Download or read book Volta written by Giuliano Pancaldi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giuliano Pancaldi sets us within the cosmopolitan cultures of Enlightenment Europe to tell the story of Alessandro Volta--the brilliant man whose name is forever attached to electromotive force. Providing fascinating details, many previously unknown, Pancaldi depicts Volta as an inventor who used his international network of acquaintances to further his quest to harness the power of electricity. This is the story of a man who sought recognition as a natural philosopher and ended up with an invention that would make an everyday marvel of electric lighting. Examining the social and scientific contexts in which Volta operated--as well as Europe's reception of his most famous invention--Volta also offers a sustained inquiry into long-term features of science and technology as they developed in the early age of electricity. Pancaldi considers the voltaic cell, or battery, as a case study of Enlightenment notions and their consequences, consequences that would include the emergence of the "scientist" at the expense of the "natural philosopher." Throughout, Pancaldi highlights the complex intellectual, technological, and social ferment that ultimately led to our industrial societies. In so doing, he suggests that today's supporters and critics of Enlightenment values underestimate the diversity and contingency inherent in science and technology--and may be at odds needlessly. Both an absorbing biography and a study of scientific and technological creativity, this book offers new insights into the legacies of the Enlightenment while telling the remarkable story of the now-ubiquitous battery.
Download or read book The Science of Naples written by Lorenza Gianfrancesco and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2024-06-24 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long neglected in the history of Renaissance and early modern Europe, in recent years scholars have revised received understanding of the political and economic significance of the city of Naples and its rich artistic, musical and political culture. Its importance in the history of science, however, has remained relatively unknown. The Science of Naples provides the first dedicated study of Neapolitan scientific culture in the English language. Drawing on contributions from leading experts in the field, this volume presents a series of studies that demonstrate Neapolitans’ manifold contributions to European scientific culture in the early modern period and considers the importance of the city, its institutions and surrounding territories for the production of new knowledge. Individual chapters demonstrate the extent to which Neapolitan scholars and academies contributed to debates within the Republic of Letters that continued until deep into the nineteenth century. They also show how studies of Neapolitan natural disasters yielded unique insights that contributed to the development of fields such as medicine and earth sciences. Taken together, these studies resituate the city of Naples as an integral part of an increasingly globalised scientific culture, and present a rich and engaging portrait of the individuals who lived, worked and made scientific knowledge there.
Download or read book Pietro Blaserna and the Birth of the Institute of Physics in Rome written by Miriam Focaccia and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws upon a wealth of archival material to present the life and achievements of Pietro Blaserna, a “gentleman scientist” whose greatest legacy is considered to be the Institute of Physics on the Via Panisperna in Rome, of which he was the creator and first director. Both in this role and as President of the Accademia dei Lincei, Blaserna contributed enormously in establishing a sound institutional base for the further development of physics in Italy. Starting from an accurate historical reconstruction of the scientific, social, and political context, the author presents the different phases of Pietro Blaserna’s life and career. As a multifaceted intellectual and a scientist holding several institutional positions, Blaserna worked ceaselessly to promote an effective policy in science and technology, which was critically important in stimulating the development of Italy as a modern nation. Blaserna may not have left scientific works that made history, but what he created in Rome was a real "house of physics", equipped with modern laboratories and instruments. In tracing his important legacy, this book will be of interest for all historians of science and for historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Italy.
Download or read book New Approaches to Naples c 1500 c 1800 written by Helen Hills and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern Naples has been characterized as a marginal, wild and exotic place on the fringes of the European world, and as such an appropriate target of attempts, by Catholic missionaries and others, to ’civilize’ the city. Historiographically bypassed in favour of Venice, Florence and Rome, Naples is frequently seen as emblematic of the cultural and political decline in the Italian peninsula and as epitomizing the problems of southern Italy. Yet, as this volume makes plain, such views blind us to some of its most extraordinary qualities, and limit our understanding, not only of one of the world's great capital cities, but also of the wider social, cultural and political dynamics of early modern Europe. As the centre of Spanish colonial power within Europe during the vicerealty, and with a population second only to Paris in early modern Europe, Naples is a city that deserves serious study. Further, as a Habsburg dominion, it offers vital points of comparison with non-European sites which were subject to European colonialism. While European colonization outside Europe has received intense scholarly attention, its cultural impact and representation within Europe remain under-explored. Too much has been taken for granted. Too few questions have been posed. In the sphere of the visual arts, investigation reveals that Neapolitan urbanism, architecture, painting and sculpture were of the highest quality during this period, while differing significantly from those of other Italian cities. For long ignored or treated as the subaltern sister of Rome, this urban treasure house is only now receiving the attention from scholars that it has so long deserved. This volume addresses the central paradoxes operating in early modern Italian scholarship. It seeks to illuminate both the historiographical pressures that have marginalized Naples and to showcase important new developments in Neapolitan cultural history and art history. Those developments showcased here include bot
Download or read book Guida alla Dea Madre in Italia written by Andrea Romanazzi and published by Venexia Editrice. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La penisola italiana ha accolto nei millenni numerosi riti, tradizioni e culti incentrati sulla Divinità Femminile, dei quali restano ampie e talora vistose tracce. Ed è proprio viaggiando alla loro ricerca, fraterra, acqua, aria e fuoco, che l'autore ha scoperto una serie diemozionanti itinerari in cui rivivere gli arcaici sapori della Grande Madre. La prefazione è di Syusy Blady, conduttrice e regista di "Turisti / Misteri per caso". All'interno, illustrazioni in b/n e 16 mappe con percorsi suggeriti per visitare i luoghi della Dea in Italia.
Download or read book Naples in the Eighteenth Century written by Girolamo Imbruglia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1734 the kingdom of Naples became an independent monarchy, but in 1799 a Jacobin revolution transformed it briefly into a republic. In these few but intense decades of independence all the great problems of the age of the Enlightenment became apparent: attacks on feudalism and on the power of the Catholic Church, the struggle for a modern economy, and aspirations to change the administrative machinery and the judicial system. Yet Naples was also the city visited by Winckelmann and Goethe, the city of Sir William Hamilton, of the study of Pompeii and Herculanum, and of the greatest musicians of the age. This collection of essays addresses a range of issues in the city's political and cultural history, and demonstrates the city's importance in shaping the modern, enlightened culture of Europe.
Download or read book Aspiring Saints written by Anne Jacobson Schutte and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of an Honorable Mention in the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Awards given by the Association of American Publishers Between 1618 and 1750, sixteen people—nine women and seven men—were brought to the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities in Venice because they were reporting visions, revelations, and special privileges from heaven. All were investigated, and most were put on trial by the Holy Office of the Inquisition on a charge of heresy under various rubrics that might be translated as "pretense of holiness." Anne Jacobson Schutte looks closely at the institutional, cultural, and religious contexts that gave rise to the phenomenon of visionaries in Venice. To explain the worldview of the prosecutors as well as the prosecuted, Schutte examines inquisitorial trial dossiers, theological manuals, spiritual treatises, and medical works that shaped early modern Italians' understanding of the differences between orthodox Catholic belief and heresy. In particular, she demonstrates that socially constructed assumptions about males and females affected how the Inquisition treated the accused parties. The women charged with heresy were non-elites who generally claimed to experience ecstatic visions and receive messages; the men were usually clergy who responded to these women without claiming any supernatural experience themselves. Because they "should have known better," the men were judged more harshly by authorities. Placing the events in a context larger than just the inquisitorial process, Aspiring Saints sheds new light on the history of religion, the dynamics of gender relations, and the ambiguous boundary between sincerity and pretense in early modern Italy.
Download or read book Ethnic Expositions in Italy 1880 to 1940 written by Guido Abbattista and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-22 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensively analyzing for the first time the phenomenon of ethnic living expositions in Italy between the 19th and 20th centuries, this book deals with the subject from a comparative European perspective and over the long term, studying analogies and differences in precedents as far back as the early modern age. The research, which seeks to go beyond the simplistic concept of "human zoos," intends to highlight the intentions, assumptions, and mechanisms of realization of the exhibitions of exotic living humans and the reactions from both the exhibited subjects and the public, exploiting a wide variety of heterogeneous sources capable of bringing out a kind of widespread popular ethno-anthropological ideas and the elements of racism contained in it. The book contributes to the understanding of Western mindsets and attitudes towards human diversity as they emerge from mass spectacular events that have over time become an international business. The present edition refers to the second Italian edition, containing an update discussing studies on the subject that have appeared between 2013 and 2021. Ethnic Expositions in Italy intends to fill a historiographical gap and to align Italian historiographies with European ones, which have long since come to terms with this legacy of the past and have explored its various historical manifestations in depth. This book is an excellent source for researchers and students alike, as well as those interested in the mechanisms that have helped shape European ideas and sensibilities on race and ethno-anthropological diversity.
Download or read book A History of Italian Fascist Culture 1922 1943 written by Alessandra Tarquini and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alessandra Tarquini’s A History of Italian Fascist Culture, 1922–1943 is widely recognized as an authoritative synthesis of the field. The book was published to much critical acclaim in 2011 and revised and expanded five years later. This long-awaited translation presents Tarquini’s compact, clear prose to readers previously unable to read it in the original Italian. Tarquini sketches the universe of Italian fascism in three broad directions: the regime’s cultural policies, the condition of various art forms and scholarly disciplines, and the ideology underpinning the totalitarian state. She details the choices the ruling class made between 1922 and 1943, revealing how cultural policies shaped the country and how intellectuals and artists contributed to those decisions. The result is a view of fascist ideology as a system of visions, ideals, and, above all, myths capable of orienting political action and promoting a precise worldview. Building on George L. Mosse’s foundational research, Tarquini provides the best single-volume work available to fully understand a complex and challenging subject. It reveals how the fascists used culture—art, cinema, music, theater, and literature—to build a conservative revolution that purported to protect the traditional social fabric while presenting itself as maximally oriented toward the future.
Download or read book The Author in Criticism written by Elio Attilio Baldi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Author in Criticism:Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom explores the cultural and historic patterns and differences in the critical readings of Italian author Italo Calvino’s works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It considers the external factors that contribute to create recognizable patterns in the readings of Calvino’s texts in different contexts. This volume therefore covers, most notably, matters of genre (science fiction, postmodernism), cultural perceptions and conventions, the (re)current image of the author in different media, academic schools, -curricula and -canons, biographical information (such as gender and background), and translation and the language in which the author speaks (or fails to speak) to us. It traces the influence of these aspects in the academic discourse on Calvino. The Author in Criticism also analyzes Calvino’s various professional roles as writer, editor, essayist, journalist, private correspondent, and public, cosmopolitan intellectual, reappraising their often little acknowledged importance for academic criticism. An important underlying idea is that the preconceived image that every critic has of Calvino before even opening one of his books is often solidified and repeated even in the most refined and complex critical analyses. This volume purposefully foregrounds the textual and non-textual parts that are usually considered peripheral to the works of an author, such as book covers, blurbs, reviews, talks, interviews, etc. In this way, this book provides insight into the reception of Calvino’s works in different countries. Moreover, it forms a broader reflection of and on important constants in the workings of literary criticism, and on the way academic discourses have developed in various cultural contexts over the last decades.
Download or read book Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century written by Mirella Agorni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translating Italy in the Eighteenth Century offers a historical analysis of the role played by translation in that complex redefinition of women's writing that was taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. It investigates the ways in which women writers managed to appropriate images of Italy and adapt them to their own purposes in a period which covers the 'moral turn' in women's writing in the 1740s and foreshadows the Romantic interest in Italy at the end of the century. A brief survey of translations produced by women in the period 1730-1799 provides an overview of the genres favoured by women translators, such as the moral novel, sentimental play and a type of conduct literature of a distinctively 'proto-feminist' character. Elizabeth Carter's translation of Francesco Algarotti's II Newtonianesimo per le Dame (1739) is one of the best examples of the latter kind of texts. A close reading of the English translation indicates a 'proto-feminist' exploitation of the myth of Italian women's cultural prestige. Another genre increasingly accessible to women, namely travel writing, confirms this female interest in Italy. Female travellers who visited Italy in the second half of the century, such as Hester Piozzi, observed the state of women's education through the lenses provided by Carter. Piozzi's image of Italy, a paradoxical mixture of imagination and realistic observation, became a powerful symbolic source, which enabled the fictional image of a modern, relatively egalitarian British society to take shape.
Download or read book Primo Levi written by Lucie Benchouiha and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2006 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the best-known survivors of the concentration camps, Primo Levi's testimony to his experiences in Auschwitz is internationally recognised as one of the most significant works of the last century. This volume examines each of Levi's works in detail, assessing and analysing the influence of Levi's time in Auschwitz on his writing. It identifies a variety of thematic, temporal, stylistic and linguistic echoes of Levi's concentration camp testimony, and traces these echoes throughout his subsequent, apparently unrelated, work. The book provides original and fascinating insights into the works of this remarkable writer, giving readers a new understanding and perspective on the immense significance and the pervasive influence of the holocaust on Levi's creative output.
Download or read book Models of the History of Philosophy written by Giovanni Santinello and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the translation of "Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker", the second volume of the multi-volume work "Storia delle storie generali della filosofia". It guides the reader from the Cartesian rejection of the ‘philosophical past’ that found voice in the work of Malebranche, to the establishment of a ‘critical’ history of philosophy by 18th century thinkers A.-F Boureau-Deslandes and J.J. Brucker. The latter pair investigated philosophy from its most ancient origins up to the contemporary age, and oversaw the transformation of the history of philosophy into a genre in its own right, thus spawning dozens of works that made a major contribution to the culture of the Enlightenment. Through careful analysis of more than 36 separate works, the authors show how in the span of a single century the theoretical and methodological techniques used to assess the history of philosophy were refined and developed.
Download or read book A History of Physics Phenomena Ideas and Mechanisms written by Raffaele Pisano and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies written by Gaetana Marrone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-12-26 with total page 2256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The Encyclopedia is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies. The Encyclopedia also includes writers and subjects of contemporary interest, such as those relating to journalism, film, media, children's literature, food and vernacular literatures. Entries consist of an essay on the topic and a bibliographic portion listing works for further reading, and, in the case of entries on individuals, a brief biographical paragraph and list of works by the person. It will be useful to people without specialized knowledge of Italian literature as well as to scholars.
Download or read book Opera Theatrical Culture and Society in Late Eighteenth Century Naples written by Anthony R. DelDonna and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The operatic culture of late eighteenth-century Naples represents the fullest expression of a matrix of creators, practitioners, theorists, patrons, and entrepreneurs linking aristocratic, public and religious spheres of contemporary society. The considerable resonance of 'Neapolitan' opera in Europe was verified early in the eighteenth century not only through voluminous reports offered by locals and visitors in gazettes, newspapers, correspondence or diaries, but also, and more importantly, through the rich and tangible artistic patrimony produced for local audiences and then exported to the Italian peninsula and abroad. Naples was not simply a city of entertainment, but rather a cultural epicenter and paradigm producing highly innovative and successful genres of stage drama reflecting every facet of contemporary society. Anthony R. DelDonna provides a rich study of operatic culture from 1775-1800. The book demonstrates how contemporary stage traditions, stimulated by the Enlightenment, engaged with and responded to the changing social, political, and artistic contexts of the late eighteenth century in Naples. It focuses on select yet representative compositions from different genres of opera that illuminate the diverse contemporary cultural forces shaping these works and underlining the continued innovation and European recognition of operatic culture in Naples. It also defines how the cultural milieu of Naples - aristocratic and sacred, private and public - exercises a profound yet idiosyncratic influence on the repertory studied, the creation of which could not have occurred elsewhere on the Continent.
Download or read book Science and the Marketplace in Early Modern Italy written by Brendan Maurice Dooley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Brendan Dooley examines Italian scientific communications in early modern history. He demonstrates that Italian science between the age of Galileo and the age of Galvani and Volta underwent two revolutions. While the methodological innovations of the time have received copious attention, Dooley is concerned with the revolution in published communicatons, which has hardly been studied at all. What his innovative research shows, in sum, is that the accomplishments of Galvani and Volta were not based upon a cultural void, but rather a century and a half of fervid activity aiming to consolidate the accomplishments of Galileo, reinforce scientific institutions, establish observation and experiment as the dominant methodology, and improve science's public relations. This process challenged traditional institutional hierarchies of specialized knowledge and had far-reaching, interdisciplinary implications for the development of universities, the profession of university science researcher, the academies, and even state government.
