Vernacularization

Vishnudas  was the first vernacular poet in Gwalior to compose powerful narratives that had the strength to survive in subsequent transmission. But while in his Rāmāyan  he invoked Valmiki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa as a model and at points followed his version closely, in terms of actual literary form and diction Vishnudas’s Rāmāyan was also part of the word of vernacular kathās circulating orally and in manuscript form. His epic also reproduces techniques of condensation and omission that are typical of oral performance and composition. The paper also examines Vishnudas's position within the emerging Hindi literary tradition and argues that his works were poetically and linguistically linked to earlier works in Madhyadesha.

Evangelista Fossa’s vernacularization of Seneca’s Agamemnon, published at the end of the fifteenth century, was not the first translation into Italian of a Senecan tragedy. This essentially failed attempt should in fact be framed in a wider context, whose origins date back to the previous century.

This article attempts to explore the reception of Hindustani film music in Malabar, its sonic vernacularization through the Mappila songs, with an extended discussion over the camaraderie of renowned music director M.S. Baburaj and famous Mappila singer A.V. Muhammed

In spite of Montaigne’s dismissal of his schooling as a “failure,” significant features of his thought can be traced to his humanist education. Not only did he acquire literacy in French at school, he picked up a comic outlook from the plays of Terence in which he acted. Further, George Buchanan exposed the young Montaigne to reformation ideas. Later, Marc-Antoine Muret’s Julius Caesar would school Montaigne in displaying confidence in face of fortune’s vicissitudes, an attitude that he would incorporate into the “heroic” skepticism of the Essays. More generally, he adopted images, language, and postures from the stage as a way of understanding the life as a comédie humaine. Montaigne, however, preferred to award a determining influence for his adult character to the infancy he spent in a rural village.

This volume brings together contributions by specialists from a variety of disciplines discussing the epistemological history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the transmission of knowledge in the Crown of Aragon. They consider, among other things, the materiality of texts, the linguistic models employed, the persistence of ancient models of perceiving the world, up to the establishment of new ways of thinking and knowledge transfer.

CONTENTS

Sabers per als laics: vernacularització, formació, transmissió (Corona d'Aragó, 1250-1600) / Isabel Müller & Frank Savelsberg

Formació del llenguatge científic i interacció lingüística

Glossaris medicobotànics multilingües de l’edat mitjana en grafia hebrea / Gerrit Bos & Guido Mensching
La terminologia catalana aljamiada en els sifre refuʾot i la importància dels doblets i triplets lèxics / Meritxell Blasco Orellana
El paper de la terminologia catalana en el procés formatiu d’una Fachsprache medicobotànica de l’occità antic / Maria Sofia Corradini

Estratègies de divulgació del saber

«Plàcia ausir est nostre mou, lo qual havem en disputar»: el Dictat de Ramon (1299) de Ramon Llull i els seus autocomentaris / Anna Fernàndez-Clot & Francesc Tous Prieto
El paper de la dona en la transmissió de l'Art lul·liana / Maribel Ripoll Perelló
Arnau de Vilanova, traductor de la pseudo-Hildegarda de Bingen: observacions i esmenes al text de la Confessió de Barcelona / Alexander Fidora

Paradigmes del saber

Reflexió epistemològica i divulgació del saber al sermó doctrinal i al sermó literari: Vicent Ferrer i Ausiàs March / Isabel Müller
Un humanisme particular: el Liber elegantiarum com a confluència de tècniques heteròclites i de models clàssics, medievals i humanístics / Lluís B. Polanco Roig
La construcció d'un clàssic: el filtratge renaixentista d'Ausiàs March (1543-1560) / Josep Solervicens
El discurs dels orígens divins de la poesia: saber historiogràfic i teoria literària a la primera edat moderna / Cesc Esteve

Contextos i co-textos

Les miscel·lànies mèdiques medievals en català: una proposta de classificació / Lluís Cifuentes i Comamala
El Facetus «Moribus et vita», el Facet francès i el català, en el context escolar baixmedieval / Rosanna Cantavella

Traductors i copistes

Del llatí al català: el cas del Regimen sanitatis ad regem Aragonum d’Arnau de Vilanova / Antònia Carré
Les fonts no pal·ladianes a la traducció de Ferrer Saiol / Raimon Sebastian Torres

When in 1962 Habermas formulated his theory of the public sphere as “a society engaged in critical debate” he sought to describe something he felt was unique to the modern liberal democratic Western world. Yet the creation of discursive spheres where people across lines of social difference debate questions of the common good, mutual interest, and forms of equality long predates the modern era and flourished well outside the “Western” world. This essay adapts Habermas’ influential concept to highlight the emergence of a nascent public sphere at the earliest layers of Marathi literary creation in 13th century India. At this inaugural stage of a regional language’s full shift to writing, we see traces of a debate in the language of everyday life that struggled over the ethics of social difference, a public deliberation that might presage key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy today.

This chapter explores word-based nominalizations in Early Modern English, a crucial period in the expansion of the English vocabulary. Nine Romance and native suffixes are traced in eighteen registers, thus covering a wide variety of registers along the formal-informal and speech-written continua. Findings demonstrate that there is a strong correlation between informal, speech-related registers and a low frequency of nominalizations, although the communicative purpose of particular registers can also have an effect here. Suffix productivity is also addressed, with results showing that, the frequency of nominalizations in terms of types and tokens increases over time across registers, except trial proceedings. However, Romance suffixes are seen chiefly responsible for this, whereas most native suffixes lose productivity during the period.

When in 1962 Habermas formulated his theory of the public sphere as " a society engaged in critical debate " he sought to describe something he felt was unique to the modern liberal democratic Western world. Yet the creation of discursive spheres where people across lines of social difference debate questions of the common good, mutual interest, and forms of equality long predates the modern era and flourished well outside the " Western " world. This essay adapts Habermas' influential concept to highlight the emergence of a nascent public sphere at the earliest layers of Marathi literary creation in 13th century India. At this inaugural stage of a regional language's full shift to writing, we see traces of a debate in the language of everyday life that struggled over the ethics of social difference, a public deliberation that might presage key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy today.

After its ratification of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the Indian government proceeded to work through a list of laws from various fields – employment, housing, healthcare, personal status – that would need to be amended to guarantee the rights in the UNCRPD. Regarding the healthcare of persons with mental illness, the law-drafters deemed it insufficient to merely amend the existing law and proceeded to draft a new, innovative mental healthcare law. When the Mental Healthcare Act (MHA) was passed in 2017, responses were strongly polarised: On the one hand, it was lauded for staying true to the vision of the UNCRPD (Duffy & Kelly, 2019), while on the other hand, especially psychiatrists heavily criticised that they anticipated the law would adversely affect their ability to treat patients

This article builds upon the concept of vernacularization as a way to better understand the circulation and implementation of global policy assemblages. The added value of a vernacularization approach is that it combines under one analytical umbrella the separate but interdependent factors which affect policy travel and use including: (a) positionality or the social and spatial status of actors, institutions and localities, (b) processes of communication that go beyond translation to make ideas and practices understandable, resonant, and useful, (c) the resulting vernacularization of aspirations and goals, and (d) the ways in which these factors change over time as policies come to ground, are modified, and circulate once again. Each aspect of vernacularization relies deeply on meaning making and remaking, whether it be the identity of the vernacularizer herself or of the institutions and cities where she is located.

After its ratification of the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the Indian government proceeded to work through a list of laws from various fields – employment, housing, healthcare, personal status – that would need to be amended to guarantee the rights in the UNCRPD. Regarding the healthcare of persons with mental illness, the law-drafters deemed it insufficient to merely amend the existing law and proceeded to draft a new, innovative mental healthcare law. When the Mental Healthcare Act (MHA) was passed in 2017, responses were strongly polarised: On the one hand, it was lauded for staying true to the vision of the UNCRPD (Duffy & Kelly, 2019), while on the other hand, especially psychiatrists heavily criticised that they anticipated the law would adversely affect their ability to treat patients.

In Il pensiero politico medievale, Gianluca Briguglia shows the plurality of medieval political thoughts, from the 13th to the 15th century : through "post-Aristotelianism", or the development of political ecclesiologies, the prevalent interest was in building new political horizons in specific contexts.