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This article aims to provide a general overview of settlement patterns in Armenia and neighbouring areas from the Early Bronze Age to Early Hellenistic times. The southern Caucasus presents unique features. For those approaching the subject for the first time, this paper aims to summarise the primary evidence for the development and transformation of the human landscape. Starting from the 4th millennium BC, it is possible to trace the outlines of a general process of sedentarisation of communities on the highlands, which took different forms and characteristics. Mobile villages dominated the Bronze Age settlement structure. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the highlands were characterised by a general development of fortified settlements, generally referred to as ‘cyclopean fortresses’, which will also be one of the main features of the later Kingdom of Urartu. Following the two centuries of Achaemenid rule, with its elusive settlement pattern, the last centuries of the 1st millennium saw the spread of Greek culture following the conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors. With the creation of large urban sites based on Hellenistic models, the concept and structure of the Mediterranean city spread across Armenia and adjacent areas.

The phenomenon of Suffixaufnahme refers to a type of morphosyntactic agreement whereby a dependent noun phrase shows case agreement with its head in addition to its functional case marking. The phenomenon is best known from Old Georgian and Hurro-Urartian, but also occurs elsewhere (Caucasus, ancient Mesopotamia, Australia), mainly in agglutinative languages. Classical Armenian shows a very similar type of agreement: dependents of heads in the accusative marked by the direct object proclitic z= may also receive the same proclitic marking regardless of their functional case. This paper explores two dimensions of this agreement phenomenon in Classical Armenian: a classification of its usage in fifth-century texts; and an attempt at explaining its likely origin outside of Armenian.

The aim of this paper is to propose five new emendations to the Armenian translation of George of Pisidia’s Hexaemeron: at v. 172 of the Armenian Mekhitarist edition read բացելով; at v. 584 read նուրբ; at v. 616 read շարադրեալս; at v. 768 read խորացեալ; at vv. 1329‑30 read զայն զարդարէ նոր որպէս. Some remarks on the peculiar rendering of hendiadyses through a single word in the Armenian translation follow. Lastly, two corrections of the editor princeps Tiroyean are reconsidered.

Making use of theoretical insights from ‘history of the bookʼ scholarship, this paper examines the way in which Mxit‘ar of Sebastia made use of paratexts (title pages, frontispieces, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, illustrations, headings, epilogues, appendices, etc.) in his ‘publishing mission’ (to use Sahak Čemčemean’s appelation) to shape readerly taste and influence the way in which his books were read, received, and interpreted. Through introductory poems, illustrations, and playful word games, he presented himself as a second Maštoc‘ and his own students like the famous fifth-century disciples of that vardapet, who were meant to transmit and create in the same Armenian Christian literary tradition, under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the mid-thirteenth century, the Mongol invasion spread fear from China to France. Yet, over subsequent decades, the threat waned, leading to a need for political and economic rebalancing. The Mongols swiftly conquered Asia and even reached Europe, reshaping the continent’s political landscape and fostering an interconnected trade network. This transformation attracted diverse merchants to new ‘intermediate’ settlements like Tana at the Don River’s mouth. Initially established by the Latins with Mongol Khan’s approval, it became a crucial stop on the ‘Mongol route to China’ in the fourteenth century. Genoese, Venetians, Catalans, Central Asian traders, Mongols, and Armenians settled there. The Armenian community, amidst growing political turbulence, demonstrated integration and sustained commercial activity. This paper explores Tana’s Armenian community in the late fourteenth century amid weakening Mongol power.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

In this paper, Old High German mood alternations in the different types of subordinate clauses (complement, adverbial and relative clauses) are discussed. The use of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses is notoriously more frequent than in Modern German and has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Based on a comprehensive corpus study, the paper will show that the licensing conditions for the subjunctive in Old High German are determined by notions such as veridicality and – in relative contexts – specificity. These conditions are thus similar (but not always identical) to those observed for Modern Greek and Romance languages. Furthermore, a syntactic analysis is provided in order to account for the licensing of the subjunctive in each type of subordinate clause.

Japanese ODA has attracted much attention in the last three decades. This paper aims to shed light on the intellectual evolution of the official discourse on Japanese ODA based on the analysis of two main ‘modes of thought’ at the foundation of it, namely national interest and international affiliation. Based on a detailed content analysis of official documents and public debates, the paper will take the role of institutional actors – Japanese political leaders, foreign ministers and intellectuals – into consideration. The role of such “entrepreneurs” has been crucial for shaping the current official discourse on Japanese foreign aid. The paper will argue, in fact, that the official discourse is a juxtaposition of two clashing ideas carefully shaped to enlarge the consensus (both domestic and external) toward the Japanese government’s policies.

This paper is dedicated to the problem of artists’ signatures in Byzantium and, more specifically, to the question of anonymity, which is often considered to be a basic characteristic of Eastern Christian art. Declaration of authorship is traditionally seen as a sign of sinful vanity, antagonistic to the religious spirit of the Middle Ages. However, work on this material reveals numerous traces of authorship left by Byzantine artists on their work in the form of epigraphical records. Through a selection of the most insightful examples, based primarily on mosaics, murals and icon painting, this paper demonstrates that the tradition of creating inscriptions bearing the names of masters was a phenomenon neither limited to a particular chronological period of Byzantine history nor influenced by specific historical or cultural transformations. On the contrary, it represents a continuous tradition developing from the period of late antiquity right up to the end of the Middle Ages. The range of surviving evidence, the variability of linguistic forms and paleographic aspects, as well as the array of creative approaches taken to the placement of signatures and dedicatory inscriptions, help to reveal a concern for the preservation of memories of individual involvement within the world of the Medieval Christian masters. Whilst not always in line with a contemporary understanding of the role of artists’ signatures, these testimonies nevertheless call for a reevaluation of the question of complete anonymity and the personality of the artist in Byzantine art.

In his novel Allah n’est pas obligé the Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma tries to convey his Malinké identity in the French language through a process of malinkisation – he interlaces Malinké words, syntactic structures and rhythm with French, playing with the two codes that he masters and portraying a fresh linguistic atmosphere. Kourouma exploits the potentiality, the richness of French linguistic varieties and thus legitimises their value. In the first part, this paper tries to analyse Kourouma’s linguistic play by focusing mainly on the language of the narrator, the child soldier Birahima. The second part of the paper attempts at proving how Kourouma’s malinkisation is part of a broader and more general project of legitimisation as regards his language(s), culture, and work as a writer.

Leaving aside historical and mythological dramas, a considerable number of plays written for the Abbey Theatre between 1904 and the outbreak of the Second World War represent emigration. They enjoyed varying degrees of success. In 1904 G.B. Shaw portrayed an Irish émigré as one of the two protagonists in John Bull’s Other Island; in the following two years Padraic Colum’s The Land and William Boyle’s The Mineral Workers were enthusiastically received by Abbey Theatre audience, the former with its depiction of young Irish men and women emigrating to America, the latter, an engineer returning to Ireland from overseas; 1907 saw three plays presenting emigration as one of the great Irish issues, both politically and economically: J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, George Fitzmaurice’s The Country Dressmaker and Lady Augusta Gregory’s The Jackdaw. They were followed by T.C. Murray’s Birthright, Lennox Robinson’s Harvest and Colum’s Thomas Muskerry. Indeed, it is almost impossible to provide an exhaustive list of all the plays dealing with emigration. The present paper aims to discuss a selection of significant plays intended for or staged at the Abbey Theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century, analysing what emigration stood for, and how it was exploited dramatically. The historical boundaries of this research (1904-1939) provide a provisional limit to an otherwise too vast study for the present paper.

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Quirinus in Enn. ann. 100 Skutsch is to be identified with Romulus. In addition to the comparison with Ov. met. 14.849 ss., new arguments are presented: the comparison with Liv. 1.16.6 and the use of the verb venerari, which is connected etymologically with Venus, who is a deity related to Romulus and the origins of Rome.

This paper offers a preliminary study of MS Atheniensis EBE 1089, a neglected lexicographic and grammatical miscellany consisting of several different sections, to be dated between the 13th and the 15th century. Among other texts, this manuscript transmits Phrynichus’ Eclogue and Moeris’ Lexicon. After providing a survey of the contents of this codex, the first part of the article deals with some of its main material features, with a description of its different sections and the scribes who copied them. Additionally, it is argued that the codex as a whole was the product of a single ‘editorial’ project carried out by a certain Μᾶρκος, active in the middle of the 16th century. The second part of the article offers a philological analysis of the folios containing the lexica of Phrynichus and Moeris; that gave the occasion to develop some new thoughts on their texts and manuscript traditions.

The fifth Imago of Philostratus Minor, which portrays baby Heracles’ struggle against the snakes sent from Hera, appears to be inspired by two Pindaric works (Nem. 1 and *Pae. 20). This paper explores the possibility that some linguistic features of Philostratus’ ekphrasis can be borrowed (presumably by secondary source) from Panyassis’ lost Herakleia. By going against the communis opinio, it is suggested that this archaic exametric poem may have survived through Imperial Age, until the 2nd century AD, alongside other mythographic and poetic works about the Heracles’ saga.

The paper investigates the Fascist exploitation of Horatian poetry by analysing the speech held by Ettore Romagnoli in 1935 on the bimillenary of the poet’s birth. Romagnoli’s oration must sacrifice to the demands of the oriented reading of Horace’s work promoted by the regime themes and attitudes characteristic of the poet (the reflections on time and the precariousness of human life, the search for self-sufficiency and aurea mediocritas, the rejection of dogmatism). Instead, the intellectual who moves from a secluded position to full adherence to the new Augustan establishment is exalted, at the cost of historical and literary distortions.

In his treatise on Persian literary theory, al-Muʿǧam fī maʿāyīr ašʿār al-ʿaǧam, Šams-i Qays (13th century) claims that a poem without the main rhyming letter (ravī) is not a poem. However, this letter is not the only recurring letter at the end of the lines of a Persian poem. Šams-i Qays discusses eight other letters (ridf, qayd, taʾsīs, daxīl, vaṣl, xurūǧ, mazīd, and nāyira) as he determines the length and the possible patterns of a Persian rhyme (qāfiya). In this paper, I aim to improve our understanding of the linguistic rationale behind the taxonomy of Persian rhyming letters by providing an annotated Italian translation of relevant passages from the Muʿǧam.

Popular fiction was a particularly successful trend in fiction from the late Qing era through the Republican period. In this fiction, a nostalgic and sentimental preservation of the Ming-Qing cult of qing 情 is clearly visible: romance and freedom of love are the expressions of a modern consciousness which makes individuals out of subjects of the traditional moral code. In a circular move to find solutions to national salvation and social change, sentimental literature searched for a compromise between tradition and modernity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the Aufhebung of the old contributed to accommodate a still unchartered modernity in two short stories by Bao Tianxiao. The intertextual analysis will show the development of a persistent ambivalence between progress and nostalgia.

This paper looks at two different manifestations of workers’ poetry as a literary tradition: the poetry of workers, peasants and soldiers (gongnongbing 工农兵) and migrant workers’ poetry (dagong shige 打工诗歌) Through a comparison between three issues of Shikan 诗刊 (Poetry Monthly) from 1976 and an anthology of migrant worker’s poetry published in 2007, this study explores some of the most relevant differences between the two in terms of aesthetics and content, before addressing questions about the shifts in the positioning of workers’ poetry vis-à-vis the political and literary authority in China.

This paper aims to analyse A Lover’s Discourse (2020), a novel by Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo, comparing it to A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978) by Roland Barthe and examining to what degree the French linguist and semiotician has influenced the author’s work. The discourse between lovers developed by Guo resembles that of Barthes on a structural, linguistic, and thematic level, but is set in an intercultural and multilingual context. By reframing the discourse as such, Xiaolu Guo contemplates themes of love, wordlessness, and home, connected to the migrant’s experience.

While predominantly seen as a technical process, environmental planning is in fact largely shaped by cultural and ideological factors. Ecolinguistics offers a coherent approach to analyse these elements, by unearthing their linguistic traces and exposing how they naturalize social-ecological goals. So far, limited efforts have gone into developing tools for a systematic ecolinguistic analysis of Chinese texts informing environmental decision-making. This paper seeks to address this gap, by introducing a novel ecolinguistic framework and the results of its application on a Chinese Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report.

The sōshoku kofun 装飾古墳 (decorated tombs) is a phenomenon of protohistoric art that developed during the Late Kofun Period (475‑710 CE) from Northern Kyūshū. This paper will discuss the data personally gathered from the iconographic and iconological analysis of the subject of the boat in seventeen sōshoku kofun in Northern Kyūshū, i.e. the present‑day prefectures of Fukuoka, Saga, and Nagasaki. The aim of this research is to understand how the subject of the boat developed artistically in this particular phenomenon of protohistoric art, why the boat was reproduced in a funerary context, and what information on the behind culture can be obtained by analysing the style, the iconography, and the links the subject of the boat has with both local and mainland symbolism.

The paper focuses on Japanese female photographers in international art exhibitions. Until recently, Japan’s photographic field was predominantly male‑dominated. Traditionally, women were considered incompetent with technical equipment and this long-enduring stereotype limited them to passive roles as models. However, from the late 1980s/early 1990s, a shift occurred, with female photographers gaining prominence. In parallel, the representation of Japanese women artists in international venues started to rise and more names began circulating in the global art circuits. This essay inspects in particular one of the most important events on the scene: the Art Biennale in Venice, the oldest and most prestigious of these large-scale exhibitions. Two important shows, held respectively in 2005 and 2009 at the Japan pavilion of the Venice Biennale, provide the starting point for this analysis: they were the only exhibitions ever dedicated to women photographers by the pavilion in its 70‑year‑old history. The artworks of Ishiuchi Miyako and Yanagi Miwa were showcased, two of the most important women photographers in recent years.

This paper proposes an in-depth analysis of the manuscript tradition of the ancient vernacular translations of Angelo Clareno’s Chronicae. After providing a description and a study of the MS Bertoliano 45, the relationships among some of the codices of the most successful and earliest translation, called A, are investigated. In particular, the text of MS P (Pisa, BLLM, Malagoli 1) is examined to verify if the codex contains the same version A.

This paper deals with Latin discontinuous nominal expressions (hyperbatons) both by a diachronic perspective internal to Latin (I-VI cent. A.D.) and compared to Romance languages. A nominal expression can be considered discontinuous when its word order is interrupted by one or more elements. In these cases a violation of the principle of the ‘domain integrity’ takes place. Discontinuity is typical of Latin and sets it apart from Romance languages, in which hyperbatons are not allowed. It is well attested in all phases of Latin so that it is considered one of the most distinctive feature of Latin word order. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that not all linearly discontinuous orders are real hyperbatons. In fact, cases in which the order Modif.-N or N-Modif. is interrupted by the complement of one of the two categories are frequent; in this perspective the domain of hyperbatons results consistently restricted. As regards real hyperbatons, we will propose the following three syntactic configurations: Type 1 due to the extraction of an element within the phrase; Type 2 due to the insertion of a weak element in second position; Type 3 due to the insertion of a verb. A final observation will concern the fact that we find in Latin kinds of hyperbatons that can be considered a clear sign of those that will develop later in Romance because they involve clitics which are absent in Latin.

This paper investigates the syntax of non-topicalized preverbal subjects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In BP, both locative PPs and locative DPs can occur in preverbal position: Na escola do Pedro aceita cartão de crédito; A escola do Pedro aceita cartão de crédito. In the latter case, the verb agrees with the locative. In BP, it is also possible to find non-argument constituents triggering verbal agreement, as in Essa estante cabe muitos livros. These sentences have been analysed as innovative constructions restricted to BP. This paper shows that some of the above structures are also present in other languages, e.g. Italian; not all of them are therefore innovative constructions of BP, and subcases need to be differentiated. The hypothesis is that sentences with preverbal non-argumental subjects have the same syntax as sentences with argumental subjects. What seems to occur in some cases is a modification in the verb thematic grid. We interpret BP’s “flexible diathesis” patterns as revealing that in this grammar, a variety of verbs have undergone a modification of their thematic grid which their counterparts in European Portuguese and other Romance languages did not.

The role and number of intermediaries involved in the process of artistic mediation tend to be all the more important as the art world becomes more autonomous, ruled by specific values, words and actions. This is particularly obvious in the case of contemporary visual arts, as this paper demonstrates. The example of a French member of the Nouveaux Réalistes movement helps to map the various categories of persons, institutions, gestures, objects owing to which a piece of scrap may be offered the career of an authentic work of art. The paper eventually provides a historical explanation of the growing role of intermediaries in modern and contemporary art, and an insight on the French present time cultural policy concerning intermediaries in the visual arts.

This paper attempts to answer whether it is possible for successful artists in one specific sector to access the domain of another artistic field at their free will. In doing so, this contribution analyses the possible existence of borders and gatekeepers between different art worlds. The aim is not just finding or defining boundaries between art fields, but rather understanding whether boundaries can be pierced through, as well as the conditions that might hinder acceptance. Moving from an art theoretical and philosophical perspective, the present paper will discuss the thesis of Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker on boundary conditions in the arts. Subsequently, their views will be tested against three recent cases of British artist celebrities, who tried to enter new artistic domains, although with alternate success. They are the episodes of Damian Hirst painfully failing as a filmmaker, of Steve McQueen slowly working his way up to the Oscars, of Douglas Gordon intentionally and irreverently challenging contemporary theatre.

Critical discourse on visual arts has dealt with art’s economic implications at least since the Fifties. At the same time, it becomes evident that artworks start to reflect on their relationship with consumer culture. This paper argues how the line is drawn in visual arts and sometimes blurred between art and its outer. In order to corroborate this assumption, the paper analyses the institutional, medial and economic pre-conditions of the field of visual arts. For this purpose, the paper will outline today’s trends in the art market, as well as in the museum and exhibition sector. In conclusion, the paper substantiates the tense relationships between art and consumption on the basis of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store.

This paper considers the role of artefacts in the historical study of dress and fashion and suggests the existence of three different approaches. The field of history of dress and costume has a long tradition going back to the nineteenth century. It adopts the methodologies of art history and considers artefacts as central to the analysis of different periods and themes. In the last few decades the emergence of fashion studies has been interpreted as distancing from artefacts. It is here claimed that fashion studies brought theoretical rigour and embraced a deductive methodology of analysis in which artefacts still played an important function. The final part of this paper introduces the reader to what can be called ‘the material culture of fashion’, a hybrid methodology borrowed from anthropology and archeology in which the object is central to the study of social, cultural and economic practices that are time specific. In particular, it shows the challenges and paybacks of such an approach.

This paper reflects on the changing role of the guardian or keeper in museums and art collections from the seventeenth century to the present. Starting from the lexical meaning of the Italian word ‘custode’, thanks to archival documentation, the research reconstructs the use of this word in the historical lexicon of museums and their professions, in different geographical and cultural contexts. Comparing the historical regulations of museums and art collections in different Italian regions, the paper argues that the profound changes associated with the functions and the professional profile of the keepers transformed them from curators of collections to mere guardians of rooms.

This paper aims at discussing the role played by the art historian Antonio Morassi (Gorizia, 1893-Milan, 1976) in the Guardi forgers affair, an intriguing saga which was of interest to merchants, collectors, and connoisseurs of the Twentieth century art market. The main character is performed by Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), one of the most important Venetian painter of vedute, cherished by forgers since the first half of the 19th century. Thanks to a long process of identification, connoisseurs as Fiocco, Goering and Byam Shaw, and Morassi itself, tried to identify some of these forgers and imitators. The paper tries to investigate the multiples roles of Morassi and his idea of threshold between true and fake, through his expertises, letters, notebooks, auctions catalogues and photos (richly annotated with vivid comments in their back), still preserved in his private Photo Archive, now property of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).

Indefinite nominals can typically be modified by pre- or postnominal adjectives in Romance languages. With the exception of a small group of adjectives concerning physical or moral characteristics whose meaning changes according to their pre- or postnominal use, the position of an attributive adjective does not alter its meaning. However, prenominal adjectives in a Spanish indefinite trigger its specific interpretation, thus preventing its variable reading; the same phenomenon obtains also in Catalan. The aim of this paper is to discuss specific cases in some Sicilian dialects – mainly in the dialect of Delia (province of Caltanissetta) – in order to provide further evidence of the fact that prenominal evaluative adjectives force the specific interpretation of indefinites in Romance. Since Sicilian dialects do not typically display prenominal adjectives, this paper will therefore draw on elatives to check whether Sicilian shows a parallel restriction in the postnominal position.

Due to the growing importance of people-to-people diplomacy in China’s global strategies, this is a momentous time for China’s international development volunteering. Drawing from underexploited Chinese sources, the paper shows that international volunteering has the potential for enhancing China’s public appeal globally and giving a ‘softer’ connotation to China’s aid to Africa. In this paper the policy, practices, and discourses about China’s voluntary service are examined and framed within the context of China’s soft power strategies. Moreover, the recent domestic debate on shortcomings of the ‘China Foreign Aid Youth Volunteers Program’ in Africa and the new directions suggested to the country’s leadership by influential Chinese academics are critically analysed. The focus is on the tailoring of a new political and ideological ‘space’ for the Chinese NGOs as implementers of future international volunteering programs. In spite of considerable debates and evolutions, Chinese international volunteering programs seems to remain under tight state control and to be best understood as social engineering efforts, with China’s soft power as their main objective.

The present paper is part of a larger project promoted by the University RomaTre on translations of Greek Patristic Texts (2nd-6th century CE) in the Latin and Syriac sources, between the 3rd and the 8th century CE. In this paper I give priority to the analysis of the cultural context of the Syriac monasticism without neglecting the more important aspect of evaluation. Some of these aspects are connected to the relationship between the hagiographic production and the historiographical tradition. This relationship is clarified, not only from the reconstruction of the manuscript tradition, but also from the opportunity to capture certain problems present in the preparatory phase of the heterogeneous Lausiac material. Therefore, their manuscript tradition must be analysed for each individual case. After a brief presentation of the status quaestionis of the studies conducted on Palladius’ text, the paper focuses on some aspects of this tradition that help us better understand the historical and cultural environment. The first aspect concerns the problem of the transmission of texts in monastic circles, the second aspect regards the original choices of Syriac translators.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the different effects that each medium (literature-cinema) may have on the experience of its readers and audience – what that medium is trying to cultivate, the limitations of each and how all of them in different ways bring greater attention to the historical phenomenon of the Armenian Genocide. With a focus on the renowned Italian-Armenian novelist Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narrative Skylark Farm the paper will first discuss the literary genre as an instrument that brings greater attention to the historical memory and then will focus on the theme of the Armenian Genocide in cinema and will deal with the dramatized version of the Skylark Farm by the Italian directors, the Taviani brothers.