Published in Chongqing in 1937, Xiandai Xizang 現代西藏 (Modern Tibet) is a key study of Tibet during the tumultuous period of Japan’s invasion of China in World War II. Authored by Fazun 法尊 (1902-1980), an eminent monk, scholar, translator, and authority on the Tibetan language, this work illuminates the interplay of society, religion, politics, and empire that shaped China-Tibet relations in a transformative age. Despite Fazun’s major contribution to Tibetan and Buddhist studies in China, his legacy has often been detached from the relationships he cultivated with his Tibetan teachers and reimagined in modernity within the ancient lineage of Chinese pilgrim-translators. Still, his influence remains profound to this day. This project presents the first English translation of Fazun’s original work, …

The Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS) in LIS is the third version, after the English and Italian version, of the digital grammar of Italian Sign Language. The present version is entirely produced in LIS, without written texts. In so doing, we aimed at a product completely accessible to Deaf signers enabling both hearing and deaf people to reflect upon LIS in LIS. As the preceding versions, this is also a product of the Horizon 2020 SIGN-HUB project. The Grammar is published in a reduced version if compared to the Table of Content of the English and Italian version, but we hope to have produced a flexible work, able to grow in the future, thanks to its digital format. The …

Il volume accoglie gli atti della giornata di studi “Luoghi di culto e ritualità in Oderzo antica”, organizzata a Oderzo il 24 giugno 2024. I diversi contributi indagano, in un orizzonte diacronico di oltre 1000 anni, dal IX secolo a.C. all’VIII secolo d.C, le molteplici testimonianze, manufatti, monumenti e aree di culto della città antica. Il quadro complessivo delle realtà esaminate consente un’analisi della sfera del sacro nella sua duplice dimensione pubblica e privata, senza trascurare confronti e approfondimenti con l’intero panorama veneto e cisalpino.

This book aims to offer a concise, though not exhaustive, exploration of the core virtues of the ‘good Muslim’, highlighting the moral foundations that are essential to the Islamic faith. It seeks to present readers with the values that Islam promotes: gratitude and patience, mercy and hospitality, tolerance and peace, protecting the weak, among others. The virtues of the good Muslim emerge from two different sources: the divine qualities, otherwise the ‘Beautiful Names’, which, or most of which, the believer will try to imitate to the best of his limited human ability; and the love of God, explicitly referred to in the Qurʾān in relation to certain categories of believers and their qualities. Two different frameworks, which nevertheless echo one …

This volume explores everyday communication practices in Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt, with a particular focus on Greek papyri and related sources. It examines how language, layout, and materiality – manifesting overtly or subtly, at global and local levels – shaped the production and interpretation of texts. Grounded in a ‘frame-based’ approach, the chapters draw on sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and multimodality to reveal how ancient writers and readers constructed meaning and articulated identities across genres, languages, and cultural contexts.

The Great Hymns and Prayers are a group of Akkadian literary compositions renowned for their sophisticated style and language. This book presents updated critical editions of the Great Prayer to Nabû and the Great Prayer to Ištar, incorporating new interpretations and newly discovered fragments for more accurate reconstructions. In addition to philological analysis, the book explores intertextual relationships with other literary and non-literary texts and provides an in-depth study of the poetics of the corpus.

This book forms part of contemporary research on the interaction between migratory early farmers of Anatolian origin and European hunter-gatherers. In southern Eastern Europe, these two ways of life coexisted for thousands of years, resulting in a wide variety of configurations and patterns. Therefore, this part of the prehistory of southern Eastern Europe is of general European importance, providing comparative material for the study of Neolithisation and offering a different perspective to illuminate the possible variants of historical development and better identify the social structures behind the differences.

Il Devisement dou monde è probabilmente l’opera della letteratura medievale che ha attraversato la più intricata vicenda testuale: scritto nel 1298 da Rustichello da Pisa, prigioniero insieme a Marco nelle carceri di Genova (in un francese fortemente mescidato da tratti italiani, riconoscibile nella sola copia rimasta, il cod. parigino fr. 1116: F), entro la prima metà del XIV secolo l’opera fu più volte tradotta in versioni che spesso sfiorano il radicale rimaneggiamento in toscano, veneziano, latino, francese, catalano, tedesco, ecc., producendo una ricchissima tradizione manoscritta e approdando precocemente alla stampa.

The Jesuit textual production from the sixteenth century leaves no doubt that the Japanese evangelising enterprise was publicised as the epitome of success. Francisco Cabral, third superior of the mission, who had initially shared this judgement, in time began fearing that the mission was, instead, doomed to failure. As he perceived the loosening of the internal ties of the Society of Jesus, and the salvation of the catechumens as more and more independent of that of the Jesuits, Cabral concluded that God had abandoned the mission. This study, using little-known manuscript sources, examines Cabral’s attitudes towards his confreres and the Japanese people, to illuminate how particular salvation mechanics could define early modern Catholic missions.

This edition is part of a wider project for a comprehensive transcription of the diary by Karl von Zinzendorf (1739‑1813). Zinzendorf was counsellor at the Treasury (Commerzienrat) in Vienna (1762‑66), Governor of Trieste (1776‑82), and later Staatsminister. From 1764 to 1770 he travelled to different European countries: Switzerland, Italy, Malta, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, the British Isles, and Belgium. The complete diary, which covers the period from his Saxon childhood to his death as minister in Vienna, is renowned for the regularity of its entries as well as the acute observations and critical self‑reflections of the author. Zinzendorf’s stay in Switzerland between June and October 1764 corresponds to one of his study trip to analyse …

This volume encompasses the proceedings of the First International Conference of the East and West in Korean Studies project Cultural Exchanges Between Korea and the West: Artifacts and Intangible Heritage, organized by Jong-Chol An and Ariane Perrin in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in May 2021 with the support of the Academy of Korean Studies. Following an interdisciplinary approach from such fields as history, heritage studies, history of art and religious studies, nine essays were selected that best illustrate the main themes of the conference. This richly-illustrated publication presents little-known historical documents and various artifacts that had been lost to time within various institutions, private collections or museum collections, tracing …

The book offers a greater understanding of the multiple layers of meaning that have been superimposed in the course of the Medieval and Modern Ages in the Rialto area. The authors follow the Leitmotiv of the memorial component that each operation of architectural reuse has carried in the history of the church of San Giacomo di Rialto, a building which stands, emblematically, as a sort of architectural relic. Adopting this principle, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the spatial model, the reuse of individual architectural and decorative elements but also, on a larger scale, the different configurations of the urban context (the Rialto market) through the centuries, after repeated destruction, reconstruction and transformation. By adopting this multi-scale approach, the …

The present volume offers a detailed analysis of a fifteenth-century court debate on God’s unicity (tawḥīd), involving the Ottoman scholars Mollā Zeyrek (d. 903/1497-98 [?]) and Ḫocazāde Muṣliḥuddīn Muṣṭafā (d. 893/1488), as a chance to highlight the dynamics of knowledge production at the time: in post-classical Islamic scholarship, an essential element of the process was scholars’ adroitness in synthesizing arguments from differing schools of philosophy and theology – via close readings of past masters. This dialectic unfolded during a period of imperial restructuring, at a time when Sultan Meḥmed II (d. 886/1481) realized his cosmopolitan and universalistic ambitions through his persistent patronage of philosophy and science, a case that is illustrated by his glorious palatine library. The setting, …

La Grammatica della lingua dei segni italiana (LIS) (A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)) è un’ampia presentazione delle proprietà grammaticali della LIS. È stata pensata come uno strumento per studenti, insegnanti, interpreti, la Comunità Sorda, ricercatori, linguisti e chiunque sia interessato allo studio della LIS. È uno dei risultati del progetto Horizon 2020 SIGN-HUB. È composta da sei Parti: la Parte 1 è dedicata al panorama sociale e storico in cui si è sviluppata la lingua, mentre le altre cinque Parti descrivono i domini linguistici di Fonologia, Lessico, Morfologia, Sintassi e Pragmatica. Grazie al formato digitale della grammatica, i testi e i video sono saldamente interconnessi, progettati per adattarsi ad hoc alla descrizione di una lingua visiva.

La mostra dal titolo Il libro di Bessarione in difesa di Platone: nell’officina dell’ultimo filosofo bizantino celebra la figura di Bessarione, una delle personalità più affascinanti e, al contempo, uno dei Bizantini più influenti del quindicesimo secolo. Oggetto dell’esposizione sono alcuni preziosi documenti conservati nella Biblioteca Marciana: manoscritti, incunaboli, prime versioni a stampa dell’In Calumniatorem Platonis, il capolavoro di Bessarione. Il percorso espositivo permette al visitatore di entrare nell’‘officina’ di Bessarione e di ripercorrere le tappe del lungo e travagliato percorso intellettuale che portò all’elaborazione e pubblicazione dell’opera bessarionea, seguendo insieme le vicende dei testi in cui il progetto filosofico e culturale di Bessarione andava via via concretizzandosi. Il presente catalogo accompagna il percorso espositivo consentendo al visitatore …

Collected here are the abstracts of the speeches delivered by the participants at the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies in the different sessions divided into Free Communications, Thematic Sessions, Round Tables, and Posters. Please refer to the Congress website for an overview of the programme: https://byzcongress2022.org/programme/.

La mostra Cipro nella Biblioteca Marciana di Venezia. Manoscritti, testi e carte (Venezia, 22-27 agosto 2022), organizzata a latere del 24° Congresso Internazionale di Studi Bizantini, della quale il presente catalogo è specchio, mira a indagare l’eredità culturale del secolare rapporto che legò Venezia e Cipro (1473-1571), sulla base dei materiali manoscritti e cartografici conservati nella Biblioteca Marciana, la più longeva istituzione culturale della Serenissima. La schedatura aggiornata dei materiali, accompagnata da un’ampia introduzione, propone un percorso che al contempo fa luce sulla vicenda dei singoli manoscritti e traccia un preliminare itinerario dei rapporti culturali che legarono l’isola al dominio veneziano.

This volume is intended to be a practical manual to learn the basics of the Ainu language, in its varieties of Southern Hokkaidō and Sakhalin. Each lesson presents one specific topic that is investigated taking into account both varieties of the language. Three kinds of activities guide the student throughout each lesson to inductively make generalisations on the language that can be supported by linguistic evidence and, possibly, to revise the information they were given as a start of their analysis. In order to do this, the student learns to observe the data, recognize recurring patterns and exceptions, and formulate a description of the language behaviours illustrated by the given examples. At the end of each lesson the student actively …