La Martinella 2002

Who's who in Italy

The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

This handbook explores the rich and as yet understudied field of women’s writing during the nation-building years that characterized the global politics of the long nineteenth century. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, the waning of the Spanish Empire, subsequent Latin American uprisings, and the Italian Risorgimento, nineteenth-century women writers cracked wide open the myths of gender, race, and class that had sustained the ancien régime. This volume shows that the transnational networks of women writing about politics, sexuality, economics, and the forging of the modern nation were much broader and more inclusive at a global level than has previously been understood. The handbook uniquely foregrounds French, Italian, Latin American, and Spanish women writers, focusing on the transnational nature of their relationships and cultural production within a growing body of research that casts an ever-wider net in the effort to document women’s voices.

The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church

This book examines the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period. During the Counter-Reformation, every aspect of religious and devotional practice was reviewed, including the role of art and architecture, and the invocation of the five senses to incite devotion became a hotly contested topic. The Protestants condemned the material cult of veneration of relics and images, rejecting the importance of emotion and the senses and instead promoting the power of reason in receiving the Word of God. After much debate, the Church concluded that the senses are necessary to appreciate the sublime, and that they derive from the Holy Spirit. As part of its attempt to win back the faithful, the Church embraced the sensuous and promoted the use of images, relics, liturgy, processions, music, and theater as important parts of religious experience.