Vidor Gian Marco

ENGLISH
"This monograph is the first attempt to analyze a modern European cemetery as an objet historigraphique total. The examination of one of the earliest modern Italian cemeteries within a comparative perspective on both a national and European level presented an opportunity to demonstrate how, beyond an apparent administrative uniformity – based on certain hygienic principles – these cemeteries of the nineteenth century are polysemic and polymorphic microcosmos. They are characterized by the coexistence and complex interaction of elements of the medieval city of the dead, the funerary space as conceived by the Enlightenment and some typical aspects of nineteenth century funerary culture. The modern cemetery is a highly hierarchized space, in which the society of the living  is mirrored, and where there is a persistence of age-old, yet recurrent categories of exclusion, marginalization and separation of bodies on the strength of Canon law (unbaptized children and suicide victims) or on the strength of cultural tradition (the hangman and his family). One of the most original contributions of my work is the reconstruction on the longue durée in the history of these categories. I had also the opportunity to demonstrate how modern cemeteries resulted from a renewed balancing out between secular and religious powers, and from a complex relationship between the process of “secularization” and the persistence of a sacred dimension in and of the funerary space. This is what emerges from the history of the La Certosa cemetery of Bologna, created in 1801, some years before the famous Père-Lachaise in 1804. This first among the extra-moenia cemeteries to be visited and used by the entire urban community, La Certosa can be considered unique on both an Italian and European level. During the nineteenth century, it was more than a simple cemetery. It was conceived and managed as a sort of “museum” of contemporary funerary art, completed by some “antiquities rooms” where ancient funerary monuments were displayed in chronological order. These came mainly from urban churches and religious buildings which had been suppressed, closed or destroyed during the Napoleonic period. La Certosa was also a “village” where the land was partially cultivated and animals were bred, and where the employees lived with their families (up to 80 people) under the authority of the cemetery-keeper, with all the consequences of this cohabitation: rebellions, abuse, controversial love stories, hatred leading to murder, illicit activities, generational friction (between parents and children) and friction between working groups.  This triple dimension (cemetery – museum- village) of La Certosa entered a crisis at the end of the nineteenth century and disappeared completely after World War I, leaving only the “cemetery” function, and ultimately making this funerary space similar to many others in Western culture.


ITALIAN
Sotto una patina di apparente uniformità amministrativa incentrata su principi igienico-sanitari, le necropoli ottocentesche si presentano ancora come universi polisemici e polimorfi. Come tali, sono caratterizzate dalla compenetrazione e dall’interazione di elementi della città dei morti medievale, dello spazio funerario immaginato e progettato dal pensiero illuminista e di aspetti tipici della cultura funeraria del XIX secolo. Si tratta di uno spazio gerarchizzato, dove la società dei vivi si riflette senza automatismi e dove persistono secolari categorie di esclusione, marginalizzazione e separazione dei corpi, come ad esempio quelle dei bambini morti senza battesimo, dei suicidi, del boia e della sua famiglia. Luoghi fondamentali per la costruzione dell’identità cittadina prima, e nazionale poi, sono il risultato di una rielaborazione degli equilibri tra poteri laici e poteri religiosi e di un complesso rapporto tra secolarizzazione e ritenzione della dimensione sacrale. Questo è ciò che emerge dalla lunga storia del cimitero della Certosa di Bologna inserita in una dimensione comparativa di ampio respiro. Tra i primi cimiteri italiani extraurbani ad essere usati dall’intera comunità cittadina, quello bolognese presenta elementi tali da farne un «unicum» nel panorama italiano ed europeo. Oltre ad essere una necropoli, è concepito e gestito come una sorta di museo d’arte funeraria contemporanea, completato da apposite sale per la collocazione di tombe antiche. Allo stesso tempo, è un villaggio dove risiede, con tutte le conseguenze della convivenza, la comunità degli impiegati e delle loro famiglie, dove si coltivano orti e si allevano animali. Questa complessità verrà indebolendosi con la fine dell’Ottocento, per scomparire completamente nei decenni successivi"

In late nineteenth-century Italy, the court, and especially the court of assizes, became a new and important public space: the law began permitting an audience in order to help control the judiciary power. This article shows that the court audience, hitherto placed at the margins of both historical narratives and historiographical analysis, played a key role in emotional interactions in the modern courtroom. Drawing primarily on court reports published in newspapers, this article offers a systematic and detailed analysis of the way in which the court audience’s emotional expectations, dispositions, experiences, and practices were described and critically evaluated by the press, by the judicial and political authorities, and by legal and social scholars. Furthermore, it highlights the gender and class dynamics at play in the portrayal and perception of the audience at court hearings. Finally, it analyzes the complex relationship between the court audience itself and consumers of court news. This article demonstrates that research on law and emotions should focus not only on the primary actors in the courtroom, that is the judge, defendant, plaintiff, and witnesses, but also on those at the margins: the audience in the courtroom as well as the virtual audience of consumers of court news. In doing so, it shows that the emotional interaction in the courtroom was a two-way process: those on trial performed for their audience, but the audience’s reactions also shaped the way in which future trials played out.

As a way of »performing the law«, courtroom
speeches have been a fundamental component of
the legal ritual and a basic component of lawyers’
identities in many countries with civil law traditions:
lawyers have presented themselves and have
been culturally perceived as legal experts who
make use of emotional strategies in order to
achieve their aims in court. Within the courtroom,
emotions have been both rhetorical tools and
goals, especially in criminal trials where forensic
eloquence aimed to create an emotional environment
that was favourable to the client. In France, a
rich literature on the art of forensic rhetoric was
both the result and the basis of a (re-)construction
of a tradition that was extremely self-conscious,
self-reflective and fundamentally emotional. The
present work analyses the role of emotions in
lawyers’ courtroom performances in the French
legal culture from the beginning of the nineteenth
century to the present. Its purpose is to identify the
main themes related to the use of emotions in the
pleading that legal professionals themselves have
considered important – albeit with differing opinions
– in the past three centuries. More broadly,
this study explores reason / dispassion and emotion
in legal practice beyond their longstanding dichotomy.
Investigating the courtroom speech as a
prototypical forensic performance through the perspective
of the legal professionals themselves shows
how reason and emotion have been continually
intertwined and how legal professionals have consciously
strategized approaches to the complex
interplay between them in the judicial processes.
[p. 286–295]
lawyers, courtroom, emotions, rhetoric,
eloquence

This article discusses three major trends in research on the complex relationship between photography and various historiographical approaches to the emotional phenomena of the past, including the most recent past. The early bond between photography and the sciences of mind, which is almost as old as the nineteenth century invention of photography itself, is no doubt the “photographic topic” that has been most explored by the history of emotions.
Secondly, the field of visual studies offers innovative perspectives that
are of great significance for historians. Finally, developments in recent German historiography promise, both on the theoretical and the empirical level, to go beyond the constraints of “logo-centrism” by analyzing the relation between emotions and photography with the concept of “intermediality”.

This collected volume edited by Anne Carol and Régis Bertrand is dedicated to the famous Napoleonic funerary reform in 1804, which forbade burials inside the towns and pushed the location of graveyards outside city centers, giving birth to modern – municipally owned – cemeteries that would modify the proto-urban landscape in both Italy and France. My chapter compares the French funerary legislation that was applied to the Italian territories with the norms that were established by Italian institutions for the city of Bologna, highlighting how most of the “new” French procedures and principles were in fact not new to local authorities. A detailed analysis of local Italian practices reveals some important changes in juridical language. Whereas the early Bolognese funerary legislation of 1801 is awash with explicit references to moral values and to some sentiments like pity (pietà) and friendship (amicizia), these are totally absent in the latter Italian norms. The presence of these references seem to be linked to a specific  political strategy of the legislator, who, appealing to common understandings of morality and emotions, tried to assert the “goodness” of the reforms, rather than simply imposing them on his citizens.

In recent years, the presence and the role that historians’ own emotions play in their work has been the topic of a vivid debate amongst academics. Are the emotions felt by the historian
dangerous, something to be avoided, or could they also be a historiographical resource and an explorative tool? This interview offers a great opportunity to become acquainted with the perspective of three different generations of French scholars who have made important contributions to the historiography of dying, death and grief. They have been asked to explore the emotional dimensions of their work within both the private and professional spheres: the choice of their research topics, the feelings emerging from intellectual and physical “contact” with sources and finally, the relationship
between their intellectual knowledge and their intimate experiences of loss.

This article investigates the peculiar cultural importance of funerary epigraphy in nineteenth-century Italy. Epitaphs, considered as a main literary genre, were not only engraved on tombstones, but also published in anthologies and were the object of manuals, treatises, articles and critical reviews. These abundant discourses on funerary epigraphy offer historians a rare opportunity to gain insight into the emotional practices that developed around them, both inside and outside funerary space and time. The investigation of this literature  highlights the awareness that emotions were crucial in reinforcing the pedagogical role attributed to the epitaph in transmitting religious, moral, civic and familial values to present and future generations.

A project by the French National Research Agency (ANR) directed by prof. Anne Carol on the history of the deceased body in Southern Europe, offered me the opportunity to focus on a topic that I had encountered by chance while carrying out my research in the Italian archives, namely, post mortem photography. The ritual practice of taking photographs of dead people, especially children, is thought by scholars (as it was by me) to belong essentially to Anglo-American “Victorian” culture, and to a lesser extent to France.  No extensive study has ever been undertaken to evaluate the presence of this practice in Italy, and this topic has been left almost untouched by both social history and the history of the arts. A long and patient examination of several ethnographic and photographic collections and institutions, as well as of cemeteries, allowed me to create a consistent corpus of images, augmented by some important textual sources, of the nineteenth and twentieth century. My work is the first attempt ever made to give an overview of the spread and importance of the “last portrait” in Italian culture, as well as to establish a chronology and put forward some interpretative hypotheses about the meanings attributed to the images themselves and to their uses, both in their social and emotional dimensions.