Books by Pier Mattia Tommasino
Ottoman History Podcast
with Maryam Patton and Shireen Hamza
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with Maryam Patton and Shireen Hamza
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/06/venetian-quran.html
Today’s scholars of early modern Europe continue to explore the myriad ways in which Islam and Middle Eastern culture found its way into European society. In this episode, we unravel another thread by focusing on an anonymous, printed Italian Qur’an that appeared in Venice in 1547. The story of this first vernacular Qur’an and its accompanying biography of Muhammad reveals a complicated tale of a text aimed at different levels of readership. Pier Mattia Tommasino shows how this Qur'an, in addition to serving as a general Renaissance guide to Islamic history, was also a manual for European refugees seeking to relocate to the Ottoman Empire. In the second half of the episode, we revisit the classic microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg. The tale of the oddball Friulian miller named Menocchio takes another turn when it is revealed that the Qur’an he read is this very same Venetian Qur’an. Re-reading Menocchio’s testimony in light of the Venetian Qur’an allows us to reflect once more on the historian’s craft and the problem of 'distance.'
The Venetian Qur'an: A Renaissance Companion to Islam
Pier Mattia Tommasino. Sylvia Notini, Tra... more The Venetian Qur'an: A Renaissance Companion to Islam
Pier Mattia Tommasino. Sylvia Notini, Translator
"The Venetian Qur'an is an impressively rich study. It is a model of multidisciplinary research, drawing on historical, literary, and linguistic approaches."—Thomas E. Burman, University of Notre Dame
"A philological masterwork that introduces readers to a shadowy figure who was central to the intellectual life of his age. It is meticulously argued, encompassing early modern Italian literature, intellectual history, and the history of Orientalism, as well as Reformation-era European religious studies."—Karla Mallette, University of Michigan
In The Venetian Qur'an, Pier Mattia Tommasino uncovers the author, origin, and lasting influence of the Alcorano di Macometto, a book that purported to be the first printed European vernacular translation of the Qur'an.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15766.html
320 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5012-1 | $59.95s | £46.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9497-2 | $59.95s | £39.00
A volume in the Material Texts series: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/series/MT.html
This volume provides the first survey of the unexplored connections between Machiavelli’s work an... more This volume provides the first survey of the unexplored connections between Machiavelli’s work and the Islamic world, running from the Arabic roots of The Prince to its first translations into Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. It investigates comparative descriptions of non-European peoples, Renaissance representations of Muḥammad and the Ottoman military discipline, a Jesuit treatise in Persian for a Mughal emperor, peculiar readers from Brazil to India, and the parallel lives of Machiavelli and the bureaucrat Celālzāde Muṣṭafá. Ten distinguished scholars analyse the backgrounds, circulation and reception of Machiavelli’s writings, focusing on many aspects of the mutual exchange of political theories and grammars between East and West. A significant contribution to attempts by current scholarship to challenge any rigid separation within Eurasia, this volume restores a sense of the global spreading of books, ideas and men in the past.
1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Machiavelli
Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
Part One – From Readings to Readers
2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back
Lucio Biasiori
3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate about War
Vincenzo Lavenia
4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians
Carlo Ginzburg
Part Two – Religion and Empires
5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the Lawgiver before and after Machiavelli
Pier Mattia Tommasino
6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
7 Machiavelli and the Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Giuseppe Marcocci
Part Three – Beyond Orientalism
8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, and Connected Political Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century
Kaya Şahin
9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean
Elisabetta Benigni
Questo è un libro su un libro: ricostruisce la genesi, la natura e la larghissima fortuna dell'Al... more Questo è un libro su un libro: ricostruisce la genesi, la natura e la larghissima fortuna dell'Alcorano di Macometto (Venezia, 1547), cioè della prima traduzione a stampa del Corano in una lingua nazionale europea. E racconta così uno snodo decisivo della storia dell'Italia d'antico regime, riportando alla luce la vita e l'avventura intellettuale di un uomo, di un autore sconosciuto: il poligrafo Giovanni Battista Castrodardo da Belluno. Traduttore del Corano, commentatore di Dante, e storico della Terraferma veneta. Il lettore conoscerà così l'universo letterario, politico e religioso di uno scrittore del Cinquecento italiano e europeo riflesso nello specchio distorto e illuminante dell'Islam e dell'Impero ottomano.
Papers by Pier Mattia Tommasino
RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY, 2020
In 1621, the Scottish scholar David Colville copied a Latin translation of the Qur’an from a manu... more In 1621, the Scottish scholar David Colville copied a Latin translation of the Qur’an from a manuscript held in the library of El Escorial (Spain) and brought the copy with him to Milan where it is still preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (MS D 100 Inf). In 2002, Thomas Burman identified a second but incomplete copy of the same translation dating from the first half of the sixteenth century in the Cambridge University Library (MS Mm. v. 26). The story of this translation is essentially the following. In 1518, Pope Leo X nominated cardinal-bishop Gilles of Viterbo legate to Emperor Charles V. While in Spain, Giles of Viterbo, the Hebraist, Arabist, Cabalist, and enthusiastic patron of Oriental studies, commissioned a translation of the Qur’an to Juan Gabriel of Teruel (formerly Alí Alayzar). Juan Gabriel was a Muslim convert to Christianity who collaborated with Catholic polemicists active in early sixteenth-century Aragon, such as Martín García (ca 1441–1521) and Martín Figuerola (ca 1457–1532). Once the cardinal brought the manuscript back to Italy, Leo Africanus, Gilles of Viterbo’s godson and teacher of Arabic, corrected and interpolated Juan Gabriel’s text in 1525.
This paper is an exercise in the history of reading and textual production in seventeeth-century ... more This paper is an exercise in the history of reading and textual production in seventeeth-century Florence. Through the analysis of a very short and fascinating miscellaneous manuscript (BNCF, ms. Magliabechi, XXXIV.31), I aim to disentangle the complex and intertwined relations between European orientalism, Italian intellectual history and Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an in the seventeenth century. Despite its fragmentary nature, the material, linguistic and doctrinal features of this miscellaneous manuscript shed a new light on the study of Oriental languages in seventeenth-century Florence and, especially, on Barthélemy d'Herbelot's stay in Tuscany between 1666 and 1671.
The paper analyses the use of Italian as a literary language in the literature of European travel... more The paper analyses the use of Italian as a literary language in the literature of European travel to the Ottoman Empire during the late Ranaissance. The choice of Italian will be explained as the link between its diffusion in Europe as a language of culture and its practical uses in the Mediterranean as a diplomatic and commercial code or as a tool of religious propaganda. During the late Renaissance, travels to the Ottoman Empire were the continuation of the peregrinatio academica and the Grand Tour to Italy of high-educated European scholars. In light of this premises, I will present different versions , both manuscripts and in print, of the multilingual relatione by the Pole Wojciech Bobowski (1610-1675), musician and dragoman in the Ottoman Empire, who wrote a description of the Topkapi Palace for European readers in Italian.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
This article presents an unknown Spanish translation of the Qur’ān, extant at the Ets Haim/Livrar... more This article presents an unknown Spanish translation of the Qur’ān, extant at the Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos Library of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam. The manuscript dates from the seventeenth century and was the work of a Spanish or Portuguese Jew living in Amsterdam or another community of the Sephardi diaspora. In the present contribution, a detailed material description of the manuscript and its contents, as well as of its Italian and Spanish sources, is offered. While the translator claimed that the work was translated “word for word from Arabic,” he actually used the Italian version of the Qur’ān by Giovanni Battista Castrodardo, published by Andrea Arrivabene in Venice in 1547. The short appendix on the life of Muḥammad, on the other hand was based on a Spanish polemical work addressed to the minority of the moriscos: the Confutación del Al corán y secta mahometana by Lope de Obregón, published in Granada in 1555. This translation represents a unique case-study of the re-contextualization of the Qur’ān in early modern Europe and of the History of Reading across European and Mediterranean confessions.
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Books by Pier Mattia Tommasino
with Maryam Patton and Shireen Hamza
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/06/venetian-quran.html
Today’s scholars of early modern Europe continue to explore the myriad ways in which Islam and Middle Eastern culture found its way into European society. In this episode, we unravel another thread by focusing on an anonymous, printed Italian Qur’an that appeared in Venice in 1547. The story of this first vernacular Qur’an and its accompanying biography of Muhammad reveals a complicated tale of a text aimed at different levels of readership. Pier Mattia Tommasino shows how this Qur'an, in addition to serving as a general Renaissance guide to Islamic history, was also a manual for European refugees seeking to relocate to the Ottoman Empire. In the second half of the episode, we revisit the classic microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg. The tale of the oddball Friulian miller named Menocchio takes another turn when it is revealed that the Qur’an he read is this very same Venetian Qur’an. Re-reading Menocchio’s testimony in light of the Venetian Qur’an allows us to reflect once more on the historian’s craft and the problem of 'distance.'
Pier Mattia Tommasino. Sylvia Notini, Translator
"The Venetian Qur'an is an impressively rich study. It is a model of multidisciplinary research, drawing on historical, literary, and linguistic approaches."—Thomas E. Burman, University of Notre Dame
"A philological masterwork that introduces readers to a shadowy figure who was central to the intellectual life of his age. It is meticulously argued, encompassing early modern Italian literature, intellectual history, and the history of Orientalism, as well as Reformation-era European religious studies."—Karla Mallette, University of Michigan
In The Venetian Qur'an, Pier Mattia Tommasino uncovers the author, origin, and lasting influence of the Alcorano di Macometto, a book that purported to be the first printed European vernacular translation of the Qur'an.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15766.html
320 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5012-1 | $59.95s | £46.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9497-2 | $59.95s | £39.00
A volume in the Material Texts series: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/series/MT.html
1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Machiavelli
Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
Part One – From Readings to Readers
2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back
Lucio Biasiori
3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate about War
Vincenzo Lavenia
4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians
Carlo Ginzburg
Part Two – Religion and Empires
5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the Lawgiver before and after Machiavelli
Pier Mattia Tommasino
6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
7 Machiavelli and the Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Giuseppe Marcocci
Part Three – Beyond Orientalism
8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, and Connected Political Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century
Kaya Şahin
9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean
Elisabetta Benigni
Papers by Pier Mattia Tommasino
with Maryam Patton and Shireen Hamza
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/06/venetian-quran.html
Today’s scholars of early modern Europe continue to explore the myriad ways in which Islam and Middle Eastern culture found its way into European society. In this episode, we unravel another thread by focusing on an anonymous, printed Italian Qur’an that appeared in Venice in 1547. The story of this first vernacular Qur’an and its accompanying biography of Muhammad reveals a complicated tale of a text aimed at different levels of readership. Pier Mattia Tommasino shows how this Qur'an, in addition to serving as a general Renaissance guide to Islamic history, was also a manual for European refugees seeking to relocate to the Ottoman Empire. In the second half of the episode, we revisit the classic microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg. The tale of the oddball Friulian miller named Menocchio takes another turn when it is revealed that the Qur’an he read is this very same Venetian Qur’an. Re-reading Menocchio’s testimony in light of the Venetian Qur’an allows us to reflect once more on the historian’s craft and the problem of 'distance.'
Pier Mattia Tommasino. Sylvia Notini, Translator
"The Venetian Qur'an is an impressively rich study. It is a model of multidisciplinary research, drawing on historical, literary, and linguistic approaches."—Thomas E. Burman, University of Notre Dame
"A philological masterwork that introduces readers to a shadowy figure who was central to the intellectual life of his age. It is meticulously argued, encompassing early modern Italian literature, intellectual history, and the history of Orientalism, as well as Reformation-era European religious studies."—Karla Mallette, University of Michigan
In The Venetian Qur'an, Pier Mattia Tommasino uncovers the author, origin, and lasting influence of the Alcorano di Macometto, a book that purported to be the first printed European vernacular translation of the Qur'an.
Full Description, Table of Contents, and More: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15766.html
320 pages | 6 x 9
Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-5012-1 | $59.95s | £46.00
Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-9497-2 | $59.95s | £39.00
A volume in the Material Texts series: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/series/MT.html
1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Machiavelli
Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
Part One – From Readings to Readers
2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back
Lucio Biasiori
3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate about War
Vincenzo Lavenia
4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians
Carlo Ginzburg
Part Two – Religion and Empires
5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the Lawgiver before and after Machiavelli
Pier Mattia Tommasino
6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
7 Machiavelli and the Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Giuseppe Marcocci
Part Three – Beyond Orientalism
8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, and Connected Political Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century
Kaya Şahin
9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean
Elisabetta Benigni
Freie Universität Berlin / Italienzentrum
23 novembre 2017
Luogo: Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, Aula L 115 (Seminarzentrum)
University of Pennsylvania
Material Texts
Class of ’78 Pavillon
Kislak Center for Special Collections
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
This paper analyzes the complex and fascinating overlapping of graphic and reading cultures of an Italian and an Arab scholar who worked together in Florence in the second half of the seventeenth century. Both anonyms, the two collaborated in translating into Italian a Qur’an published in French in 1647. The outcome of this collaboration is a two-folios manuscript, which despite its fragmentary nature, clearly reveals the cross-cultural and trans-religious features of textual translation and cultural transmission in the Mediterranean, as well the unexplored complexity of Orientalism in seventeenth-century Florence.
Pier Mattia Tommasino
The Stomach of the World: Petrarch, Muhammad, and Mediterranean Studies.
Monday, October 26, 2015, 4pm
The Italian Academy, NY
June 9, 2015, 3:00 pm,
Università degli Studi di Macerata,
Biblioteca Statale di Macerata, via Garibaldi, 20.
Pier Mattia Tommasino
Columbia University
Discussant:
Vincenzo Lavenia,
Università di Macerata.
Faculty House, 5:30 pm.
This paper focuses on the use of Qur'anic embryology in European religious polemics against Islam and in the translations of the Qur'an between the 12th and the 16th centuries. I will discuss
the relation between science and religion as well as between ignorance and knowledge of languages in the translation and manipulation of religious texts.
Maison Française
Columbia University
East Gallery, Blue Hall
Writing across Borders and Languages A conversation with Italian-Algerian Author Amara Lakhous
Author joined by Madeleine Dobie, Elizabeth Leake, and Pier Mattia Tommasino.
Born in Algiers in 1970, Amara Lakhous departed for Italy during the violence that ravaged Algeria in the 1990s. His critically acclaimed novels in Arabic and Italian include Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2010), Divorce Islamic Style (2012) and Dispute over a Very Italian Piglet (2014). Using humor to explore the encounter of cultures, religions and languages, Lakhous's work explores the experience of exile and the dynamics of migration in the contemporary Mediterranean. His novels have won major literary prizes, including Premio Flaiano per la narrativa in 2006 and Algeria’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix des libraires algériens in 2008. Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio has been adopted by Cornell University as the New Student Reading Project text for 2014.He will discuss his novels, the practice of bilingual writing and translation, literary culture in Algeria and Italy, and the social and political framework of contemporary migration, with Columbia Professors Madeleine Dobie (French and Comparative Literature), Elizabeth Leake (Italian) and Pier Mattia Tommasino (Italian).Co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Institute of African Studies, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, European Institute, Middle East Institute, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and Department of Italian.
Andrea Celli (University of Connecticut)
Dante's Graffiti in Palermo. The Divine Comedy in a Prison of the Inquisition
The talk centers on two striking images of the ‘hellmouth,’ drawn on the walls of the seventeenth-century prison of the Spanish Inquisition in Palermo. By considering contextual references to the Divine Comedy disseminated in graffiti on the same walls, the talk explores a phenomenon of reception and appropriation of the Comedyin the early-modern Mediterranean. It connects the drawings to Medieval and Baroque plays, to West-Mediterranean iconography, and to early-modern book trade. It also calls into question sociological and cultural notions that literary studies often employ. The Dantesque afterworld represented on the walls of the prison in Palermo reflects intricate interactions between high culture and illiterates, between different religious contexts, and institutional levels. Rigid demarcations of eras – the Middle Ages versus the modernity – also seem to fade.
Respondent: Diane Bodart (Columbia, Art History)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia, Italian)
ARABIC TRANSLATION AT THE END OF IMPERIAL SPAIN (1714-1814)
Speaker: Claire Gilbert (History, University of Saint Louis)
Respondent: Ardeta Gjikola (The Society of Fellows, Columbia)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Italian, Columbia)
Moderator: Seth Kimmel (LAIC, Columbia)
This paper studies how scholars and politicians of the Ilustración relied on medieval precedents in Spanish Arabism for philological and political projects. Those precedents were related to the politics of belonging and exclusion which shaped early modern Spanish society. Their memory and use into the eighteenth century affected the new attitudes of Spanish foreign policy with Arabic speakers across the Mediterranean. Departing from the example of the Hieronymite friar, Escorial Arabic professor, and administrator in Spanish Tangier, Patricio de la Torre (1760–1814), I explore policies of memory and adaptation of the linguistic technologies and ideologies of the late “Reconquista” in Spain’s colonial agenda in Morocco, particularly through Torres’s adaptation of the works of Pedro de Alcalá (1505-1506). Indeed, the drive to “reduce” the common language of the ally or enemy was just as vital in the 1790s for Spanish ministers looking to Morocco as those in the 1490s looking to Granada. In each of these contexts, and throughout the period between, translators and philologists provided the linguistic knowledge with which to rule across boundaries and conduct international relations.
Emily Wilbourne (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
THE SINGING SLAVE: RACE, PLACE, AND VOICE AT THE MEDICI COURT IN THE PRIMO SEICENTO
Respondent: Özden Mercan (Italian Academy, Columbia University)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia, Italian)
It has become a truism of music history that early modern Europeans had no interest in replicating, imitating, or invoking the sounds of non-European music. In 2013 Owen Wright, for example, discussing early modern turqueries, emphasized that, “however realistic the costumes may have been, there is nothing authentically Turkish in the music.” Many other scholars make a similar point. In this paper I argue otherwise, by tracing musical performances by enslaved labourers at the Medici court. I argue not only that the sounds of foreign musics were known and recognized by educated Italian audiences, but that the prevalence of musical performance among the work of enslaved court entertainers served to justify certain types of enslavement and to objectify certain registers of musical sound.
Marya Green Mercado (Rutgers University)
A MEDITERRANEAN APOCALYPSE: ITALY IN THE MORISCO APOCALYPTIC IMAGINARY
Respondent: Seth Kimmel (Columbia, LAIC)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia, Italian)
The apocalyptic texts, known as jofores, circulated among Moriscos, Muslims who were forcibly converted to Catholicism in the early sixteenth century. They were attributed to Islamic and Christian sources, and they predicted the loss of Muslim Iberia to Christians, the forced conversion of Muslims, and their persecution by the Inquisition. These texts also presented a future in which Muslims would once again have political control over the Iberian Peninsula. As such, Morisco apocalyptic texts have been previously analyzed within an Iberian framework as reflections of the immediate concerns of Moriscos. In this paper I will argue that the jofores of the Moriscos are best understood within the broader context of the early modern Mediterranean. I will do this by analyzing the presence of Italy in the Morisco apocalyptic imaginary through an analysis of these jofores, as well as Inquisition records against Moriscos where they express their ideas about the End Times. There is no doubt that Italy featured prominently in Christian and Islamic early modern apocalyptic texts in the Mediterranean, not in small measure due to the Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry for the control of the Mediterranean. This paper will analyze the presence of Italy in Morisco jofores to argue that this presence sheds light on Morisco self-conceptions of their role in the political life of the Mediterranean. Through the production and deployment of prophecies Moriscos placed themselves at the center of the Ottoman-Habsburg struggle for the control of Italy and the Mediterranean, which they viewed as the cosmic struggle of the End Times.
This event is co-sponsored by the Hispanic Institute, and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures (LAIC, Columbia)
Gabriele Pedullà (Università di Roma Tre)
Studying Italian Literature: a Geographical Approach
Between 2010 and 2012 Einaudi published a three-volume Atlante della letteratura italiana edited by Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà, in which Italian cultural tradition was reinterpreted in the light of geography and through systematic recourse to maps, graphs and digital instruments. One of the two directors of the project will talk about the aims and the results of the Atlante, putting special emphasis on the methodological issues and on the possibility to write a post-national literary history.
Respondent: Nelson Moe (Columbia University)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
Seth Kimmel (LAIC, Columbia University)
The Disciplines, to Scale: Bibliography between Spain and Italy
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
Respondent: Erin Rowe (John Hopkins University, IAS 2017-2018)
When sixteenth-century Iberian humanists such as Juan Páez de Castro, Juan Bautista Cardona, Benito Arias Montano, and Antonio Agustín imagined what King Philip II’s royal library—eventually established during the 1560s and 1570s in San Lorenzo as part of the Escorial monastery complex—ought to look like, they invoked Italian models. Foremost on their minds was the Vatican library, whose decoration, architecture, heating technology, and, especially, bibliographic organization they hoped to imitate. The ceiling frescos of the liberal arts realized in the Escorial’s main reading room by Pellegrino Tibaldi likewise evoked a visual taxonomy of knowledge that was indebted to Italian models. In studying the Escorial’s bibliographic vision across a variety of media and scales, my paper examines the details as well as the limits of this indebtedness.
* Event co-sponsored by the Burke Library, Columbia University
516 Hamilton Hall,
Columbia University
Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College)
The Qur’an in the Enlightenment
Respondents: Sarah R. bin Tyeer (Columbia University) & Claire Gallien (Université de Montpellier, and Edward W. Said Fellow at the Heyman Center)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
The Qur'an was an object of scholarly attention in the eighteenth century, when, in the wake of Lodovico Marracci's philological Latin achievement of 1698, a number of writers attempted a literary translation of the holy book of Islam. In the same period, the Qur'an also served as a multivalent symbol--of revealed religion, of literature, and of law. This paper first examines the scholarly achievements of the period's European translators from Arabic, and then compares them to the Qur'an's reception in the Enlightenment to reveal both the connections and the differences between philological and "philosophical" reception in this formative era of Western intellectual culture.
* Event co-sponsored by the Middle East Institute (MEI) & Columbia Global Centers
Respondent: Silvana Patriarca
Moderator: Konstantina Zanou
Thursday, October 19, 2017, 6:00 pm
Room 403, International Affairs Building, Columbia University
SEPTEMBER 28, THURSDAY, 6:00 pm,
Columbia University, Schapiro Center, Room 415
Simone Brioni (Stony Brook University),
What is a 'Minor' Literature? Somali Italian Literature and Beyond
Respondent: Madeleine Dobie (Columbia University)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
Abstract:
Simone Brioni analyses to what extent Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the three main features of ‘minor literature’ – namely ‘the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’ – are relevant in analyzing literature by authors of Somali origins in Italian. Because of Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract reference to gender and race issues and their vague concern for the geographical, linguistic and cultural specificities of literatures by minor authors, Brioni will argue that ‘minor literature’ should not be seen as a rigid framework to be applied in interpreting a specific case study, although its theoretical flexibility might be useful when investigating a literature that strongly refuse categorization. In particular, Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to ‘minor’ ‘literature as a literature ‘in becoming’ helps to identify the position of Somali Italian literature in a transnational context, proposing some changes in how 'Italian' literature has been conceptualized so far.
413 Hamilton
Columbia University
In my life, I have always been a minority. I was born in Algiers to a very Berber family. In 1995, I escaped from Algeria to Italy. I lived there for 18 years, first as a political refugee, then as an immigrant. In June of 2008, I became an Italian citizen.
Personally, I experienced the challenges of belonging to the Berber minority in Algeria and to the Muslim North African minority in Italy, especially after September 11th, 2001. This new existential, political, and cultural condition pushed me to continually ask myself: how can I reconcile my culture of origin with new cultures? How should I behave with the majority population? Why is it crucial to get involved in and open up to the world of diversity? How can I avoid ethnic ghettoization, exclusion and self-exclusion? I dedicated my academic studies at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” to the Muslim immigrant minority in Italy. In my PhD thesis, I concentrated on Arab-Muslim immigrants because they represent a linguistic, religious and geographically homogeneous block. They were Arabs, North Africans and Sunni Muslims. This anthropological research became the basis of four novels that I published in both Arabic and Italian.
Amara Lakhous was born in Algeria in 1970. He moved to Italy in 1995. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Algiers and another in cultural anthropology from the University of Rome, La Sapienza where he completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Living Islam as a Minority.” He is the author of five novels, three of which were written in both Arabic and Italian. His best-known works are the much acclaimed Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2008), Divorce Islamic Style (2012), A Dispute over an Very Italian Piglet (2014). His last novel, The Prank of the Good Little Virgin in Via Ormea, came out in Italian in 2014 and will be published in English by Europa Editions in May 2016. His novels have been translated from Italian into many languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Danish. Lakhous has been awarded, among others, the Flaiano Prize in Italy in 2006 and the Algerians Booksellers Prize in 2008. Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio has been adapted into a movie by the Italian director Isotta Toso in 2010 and many theater productions. Also, it was chosen for the 2014 New Student Reading Project at Cornell University. This semester, he is a Visiting Professor at University of Connecticut. He lives in New York.
413 Hamilton
Franco Baldasso (Bard College)
A Mirror for Italy: Intellectuals in Trieste Facing the Collapse of Yugoslavia
In early 1990s post-Cold War political and cultural crisis, public intellectuals from the city of Trieste established a unique literary practice surpassing orientalist approaches to Eastern Europe. The city’s transnational liminality, complex cultural legacy, and troubled memory are the framework for a sophisticated discourse that countered widespread western assumptions and interpreted the insurgence of repressed memories of violence during WWII, in a moment when international media were reporting the Italian crisis through frequent references to the collapse of Yugoslavia. During the conflicts in the Balkans, Trieste faced a conspicuous flux of volunteers, refugees and goods to and from the war sites on a daily basis. Whereas other western commentators lamented a stark binary opposition between East and West, authors such as Adriano Sofri, Claudio Magris, Enzo Bettiza and Fulvio Tomizza read a disquieting continuity, both in their personal and national history. They elaborated a critical reconsideration of Italy’s present vis-à-vis the definitive loss of an Orient that had traditionally strengthened Italy’s proverbially weak national project. If the return to Europe was one of the political slogans that fueled interethnic hatred in former Yugoslavia during the war, the war itself reminded Italy the fragility of its European lifestyle.
Franco Baldasso (Ph.D, New York University) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Bard College, NY. He published a book on the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna, 2007) and co-edited an issue of Nemla-Italian Studies titled “Italy in WWII and the Transition to Democracy: Memory, Fiction, Histories.” His articles in appeared in Modern Language Notes, Romance Notes, Context, Nemla-Italian Studies, Poetiche and Scritture Migranti. Baldasso collaborates with publicbooks.org and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled: “Against Redemption: The Early Postwar Debate over the Transition from Fascism to Democracy in Italy.”
413 Hamilton
Elizabeth Horodowich (New Mexico State University)
The World Seen from Venice: Representing America in Early Modern Printed Maps
Very few Venetians traveled to the Americas in the sixteenth century, but Venetian cartographers produced more maps of the New World than mapmakers in almost any other European city, often by sequestering cartographic knowledge from otherwise secretive Spanish and Portuguese maps that allowed them to depict the most up-to-date news about global travel and exploration. These Venetian armchair travelers, especially the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi, profoundly influenced Northern European mapmakers in their wake, including cartographers such as Abraham Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator. In mapping the New World, these Venetian mapmakers regularly made specific arguments about the Americas: namely, that the New World represented an arena of luxurious wealth and ethnographic contrast, as well as one of self-reflection and compatibility. In particular, Venetian maps of the New World regularly inserted a series of toponyms onto their maps to demonstrate Venetian participation in the “discovery” of the New World. By examining the imagery and toponyms of sixteenth-century Venetian maps of the Americas, we shall see how Venetian mapmakers played a crucial but traditionally unrecognized role in the invention of America, not as a colonial power, but through the collection, production, and dissemination of cartographic knowledge about the New World.
Elizabeth Horodowich is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. Her research focuses on the history of Venice, and most recently, Venice in cross-cultural and global history. Her forthcoming publications include Imagining the New World in Renaissance Italy (edited with Lia Markey, Cambridge University Press 2016), and The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination in the Age of Encounters (Cambridge University Press, 2017).