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Lo studio dei manoscritti coranici piu antichi e fondamentale per conoscere la prima diffusione del testo sacro e soprattutto la sua consistenza. In attesa, ormai fin troppo prolungata, di studi sui materiali ritrovati a Sanaa, lo studioso a cui si devono i maggiori contributi sull'argomento e senz'altro Fran50is Deroche. Suo e anche il piu recente saggio esaustivo e completo, nel quale analizza un esempla re manoscritto coranico, conservato tra varie biblioteche, probabilmente risalente alla fine del VII secolo.1 Si tratta della versione, benche incompleta, piu impor tante e antica e per tale ragione Deroche dedica a tale esemplare un'analisi mi nuziosa con un'acribia difficilmente superabile. La questione della storia del ma noscritto di probabile origine egiziana, le differenti (5) mani dei copisti, e le pe culiarita ortografiche di ognuno e nel complesso, rispetto alla versione contem poranea della vulgata di cUtman e ad altri esemplari antichi, sono tutte affronta te con una capacita e un equilibrio convincenti. L'ampia parte in arabo riprodu ce il testo segnalando ovviamente le peculiarita del ductus consonantico e anche cancellature, interventi di vario tipo e peculiarita di ogni genere. Inserito tra le due parti, un consistente apparato di immagini offre riproduzioni del manoscrit to e di altri materiali citati e utilizzati nel saggio. Il prodotto finale di un percor so cosi argomentato e condivisibile e la datazione del manoscritto e alcune fon damentali considerazioni sullo stato del testo coranico attorno all'ultimo quarto del VII secolo. Senza alcuna valutazione polemica e con un argomentare che procede spedito col fermo vincolo documentale e logico, Deroche seppellisce, se ancora ve ne fosse bisogno, le affascinanti interpretazioni di Wansbrough e quel le, piu recenti, che ipotizzano la circolazione di versioni coraniche alquanto di verse da quella Cutmanica. Allo stesso tempo, dimostra come la grafia coranica fu una costruzione progressiva, che nel caso specifico era gia frutto di una trasmis sione scritta del testo, quantunque continuamente rielaborata e perfezionata per almeno due secoli, giungendo a una fissazione non scevra da problemi e inconsi stenze che anche l'edizione cairina, considerata oggi standard, denota. La ricerca sul testo coranico, con lo spettro di ipotesi piu diverse, da quelle che accettano la visione islamica, a quelle piu scettiche, ha conosciuto negli ul timi anni un nuovo vigore. Il volume curato da Manfred S. Kropp e il piu recen

Kathryn Klingebiel, ‘Occitan Linguistic Bibliography for 2012’, Tenso, 29:173–208. See also YWMLS, 75:150–57. Aitor Carrera reports on ‘Activitats de la Catedra d’Estudis Occitans de la Universitat de Lleida’, ER, 36:437–38. Marie-Laure Savoye et al., *‘Sur les traces d’Edith Brayer: catalogue des manuscrits francais et occitans de la Bibliotheque Vaticane’, MEFR, 126.2, . The world of Occitan scholarship and literature has now lost Pierre Bec (1921–2014), memorialized by Francois Pic in and by David grosclaude, Anem! Occitans!, 149:4–5, . Further obituaries for Peter T. Ricketts (†7 May 2013) and Marti de Riquer (†17 September 2013) have appeared: for the former, by Walter Meliga in RLiR 78:303–6 and F. R. P. Akehurst in Tenso 29:231–44 (with substantial bibliography, 234–44); and for the latter, by Alberto Varvaro in MedRom, 37, 2013:432–35. Varvaro (1934–2014) was himself remembered in necrologies by Laura Minervini and giovanni Palumbo in RLiR, 78:607–17, and by Francisco Rico and Isabel de Riquer in El Pais (1 November 2014). Other losses noted in 2014: Moshe Lazar (†13 December 2012), remembered by Robert A. Taylor in Tenso, 29:225–30; James J. Wilhelm (†13 December 2012), with obituary by Janet A. Walker, Tenso, 29:219–24; and Marcelle D’Herde Heiliger (†1 March 2014). Yan Lespoux, ‘Un pilier meconnu de l’occitanisme: Pierre-Louis Berthaud (1899–1956)’, AIEO 10, 625–33, traces the crucial role played by this mentor of Robert Lafont in the Occitan movement between 1930–1960. Jean Thomas, ‘Fernand Barrue, entre gasconha e Lengadoc’, AIEO 10, 852–59, provides a portrait of a now-forgotten poet (1891–1956), author of three collections, who returned to using his native gascon in his late works—and whose poetry deserves a full edition. Id., ‘Paul Debar (1794–1853)’, Gardy Vol., 897–909, reviews the life and work of a poet who is cited 94 times in Mistral’s Tresor. Bernat Vernhieras, ‘Andrieu Lagarda, passaire de la lenga’, AIEO 10, 921–30, recaps the productive career and ‘obra considerabla’ of this militant Occitanist of the generation of 1945. R. Anthony Lodge, *‘Jacques-Louis Menetra and his experience of the langue d’oc’, pp. 210–17 of Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900: A Sociolinguistic and Comparative Perspective, ed. gijsbert Rutten et al., Amsterdam, Benjamins, viii + 334 pp. Elena grinina and galina Romanova, ‘La imatge de l’occita a Russia’, AIEO 10, 954–57, present a brief overview, with specific attention to two works: Academia de Linguistica, La formacio de llengues romaniques literaries: el provencal/l’occita, 1991; and Tatiana Alisova and Camila Pluzhnikova, El provencal antic: La historia de l’Occitania medieval. La gramatica historica. Crestomatia, 2011.

The prosecution—whether domestic or international—of international crimes and atrocities may implicate extremely aged defendants. Much has been written about the legalisms that inhere (or not) in trying these barely alive individuals. Very little however has been written about the aesthetics the barely alive encrust into the architecture of courtrooms, the optics these defendants suffuse into the trial process, and the expressive value of punishing them. This is what we seek to do in this project.

This paper discusses the trial against Bruno Dey, who was an ss guard at the concentration camp Stutthof in 1944 and 1945. The accused was 92 years old at the time the trial was opened before a juvenile division of the regional court in Hamburg in 2019. The trial ended with a conviction and a sentence of two years on probation. On the first day of the main hearing, the presiding judge remarked that it was an ‘unusual trial’. This expression is a leitmotif for this paper. The first section explains the historical and legal context of the trial. The paper then provides an account of the opening session, the testimonies of the accused and the witnesses, as well the judgment.

To this day, the trial of Pol Pot in July 1997 in Anlong Veng remains an underexplored topic, possibly because it is seen as a parody of justice organised by a rival Khmer Rouge faction. Images of the event show an old and fragile man who has to be supported by guards to the meeting hall. Drawing on anthropologist Ashley Thompson’s study of the ‘substitute body of the king’, the paper examines the corporeal strategies at play in the trial and in the display and cremation of Pol Pot’s body in April 1998. Using a range of materials (articles in media, pictures, videos, and artworks), it brings into conversation ‘forensic aesthetics’, performance theory, and contemporary visual arts to investigate the role of Pol Pot’s body as a political tool in the troubled context of post-transition Cambodia.

This paper adopts an embodied cognitive perspective to review the significance of dynamic patterns in the visual expression of meaning. Drawing upon the work of Rudolf Arnheim we first show how perceptual dynamics of inanimate objects might be extended in order to structure abstract meaning in fixed images such as paintings. Second, we evaluate existing experimental work that shows how simple kinematic structures within a stationary frame might embody such high-level properties as perceptual causality and animacy. Third and last, we take inspiration from these experiments to shed light on the expressiveness of dynamic patterns that unfold once the frame itself becomes a mobile entity (i.e., camera movement). In the latter case we will also present a filmic case study, showing how filmmakers might resort to these dynamic patterns so as to embody a film’s story content, while simultaneously offering a further avenue for film scholars to deepen their engagement with the experimental method.

This paper examines the absence of geminate -rr- in Sanskrit and argues that the synchronic ban on this sequence results from continued high ranking of an Obligatory Contour Principle constraint against heteromorphemic geminates (inherited from PIE) combined with the substrate influence of Dravidian languages in which the rhotics are non-geminable. New -rr- sequences that arose in Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Aryan from PIE *-LL- or *-LHL- after loss of the laryngeal and merger of *l with the rhotic were repaired through degemination. This hypothesis predicts a development of PIE *(-)CL̥HLV- to Sanskrit (-)Cī/ūrV- which has not been previously recognized in the treatments of Indic historical phonology. This development is arguably found in mūrá- ‘stupid’ < *mūrra- < *mr̥hx-lo- (cf. Hitt. marlant- ‘stupid’), ūrú- ‘thigh’ < *u̯ūrru- < *(hx)u̯l̥hx-Lu- ← *(hx)u̯l̥hx-Lo- (cf. Hitt. walla- ‘thigh’), śīrá- ‘fervent’ < *śīrrá- < *k̑l̥hx-Ló- (cf. śrā́ya-ti ‘be fervent’), and perhaps in several other examples.

The Magic of Saida by M.G. Vassanji (2012) centres on the central figure of the novel’s story, Kamal. He is the son of an African mother and an Asian (read Indian) father, who grows up in Tanzania and then relocates to Canada where he becomes an established doctor. The novel tackles themes of African-Asian (read Afrasian) racial identity, belonging, and the effects of the past on the present. Kamal identifies mainly as an African when residing with his mother in Kilwa during his childhood; he is then urged to embrace an Indian identity when he is sent to live with his uncle in Dar es Salaam in his early adolescence. Decades after moving to Edmonton, Canada, Kamal decides to come back to Kilwa. This paper explores the tension and ambiguity in Kamal’s identity by analyzing the way he defines himself—or is defined—in Kilwa and Dar es Salaam, and then investigating, through an eclectic psychochriticism lens, how that in turn affects him as he ages and drives him to return in seach of what it means to be both an Asian and an African in the context of East African cultural landscapes.

This article considers Plato’s view of philosophy depicted in his cave analogy in light of Arendt’s distinction between Socratic and Platonic philosophy. Arendt argues that philosophy functions, for Socrates, in an immanent world, characterized by examining and considering—in addition to refining opinions through persuasion about—the currency of politics, which thereby closely associates philosophy with politics. On her view, Plato makes philosophy transcend politics—the world of opinion—when Socrates fails to persuade the Athenians. The cave analogy seems to support Arendt’s view that Plato disparages the immanent philosophical project she associates with Socrates. I argue that Plato depicts in the cave analogy particular difficulties in judging the assertion of the one who claims to have left, since, in the cave, that assertion becomes an opinion among opinions because it cannot be evaluated with reference to a transcendent truth by those in the cave. As a result, those in the cave cannot discern whether the one claiming to have left has the knowledge required to rule justly or is a tyrant claiming to have such knowledge in order to secure power. I conclude that Plato depicts the cave and its difficulties to invite the reader to engage in a philosophical project of judging for oneself, rather than accepting the rule of another who claims to know.

This paper discusses Alfred Russel Wallace’s Amazonian ethnography and his collaboration with Robert Latham on the models of indigenous Amazonian peoples that were placed on display at the Crystal Palace ethnological exhibition in 1854. The reception of scholars and the public to this innovative work is also considered. Wallace’s involvement in the first British ethnological exhibition of large proportions was fundamental to the dissemination of his work, which made a valuable contribution to a field of study—the ethnology of South America—that was still in its infancy in Britain, in marked contrast to Portugal, Spain, Germany and France. Wallace’s field observations of indigenous peoples were instilled in the British imagination through the handbook to the exhibition, in which Latham stressed the importance of Wallace’s descriptions to the advancement of the field of ethnology. Indeed, Wallace’s ethnographic accounts were deemed to provide an authoritative supplement to James Prichard’s preliminary and still somewhat limited ethnological map of northern South America, contributing to the creation of a more complete picture of the indigenous Amazonian peoples of Brazil.

In the Sixteenth Century, the Italian humanist Giulio Camillo built a ‘Theatre of Knowledge’ for the French King Francis I. Previous scholarship has debated whether this theatre was a physical place, a mental (mnemonic) space, or both. New archival evidence that has been overlooked in previous scholarship on Camillo, and his theatre, unequivocally proves for the first time that Camillo’s theatre had in fact been built in Paris. This invites a reconsideration of past reconstructions of the theatre and allows for the formulation of a new one. In this article, I have explored the hypothesis that Camillo’s theatre resembled an anatomy theatre. I have used 3D modelling and virtual reality in order to reconstruct some of the spatial features of Camillo’s theatre and explore how these insights further our understanding of his theatre in terms of historical and current practices surrounding the presentation of information and the invention of new knowledge.

The case of Lidio Cipriani (1892–1962) is symptomatic of a time when sciences like anthropology and ethnology supported the fascist ideology and gave it scientific approval in a crucial political moment for Benito Mussolini’s regime (1930–1940), which enacted racist laws and institutionalized the establishment of racial segregation in the colonies as well as within the boundaries of the motherland. Over the past thirty years historiography has focused some attention on the issue, but in this contribution I would like to highlight a point that has only been mentioned in passing in studies dedicated to the Florentine anthropologist, namely the questions surrounding the use of his massive photographic corpus. Since the use of imagery to nourish a collective imagination had become crucial for the fascist regime, an analysis of these images and their circulation may allow us to better explore the interrelationship between a totalitarian political power, the social body impregnated with propaganda, and the physical anthropology practiced by Cipriani, who produced a colossal visual corpus that suited the fascist theoretical apparatus.

Divine epithets are short nouns, adjectives, and participles which are in apposition to the actual name of a deity or which even replace it. Since incantations and incantation-prayers must be effective, they are enhanced by a variety of strategies. Divine epithets can be understood as strategies used to improve the effectiveness of ritual speeches. They evoke divine qualities that are relevant for a particular context and allow for a more effective interaction with the deities. Divine epithets may also refer to successful mythical deeds of the gods which provide positive analogies for the present situation and, therefore, guarantee the achievement of the supplicant’s request.

The 17th-century manuscript M7709 (held in the Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia) includes an Armenian copy of the History of the City of Brass, to which an unknown scribe has added short poems about Alexander the Great. The first of three articles that together present the Alexander poems of M7709 in full, with English translation, for the first time, this article introduces the manuscript and considers the first six poems: the seduction of Olympias, and Alexander’s encounter with plant-men at the edge of the world. It adds commentary on the poems’ relationship to the corresponding part of the History of the City of Brass on each page, proposing textual reasons why the scribe added the poems where he did. Across the three articles, this commentary delves into textual relationships beyond the pages of M7709, linking the Armenian History of the City of Brass, Alexander Romance and other texts and traditions, to show how this manuscript is situated amid wider networks of circulating literature. As a microhistorical study, it seeks to provide illumination into the macrohistory of medieval and early modern literature in and beyond the Caucasus.

In this response essay, which culminates with an application of my theory of narrative empathy to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, I comment on an article by Cornelis Bennema and engage with the ideas in the framing, introductory essay by Jan Rüggemeier and Elizabeth E. Shively. In the course of carrying out these tasks, I also offer what I hope will be broadly useful comments on fictional and nonfictional contexts for character construction, on characters and characterization, and on the way diverse actual readers engage with characters. This essay concludes with some thoughts on narrative empathy, responding to the final section of Rüggemeier and Shively’s essay, which offers comprehensive overview of empathy and sympathy as aspects of emotional reading.

In this article I revisit Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 work One-Dimensional Man with the goal of reactivating Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional society but in regard to the current practice and discipline of history. On my reading, it is in the field of history that the dangers of one-dimensionality are felt most acutely today. Especially in the ways that historians and philosophers of history continue to render history as a mausoleum to warehouse an entombed and inactive past. In what follows, I offer a willful and intentional reading of the role and place of philosophy of history in One-Dimensional Man in order to demonstrate the ways that history and historians have now become key proponents of one-dimensionality. I then marshal Marcuse’s analysis, though shorn of the speculative teleology that characterizes the two-dimensional history of Marcuse’s dialectic, in order to reactivate history as a multi-dimensional force to enact change in the future.

Forgotten during several years and rediscovered by historians of the Annales in the 1930s, Paul Lacombe’s De l’histoire considérée comme science (1894) is now quoted in such books as Antoine Prost’s Douze leçons sur l’histoire and the Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. Lacombe’s work is important from an historical standpoint. Against the focus on single events that prevailed in the late nineteenth century, Lacombe defined scientific history as the identifications of regularities for the purpose of articulating laws. Against the empirical approach practiced during that same period, he also stressed the importance of the hypothesis – of the assumptions that made the selection of the facts possible. Finally, connected to several militant women of the time, Lacombe, sought to do what we would now call “gender history,” that is, to study the distribution of gender roles during specific periods. While anticipating several developments in the theory of history, Lacombe was yet a man of his time. He thus did not foresee that his (and his contemporaries’) contrast between observation-based and document-based science would later be challenged, some philosophers now arguing that chemists and physicists are not more able than historians to “observe” the phenomena that they describe.

This essay unearths the guiding question of David Harlan’s 1997 book, The Degradation of American History. While most commentators have focused their attention on Harlan’s biting criticism of the historical profession, this essay argues that Harlan’s diatribe against historical scholarship pursued “for its own sake” stems from a deep concern about the moral education of citizens in an age that François Hartog and others typify as “presentist.” Although Harlan’s remedies against presentism are found wanting, the essay argues that the question raised in The Degradation of American History is a relevant, timely, and still unresolved one, now even more than at the time of the book’s original publication.

Through Judith Butler’s theories, it is depicted that dystopia is embedded within our most precious ideals. Dystopia depicts a world in which the right to choose and self-discovery has lost all meaning, and in which individuals are tools through which ideology is implemented. Zoya Pirzad, in her book, Things We Left Unsaid, talks about the unfairness of cultural values. She questions idealistic attitudes towards life’s realities and invites us towards new definitions of humanity. It is revealed in this research that our attitudes towards humanity can be very rigid and restrictive; in a way that the differences that show humanity’s complexity and beauty are considered unpleasant and unnatural and the result is nothing but pain and unhappiness.

The illustrations of Medina and Mecca in al-Ǧazūlī’s prayer book Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt have drawn the attention of many scholars, who have come up with different interpretations. In the present article, a subgroup within the Maghribī manuscripts of that text is defined for the first time: luxury manuscripts that date from the 11–12th/17–18th centuries and that were mostly produced for important owners, certainly in Morocco, possibly in other parts of the Magrib. The manuscripts in this subgroup have an illustrated and illuminated addition that physically precedes the text of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, but that does not belong to the text of the prayer book. In the present article that addition is for the first time identified as such and described. A small corpus has been assembled and, by way of example, the article contains a detailed description of two manuscripts belonging to that newly defined subgroup: MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arabe 6983, and MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Or. oct. 240.

This paper studies Coptic communal identity in early Islamic Egypt by analyzing two hagiographical narratives from the Christian Copto-Arabic text The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. The narratives relate incidents of sacred images that become ‘aggressive’ when they retaliate against insults. Although the relation between religious violence and sacred art has merited much scholarly attention, the focus is usually on humans as the aggressors and sacred art as the victim. The reverse is scarcer, and its rarity means we miss an opportunity to rethink such narratives as communicative modes of rhetoric to be contextually interpreted. Here I argue that these aggressive sacred images were tools of power within a polemic religious discourse aimed at proclaiming divine truth, undergirding it with supernatural power, and ultimately shaping Coptic communal identity around this discourse.

Taking a look at Lot through the lens of Biblical Masculinity Studies, we see him constantly trying to meet ideals of a performance of hegemonic masculinity but failing to do so. This paper uncovers masculinity as the motor of the narrative in the Lot stories, especially in Gen 19. The stories make fun of Lot and his offspring, the Moabites and Ammonites, as “failed” men. This paper analyses how this is achieved by the authors. Masculinity and masculine traits are artistically and deliberately used as a highly idealised background foil in order to highlight Lot’s failure. Furthermore, the authors’ point of view is highly ideological. They are in a superior and dominant position from which they portray Lot and his masculinity. They do this from safe distance, since they themselves are not represented in the stories by a character.

This article attributes a manuscript in the collection of the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands, to Willem Silvius (c. 1520–1580), an Antwerp printer and a former writing master. The manuscript carries the title Variarum Scripturarum Exempla and contains 44 writing samples in eight different languages. It probably served as Silvius’ personal writing-book, which he used to attract customers when he was working as a writing master in Louvain. In 1562 he intended to publish the manuscript as the first printed exemplar-book in the Low Countries which contained writing models for different languages and settings. Although this publication never materialised, Silvius’ writing-book is a testimonial for the life and the achievements of one of most significant printers of sixteenth century Antwerp.

In all languages, lexicons constitute a valuable source of information on femininities and women. This assertion is enhanced in the case of pre-modern Arabic lexicography, due to the diversity of its contents. However, the picture of women in lexicons has always received more attention in the field of lexicography in Western languages than in Arabic. This paper aims to fill a minor part of this noteworthy gap, by shedding light on all semantical, lexical, and orthographic elements which concern the word “woman” (imraʾa/al-marʾa) in pre-modern Arabic lexicons, more specifically, under the root m-r-ʾ.

Italian scientific biopics experienced a period of extraordinary media hype in the 1970s, when some intellectuals personally committed to bringing the lives of the scientists of the past to television in order to discuss the relationship between knowledge and power in the present. Nevertheless, might we properly speak of “Italian-style” historical-scientific fictional drama? To answer this question, we will focus on Roberto Rossellini, Liliana Cavani and, above all, Lucio Lombardo Radice, a promoter, scientific consultant, author and presenter of, and sometimes even actor in, some of the most controversial of these scientific biopics. This article aims, first of all, to reconstruct this history, explaining the reasons for the success of the genre, starting in the 1960s, and the crisis it underwent in the 1980s; secondly, to ascertain the influences these ideological works exerted on choices, approaches and styles of the next generation of science historians and communicators.

Perceptual organisation is hypothesised as a key in the perception and appreciation of abstract art. Here, we investigated how relational and compositional features affected the perception and aesthetic appreciation of Black Square and Red Square by Kazimir Malevich (1915). We studied how (i) the presence and obliquity of the red square and (ii) the relative configuration of the black and red square affected the detectability of the obliquity of the black square in this artwork. Results showed that the simultaneous presence and obliquity of the red square masked the obliquity of the original black square. The likelihood of the black square being incorrectly perceived as an exact square was always maximum in the original configuration and even slight alterations in the original configuration of the work resulted in the obliquity of the black square to be noticed. The original artwork was more aesthetically preferred compared to its alternatives. We argue that the artist may have intentionally set the configuration to mask the obliquity of the black square and maximise the aesthetic preference.

This photo essay examines key events in the career of physician-activist Tolbert Small, a doctor for the Black Panther Party and one of the first American doctors to practice acupuncture. It features the historic 1972 Black Panther Party delegation to China where Small first learned about acupuncture, as well as the Harriet Tubman Medical Office where he incorporated acupuncture into his practice.