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The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In "Fate and Honor, Family and Village," Rudolph Bell argues against this characterization by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture more accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant's life: "Fortuna" (fate), "onore" (honor, dignity), "famiglia" (family), and "campanilismo" (village). "Fortuna" is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the worldview from which all social life flows. The concept of "Fortuna" does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, Fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies. Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a post-modern world.
The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In Fate and Honor, Family and Village, Rudolph Bell argues against this characterization by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture more accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant's life: Fortuna (fate), onore (honor, dignity), famiglia (family), and campanilismo (village).Fortuna is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the worldview from which all social life flows. The concept of Fortuna does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, Fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a post-modern world.
"How to Do It" shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely
new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the
households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better
lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the
manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your
husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires,
throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a
week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey
through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little
literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social
history.
As a feeling or instinct for kinship, empathy is rooted in human connectedness - it belongs to the field of emotional forces that attract and repel and alloy. Since empathy springs from a person's sense of oneness with another, it differs from sympathy, which marks a distance between the unharmed perceiver and the injured perceived, and from altruism, which also poses difference by setting between them the objective duty of the unharmed to help the injured. This book is an experiment in empathy: it takes a new step by mapping out the profile empathy had in the creative imagination of Europe in the Middle Ages, the period when European culture took permanent shape. The studies give special attention to how the stimuli of art were used to teach, and hold up for imitation models of empathetic fervour. They identify areas in which the dynamic between insiders and outsiders forced subversive explorations of what it meant to be human. Like falling in love across ethnic, racial, or religious borders, empathy has its dangers, one of which is assimilation to former outsiders. This book is also an emphatic experiment in that it is a collaborative work by a number of scholars in different fields. Each contributor is an acknowledged expert, not only in one area, but also in crisscrossing the artificial borders of academic departments to reveal the interlocking connections that give emotional power to all images, verbal, pictorial, or performative. Thus, a number of themes weave through the whole book: art history, musicology, theology, biography, spirituality, and feminism.
Is there a resemblance between the contemporary anorexic teenager
counting every calorie in her single-minded pursuit of thinness,
and an ascetic medieval saint examining her every desire? Rudolph
M. Bell suggests that the answer is yes.
"How to Do It" shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely
new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the
households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better
lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the
manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your
husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires,
throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a
week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey
through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little
literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social
history.
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