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      • Crime and Forgiveness
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2013

        Crime and Forgiveness

        The Death Penalty in the Mental Horizon of Christian Europe (14th–18th Century)

        by Adriano Prosperi

        During the centuries of the ‘long Middle Ages’, a great public spectacle gradually acquired a structure: death by justice. In the night between the 1st and 2nd May 2011, the President of the United States Barack Obama made a special appearance on television and announced to the nation and the world the death of Osama bin Laden. His first words were: ‘Justice has been done’ – ‘justice’, which in Italian has the same etymological root as the verb ‘giustiziare’, to execute. This single sentence brings out the fundamental question underlying the function of justice: is it a physical elimination of the criminal or a punishment which enables that person to repent and achieve moral regeneration? Is it an act of revenge or forgiveness? In the light of this history, Adriano Prosperi investigates the complex links with condemned people which our culture gradually established, until it eventually arrived at a Christianization of death as punishment: a public spectacle where the Christian cross occupies a central place in a great, cruel festival, and where the offering up of the criminal’s life was celebrated on the scaffold as a way of expiating the individual’s sins and purifying the community from evil.

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      • Fossils, Apes and Humans
        History

        Fossils, Apes and Humans

        by Carlo GInzburg

        Today we regard paleontology and connoisseurship as very distant spheres of knowledge. But are they not sharing a commitment to the decipherment of clues, either natural or cultural? This richly illustrated collection of essays will substantiate this argument through a series of case studies, starting from Agostino Scilla, a painter and collector, author of an early work on paleontology: La vana speculazione disingannata dal senso (Empty speculation disproven by senses, 1670). The reconstruction of this complex intellectual trajectory will go on, focusing on two friends, Petrus Camper (1722-1789) and François-Xavier de Burtin (1743-1818). The former, a well-known Dutch anatomist, was interested in painting and physiognomy: his argument about “facial lines” was reworked (and distorted) by 19th and 20th century racism. The latter, a paleontologist and a collector, moved from the study of fossils in the region of Brussels to the study of paintings. Burtin’s work inspired on the one hand, Georges Cuvier, the founder of comparative anatomy; on the other, Giovanni Morelli, the founder of “scientific” connoisseurship. This divergent, but connected reception will throw much light on the central theme of the book: the intricate relationship between paleontology and connoisseurship.

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      • The Calling
        History
        April 2016

        The Calling

        Stories of Jesuits in the 16th and 17th Centuries

        by Adriano Prosperi

        This book explains not who the Jesuits were, but how their awareness of having become Jesuits was constructed. It does so on the basis of a collection of documents which have often been referred to as ‘autobiographies’, in fact individual members’ accounts of how they received their calling. Each Jesuit had to describe in writing how the divine call had come to him, what signs had preceded it and how he had broken away from his ‘fleshly’ family to become a member of the Company. Their acute awareness of the definitive nature of the close pact they had established with God by becoming members of the army of the Lord, made the Jesuits new, unusual figures, unprecedented in the history of Christian religious orders: men trained to carry out arduous missions into the most distant countries of the world, in contact with unknown cultures, without any weakening of their ties with the Company; a classic case is Matteo Ricci. Accepting their calling meant adopting a special life, characterized by a modern form of asceticism: a total break with the past and their families, a readiness to go wherever they were sent, as new apostles.

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      • Progress
        Society & culture: general
        May 2020

        Progress

        by Aldo Schiavone

        The twentieth century saw a faster and more radical transformation of the material and cultural conditions of life than any previous century in the history of the human species. It was also the first century that saw huge masses of women and men in every part of the planet become protagonists of their own destiny. But it was also the century which, particularly in its last two decades – with an increasing tendency, transmitted with even greater force to the following century – saw the crumbling of the idea that human history had a meaning and a direction, and that it had a general tendency to improve from generation to generation. That is to say, it destroyed the idea of progress, hitherto a banner of modernity (the ancient world had never conceived of anything similar, being imprisoned in a closed and limited representation of time and historicity). And this at the very time when it should have been celebrating its triumph. How was it possible for this to happen? What lies behind this seeming paradox? And what does it tell us about the difficulty of the period through which we are passing? What future does it suggest? This book tries to answer these questions by standing at the crossroads between different disciplines, in a perspective of the social history of ideas: philosophy, science, politics, anthropology, material culture. But it is also intended as a modest suggestion that may help us rediscover a sense of our history – one that is not linearly optimistic or providentialistic, but still conscious of the extraordinary potential of the human species, at this point in its development.

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      • Pontius Pilate
        History
        January 2017

        Pontius Pilate

        Deciphering a Memory

        by Aldo Schiavone

        The biography of Pontius Pilate is the crucial dramatic point of intersection between Christian memory as preserved in the Gospels, Jewish history and Roman imperial history. It includes an episode of unparalleled importance in the history of the West – the death of Jesus. Pilate is the only historical figure whom Christian tradition records as having had a long dialogue with Jesus. He appears to have uttered and listened to words, made and witnessed gestures, that have accompanied us for two thousand years. Who was he really? A despot? An accomplice? A bungler? Why do the Gospels flood his figure in a light that blurs its outlines, making all his features ambiguous and elusive? What are they trying to hide? The book approaches the theme as if for the first time. It does not ignore the huge mass of previous studies, but filters and reworks them in a reconstruction that sets out simply to describe and explain what might have happened. In so doing, however, it offers a surprising solution to an enigma.

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      • The End of the Past
        History
        July 2020

        The End of the Past

        Ancient Rome and the Modern West

        by Aldo Schiavone

        This searching interpretation of past and present addresses fundamental questions about the fall of the Roman Empire. Why did ancient culture, once so strong and rich, come to an end? Was it destroyed by weaknesses inherent in its nature? Or were mistakes made that could have been avoided—was there a point at which Greco-Roman society took a wrong turn? And in what ways is modern society different? Western history is split into two discontinuous eras, Aldo Schiavone tells us: the ancient world was fundamentally different from the modern one. He locates the essential difference in a series of economic factors: a slave-based economy, relative lack of mechanization and technology, the dominance of agriculture over urban industry. Also crucial are aspects of the ancient mentality: disdain for manual work, a preference for transcending (rather than transforming) nature, a basic belief in the permanence of limits. Schiavone’s lively and provocative examination of the ancient world, “the eternal theater of history and power,” offers a stimulating opportunity to view modern society in light of the experience of antiquity.

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      • The Future of the Image
        Philosophy
        February 2017

        The Future of the Image

        by Federico Vercellone

        Thanks to the new technologies, images have become the true obsession of our time. The Internet, smartphones, television, newspapers, and even the instruments of medical research, subject us to a daily bombardment, a constant flow of images which penetrate and overwhelm the canons of cultural transmission and of the interpretation of the present. The age-old conflict between image and word seems to have ended with the unexpected defeat of the latter. Is it possible to find our way through this new forest without adopting excessively reactive attitudes, tending towards a new iconoclasm? Will we be able to benefit from the potential of images, by recognizing the needs that their hyperproduction expresses, without suffering its violent consequences? The new task is to identify the model of reason for a world where images are no longer appearances but cultural environments.

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      • Never Again Without Teachers
        Society & culture: general
        May 2019

        Never Again Without Teachers

        by Gustavo Zagrebelsky

        ‘No teachers ever again!’ the young protesters wrote on the walls of Paris in 1968 – an anti-authoritarian, egalitarian motto which sums up the dream of a freer society. What they didn’t realize is that without teachers we are condemned to the single thought, to uniformity, sameness. Are there any teachers left today? A democracy which flattens the high down to the level of the low seems to need only influencers, communicators and tutors in success who reassure and console, rather than guides of the spirit who awaken consciences. In this passionate book Zabrebelsky discusses some of the great figures of history and literature to re-examine a role which is as anachronistic as it is necessary: who is there today who can stir popular unrest, think of alternative ways of doing things, move vital and liberating energies to progress towards a sense of something new? Teachers will no longer exist, however, if there are no pupils; only when someone starts asking questions of meaning and ethical needs again will it be possible for teachers to reappear in our world.

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      • From Rights to Duties to Justice
        Politics & government
        March 2017

        From Rights to Duties to Justice

        by Gustavo Zagrebelsky

        Human rights have not benefited everyone in the same way; on the contrary, they have benefited some, the few, at the expense of others, the many. They have not given us a world that even the majority of human beings, can recognize as better. When ‘governments and great experts and smiling politicians and millionaire foundations’ discuss hunger and its causes, they always concentrate on objective factors, beyond the reach of any structural political intervention. Few mention financial speculation which raises the prices of food and medicines, causing famines and epidemics; neo-colonial policies for the control of sources of energy; the unlimited exploitation of natural resources; the colossal mass of investments that are diverted from purposes of general interest to research into and production of arms. The extent of this failure of humanity is documented by facts, records, numbers. We inhabitants of the privileged part of the world live fairly contentedly, every day, with the occasional journalistic report and the occasional documentary: media which tend to enhance indifference, by isolating the dramas in the vast and harmless field of literature and film, rather than shaking the conscience of the world, which contents itself with contemplating its rights, indeed its ‘culture of rights’. Literature nourishes intellects, but practice, and, above all, rulers who exercise power, have little time for literature.

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      • A Scattered Crowd
        History
        May 2019

        A Scattered Crowd

        Doctors and Peasants in Nineteenth-Century Italy

        by Adriano Prosperi

        With the rise of statistics, many modern states made it a tool of government and a link between the authorities and their subjects (or citizens). The case of Italy was that of a composite world where the early emergence of statistical science (with Melchiorre Gioia) was accompanied by many studies on the reality of the populations. Naples under the Bourbons and under the reign of Gioacchino Murat, and central-northern Italy under Napoleon, were the fields of application of studies which covered everything from folklore to material conditions. The growth of a high-level modern medical science, in contact with the scientific cultures of Germany, France and Britain, provided the new Italian nation with a means of analysing the social and sanitary problems of the country. A rich documentation of all this survives in the studies of the socio-sanitary conditions of the inhabitants of Italian towns and communes which began in the early nineteenth century and continued for nearly a century. The statistical study of sanitary and hygienic problems, commissioned by Italian governments and carried out by the corporation of local doctors highlighted the abject conditions in which most of the Italian population lived from many points of view: malnutrition, disease, alchoholism, illiteracy, high infant mortality, short average lifespan, devastating death rate from malaria, cholera, pellagra, etc. But the economic policy of the ruling classes – big landowners in the south and the entrepreneurial middle classes in the north – chose to turn Italy into an economic and military power, leaving the agricultural world to fend for itself. And medical science was split between those who, like Camillo Golgi, dedicated their lives to solving the problem of malaria, and those who, like Paolo Mantegazza, offered the culture of a rising middle class intriguing opportunities to explore the mysteries of pleasure and sexual hygiene.

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      • The New Populism
        Society & culture: general
        April 2017

        The New Populism

        Democracy Stares into the Abyss

        by Marco Revelli

        A crisp and trenchant dissection of populism today. The word “populism” has come to cover all manner of sins. Yet despite the prevalence of its use, it is often difficult to understand what connects its various supposed expressions. From Syriza to Trump and from Podemos to Brexit, the electoral earthquakes of recent years have often been grouped under this term. But what actually defines “populism”? Is it an ideology, a form of organisation, or a mentality? Marco Revelli seeks to answer this question by getting to grips with the historical dynamics of so-called “populist” movements. While in the early days of democracy, populism sought to represent classes and social layers that asserted their political roles for the first time, in today’s post-democratic climate, it instead expresses the grievances of those who had until recently felt that they were included. Having lost their power, the disinherited embrace not a political alternative to –isms like liberalism or socialism, but a populist mood of discontent. The new populism is the “formless form” that protest and grievance assume in the era of financialisation, in the era where the atomised masses lack voice or organisation. For Revelli, this new populism is the child of an age in which the Left has been hollowed out and lost its capacity to offer an alternative. (From the Verso Books presentation)

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      • The Plan
        Society & culture: general

        The Plan

        by Marco Belpoliti

        The plan is a journey like those of the travelling salesmen who used to follow the country roads. The geographical space across which the book moves is the Po plain; the cities it describes are Milan, Modena, Mantua, Reggio Emilia, Ravenna, Bologna, and others. In each of these fascinating urban worlds history has created unique characteristics. Cultural signals evoke today and yesterday. Figures of artists, actors, directors, novelists, poets, strange and bizarre individuals parade in front of the reader’s eyes like characters out of a Fellini film. Some are still alive, many are dead, but all belong to an artistic and intellectual world with clearly recognizable features. Each character has a story set on the banks of the Po, or under the arcades of the cities scattered across its plain. They are stories of encounters, for the material from which the author draws inspiration comes from his friendships, associations and collaborations. So Pianura is an account of an age of art and creativity from the 1970s to the present day. Like Claudio Magris’s Danubio, it is a journey through cultural memory which conjures up a surprising portrait of those regions which have known the ideals of secular emancipation and communist utopia, and today are experiencing a regression into political localism. A portrait of agricultural countryside inhabited by characters who people an extraordinary narrative, a sentimental journey, an assemblage of fragments of memory which together form one of the most original cultural novels of recent years.

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