A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era.
 
Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth.
 
Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.
 

Spatial analysis on the basis of material culture has always been one of the major topics in archaeological research. Designating Place analyses the urban space of Roman Ostia and Pompeii in different ways, namely via geophysical analysis, spatial analysis, iconographic analysis and epigraphic analysis. This book honors the work of Hanna Stöger, the Leiden scholar who died in 2018. Hanna’s work in Ostia was not finished and this book contains contributions from people who inspired her, people she worked with, people she inspired and people who presented on sessions she organized. The book presents new data on Ostia obtained by techniques such as Space Syntax, high-resolution, shallow seismic reflection survey, the analysis of operational-sequences, linguistic landscape studies and collective memory studies, by scholars from the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, the UK, and the USA. As a bonus a selection of these papers form a hidden book on Roman bathing and water management.

Italy’s economic expansion after World War Two triggered significant social and cultural change. Secularization accompanied this development and triggered alarm bells across the nation’s immense Catholic community. The Devil and the Dolce Vita is the story of that community – the church of Popes Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI, the lay Catholic Action association, and the Christian Democratic Party – and their efforts in a series of culture wars to preserve a traditional way of life and to engage and tame the challenges of a rapidly modernizing society. Roy Domenico begins this study during the heady days of the April 1948 Christian Democratic electoral triumph and ends when pro-divorce forces dealt the Catholics a defeat in the referendum of May 1974 where their hopes crashed and probably ended. Between those two dates Catholics engaged secularists in a number of battles – many over film and television censorship, encountering such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Venice Film Festival became a locus in the fight as did places like Pozzonovo, near Padua, where the Catholics directed their energies against a Communist youth organization; and Prato in Tuscany where the bishop led a fight to preserve church weddings. Concern with proper decorum led to more skirmishes on beaches and at resorts over modest attire and beauty pageants. By the 1960s and 1970s other issues, such as feminism, a new frankness about sexual relations, and the youth rebellion emerged to contribute to a perfect storm that led to the divorce referendum and widespread despair in the Catholic camp.

November 1925: In search of health and sun, the writer D. H. Lawrence arrives on the Italian Riviera with his wife, Frieda, and is exhilarated by the view of the sparkling Mediterranean from his rented villa, set amid olives and vines. But over the next six months, Frieda will be fatally attracted to their landlord, a dashing Italian army officer. This incident of infidelity influenced Lawrence to write two short stories, “Sun” and “The Virgin and the Gypsy,” in which women are drawn to earthy, muscular men, both of which prefigured his scandalous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 

In DH Lawrence in Italy, Owen reconstructs the drama leading up to the creation of one of the most controversial novels of all time by drawing on the unpublished letters and diaries of Rina Secker, the Anglo-Italian wife of Lawrence’s publisher. In addition to telling the story of the origins of Lady Chatterley, DH Lawrence in Italy explores Lawrence’s passion for all things Italian, tracking his path to the Riviera from Lake Garda to Lerici, Abruzzo, Capri, Sicily, and Sardinia.

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Interest in dissonant heritage has grown significantly in recent years. Difficult legacies, such as monuments and urban and artistic works, as well as intangible personal and communal experiences are linked to dictatorships, regimes, wars, slavery, and exploitation. In some places, a dissonant heritage creates tension. In other places, difficult histories are cancelled or ignored. But forgetting is not the solution. Critical analysis can help us ‘face the past’ and process it in order to move forward. This applies to tourism as well: ‘Difficult’ places, monuments and experiences become opportunities for gaining and creating knowledge for a public interested in historical issues. At the same time, tourist presence is an incentive for communities to better comprehend their contested past(s). This volume contains contributions by scholars from various countries and different backgrounds, such as historians, architects, and anthropologists, who deal with this topic from different angles. The volume is divided into two parts: the first part concentrates on Italy, while the second part covers other countries in the world.