Renaissance Studies

Historians have assumed that early modern Europeans did not practice neo-naticide similar to the great Asian civilizations, but sex-ratio studies are only now entering the demographic literature. This article passes in review both published and unpublished research on sex ratios at baptism in Italy, France, England and colonial Acadia, together with juvenile sex ratios drawn from censuses in Germany, France and Italy. Both endemic and conjunctural imbalances appear everywhere, but they could target females or males depending upon the context. It is still considered newsworthy that in much of the world, parents select the sex of their children before bringing a pregnancy to term. In China, the sex ratio at birth is currently 116 males for every female, while in India, the rate is 111, significantly above the well-established biological norm of 105. 1 This sex preference creates well-publicized difficulties for young men seeking brides (The Economist, April 18 2015). Why kill females preferentially? The literature often lays the blame on misogynistic ideologies, suggesting that it would be sufficient to combat them with propaganda in order to eradicate the practice. There are several better reasons: first of all, in agricultural economies requiring strenuous ploughing with large animals and equally strenuous field and forest work far from home, males were better value. In patrilocal societies where husbands, or their families, received a sizeable dowry for the bride (which served as a security cushion for her and her children in the event of the premature death of either spouse), parents were unequal to the task of providing those for several daughters. Finally, if the aim is to keep the future population stable in order not to overstretch resources, then killing future child-bearers is simply more efficient than killing males and females indiscriminately. Today unwanted pregnancies are usually terminated by abortion, but in the past, the safer solution was to kill the newborn or expose it to the elements. Infanticide, like abortion, may be human universals, that is, part of the behavioural repertoire of every known society, although its frequency would vary according to local environmental conditions. 2 Humans are not alone in this behaviour: mothers in many species of mammals will sometimes cull their offspring at birth. In Darwinian language, infanticide, or abortion that has replaced it, are adaptive mechanisms involving some kind of rational decision-making on the part of the parent, which is usually the mother. 3 In most societies, newborns are not considered full-f ledged persons when leaving the womb. Rather, some sort of ceremony confers a name and social identity on them, sometimes providing an additional set of symbolic kin. Returning to the great Asian civilizations where sex-selective behaviour persists, parents enact strategies to better themselves and assess the likelihood of survival and future of the newborn infant. In traditional China and Japan, neonatal infanticide was a kind of post-natal abortion that allowed parents to choose the number, the spacing and the sex of their offspring, while coping better with short-term difficulties like famine. 4 In his compelling recent study on northeastern Japan, Fabian Drixler suggests that one-third of live births ended with infanticide during the 18th century, despite government disapproval of the practice. 5 Historians sometimes

Susan Frances Jones, Anne-Sophie Augustyniak and Hélène Dubois, ‘The Authenticity of the Quatrain and the other Frame Inscriptions’, in The Ghent Altarpiece. Research and Conservation of the Exterior. First Phase, (Contributions to the Study of the Flemish Primitives 14), eds. B. Fransen, C. Stroo, KIK-IRPA (The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage), Brussels, 2020, pp. 273-308

... Sergew Hable-Selassie, 'The Ge'ez letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal', in IV Congresso Internationale di Studi ... el Nilo naçe en Ethiopia y va en la mar en Alexandria' (Cristóbal Colón, Textos y documentos completos, ed. C. Varela, Madrid: Alianza ...

O histórico de transmissão de Magnum haereditatis mysterium a partir de fontes primárias do cantochão é traçado em direção às publicações de época dos motetos homônimos arranjados por Willaert. A análise do cantochão mostra que suas fontes podem seguir duas correntes, uma com o modo hipodórico transposto e outra sem a transposição. Estas fontes foram comparadas, paralelamente ao Liber usualis, aos correspondentes canti firmi de edições dos motetos de Willaert a quatro ou a cinco vozes, visando uma compreensão maior do padrão de variação entre fragmentos correspondentes dos motetos. Para este propósito, foi realizada a análise melódica e silábica do texto, de acordo com as regras de colocação silábica de Lanfranco e Stocker. Finalmente, a comparação de um manuscrito deste moteto, anterior às suas publicações, é realizada, junto a uma discussão sobre cultura de impressão que sugere o envolvimento de intérpretes, compositores, editores e teóricos neste processo. 

Abstract: To read Camões’ poetry as if it were a discursive act similar to the contemporary “literature”  is  somewhat  anachronistic.  This  epistemic  limitation  feeds  on  the  lack  of  a  strong  counter-concept.  The  attempt  to  compensate  for  the  pragmatic  defectiveness  of  written communication through the hermeneutical filling of historical gaps is also an ungrateful task, for it submits all of its findings to the rule of current literary studies, their theoretical as well as institutional inertia. Not only that, but also Camões’ very work seem to “require” not to be confused among others: it accuses the lyrical poets of being “sophists”, in the well-known “Sôbolos rios que vão”; it mocks, through Duriano’s speech, a platonic “love fine like a melon” to which the passionate Filodemo gave himself; in the ridiculous figure of the unhappy Satyre, it represents the despair of love as a “depiction” of what “roughness and savage science had taught him.” These figures become all the more important when we intend to conceive the ethic-rhetorical coordinates of poetic writing in the 16th Century. Our article poses some questions around this “Anti-literary Camões” as a small contribution to the reconstruction of the pragmatic space of his poetry, perhaps also applicable to pre-bourgeois poetry in general.Keywords: Lyric Poetry; Topic; Rhetorics.

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Resumo: É algo anacrônico ler a lírica de Camões como se fosse um ato discursivo afim à contemporânea "literatura". Essa limitação epistêmica se nutre da ausência de um "contraconceito" rigoroso. Corrigir a defectividade pragmática da escrita por meio do preenchimento hermenêutico de lacunas históricas é uma tarefa ingrata, pois tudo submete à regra dos atuais estudos literários, suas inércias teórico-institucionais. Não bastasse isso, a própria obra camoniana em diversos passos exprime um non confundar: acusa, nas conhecidas redondilhas "Sôbolos rios que vão", os poetas que cantaram o amor profano de "sofistas"; ironiza, na boca dum Duriano, o "amor fino como melão" a que o apaixonado Filodemo se entregava; representa, na figura ridícula do infeliz sátiro da égloga, o desespero amoroso como "imaginação" do que "a rudeza e a ciência agreste lhe ensinara". Essas figuras ganham importância quando reimaginamos as coordenadas ético-retóricas da escrita de Quinhentos. Nosso trabalho propõe algumas questões à volta desse "Camões antiliteratura" como pequena contribuição para a reconstrução do espaço pragmático de sua obra, aplicável talvez à poesia pré-burguesa.
Palavras-chave: poesia lírica; tópica; Retórica.

The article discusses the Song (cansó, canzone, canción, canção) as a genre within a historical framework. This task demands an approach from Rhetorics, as well as from Theory and History of written media, and Literary History. Through the comparison of tornadas or commiati in a chronological order, we can see how this structure progressively acquires the role of stabilizing a moral content rhetorically suitable to the genre, and how this orientation towards ‘textual semantics’ is later displaced and leads to the undermining of that moral purport, thus making the tornada a specific index to the historical pragmatics of poetry writing. In the last part, this article focus mainly on Luís de Camões’ tornadas, especially the way how his Songs enact this displacement.

Keywords: Canção. Literary History. Camonian Studies.

Le 3 avril 1559, la France signe avec l’Espagne et le duché de Savoie la paix du Cateau-Cambrésis qui met fin à la onzième guerre d’Italie. Afin d’entériner ce traité, deux mariages royaux sont organisés : la fille aînée de Henri II, Elisabeth, est offerte à Philippe II, tandis que la sœur du Roi de France, Marguerite, est très vite fiancée au duc de Savoie, Emmanuel-Philibert, le grand allié des Espagnols. Dès l’annonce de ces doubles fiançailles, les festivités battent leur plein dans tout le royaume, et les poètes prennent la plume afin de célébrer les noces mais aussi la victoire diplomatique qui vient d’être remportée par le Roi de France.
Parmi ces poètes, Du Bellay et Ronsard proposent leurs services à la famille royale et c’est l’épithalame de Du Bellay, tout juste rentré de son exil romain, qui est finalement choisi pour être représenté lors du banquet de noces de Marguerite et du duc de Savoie . Ronsard, s’estimant lésé, laisse éclater son dépit et sa colère dans une production nuptiale paradoxale, deux textes « rudes » où il se plaît à prendre le contre-pied de la pièce composée par Du Bellay, en rompant volontairement avec son allégresse, son genre, et sa tonalité.

L’articolo esamina dal punto di vista linguistico l’epistola inviata dal filosofo ebreo cretese Elia del Medigo a Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, risalente al 1485-1486 e contenuta nel ms. Paris, BnF, Lat. 6508. Si tratta di una delle lettere più importanti dell’epistolario pichiano, non solo per il suo contenuto filosofico, ma anche per la commistione di codici linguistici che testimonia: latino; in parte ebraico; volgare nelle sezioni confidenziali, quest’ultimo da distinguere fra lingua dell’autore, attestata da un’annotazione autografa in veneziano, e lingua delle parti trascritte al copista, un toscano entro cui si infiltrano settentrionalismi da riportare verosimilmente a Elia.
The article provides a linguistic analysis of the letter sent by the Jewish philosopher Elijah del Medigo to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (around 1485/86) witnessed by MS Paris, BnF, Lat. 6508. It is one of the most important letters in Pico’s correspondence, not only for its philosophical content, but also for its linguistic features. Latin (and Hebrew, in small parts) alternates with the vernacular language. The latter, however, differs substantially between Elia’s own annotations, written in Venetian,
and the rest of the letter, written by a scribe mostly in Tuscan vernacular.