Vittoria Colonna

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna's influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women's place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Vittoria Colonna

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna’s influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women’s place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Negus Ezana: Revisiting the Christianisation of Aksum

The Christianisation of Ethiopia is decoded within the reign of Ezana. The person of Ezana as a real-time figure and within the context of then Aksumite religious-cultural and political dynamics creates the background of the narrative for Ethiopian Christianity. In a revised study as a follow-up to the investigations of the dating of Ezana, revisiting his conversion, the study attempts to locate the Negus within the complex of then emergent Christian orthodoxy continuum whilst assigning due regard to the Judaic background enveloping Aksumite religion and antiquity. This attempt adds to the development of an integrated approach to church history, where the integrated narrative of Aksumite Christianity will be composite to the complete documentation of early Christianity. The investigation was accomplished through a multi-approach, whilst the main method was document analysis, as commensurate with the nature of the study, cultural historiography and the archaeology of religion was dually engrained. A review of the conversion and reality of Ezana in tangent with the recorded accounts of Ethiopian Christianity, when exerted through reference to archaeological, epigraphic and numismatic evidence, enhances a comprehensive narrative on the recorded inceptions of Ethiopian Christianity. The conversion of Ezana and the narrative of Frumentius’ ordination as the first Abuna though an account mainly ascribed to narratives by ecclesiastical historians; is an event that can be substantiated through the re-examination of archaeological-epigraphical data. Therefore, Aksumite Christianity should be composite to wholistic Christian narratives as paralleling the manner Vandal episodes and eastern Christianity are duly noted.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Whilst the article takes the main form of a historical review of Ethiopian Christianity’s origins, there are inferences to biblical studies and archaeological establishments. The main methodology takes the form of a document analysis in the form of comprehensive literature review which also includes references to epigraphy.

Religious statecraft: Constantinianism in the figure of Nagashi Kaleb

The Himyarite invasion of 525 CE by Kaleb of Aksum was a definitive war in the narrative of global religion and politics. The accounts surrounding the war corroborate the notion of an impressed Constantinian modus of establishing religious statecraft. Whereas there has been much anthropological and archaeological work on the South Arabian–Aksumite relations from the 4th to the 6th centuries, revisionism in perspective of literary sources and respective evidence retains significance given the dynamism of Ethiopianism as a concept. Implicative document analysis, cultural historiography and archaeology of religion are relevant methods used in this study. There are parallels between Kaleb’s new Zion agenda and Constantine’s nova Roma persona, both resembling an emergent Christian-religious state. It is from this religious (Christian) state that a geopolitical policy that defined the trajectory of their respective nations emerged. The replete epigraphy and literary evidence on Ethiopia and its Byzantine connection aggregately affirms the explicit existence of a Christianised foreign policy.Contribution: The research revises the narrative of Ethiopian Christianity with a lens of political-religious dynamics thereby contributing to the field of theology and history.

The work of architect Victor Lukomsky in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia (1884-1947)

A large number of Russian architects came to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as emigrants in the aftermath of the October Revolution (1917-1921), in the late second and early third decade of the 20th century. Among them was Victor Lukomsky, one of the most prolific Russian emigrant architects. Despite its extraordinary significance, the work of architect Victor Lukomsky (1884-1947) has not been comprehensively understood in contemporary cultural historiography. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to shed light and present details on his activities in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes / Yugoslavia to the professionals and highlight its importance, thus encouraging further research and interpretation of the contribution of Russian emigrants to the Serbian interwar architecture.

Africanism, Apocalypticism, Jihad and Jesuitism: Prelude to Ethiopianism

Ethiopianism conceptually shaped modern Africa. Perceivably, this has been deduced from distinguished events in Ethiopian history. This investigation explored Ethiopianism as a derivate of the multifaceted narrative of Ethiopian religious political dynamics. Ethiopianism has arguably been detached from the entirety of the Ethiopian Christian political establishment, being deduced separately from definitive events such as the Battle of Adwa 1896. This research reconnected Ethiopianism to a wholistic religious–political matrix of Ethiopia. Therefore, it offers an alternative interpretation of Ethiopianism, as a derivate of Africanism and Apocalypticism, also correspondingly as a factor of Islamic Jihad and Jesuit Catholicism. The research was accomplished mainly through document analysis and compositely with cultural historiography. This study was a revisionist approach to Ethiopianism as a concept, deriving it from the chronological narrative of Ethiopian Christianity’s religious and political self-definition. Consequently, this realigned Ethiopianism as a derivate of multiple influences. Ethiopianism was possibly a convolution of the Donatist biblical appeal to the nativity, Judaic apocalypticism, Islamic attacks and Jesuit missionary diplomacy. Throughout the narrative of the Ethiopian Christian establishment, autonomy and independence are traceable; in addition, there is an entrenched enculturation of native Christianity and synergy with the political establishment. This formulates a basis for Ethiopianism as an ideology of African magnanimity. Parallel comparisons of Ethiopianism against Donatism and Zionism decode the nationalistic matrix of Ethiopia. Dually encultured native religious practice coupled with theocratic symbiosis of politics and religion fostered resistance from Islamisation and Jesuit Catholicisation. Further enquiry of Ethiopian Christianity as an index of the Ethiopian political establishment, from which Ethiopianism is derived, is qualified.

What the Victorian Empire Learned: A Perspective on History, Reading and Print in Nineteenth-Century Textbooks

This essay draws upon trends in cultural historiography as well as the methodologies of book history to argue that Victorian school histories articulated and reinforced three persistent myths of modernity (all of which have been thoroughly discredited by scholarship but persist in popular historical understanding). These are the notion that literacy is necessary to progress, the idea that the advent of printing with moveable type was a harbinger of enlightenment, and the tenet of historians’ practice that written records are a necessary precondition for the discipline to function. Each of these ideologies is concerned with the practices of reading and writing, print culture, and documentation, which are intrinsic to the scholarship of book history. To identify the connections, we should read the texts of school books alongside the bibliographical and archival evidence of their materiality and mobility. The texts conveyed a lesson of European superiority indirectly by retelling the Whig narrative of English liberty. Colonial editions and other iterations were widely circulated. The article offers five examples of schoolbooks to demonstrate how they worked and how they travelled, then proposes a digital humanities solution to the historiographical and bibliographical challenges that arise. A complex relational database connecting three sets of data: about the attributes of books in their multiple versions, about the people associated with their authorship and publishing, and about the institutions that supported them.

Introduction

This Introduction shows how this book contributes to the emerging field of postcolonial book history and cultural historiography. By demonstrating its relevance to the capitalism and slavery thesis, it shows how books, too, were industrial goods capitalized by slave labor. It explains that early American proprietary subscription libraries were centers for revolutionary leadership development, and one location where colonials imbibed British political thought. In challenging the civic republicanism thesis of Caroline Robbins, J. G. A. Pocock, and Bernard Bailyn it argues that ownership of slaves was the proprietorship formative of the virtue of the republican citizen and that C. B. MacPherson’s theory of possessive individualism more accurately describes their citizenship. It maps the networks through which colonials purchased books, and gives a history of early American reading. The most popular genres among early Americans are documented, and anti-slavery is shown to be both a product of revolutionary thinking and an inspiration for it.