Suchergebnisse

Il contributo considera la vicenda europea di Giambattista Casti, la cui carriera poetica si costruisce all'ombra delle corti e al servizio di diplomatici, attivi in particolare nella rete asburgica. Casti definisce attraverso la sua frequentazione del mondo della politica, che lo porta a entrare in contatto con le principali corti europee, dalla Russia al Portogallo, una sua personale idea della diplomazia e della funzione dei letterati che affiancano gli uomini di potere. La poesia diventa così una forza di intervento militante, che interviene a correggere le storture delle dinamiche storiche e a richiamare i lettori sui valori forti della cultura dei lumi come la pace e la tolleranza.

This article examine handwriting textbooks from 18th-century Europe. In 1774 the court of Vienna charged Johann Ignaz Felbiger with reforming the schools and his book on penmanship (1775) became the standard reference for how to write. In 1776 the Court sought a book on penmanship to be used specifically in Serbian and Vlach schools; the textbook of Zaharija Orfelin (1778) came into being to fill this need. The textbooks of both Felbiger and Orphelin have their basis in Felbiger's first book on penmanship (1768). We also explore the possibility that other European handwriting manuals served as models for earlier works by Orfelin (1759, 1776).

They never met. But the 'friendship by correspondence' (1628–1634) between the traveller Pietro Della Valle and the desk-bound librarian of the imperial library in Vienna, Sebastian Tengnagel, was built on a solid foundation: their shared passion for the Christian and Muslim East, its languages and its books was an "iron bond" that gave rise to a close and immediate understanding between two men, despite their huge differences of temperament and experience. However, these letters (kept at the Vatican Archives and the Austrian National Library) do not just bear witness to the growing knowledge of the East in the first half of the 17th century. They also show that early Catholic Orientalism had its roots in a highly stratified terrain, in which military conflict, irenic tensions, missionary propaganda, philological investigation, religious disputes, a rejection of book censorship, and theories on sovereignty were layered and interwoven. But how, and why, would anyone choose to become an orientalist, and what did it entail? Rome and Vienna, the cities from which the letters were written, were both normative centres with universalist ambitions; both were engaged in a profound rethinking and redefinition of secular and religious power. The pages written by Tengnagel and Della Valle reflect the writers' love of and interest in books. But reading carefully between the lines you can also hear the 'noises off' of the cities in which they were penned.