and is very common in different areas of language use, it has been the subject of various studies. In this paper, we focus on lexical transfer investigating its effects on the use of intensifiers among first-year undergraduate university students of English at Zadar University, Croatia. The aim of this cross-sectional study is to examine whether there is a connection between the use of intensifiers in L2 and L1, i.e. whether the knowledge of intensifiers in L1 Croatian influences learners' use or knowledge of intensifiers in L2 English. Intensity is a basic human cognitive category and has an important function in communication. Specifically, the speaker expresses emotions or an attitude towards a topic using intensifiers. Furthermore, intensifiers are used in different collocations modifying adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. However, this study focuses only on intensifiers that appear in adverb-adjective collocations, and their use is observed in a relatively large group of language learners at a single point in time. Relevant data are collected using questionnaires as well as cloze-tests and translation tasks which focus on semantics and collocation.

The aim of the paper is to give a critical summary of the traditional and more alternative techniques and activities for pronunciation practice recommended in the literature. In the past few decades the theoretical approaches to teaching pronunciation have changed considerably, from giving a strong focus on the accurate production of individual speech sounds to shifting the focus onto the greater communicative relevance of connected speech and intelligibility. Approaching L2 pronunciation teaching is not an easy task, and it needs to be systematically dealt with. The paper discusses several decisions teachers need to make when choosing activities for pronunciation practice: selecting the type of phonological structure to practice, deciding on the speech mode, determining the structural level of practice, focusing on a particular type of instruction, establishing the degree of control of the structure that is practiced, and choosing which cognitive skill to enhance while practicing. With regard to the various techniques for teaching pronunciation, the analysis shows they have adapted accordingly in line with the different trends. Hence, while traditional activities such as automatic repetition, ear-training and explicit phonetic instruction are still considered effective, additional priority is given to activities for raising phonological awareness, communicative activities and techniques that adopt an interdisciplinary approach.

Content and coherence are the categories most difficult to evaluate fairly when raters use analytic scoring scales. Readers inevitably interpret texts in their own idiosyncratic ways, depending on their knowledge, experience, ethical considerations, and other personal biases that they cannot completely set aside when grading a text. This is also true for descriptors, which are themselves short texts. To make matters worse, due to the very nature of writing but also the lack of consensus among experts in discourse research, writing theory, and writing assessment, descriptors are categorized vaguely and inconsistently. As a result, raters seeking useful evaluation criteria are confronted with descriptors that cover the same concept, such as “relevance”, being categorized in one set of criteria as relating to the content of the written text and in another as belonging to the category of coherence. Nevertheless, the objectivity of the evaluation of written work can be increased. The article examines the relationship between content and coherence, which is reflected in the way the two concepts are defined in the relevant literature, as well as in some descriptors used in two grading scales used in Slovenia. The empirical part of the paper presents a case study involving 46 secondary school teachers, whose responses to a questionnaire confirm the subjectivity of the understanding of individual descriptors and the need for adequate training of teachers in the use of analytic scoring scales, regular standardization in the schools where they work, evaluation of the assessment scales they use and their possible adaptation.

As Zen took root in the West over the past century, there emerged a number of differing interpretations of one of its key facets, namely the question of the relationship between language and enlightenment. The two camps which came to garner the most attention in philosophical circles are eliminativism, which understands enlightenment as the cutting off of linguistic and socio-cultural categories, accomplished by arbitrary means, and constructivism, which identifies satori with the exercise of certain linguistic and cultural conventions. In the present paper, we first lay out some of the most important criticisms of these two positions, arguing that the two accounts fall into the error of either demonizing or fetishizing language, respectively, before outlining a different approach to the relationship between practice and realization, drawing on the largely neglected work of perennialist thinkers and a phenomenologically informed notion of symbolism. By taking the idea of the symbol in its double meaning, namely as that which “casts together” the culturally conditioned particularities of Zen into a unified tradition, and yet points beyond them as a “sign” of something that itself transcends all description, we propose an interpretation that can do justice both to the crucial role played by concrete practices and to the transcendent nature of their soteriological “end”.

In the early 1930s, when the project of scientific modernization was in full swing in Chinese Buddhist circles, Dharma Master Taixu wrote a series of essays on “Realism” (Xianshi zhuyi 現實主義, 1928–1931). These represent one of the profoundest series of writings documenting his understanding of the link between science and Buddhist epistemology/ontology, and consequently also on the role of his notion of scientific Buddhism for modern times. Aside from his meditations on the relationship between science and Buddhism, in this important series of essays Taixu also provided his more or less critical accounts on modern philosophical currents in contemporary China, including Russell’s “New Realism” and materialism. This paper aims to provide a concise reading of the above-mentioned writings by Taixu, in order to cast some new light on the understanding of Western modern philosophy in Chinese Buddhist modernism of the Republican Era, on the one hand, and to highlight the main theoretical features of Taixu’s notion of scientific Buddhism, on the other. Aside from that, I also aim to present some new insights into the otherwise overlooked aspects of the broader intellectual sphere of Chinese Buddhism of the Republican Era. As regards the broader historical and intellectual context of Taixu’s writings, the analysis provided in this article will be regarded within the framework constructed in my forthcoming article on Taixu’s philosophy in the journal Buddhist Studies Review.

One of the most recognizable thinkers of the 16th century France, Jean Bodin, wrote what is perhaps the first methodological treatise of instructions and guidelines on how to not only read and write but also understand history. With his universal interest in all things human, Bodin predated Marc Bloch’s postulate that historians should ideally be interested in all forms of life if they were to perform their task as dutifully as possible. In 1566 Bodin published one of the most frequently reprinted works, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem – “The Method for the Easy Understanding of History”. Although he expressed keen interest and good knowledge of a score of ancient historians, listing them in the fourth chapter of his work (De historicorum delectu – “On the Choice of Historians”), one of them was particularly close to his heart. The Roman historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus who is, according to Bodin, “a most honest author [who] possessed experience of important affairs”, provided Bodin and many of his colleagues with a model (stasis) narrative for discussing a changing world in turmoil – something Bodin was no stranger to in the time of the French religious wars. However, the explanation that it was the rhetorically efficient model narrative that inspired Bodin to copy Sallust’s argument seems unsatisfactory and biographically superficial. Instead, this paper closely analyses the Sallustian chapters that purportedly motivated Bodin’s thinking and proposes that there are little grounds in Sallust for Bodin’s legal and historical framing of absolutist sovereignty.