This introduction aims to explain the lines of research of a group of scholars, brought together in a joint project on the history of sacrifice from the late Middle Ages to the modern world. Taking into account the theoretical framework formulated by a long tradition of studies on sacrifice, the group compared different historical contexts, focusing on the emergence of religious sciences, biblical commentaries, self-sacrifice and the idea of martyrdom, sanctity, the global missionary context, European approaches to sacrificial rites in Asia, and the relationship between the idea of crusade and the doctrine of sacrifice.

Il rito del kurban tra i pauliciani bulgari: le fonti missionarie (secoli XVII-XVIII)
Silvia Notarfonso

In this essay, I investigate the Paulician communities that lived in Ottoman Bulgaria between the 17th and 18th centuries. At the end of the 16th century, a group of Bosnian Franciscans founded a Catholic mission there and began to convert the Paulicians. However, Paulician religious conduct remained tied to ancient customs, traditions and rituals perceived by the missionaries as superstitions. In particular, the vast majority of Paulician converts continued to practise animal sacrifice (commonly known as ‘Kurban’). Catholic missionaries and bishops active in the area tried to manage this controversial custom and sometimes ended up tolerating it. The Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, on the other hand, ended up anathematising the tradition as a superstitious and pagan ritual in the second half of the 18th century: did they succeed in achieving these goals permanently?

L’arte della conversazione. Alla ricerca del sacrificio perduto: da Tylor a Freud (1870-1913)
Cristiana Facchini

Theories of religion, which appeared in the second half of the Nineteenth century, focused their attention on the analysis of sacrifice. The theorizing process that is so distinctive of this period contributed to define a number of relevant concepts that exerted a relevant influence in the Twentieth century. This article aims to illustrate the path which led to relevant theories of sacrifice unearthing the conversation among some scholars and intellectuals of different European countries whose work contributed to the rise and institutionalization of new disciplinary fields: sociology, anthropology, ethnology, history of religions, psychoanalysis.

Il fallito processo di beatificazione di tre martiri trinitari spagnoli ad Algeri (sec. XVII)
Michele Bosco

This essay aims to reconstruct the events related to the last years of life and the alleged martyrdom of three Spanish Trinitarian friars (Juan de Águila, Bernardo Monroy, Juan de Palacios), who died in slavery in Algiers and tries to explain the possible reasons for the failure of their canonisation. The background of the story is the redemption of captives held in 1609 in Algiers, where the friars were imprisoned and died between 1613 and 1622, suddenly being considered as martyrs. But martyrdom does not always lead to sanctity: on the basis of unpublished sources, conserved in Spanish and Vatican archives, this essay intends to shed light on the reasons that resulted in the failure of their canonisation process.

Il sacrificio della carne. Donne a immagine di Cristo (XIX-XX secolo)
Eleonora Rai

This paper explores some key aspects of the manifestation of stigmata, understood as a sign of Eucharistic sacrifice experienced by atoning souls, on the part of women in the course of the 1800s–1900s. It reflects on the re-evaluation of the female, stigmatized body as a sacred, potentially sacramental object in the 19th-20th-century socio-religious and theological context. It focuses especially on the case studies of nun Tomasina Pozzi (1910-1944) and lay woman Margherita (1908-?), two women who presented themselves as atoning souls, showed stigmata, attracted both devotion and criticism, and were the object of ecclesiastical investigations.

Sacrificio di sé e idea di stato in Balthazar de Ayala
Davide Dainese

The paper aims to explore the theme of self-sacrifice in Balthzar de Ayala, a Brabant judge of the second half of the 16th century in the service of the Spanish Crown. Ayala is on the whole a marginal figure in recent historiography and, moreover, only one work is ascribed to him: De iure et officiis bellicis et disciplina militari. Nevertheless, Ayala is a well-known figure in the juridical (and theological) culture of the so-called "long iron century," and Hugo Grotius mentions him in the Prolegomena of his De iure belli ac pacis. With this essay, therefore, which wishes to deepen Ayala's political conception as well as his doctrine on just war, I intend to add a piece to the knowledge of the themes and problems of the history of law in the Early Modern Age.

Sacrificio, vendetta, giustizia: Carlo I e il regicidio nella letteratura rivoluzionaria inglese negli anni delle guerre civili
Francesco Quatrini

The execution of Charles I Stuart on January 30, 1649, quickly came to be known throughout Europe: for the first time in England history, a king formally in charge had been put to death. Justifying such a decision became a fundamental task for the Parliamentarians. This paper aims to show that classical resistance theories were merged with a language and concepts belonging to the category of religious sacrifice in revolutionary literature. Such a blend between human justice and sacrifice was indeed one of the strategies to justify the execution of Charles I.

Sacrificio del desiderio e matrimonio cristiano fra tardomedioevo e prima età moderna
Fernanda Alfieri

The essay examines the positions of Catholic doctrine in the early modern age on the connection between sacrifice and sexuality. It was examined a body of moral literature characterised by different levels of specialisation and relative recipients: manuals of spiritual instruction aimed at educated readers but not necessarily members of the clergy, texts for confessors and judges settling matrimonial disputes, works of wide circulation and others that remained in the shadows. A common line emerges: the sacrificial condition is desirable and necessary, and the conjugal status is hopelessly second to that, far more noble, far more sacrificial, of the religious devoted to celibacy.

Le ‘Indie’ della peste: il contributo gesuita all’ampliamento semantico del concetto di ‘martirio’
Sonia Isidori

The Jesuit theological reflection has played an important role in the long process of redefining the semantic extension of the term ‘martyrdom’. The originality of the Jesuit contribution on the topic is evident in the reflection on the “martyrio per pestem”. Through the study of two consolatory letters written by General Muzio Vitelleschi and the analysis of the “litterae indipetae” it is possible to trace the fourth directive of action of the Jesuit missionary magisterium, the “Indies of the plague”, and to clarify the importance and vividness of Jesuit discussion on the martyrdom for charity.

Le sacrifice de Noé: situation, interprétations
Pierre-Antoine Fabre

The account of the sacrifice performed by Noah on leaving the ark (Gen. 8.20-1) is certainly one of the most enigmatic moments in the first chapters of Genesis. How are we to understand this sacrifice, which God does not command, but which immediately precedes a radical transformation of the discourse that God addresses to Noah, a discourse which might seem to return to his very first address to Adam, but which in reality introduces between man and the animals the weapon of a domination by terror. We will be interested in the different interpretations that have marked this story in Christian exegesis and in the various manifestations of the iconography that has been used to convey it.

Contando i martiri in Cina. La controversia sul martirio in uno spazio missionario globale
Michela Catto

It was not difficult for a foreigner in China to get killed. China was the country that resembled Ancient Pagan Europe most closely and thus it was the perfect place for martyrs. Nevertheless, among the many Jesuits who suffered persecution, tribulation, imprisonment and torture, few of them suffered death for hatred of their religion. Such an absence became a matter for disputation among the religious orders over the Chinese Rites. If bloodshed was a requisite for the spread of Christianity, the lack of martyrs of the Society of Jesus was proof that the type of Christianity they preached in China was not the true faith, but an adapted and compromised version. Among the first observers of this peculiar absence of Jesuit martyrs in China was Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (1600-1659), one of the main opponents of the Jesuit method adopted in China. In his writings, the absence of Jesuit martyrs became the confirmation that the adaptation practised by the Jesuits had denied the Christian message its most subversive power and witness to the faith.

Sacrificio e violenza sacra nella propaganda crociata di età avignonese: Marino Sanudo e l’immagine della Terra Santa
Irene Bueno

After reviewing the scholarly debate on the sacralization of war and the symbolic centrality of Jerusalem in the notion of crusade, this essay focuses on the propagandistic elaboration of the Holy Land image in the context of the debates of the Avignon period, paying specific attention to the works of Marino Sanudo. In this context, the temporal distance from the first crusades and the need to assert continuity with their tradition enhance the recovery of the image of Jerusalem, the place of Christ’s sacrifice and of the crucesignatus’s military and penitential itinerary.

Le rievocazioni storiche, la ricerca dello svago e il regime fascista: il Palio di Asti e Siena
Alessandro Micocci

This article analyse, through a comparison of two italian historical reenactments, the Palio of Siena and that of Asti, the strategy of using local history in the propagandistic and aesthetic sphere of the fascist regime. In particular, the work will focus itself on the rivalry that developed between Asti and Siena for the legitimization of their own reenactments, as rooted in continuous history. Asti’s recourse to the Sienese model involved a growing controversy that the regime resolved by conferring the monopoly of the term “palio” to Siena. The analysis aims to show how the model of the historical exhumation did not provide guarantees regarding the manteinance of its aesthetic content, let alone could achieve its educational-anthropological purpose by grafting on the community a series of lasting historical memories, symbols, and aesthetic apparatuses. The local community seeks, in historical reenactments, a passtime and a form of aggregation and novelty, quickly putting aside the whole ceremonial complex and the series of historical reminders inserted on by the local administration and organs of the regime. Historical reenactments, then, does not seem to be able to survive solely through the recovery of perennial historical characters, as the regime believed.

‘Green’ Malthus? A Bibliographical Itinerary between neo-Malthusianism and Environmentalism
Jacopo Bonasera

This contribution presents a bibliographical itinerary on Twentieth century environmental revival of Malthusian doctrines. After introducing both the main conceptual strains inherent to the topic, and their scientific interest the essay takes into consideration the Post-WWII emergence of global environmentalism. A survey of the texts of 1960s and 1970s exponents of Neo-Malthusian environmentalism shows the important role played by this tradition of thought in shaping environmental concerns on both the scientific and the governmental level. The itinerary ends with an analysis of the main authors and strains of enquiry that have assessed the historical and conceptual relevance of Neo-Malthusian environmentalism. It is argued that more researches into Malthus’ legacy over time could grant significant theoretical gains both for the history of political thought, and its entanglments with the history of environmentalism.

La riflessione politica nell’Albergo di Maiolino Bisaccioni
Manuela Caianiello

The article highlights the political view in the novella L’Albergo by the Ferrarese author Maiolino Bisaccioni. The analysed text, unpublished in an annotated edition, gives a tacit view on the relationship between the sovereign and his collaborators. Generally, it offers a portrait of the 17th-century court. In this work we wanted to emphasise how fundamental is the testimony of Bisaccioni, who, as a politician and secretary at the service of many, on several occasions he expressed a personal opinion about the art of governing.

A (New) Spectre Is Haunting Europe: National Memory
Massimo Vallerani

History is under attack, all over the world, for both the political and propagandistic uses of the past – which increasingly frame the actions of autocratic governments – and for the bans on writing, studying, teaching subjects that may be regarded as offensive to the memory of one country or even a threat to its national unity. These two perspectives are closely linked, because it is precisely in those countries where history, or rather an idealised or politically-oriented image of the past, is employed with greater ideological zeal that it is more difficult to write history without repressive state intervention. The examples are many: prison sentences for those who tackle certain topics, state censorship of school curricula, inaccessible archives, destroyed documents, marginalisation of disobedient officials, coercive rewriting of the past. It has become increasingly difficult to maintain the vital link between historical research, dissemination of results and teaching, to the detriment of an official history increasingly bent to the ideological pretensions of governments to create unitary histories in homage to a distorted idea of national prestige.

Nazionalismo catalano e riscrittura della storia. Un’intervista a Jordi Canal
Jacopo Lenzi

In an interview with Jordi Canal, professor of Contemporary History and expert on Spanish nationalism, the topic of the rewriting of history for political purposes by members of the Catalan nationalist movement is addressed. Canal addresses issues that animate political and intellectual debate in contemporary Spain in relation to the independence aspirations of a section of Catalan public opinion. Canal’s studies on Catalan nationalism exemplify the ideological drive to set regional history as a “destiny of independence.”

Misuse of History: Assault on Democracy in India. An interview with Aditya Mukherjee
Vera Foralossi, Ettore Maiorana

In the interview with Aditya Mukherjee, various issues related to Communalism in India are addressed. The attempts of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), currently ruling the country, to change history textbooks to introduce the manipulated view of India's past expressed by Hindu nationalism. Mukherjee also talks about the current Indian government's attacks on historians' freedom of research: the public accusations of terrorism levelled at dissident scholars and also the professional marginalisation of those who refuse to bend historical discourse to the demands of the establishment linked to Hindu nationalism. Muckerjee inform us about the strong resistance against attempts to erase Muslim culture from India's official history.

Under the State Supervision: Academic History in Putin’s Russia. An interview with Alexander Makhov
Davide Cocetti

In the interview, a young researcher, Alexander Makhov, recounts his first-hand experience of studying the relationship between public authorities and academic historians in 21st century Russia, in particular the way in which state memory policy influences the academic discourse concerning Soviet history. Over the past two decades, due to Putin’s increasingly censorious interventions, this type of research has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, in Russia.

Access to archives and national memory in France. An interview with Raphaëlle Branche
Alexander Luca Coscarella

In the interview, Raphaelle Branche, a member of the Conseil supérieur des Archives and a specialist in the administrative mechanisms that control access to documents, will examine the attempts made by the French government in recent years to remove documentation from consultation. Archives and access to documentation are a 'classic' battlefield of historical research in all countries of the world. But it is in France where the most advanced reflections on the relationship between democracies and public documentation have matured, and where state interventions in defence of national memory have been strongest.

Antichistica e razzismo nel dibattito culturale statunitense. Una intervista ad Alice Borgna
Alberto Franchini

In the interview, Alice Borgna addressed the issue, particularly controversial in the U.S. today, of the relationship between classical culture and multicultural societies that claim other models of the past. In light of the debate sparked by Padilla Peralta’s statements about racism inherent in the study of the Classics, Borgna reflects on the relationship between minorities and culture, on the celebration of the classical world in a profoundly changed world where a significant portion of the population no longer recognizes itself in that past.

How to Write History?
Florian Coulmas

78 years after the annihilation of Hiroshima, a G7 summit is scheduled to take place in Hiroshima. That both representatives/heirs of the victims and the victimisers of the first nuclear strike in human history will sit there around the same table is ample reason to reflect on the way this event is and should be remembered. Recalling some details of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this text recalls that the bombs did not, as is often thought, bring about Japan’s surrender in World War II and touches upon the contingency of history writing. It also recalls that it was common practice for a long time to refer to the “nuclear holocaust” and raises the question of whether and how present-day circumstances – in particular the fact that the 2023 G7 summit takes place in times of a war not anticipated by many just a year ago – do and should influence the perception and evaluation of past facts and thus their sedimentation in history.

Tavolate e territorio. Feste, cibo e comunità in Italia dal secondo dopoguerra a oggi
Ilaria Porciani

Traditional feasts (the Palio in Siena), celebrations of the local patron saint (Festa del Redentore); events organized by long-standing charitable organizations (the Purgatory lunch in Gradoli), festivals staged by political groups (the First of May, Festa de L’Unità, or the Lega festivals), or even the replica of a 19th Century political banquet staged for the 150th jubilee of the Italian Unification provide important occasions for communities. Diverse as they are, they are all characterized by commensality and sharing of local food.

Comunicare il fascismo: il racconto della Rai
Beatrice Tioli

This essay is divided into 2 sections. The first one is about the storytelling broadcasted by Italian television from its origin to nowadays about Italy’s fascist era, investigating what and how has been broadcasted, and which are the following interpretations. The second one is a quantitative analysis, based on archival research on the Teche Rai, about the presence of fascism in Rai’s programming of the last 20 years, with a focus on 4 programs, to map the episodes dedicated to fascism (and related concepts).

Le carte del Partito comunista francese per una storia del comunismo in Africa
Gabriele Siracusano

The history of African anti-colonial movements, especially those present in the French colonies, can be reconstructed thanks to the documentation of the French communists. The documents of the PCF, collected in the Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint Dénis, offer an important point of view on African decolonization. These sources provide the missing piece for a social, political and cultural history of relations between metropolises and colonies and between North and South of the world. Together with the digitization projects of the French sources preserved in the former Soviet archives (today still in Russia) and the documentary mass produced by trade unions and colonial security services, the sources of the PCF are also essential for internationalizing the history of the French Communist Party, reconnecting it to the broader relatio

Fonti per la storia del comunismo italiano, il colonialismo e la decolonizzazione in Africa
Gregorio Sorgonà

The international politics of the Italian communist party has been mainly investigated focusing the party’s entanglement with the Soviet Union, in a framework dominated by the East-West conflict. Since the 2000’s, the global dimension of Icp international politics has been underlined by historians. The focus on the place of Africa in Icp global relations is even more recent. The article contributes to this last field of research by an assessment of the Icp archival sources between the 1920s and the 1960s that are related to colonialism and decolonization in Africa.

Communism and Africa: From Colonialism to Decolonization through Russian Sources
Anna Shapovalova

The article presents an overview of sources on Africa and global communism that cover the period between 1920s and 1970s and are stored in the central archives of the Russian Federation (RGASPI, RGANI, GARF, RGAE, AVP RF). It also provides information on documentary collections and digitalised sources. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this presentation aims to introduce major collections, to outline possible research directions and to facilitate therefore the study of this vast subject for non-Russian scholars, when work in Russian archives becomes more accessible again.

Mercati del sesso fra passato e presente. Una introduzione
Fernanda Alfieri

The text introduces the discussion of Marzio Barbagli’s volume, Comprare piacere. Sessualità e amore venale dal Medioevo a oggi.

Apparentemente periferica. Prostituzione e regolamentazione della morale sessuale in età moderna
Fernanda Alfieri

Prostitution has been traditionally treated as a phenomenon related to marginality, both by scholars and by observers contemporary to the periods considered in the volume. As Marzio Barbagli shows, however, it is central, intertwined with the organisation of communities. This essay reads the history of prostitution and the history of marriage from a comparative perspective, highlighting unexpected connections. Marriage is the institution that legitimises sexuality, making it decent and productive. Prostitution, too, with the various forms of regulation produced over a centuries-long history, has been the object of an economy of money and morality that incardinates social organisation.

Sessualità e prostituzione nella cultura scientifica positivista
Matteo Loconsole

Stemming from the work by Marzio Barbagli, the present essay aims at investigating Western sexual morality focusing on the study of the history of prostitution in the Nineteen and Twentieth centuries. In this sense, it will show how positivist medical and anthropological theories, heirs of ancient sexual and gender prejudices, were able to convey the values of a sexual morality that, on the one hand, legitimated the exercise of female prostitution as a phenomenon necessary to ward man’s well-being, while on the other hand it stigmatized male prostitution, especially if homosexual, as a symbol of a lost, ideologically characterized, virility.

Comprendere le ingiustizie contro le sex worker nel corso dei secoli
Giulia Garofalo Geymonat

Researching the sex work market is a difficult endeavour, both for past and present times. Indeed, this market has often been largely hidden, and at least partially criminalised. The very definition of what is prostitution has been, and still is, contested. Studying its evolution throughout the centuries, looking at different cases in Europe and the United States, can be useful to the understanding of injustices experienced by the people, women and others, who sell sex.

Biografia di un intellettuale nell’Europa del Novecento. Una introduzione
Paolo Capuzzo

The text introduces the discussion of M. Salvati’s volume, Camillo Pellizzi. Un intellettuale nell’Europa del Novecento, and outlines the path that led Salvati to study Pellizzi.

Fra corporativismo e sociologia: Camillo Pellizzi nell’interpretazione di Mariuccia Salvati
Pietro Costa

This paper comments on Mariuccia Salvati’s analysis of the life and work of Camillo Pellizzi. The commented book comprehensively and convincingly reconstructs Pellizzi’s personality in the context of fascist and post-fascist Italy, focusing on issues such as corporatism, the theory of elites, the teaching of sociology.

Le “quasi” due vite del sociologo Camillo Pellizzi
Loredana Sciolla

Mariuccia Salvati dedicates the last chapter of the volume to the “almost” two lives of Camillo Pellizzi, the first characterized by militant adherence to fascism, the second by the “pure” study of society. This article mainly deals with this last phase, the phase of maturity, which coincides with the first decades of the second post-war period. The role of sociologist played by Pellizzi, in many ways original and innovative, was however not always recognized and appreciated by the Italian sociological culture which, more generally, supported the irrelevance of sociology in the Fascist period. The article asks some questions about the reasons for this lack of consideration and underlines elements of continuity, as far as the sociological approach is concerned, between the two phases of Pellizzi’s biography.

L’industria in epoca preindustriale? Riflessioni su “L’industrie au village” di Catherine Verna
Mathieu Harsch

The book published by French medievalist Catherine Verna L’industrie au village (2017) raises a double question: on the one hand because it uses the term industry in reference to the Middle Ages, and on the other because it associates the same term with the village, i.e. rurality, whereas medieval industry – at least for those who think it is possible to talk about industry during these times – is traditionally associated with cities rather than the countryside. In the introduction of the book, Verna conducts a historiographical review of the concept of industry, limited to only French medievalists. This paper endeavors a similar review but focused on Italian historiography, illustrating how the concept of industry appears no clearer to Italian medievalists than it does to French ones. In addition, it discusses the definition of industry proposed by Verna – in order to determine whether it is appropriate or not to talk about “industry in the pre-industrial times” – and analyzes what the author means by the expression “industry in the village”. In particular, it pays attention to the concepts of small town and industrial district developed by Verna within her case study (the Pyrenean village of Arles-sur-Tech and the Vallespir localities in the 14th and 15th centuries), i.e. two concepts that constitute valuable interpretive keys for the history of medieval and modern Italy.

Stefano Malpassi, “La «democrazia economica» americana”
Roberta Ferrari

Maria Malatesta, “Storia di un’élite”
Francesca Sofia

Isabella Lazzarini, “L’ordine delle scritture”
Luca Zenobi

Francesca Trivellato, “Ebrei e capitalismo”
Guido Bartolucci

Valentine Lomellini, “Il «lodo Moro»”
Mirco Dondi

Jean-Noël Allard, “La Cité du rire”
Maria Serena Chiodo

Ottavia Niccoli, “Muta eloquenza”
Alessandro Arcangeli

Kriston R. Rennie, “The Destruction and Recovery of Monte Cassino”
Giulia Zornetta

Levi Roach, “Forgery and Memory”
Dario Internullo

Simona Troilo, “Pietre d’Oltremare”
Serena Nicolini

F. Benigno – D. Di Bartolomeo, “Napoleone deve morire”
Gianluca Albergoni

Clemens Gartner, Walter Pohl (ed.), “After Charlemagne”
Erika Cinello