Luck in Italy: Modern Princes, from Pinocchio to Foucault's Pendulum
The Oxford Italian Association TOIA NEWSLETTER NO. 76 May – June 2016 Text and voice, text vs voice: Dante on writing and reading Carlo Ginzburg is a noted Italian historian Taylor Special Lecture and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is by Professor Carlo Ginzburg best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina. The shift from an oral, gestural performance to a silent reading of an invisible, In 1966, he published The Night Battles, and therefore reproducible, text, which does not an examination of the benandanti visionary folk need to be publicly performed, may have been tradition found in sixteenth- and seventeenth- independently invented, or reinvented, in century Friuli in northeastern Italy. He returned to looking at the visionary traditions of early different societies. modern Europe for his 1989 book Ecstasies: The lecture will approach this topic Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. focusing on the crucial role played, within the The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Western tradition, by Dante’s attitude towards Ginzburg, Carlo Ginzburg was born in 1939 in the silent reading of poetry, on the one hand, and Turin, Italy. He received a PhD from the the poetical text as an independent entity, on the University of Pisa in 1961. He subsequently held other. teaching positions at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles (1988– 2006), and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, with contributions to art history, literary studies, and the theory of historiography.
[Show full text]