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‘With tempered notes, in the green hills and among rivers’: Music, Learning, and the Symbolic Space of Recreation in the Manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, α.F.9.9

GIOVANNI ZANOVELLO

in The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy: Sound, Space and Object

How did the frottola inhabit Renaissance palazzi? One almost recoils from placing this unsophisticated music within the system of austere symbols that aristocratic interiors had to convey. This ... More

How did the frottola inhabit Renaissance palazzi? One almost recoils from placing this unsophisticated music within the system of austere symbols that aristocratic interiors had to convey. This apparent contradiction, however, may offer precious insights on the status of music at the turn of the sixteenth century. This chapter describes the layout and content of a Paduan frottola source, MS Modena, Biblioteca Estense, Alpha.F.9.9, and the context in which it originated. The contrast between the highly learned framework and the more vernacular content of this manuscript arguably reflects the tension between humanistic standards required of music and a secular repertory just beginning to adjust to a new role. Only later would music be able to develop the vocabulary for a fruitful dialogue with literary and artistic humanism.Less

Hebrew Manuscripts in an Age of Print

Yaacob Dweck

in The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice

This chapter posits Leon Modena's writing practices within the context of early modern Venice, capital of Hebrew printing and center of manuscript production. The circumstances of Modena's life as ... More

This chapter posits Leon Modena's writing practices within the context of early modern Venice, capital of Hebrew printing and center of manuscript production. The circumstances of Modena's life as well as the cultural world of early modern Venice offer some context for why Ari Nohem (The Roaring Lion, 1840) did not appear in print in the seventeenth century. As a work of criticism, Ari Nohem reflected upon the transmission of Jewish tradition, particularly the transmission of esoteric information and the principles of Jewish law. Modena argued that the printing of legal and kabbalistic books had effected a radical change in the transmission of Jewish tradition, a change that he decried in no uncertain terms at several points. Ari Nohem polemicized against one medium, print, in the form of another, manuscript.Less

History of a Failure

Yaacob Dweck

in The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice

This epilogue argues that the failure of Ari Nohem was manifold. Modena failed to convince his immediate audience, and by extension the Jewish community of Venice, and by further extension Jewish ... More

This epilogue argues that the failure of Ari Nohem was manifold. Modena failed to convince his immediate audience, and by extension the Jewish community of Venice, and by further extension Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, to abandon their embrace of a new Jewish theology that masqueraded under the guise of tradition. This was hardly surprising: no critic, no matter how stinging or how subtle, can convince people to change their beliefs or to abandon their practices. Modena had also failed to convince other scholars and other critics—the very people who might have been most receptive to his argument. To describe Ari Nohem as a failure is neither to indict the book nor to celebrate it. It is an attempt to understand it as a work written by an author constrained by the limits of his own particular moment in history.Less

The Female Monarch and the Woman Poet: Mary of Modena, Anne Killigrew, and Jane Barker

Carol Barash

in English Women's Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority

This chapter discusses the writings of Anne Killigrew and Jane Barker. For Killigrew, the world of ritual around Mary of Modena provided a complicated but powerful model of female authority for a ... More

This chapter discusses the writings of Anne Killigrew and Jane Barker. For Killigrew, the world of ritual around Mary of Modena provided a complicated but powerful model of female authority for a woman who was not herself Catholic. For Jane Barker — who did convert to Catholicism and followed Mary of Modena into exile in France in 1688 — the queen's symbolic presence was crucial in justifying her creative endeavours.Less

Anne Finch: Gender, Politics, and Myths of the Private Self

Carol Barash

in English Women's Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority

This chapter, working back and forth between published and manuscript versions of Anne Finch's poems, begins with the political poems, particularly her elegies on the deaths of James II in 1701 and ... More

This chapter, working back and forth between published and manuscript versions of Anne Finch's poems, begins with the political poems, particularly her elegies on the deaths of James II in 1701 and Mary of Modena in 1718. It goes on to suggest a shifting relationship in the position of the subject between public and private in ‘The Introduction’ and ‘The Spleen’. It then discusses the ways in which the manuscript poems, with overlapping personal, political, and religious referents, were shaped into essentially lyric works for inclusion in Miscellany Poems. The chapter concludes by describing the ways in which Finch's debt to a range of earlier women writers is sculpted into the first genealogy of women's writing in ‘The Circuit of Apollo’ and other poems.Less

Politics and Performance: Gustavo Modena’s dantate

Michael Caesar and Nick Havely

in Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation

This chapter attempts to reconstruct, as far as possible, the dantate performed in London and in Italy by the celebrated actor and patriot, Gustavo Modena. These were a distinctive form of ... More

This chapter attempts to reconstruct, as far as possible, the dantate performed in London and in Italy by the celebrated actor and patriot, Gustavo Modena. These were a distinctive form of declamation of passages from the Divine Comedy which met with considerable acclaim between the 1830s and the 1850s, and enjoyed a long afterlife in the memory of witnesses and fellow professionals for at least half a century after Modena's death in 1861. The chapter contributes to the study of Dante in the nineteenth century by exploring the possibilities and limitations of oral performance of the text at a time when Dante was rapidly filling the role of national poet amidst the heightened political tensions of the Risorgimento. The concluding sections place Modena's further reflections on and performance of Dante in the context of his growing disillusionment with the likely and actual outcomes of the struggle for nationhood.Less

Miscellanea

in Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Works of Sarra Copia Sulam in Verse and Prose Along with Writings of Her Contemporaries in Her Praise, Condemnation, or Defense

This part includes sonnets by Gabriele Zinano and Sarra Copia Sulam's response to one of them. Leon Modena, the rabbi closely involved in Sulam's biography, was privy to the content of the letters ... More

This part includes sonnets by Gabriele Zinano and Sarra Copia Sulam's response to one of them. Leon Modena, the rabbi closely involved in Sulam's biography, was privy to the content of the letters she wrote to Ansaldo Cebà and received from him, and to her problems with her adversaries. Also included in this part are a dedication to Copia from Modena's play Ester (1619) and Modena's epitaph for her tombstone (1641).Less

History and Fiction

in From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

Meir Wiener developed an interest in historical fiction for practical and theoretical reasons. His concept of the historical novel can be seen within the theoretical framework of socialist-realist ... More

Meir Wiener developed an interest in historical fiction for practical and theoretical reasons. His concept of the historical novel can be seen within the theoretical framework of socialist-realist discourse. Wiener argued that historical progress is driven primarily by the plebeian underclass, and that the vagabond intellectual and artist is the voice behind this underclass. This theory can be interpreted as a response to Georg Lukács's concept of the historical novel, in which he dismissed the masses as a historical force. Both Wiener and Lukács are critical of “psychological modernization,” but Wiener proposes a different kind of artistic modernization known as “metaphorical modernization.” This chapter discusses Wiener's historical fiction and his ideas on Jewish history, along with his historical concept of the Yiddish literature. It looks at Wiener's historical novella Valenty Gulviets, which he revised and expanded after arriving in the Soviet Union, turning it a short novel entitled Kolev Ashkenazi. The chapter also examines another Wiener novel, Baym mitllendishn yam (At the Mediterranean Sea), which focuses on the seventeenth-century Venetian rabbi Leon Modena.Less