Humanities & Social Sciences

Credited on its first title page to William Shakespeare and William Rowley, The Birth of Merlin continues to provoke speculation about its place in the Shakespeare ‘Apocrypha’. The play is an imaginative re-working of the story of Merlin the Magician and his part in the struggle against the Saxon invasion of Britain. It contains not only scenes of love, war, and court politics, but a devil, a clown, and an unusual number of spectacular stage effects. This edition seeks to provide contexts for the play’s diverse elements (chronicle history, romance, spectacle, and comedy), and considers its relationships with a wide variety of texts from Geoffrey of Monmouth and the English prose Brut to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. This book, originally published in paperback in 1991 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-34-0, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.

Debates about the possibility of an open culture – or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture – often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, politics, philosophy), Haun Saussy calls out the typical vices of comparison and proposes ways to unseat them. For however much it is abused, distorted, and manipulated, comparison retains an essential link to the idea of justice.

This volume addresses the history of the “Colonia Olivetti” in Brusson (Aosta Valley, Italy), one of the holiday camps provided by the Olivetti Company for the children of its employees. The building, designed in 1955-57 by two young Italian architects, Leonardo Fiori and Claudio Conte, is an outstanding case study for several reasons. The two architects were selected through a public competition, in which figures like Carlo Scarpa, Vico Magistretti and Marcello D’Olivo, among others, participated. Therefore, the analysis of these projects, some of which almost completely unknown, offers a cross section of Italian architecture in the years of the so called “Economic Boom”, and highlights some key issues connected with the quick evolution of the country. On the one hand, the alpine context of Brusson required a deep reflection upon the relationship between modern architecture and the natural landscape, in a period during which mass-tourism transformed the way people experienced the mountain. On the other, the update of educational theories and pedagogical programs followed by the Olivetti Company led to a complete redefinition of the architectural typology – the “Colonia” – which Fascism had deeply characterized with propagandistic and political purposes during the 1920s and 1930s. The search for the autonomy of the child – as opposed to the previous decade’s tendency to sublimate the individual into the masses – produced a pedagogical renewal which had profound consequences on this kind of architecture. The winning project, conceived by Leonardo Fiori and Claudio Conte, provided a well-balanced answer to the many issues at stake, thanks to a careful approach to the natural and cultural context as well as to their innovative technical research. In collaboration with the Pasotti Company, which had extensive experience in the field of demountable structures, Fiori and Conte developed a new prefabricated building system that was connected to much of the contemporary research at the time. The Colonia Olivetti would become a “model-building”, a starting point for a long series of other structures such as the Pirovano lodge in the Dolomites and the many prefabricated school buildings that would spread from Northern to Southern Italy. The volume retraces the history of this outstanding building, and deals with all the themes that influenced its creation and character, thanks to a thorough survey carried out in many archives (Archivio del Moderno – USI, Balerna; Olivetti Historical Archive, Ivrea; Carlo Scarpa Archive, Treviso; Vico Magistretti Archive, Milano; Municipal Archive, Milano; Municipal Archive, Brusson; etc.). In addition to the text, the volume features a remarkable iconographical apparatus, parts of which were previously unknown, composed of architectural drawings, sketches, documents and pictures, including those by the photographer Enrico Cano, who – in a dialogue with the author – shot the building in 2019 in order to document its present condition.

Strategy-making takes place in webs of socio-material practices, where agency is mediated by artifacts and actors continuously reframe the way on which they give sense to their actions and objectives. Despite agency still depends on human actors, material artifacts can play a critical role in these ensembles of practices making strategizing always open to transformation. The practices associated with the strategy formation encompass conflicting people mental models, distributed knowledge and materiality for the development of a systematic, coherent and coordinated strategic process. The activities that qualify strategy-making are multifaceted and include a more or less deliberative and routinized individual decision-making and the conscious or unconscious exploration of emerging patterns. According to a cognitive approach to strategy-making, what strategists decide is largely influenced by their different perceptual filters, which are unique, as they were formed through the specific ways of engaging with the world, and by the construction of shared meanings. This consideration puts scholars to elaborate about the use of visual artifacts to frame strategic thinking and conceptualize a shared strategic orientation. The unfolding character of strategizing process stimulates to better understand the knowledge production process that explains the epistemic nature of the process itself. In particular, it has been demonstrated that the use of visual representations supports the knowledge production during the innovation processes as it facilitate the abstraction and the concretization of innovation practices. The potential benefits of using visual representations for fostering strategizing process have not yet been analysed extensively. Few case studies reflecting on the crucial role of visual representation in the strategy process and decisions in complex setting. This study aims to fill these gaps and explores how strategy maps shape the strategic practices within Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The Italian University setting is a complex research field as it is a multivoiced domain and a rapidly changing one. A recent reform is stimulating a radical change in the management policies making the strategy processes a pluralistic and uncertain work.

Corpus-based translation studies has become a major paradigm and research methodology and has investigated a wide variety of topics in the last two decades. The contributions to this volume add to the range of corpus-based studies by providing examples of some less explored applications of corpus analysis methods to translation research. They show that the area keeps evolving as it constantly opens up to different frameworks and approaches, from appraisal theory to process-oriented analysis, and encompasses multiple translation settings, including (indirect) literary translation, machine(-assisted) translation and the practical work of professional legal translators. The studies included in the volume also expand the range of application of corpus applications in terms of the tools used to accomplish the research tasks outlined.

This open access book provides translations of early German versions of Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew. The introductory material situates these plays in their German context and discusses the insights they offer into the original English texts. English itinerant players toured in northern Continental Europe from the 1580s. Their repertories initially consisted of plays from the London theatre, but over time the players learnt German, and German players joined the companies, meaning the dramatic texts were adapted and translated into German. There are four plays that can legitimately be considered as versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The present volume (volume 2) offers fully-edited translations of two of them: Tito Andronico (Titus Andronicus) and Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen / An Art beyond All Arts, to Make a Bad Wife Good (The Taming of the Shrew). For the other two plays, Der Bestrafte Brudermord / Fratricide Punished (Hamlet) and Romio und Julieta (Romeo and Juliet), see volume 1. These plays are of great interest not only to all Shakespeareans, but also to scholars who are concerned with the broader issues of translation, performance and textual transmission over time. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Swiss National Science Foundation.

The labour market is becoming harder and harder even for graduates. The economic difficulties added by Covid-19 restrictions worsened the graduates’ employability. In our opinion, public authorities should intervene to soften the school-to-work transition and graduates should become more entrepreneurial to overcome own market difficulties. We realised a survey on graduates from Padua University, the largest university in the Veneto region, Italy. In this survey, among other things, the entrepreneurial spirit of graduates was investigated. This spirit is intended as both the propensity to undertake an own business and the skill to find own ways and resources to overcome the possible difficulties while searching for a job either as employee or self-employed. It emerged that the propensity to start an own business concerns only a bunch of fresh graduates and that the capacity to implement personality resources is large among young people but remains unexplored because of cultural and contingent reasons.

No longer a mere finding aid, the Repertorium Germanicum has become a complex register volume on church and curia history that, together with the sub-project Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum, aims to meet ever increasing demands. This volume addresses new questions to both repertories.

Optical physics

Die Armee ist ein zentraler Machtfaktor im Staat, militärische Informationen sind grundsätzlich gesetzlich geschützt. Das Militär bildet zudem ein soziales System mit eigenen Normen, Ritualen und Symbolen. Die hierarchische Struktur und das starke Berufsethos prägen das Militär bis heute. Innerhalb dieses Rahmens bildeten sich immer wieder geheime Netzwerke von Militärangehörigen mit abweichenden Verhaltenskodizes. Sie erregten häufig den Verdacht, gegen das eigene Militärsystem oder den Staat gerichtet zu sein. Die Autorinnen und Autoren des Bandes erkunden die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Geheimbundorganisationen, Geheimnisträgern, Verschwörern und dem Militär – von Freimaurern und Illuminaten bis zum Stauffenberg-Kreis.

In a first treatise on vowel acoustics, entitled Preliminaries, intellectual, methodological and empirical reasoning was exposed that gives rise to scepticism about the prevailing acoustic theory of the vowel, the formant theory. In this second treatise, pursuing the quest for the acoustic representation of vowel quality, the variability of the vowel spectrum and its dependence on fundamental frequency is revisited on the new empirical basis of the Zurich Corpus of Vowel and Voice Quality, with the aim of formulating knowledge-based statements concerning the spectral representation of vowel quality in general and of questioning the cause of the observable relation of the vowel spectrum to fundamental frequency. As a central result, three statements are presented that serve as primary indices for a future acoustic theory: The vowel sound is a kind of perceptual and acoustic foreground–background phenomenon, spectral representation of vowel quality is nonuniform and, most importantly, the recognition and spectral representation of the vowel does not relate to fundamental frequency but to pitch (or to a comparable perceptual reference). The treatise concludes with a reflection on the prerequisites and challenges of building a future acoustic theory of the vowel.

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Motivation wird als ein entscheidender Faktor für erfolgreiches Lernen betrachtet. Laut der Empathisierer-Systematisierer-Theorie hat jeder Mensch einen so genannten Brain Type, der sich aus unterschiedlich starken Anteilen zweier Dimensionen zusammensetzt. Menschen mit starkem Empathisierer-Anteil achten auf Emotionen und Beziehungen. Systematisierer sind Menschen mit starkem Interesse für Systeme und Strukturen. Es konnte bisher gezeigt werden, dass der Brain Type besser als das Geschlecht vorhersagt, ob ein Mensch ein naturwissenschaftliches Studium beginnt. Ziel der vorliegenden Studie war es, zu überprüfen, ob Zusammenhänge zwischen der Motivation für die Beschäftigung mit Naturphänomenen und dem Brain Type auch im Vorschulbereich vorliegen. Dazu wurden Fragebogendaten und anhand von Videoaufnahmen erfasste Sichtstrukturen, die auf Motivation schließen lassen, miteinander korreliert. Die Ergebnisse zeigten erwartungsgemäß, dass nur Kinder mit einem großen Systematisierer-Anteil in beiden Lernumgebungen motiviert scheinen. Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Geschlecht eines Kindes und der Fokussierung auf die Lernumgebung ließen sich nicht erkennen. Ausgehend von den Ergebnissen lassen sich erste Hinweise für die Gestaltung von geeigneten Lernumgebungen für alle Kinder ableiten.

Wang Wei has traditionally been considered one of the greatest of Tang dynasty poets, together with Li Bo and Du Fu. This is the first complete translation into English of all of his poems, and also the first substantial translation of a selection of his prose writings. For the first time, readers encountering his work in English translation will get a comprehensive understanding of Wang Wei‘s range as a poet and prose writer.

Over the past 30 years, museums have turned to participation in the hope that direct involvement of non-museum staff would serve their claims to be accessible, inclusive, representative and diverse. And yet, adding participation to museums has often generated conflict, disappointment and anger. Deconstituting Museums argues that the difficulties produced by adding participatory practice arise from political incompatibility. In the representational liberal logics that underpin museum decision-making, trustees and professionals make decisions ‘on behalf of’ future generations and the public. This is a political infrastructure the book names ‘museum constitution’. Conversely, participation arises from ideas and practices from direct and horizontal political traditions, drawing those who act as facilitators into new relationships and expanding political imaginations. Through sustained engagement with theories of affect, materialism, and feminist and decolonial praxis, Helen Graham identifies techniques for deconstituting museums. She uses experimental writing as a method to turn away from the desire to right institutional wrongs and towards relational and directly negotiated ways of organising. In doing so she locates participation not as engagement but as a mode of governance that is enabled by, and enables, variant political ontologies. This is an alternative named ‘participatory worlding’. The affective work of facilitating participation has long tugged at and frayed museums’ constitutional liberal logics. Deconstituting Museums envisages how participation and its affects might be activated in reworking the politics of heritage.