Storica. 66 • anno XXII, 2016.

Saul e gli altri: il nuovo cinema sulla Shoah e i dibattiti della memoria
Valentina Pisanty

Taking the cue from an analysis of four Holocaust movies released between 2014 and 2015, as well as of the critical responses they elicited, this article re-examines the current debate on the interplay between cinema and Post-Memory. Despite the fact that some of these films, in particular Saul fia, offered a theoretically controversial approach to the subject of Holocaust representation, they did not raise debates comparable to those that accompanied the release of similar movies in previous decades. What does this lack of controversy indicate and to what extent can it be attributed to a change in sensibility investing the memory of the Shoah? My hypothesis is that the phenomenon known as Holocaust fatigue is but the tip of the iceberg of a deeper transformation; such a transformation involves the institutionalization of Memory, on the one hand, and a gradual acknowledgement of the master narrative’s failure to encompass the diversely traumatic experiences we are currently struggling to make sense of, on the other.

Parole chiave: Shoah; Semiotica; Post-Memoria; Cinema.

Keywords: Holocaust; Semiotics; Post-Memory; Film Studies.

Il bruco e l'arcobaleno. Nuovi paradigmi per la storia culturale e religiosa dell'alto medioevo
Luigi Canetti

The article emphasizes the need to find new epistemological categories to redefine the relationship between medieval history and religious history, a relationsip that has been in crisis for almost twenty years. After providing a broad historiographical overview and some concrete examples, the A. suggests that we need to begin anew from fields of research – such as the history of religions, ethnolinguistics, cognitive science and evolutionary biology – that have been able to express the great heuristic potential in the study of religious experience on the basis of new explicative paradigms of cultural change.

Parole chiave: Cristianizzazione; Epidemiologia; Iconimo; Santità.

Keywords: Christianization; Epidemiology; Iconymous; Sanctity.

Il lungo dopoguerra. Gli storici e le storie d'Italia
Luca Baldissara

In the first thirty years of the history of Republican Italy, historians were at the same time researchers of the past, teachers of history, and hommes de lettres. They studied the past but did not disdain political commitment to the present. They were intellectuals that reconstructed the events of the recent past and participated in the process of cultural formation of young people, combining academic diligence with political engagement. Many would devote their work of historians to understanding what it was, in the history of Italy, which gave rise to war and Fascism. In the postwar period Italian historians elaborated therefore a global reading of the history of their country to explain Fascism and the war. In the general histories of Italy published between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s it is particularly evident than the reflection on the past proceeded from its results in the present. A new reading of those histories today can contribute to the elaboration of a collective profile of Italian historians, with special reference to their public role in the long postwar period. ‘Postwar’ indicates a homogeneous historical phase, characterized by the deep transformation of Italy from a rural to an industrial and urbanized country, where politics and culture were tightly interwoven. The crisis of the late 1970s – a crisis of the idea of boundless growth, the fiscal crisis of the state, the crisis of mass political parties, the crisis of a model of relationship between politics and culture – would eventually put an end to this historiography and a specific way for historians to be «intellectual». Parole chiave: Storiografia; Storiografia del fascismo; Storia dell’Italia repubblicana; Storici italiani.

Keywords: Historiography; Historiography of

Fascism; History of Republican Italy; Italian historians.

Di nuovo la rivoluzione? Pensare il cambiamento nel XXI secolo
Daniele Di Bartolomeo

This article examines three books published in 2015, which present revolution as a still-ongoing event of global reach. All the texts describe revolution as a phenomenon involving an extended space (the Atlantic or even the entire world) and an equally wide timespan, stretching from the seventeenth century to the present. The common thread running through these studies is the belief that modern revolution is/was a global phenomenon, encompassing similar events occurring in different times and spaces, which mutually influenced each other, either directly or after years or centuries, through the circulation of texts, ideas, people, and models of action. At the close of the last century, under the blows of revisionist criticism and the ruins of the Communist dream, revolution seemed to have definitively lost its centrality in the political imagination and historical debate as an instrument for thinking and bringing about historical change. In the light of these recent publications, however, the question arises whether such a period has truly come to an end.

Parole chiave: Rivoluzione moderna; Global History; Storia comparativa; Primavera Araba.

Keywords: Modern revolution; Global History; Comparative History; Arab Spring.

Antropofagia in chiave storica: prospettive a confronto
Alessandro Pastore

Moving from the discussion of two recent books on medieval and early modern anthropophagy [A.A. Montanari, Il fiero pasto. Antropofagie mediveali, Bologna 2015; A. Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, Princeton 2011] this paper analyzes various ways to approach the study of cannibalism from a strictly European point of view, and classify the different uses (nutritional, ritual, «medical») men and women made of their eating of human flesh. The second part of the article focuses on some methodological issues arising from historical narratives and anthropological literature regarding cannibalism, including the contested nature of the evidence, the way in which sources are read, checked and crossed, the ambivalent relationship between texts and images, and the chance to go beyond the conventional chronological and geographical boundaries.

Parole chiave: Cannibalismo; Europa e Nuovo Mondo; Antropologia medica; Storia culturale e storia intellettuale.

Keywords: Cannibalism; Europe and the New World; Medical anthropology; Cultural and intellectual history.

Dal torchio alla piazza. Barbierato legge Salzberg

Economia cristiana fra rischio e incertezza. Evangelisti legge Bukała

Liberismi mediterranei Meriggi legge Isabella, Zanou