Anita Traninger – författare

Erasmus of Rotterdam took meticulous care of his image, both in his writings and in fashionable means of self-expression, which included numerous portraits, a medal and a personal device. Nevertheless, he remains an elusive figure. In an effort to shed new light on his style, key concepts and popularity, this book takes four words as starting points for essays about some of Erasmus’ most distinctive ideas: lucubratio, festivitas, persona, and copia. They all capture convictions, projects and practices that inform and characterise his works. In the sense proposed by Raymond Williams, they are keywords that encapsulate intellectual and social change beyond pure ideas, thus keys to the dynamic Latin humanist literature of the early sixteenth century in general.

Der zweisprachige, deutsch-italienische Band geht der Frage nach, inwiefern Rezensionen in Zeitschriften zwischen 1700 und 1850 zu einem Begriff der ‚Weltliteratur‘ beitrugen, wobei ‚Weltliteratur‘ als Diskursanker rekonstruiert wird, der von Beginn an durchaus widersprüchlich eingesetzt und verstanden wurde. Bisher ausgeblendet geblieben ist die Frage nach den kommunikativen Bedingungen, die einer transnationalen Verständigung über Literatur zugrundelagen. Die Beiträge kehren zu den fundierenden Konstellationen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts zurück, um einen Aspekt in den Blick zu nehmen, der bisher erstaunlich vernachlässigt wurde: jenen der medialen Voraussetzungen des Weltliteratur-Diskurses. Dies ist umso erstaunlicher, als Goethe den Begriff der ‚Weltliteratur‘ nicht von ungefähr mit Blick auf die neuen Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten prägte, die das schnellste Massenmedium seiner Zeit, die periodische Presse, bereithielt. Mit Blick auf eine breite Palette von europäischen Zeitschriften wird die Rezension in ihrer kommunikationssteuernden Bedeutung für die frühe Aushandlung von ‚Weltliteratur‘ sichtbar gemacht. Die Beiträge des Bandes zeigen, wie Rezensionen die frühe internationale Debatte allererst ermöglichten und nachhaltig prägten.

Do heads excite a desire to chop them off; a desire to decapitate and take a human life, as anthropologists have suggested? The contributors to this book are fascinated by ‘disembodied heads’, which are pursued in their many medieval and early modern disguises and representations, including the metaphorical. They challenge the question why in medieval and early modern cultures the head was usually considered the most important part of the body, a primacy only contested by the heart for religious reasons. Carefully mapping beliefs, mythologies and traditions concerning the head, the result is an attempt to establish a ‘cultural anatomy’ of the head, which is relevant for cultural historians, art historians and students of the philosophy, art and sciences of the premodern period. Contributors include Barbara Baert, Esther Cohen, Mateusz Kapustka, Arjan R. de Koomen, Robert Mills, Marina Montesano, Scott B. Montgomery, Catrien Santing, Jetze Touber, and Bert Watteeuw.

This volume exposes the contested history of a virtue so central to modern disciplines and public discourse that it can seem universal. The essays gathered here, however, demonstrate the emergence of impartiality. From the early seventeenth century, the new epithet ‘impartial’ appears prominently in a wide range of publications. Contributors trace impartiality in various fields: from news publications and polemical pamphlets to moral philosophy and historical dictionaries, from poetry and drama to natural history, in a broad European context and against the backdrop of religious and civil conflicts. Cumulatively, the volume suggests that the emergence of impartiality is implicated in the period’s epochal shifts in epistemology and science, religious and political discourse, print culture, and scholarship.Contributors include: Jörg Jochen Berns, Tamás Demeter, Derek Dunne, Anne Eusterschulte, Christine Gerrard, Rainer Godel, N.J.S. Hardy, Rhodri Lewis, Hanns-Peter Neumann, Joad Raymond, Bernd Roling, Bastian Ronge, Richard Scholar, Nathaniel Stogdill, Anita Traninger, and Anja Zimmermann.