scholarly journals ON POPULARIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION IN ITALY BETWEEN 12TH AND 16TH CENTURY

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-101
Author(s):  
Raffaele Pisano ◽  
Paolo Bussotti

Mathematics education is also a social phenomenon because it is influenced both by the needs of the labour market and by the basic knowledge of mathematics necessary for every person to be able to face some operations indispensable in the social and economic daily life. Therefore the way in which mathematics education is framed changes according to modifications of the social environment and know–how. For example, until the end of the 20th century, in the Italian faculties of engineering the teaching of mathematical analysis was profound: there were two complex examinations in which the theory was as important as the ability in solving exercises. Now the situation is different. In some universities there is only a proof of mathematical analysis; in others there are two proves, but they are sixth–month and not annual proves. The theoretical requirements have been drastically reduced and the exercises themselves are often far easier than those proposed in the recent past. With some modifications, the situation is similar for the teaching of other modern mathematical disciplines: many operations needing of calculations and mathematical reasoning are developed by the computers or other intelligent machines and hence an engineer needs less theoretical mathematics than in the past. The problem has historical roots. In this research an analysis of the phenomenon of “scientific education” (teaching geometry, arithmetic, mathematics only) with respect the methods used from the late Middle Ages by “maestri d’abaco” to the Renaissance humanists, and with respect to mathematics education nowadays is discussed. Particularly the ways through which mathematical knowledge was spread in Italy between late Middle ages and early Modern age is shown. At that time, the term “scientific education” corresponded to “teaching of mathematics, physics”; hence something different from what nowadays is called science education, NoS, etc. Moreover, the relationships between mathematics education and civilization in Italy between the 12th and the 16th century is also popularized within the Abacus schools and Niccolò Tartaglia. These are significant cases because the events connected to them are strictly interrelated. The knowledge of such significant relationships between society, mathematics education, advanced mathematics and scientific knowledge can be useful for the scholars who are nowadays engaged in mathematics education research. Key words: Abacus schools, mathematics education, science & society, scientific education, Tartaglia

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRETT BOWLES

Taking an anthropological approach, this article interprets Pagnol's critically acknowledged classic as a reinvention of a carnivalesque ritual practised in France from the late middle ages through the late 1930s, when ethnographers observed its last vestiges. By linking La Femme du boulanger (The baker's wife, 1938) to contemporaneous debates over gender, national decadence, and the definition of French cultural identity, I argue that the film recycles the charivari's long-standing function as a tool of popular protest against social and political practices regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the nation. In the context of the Popular Front, Pagnol's charivari ridiculed divisive partisan politics pitting Left against Right, symbolically purged class conflict from the social body, and created a new form of folklore that served as a focal point for the communitarian ritual of movie-going among the urban working and middle classes. In so doing, the film promoted the ongoing shift in public support away from the Popular Front in favour of a conservative ‘National Union’ government under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who in 1938–9 assumed the role of France's newest political patriarch.


Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny

From about the late fifteenth century onwards, literature and learning acquired increased importance for the social position of noble and elite-commoner families in France. One reason is the expansion and rise to prominence of the royal office-holder milieu, which had no exact equivalent in, say, England, where the aristocracy was much smaller than the French nobility and where there was no equivalent of the French system of venality of office. In France, family literature often helped extend across the generations a relationship between two families—that of the literary producer and that of the monarch. From the late Middle Ages, the conditions for family literature were made more favourable by broad social shifts. Although this study focuses mainly on the period from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, it is likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers thrived especially up to the Revolution.


1992 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 225-237
Author(s):  
Judy Ann Ford

Historians have long been aware that patronage is a crucial factor in interpreting the social meaning of art. The late Middle Ages knew a variety of patrons, each employing art to communicate different sorts of concern: royal and aristocratic courts emphasized political messages, urban communes created governmental myths, cathedrals and monasteries gave expression to spiritual ideas—and all used art to convey notions of social identity. Recent investigations into the process of choosing and procuring works of art in these contexts have not only added perspective to formal art criticism, they have also deepened our understanding of the groups interested in the creation of art. One area in which questions of patronage could perhaps be better illuminated is the community of the parish. The parish served as the primary religious community for the majority of men and women for most of the Middle Ages. It was complex in composition, involving both laity and clergy, encompassing other religious associations, such as gilds, and including the devout and the indifferent, the orthodox and the dissenters.


Author(s):  
Christoph Winzeler

Abstract„In the Name of God the Almighty!“, Swiss constitutional law on religions - balancing and apeacing in historic tradition. From the 16th century onwards, the Reformation and its consequences have influenced the development of the Swiss Confederation. During the late Middle Ages, the Confederation had been struggling to find its way as a system of treaties within a growing number of Cantons. The Reformation divided the Cantons in two ‚camps‘, both trying to defeat each other on the battlefield, which resulted in four successive Peace Treaties (‚Landfriedensbünde‘). 1847 there was a last civil war between the conservative or catholic ‚camp‘ and the liberal or protestant majority. From 1848 until 1973, the Federal Constitution contained discriminations against catholics, including a probihition of the Jesuits. In 2009, under changed circumstances, a new religious discrimination was introduced into the Constitution: the ban on minarets. Islam is now making a way through Swiss history comparable to that of Catholicism in the 19th century. Yet the law of the Cantons, developed over the centuries, provides for adequate instruments to cope with the challenges of the 21st century.


Slovene ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-297
Author(s):  
Anissava Miltenova

There is a proposition in palaeoslavistics that the reconstructed prototype of the Izbornik of 1076 is a composition designated as the Kniazheskii Izbornik, which originated from the time of the Bulgarian Tsar Peter (927–969). This article presents an overview of the contents of three manuscripts, which are copies of texts in the so-called Kniazheskii Izbornik: No. 162 from the collection of the Moscow Theological Academy, from the 15th century, Russian origin; No. 189 from the collection of the Hilandar Monastery and which is composed of two parts: Part 1 from the beginning of the 17th century, probably written by a copyist from Moldavia, and Part 2 from 1684, Russian in origin; and No. 280 (333) from the collection of St. Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church, 15th–16th century, Moldavian in origin. There are suggestions for primary sources of these manuscripts, and the article considers the paths by which texts identical to the Kniazheskii Izbornik found their way into miscellanies in the Late Middle Ages. The three miscellanies under discussion are important witnesses of the paraenetic literature in the earliest period of the Slavia Orthodoxa, which integrated homilies of John Chrysostom, question and answers, interpretations of the Scripture, wise sayings, narration, and apophthegmata from the Paterikon and fragments of the Kniazheskii Izbornik.


Author(s):  
Riccardo Berardi

The aim of this paper is to reassess the history of the Sanseverino family, princes of Bisignano in Calabria in the Late Middle Ages; by focusing on a specific and unpublished source: the so-called “reintegre or platee” as written in the first half of the 16th century. These are public sources mostly enlisting properties and benefits; they serve the purpose of re-possessing the privileges taken from the princes themselves over the previous century. The paper will therefore focus not only on the management and character of the seigneurial landholdings but also on the reconstruction of both the local networks of power exerted on the population and the local political system. It will shed new light on the still debated historiographical issue centered on the seigneurial authority in southern Italy by assessing its local rooting and pervasiveness since the 14th century.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Šimek

In the course of 2006, the Archaeology Department of Varaždin Town Museum conducted the first major archaeological excavations of the outer fortification structures of the Old Town (Stari Grad). During the excavation of the northern and western wet ditches, dug in the course of the 16th century at the time of the large Renaissance modernisation of the mediaeval fort, numerous and various archaeological artefacts were collected. The artefacts were damaged and unusable, and had been thrown into the water of the defence ditch as useless rubbish. Simple conical glasses were identified among the large quantity of various pieces of ceramic crockery. These form one of the categories of tableware: drinking vessels. In an analysis of finds unearthed in this campaign, thirteen glasses of the same type have been identified. Although they differ in certain details, they still represent a recognisable typological category and are classified as simple conical glasses. Their stratigraphic location, as well as a comparison with known specimens from other sites dates the glasses to the Late Middle Ages and the 15th century, with their possible use also at the beginning of the 16th century. Given their simple workmanship, modest decoration and mass production, they indicate local production, and their use is associated with members of lower social classes inside the feudal fortifications.


Author(s):  
Jesús Olivet García-Dorado

Este trabajo tiene como objeto fundamental el estudio de las cofradías clericales en la Baja Edad Media, en concreto el Cabildo de Curas y Beneficiados de Toledo en la segunda mitad del siglo XV. Mediante el estudio de cuatro obituarios de esta institución, se puede conocer la composición y el desarrollo institucional de estas corporaciones y su importancia en el medio social, donde desarrollaron sus actividades.The main purpose of this article is to study clerical brotherhoods in the late Middle Ages, specifically the Chapter of Priests and Incumbents of Toledo in the second half of the fifteenth century. The composition and the institutional development of these corporations and its meaning in the social environment, where they carried out its activities, can be determined through the study of four of this institution’s obituaries.


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