This book records the landmark performance of The Merchant of Venice in the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the Jewish quarter that gave the world the word ‘ghetto’. Practitioners and critics discuss how this multi-ethnic production and its radical choice to cast five actors as Shylock provided the opportunity to respond creatively to Europe’s legacy of antisemitism, racism and difference. They observe how the place and play stand as ambivalent documents of civilization: instruments of intolerance but also sites of cultural exchange.

The impact of the Hellenization in the Ancient Near East resulted in a notable presence of Greek koiné language and culture and in the interaction between Greek and Nabataean that conducted inhabitants to engrave inscriptions in public spaces using one of the two languages or both. In this questionably ‘diglossic’ situation, a significant number of Nabataean-Greek inscriptions emerged, showing that the koinéŽ was employed by the Nabataeans as a sign of Hellenistic cultural affinity. This book offers a linguistic and philological analysis of fifty-one Nabataean-Greek epigraphic evidences existing in northern Arabia, Near East and Aegean Sea, dating from the first century BCE to the third-fourth century CE. This collection is an analysis of the linguistic contact between Nabataean and …

La comprensión de la idea de imitatio que Cicerón defiende en su obra desvela un pensamiento en diálogo con una tradición que el orador romano no deja de construir con fines políticos. De ahí que el estudio del Cicerón imitador nos proporcione un extraordinario ejemplo de esa necesidad que toda comunidad humana tiene de construir un relato integrador recurriendo a la memoria de los textos y de los hechos que favorecen la convivencia y de aquellos que la imposibilitan. La memoria de los primeros nos debe incitar a la imitación; la de los segundos, al rechazo.

In the Imperial books of his Roman History, Cassius Dio focuses on individual emperors and imperial institutions to promote a political framework for the ideal monarchy, and to theorise autocracy’s typical problems and their solutions. The distinctive narrative structure of Dio’s work creates a unique sense of the past and allows us to see Roman history through a specific lens: that of a man who witnessed the Principate from the Antonines to the Severans. When Dio was writing, the Principate was a full-fledged historical fact, having experienced more than two hundred years of history, good and bad emperors, and three major civil wars. This collection of seven essays sets out to address these issues, and to see Dio not …

This volume collects papers presenting corpus-based research on Chinese language and linguistics, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The contributions cover different fields of linguistics, including syntax and pragmatics, semantics, morphology and the lexicon, sociolinguistics, and corpus building. There is now considerable emphasis on the reliability of linguistic data: the studies presented here are all grounded in the tenet that corpora, intended as collections of naturally occurring texts produced by a variety of speakers/writers, provide a more robust, statistically significant foundation for linguistic analysis. The volume explores not only the potential of using corpora as tools allowing access to authentic language material, but also the challenges involved in corpus interrogation, analysis, and building.

The interviews and audio recordings comprised in this volume are the outcome of a field research to Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh which took place in October-November 1985 for the preparation of the Author’s BA thesis on the life and teachings of the Indian saint Sai Baba of Shirdi (d. 1918), discussed at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in June 1987 (Un maestro dell’India moderna: il Sāī Bābā di Śirḍī. L’uomo, l’ambiente, gli insegnamenti). The conversations of each day are preceded by excerpts from the Authorʼs diary. These testimonies record the words of various people in the village of Shirdi and other locales, among whom are the last old men who knew Sai Baba: Balaji Pilaji Gurav, Bappaji …

This book is the result of a fruitful exchange between the textual studies about Marco Polo’s Devisement dou Monde and the socio-historical research regarding Mendicant Orders. The Order of Preachers, in particular, includes the figure of the Venetian merchant as an auctoritas in the area of anthropological knowledge of Eastern traditions, through a Latin translation process contributing to evangelization in Asia. The aim of this book is to analyze the Dominican reception hybridizing philological and linguistical with historical and archival methods. The crossing of these research trajectories led to the finding of a parchment that testifies definitively the trusting relationship between Marco and the preachers of SS. Giovanni e Paolo convent. This convent is a key cultural center in the …

Nuzi was a town in what is today northeastern Iraq. It flourished as part of the kingdom of Mittanni from about 1475 to 1350 BCE, early in the Late Bronze Age. Uniquely for a town of its moderate size, Nuzi produced a huge number of documents of which almost 7,000 survive. These include economic, legal, administrative, and even a few scholastic texts. They come from government offices in the town, private houses from several of the town’s neighborhoods, and private villas in Nuzi’s wealthy suburbs. The present volume presents text editions, including transliterations, translations, and analyses of some 
of these tablets from the suburbs, predominantly from a single family’s records, a huge private archive, one of the largest ever to …