Han Lamers - Böcker

The year is 1932. In Rome, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini unveils a giant obelisk of white marble, bearing the Latin inscription MVSSOLINI DVX. Invisible to the cheering crowds, a metal box lies immured in the obelisk’s base. It contains a few gold coins and, written on a piece of parchment, a Latin text: the Codex fori Mussolini. What does this text say? Why was it buried there? And why was it written in Latin?The Codex, composed by the classical scholar Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci (1867-1960), presents a carefully constructed account of the rise of Italian Fascism and its leader, Benito Mussolini. Though written in the language of Roman antiquity, the Codex was supposed to reach audiences in the distant future. Placed under the obelisk with future excavation and rediscovery in mind, the Latin text was an attempt at directing the future reception of Italian Fascism. This book renders the Codex accessible to scholars and students of different disciplines, offering a thorough and wide-ranging introduction, a clear translation, and a commentary elucidating the text’s rhetorical strategies, historical background, and specifics of phrasing and reference. As the first detailed study of a Fascist Latin text, it also throws new light on the important role of the Latin language in Italian Fascist culture.

The year is 1932. In Rome, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini unveils a giant obelisk of white marble, bearing the Latin inscription MVSSOLINI DVX. Invisible to the cheering crowds, a metal box lies immured in the obelisk’s base. It contains a few gold coins and, written on a piece of parchment, a Latin text: the Codex fori Mussolini. What does this text say? Why was it buried there? And why was it written in Latin?The Codex, composed by the classical scholar Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci (1867-1960), presents a carefully constructed account of the rise of Italian Fascism and its leader, Benito Mussolini. Though written in the language of Roman antiquity, the Codex was supposed to reach audiences in the distant future. Placed under the obelisk with future excavation and rediscovery in mind, the Latin text was an attempt at directing the future reception of Italian Fascism. This book renders the Codex accessible to scholars and students of different disciplines, offering a thorough and wide-ranging introduction, a clear translation, and a commentary elucidating the text’s rhetorical strategies, historical background, and specifics of phrasing and reference. As the first detailed study of a Fascist Latin text, it also throws new light on the important role of the Latin language in Italian Fascist culture.

Greece Reinvented discusses the transformation of Byzantine Hellenism as the cultural elite of Byzantium, displaced to Italy, constructed it. It explores why and how Byzantine migrants such as Cardinal Bessarion, Ianus Lascaris, and Giovanni Gemisto adopted Greek personas to replace traditional Byzantine claims to the heirship of ancient Rome. In Greece Reinvented, Han Lamers shows that being Greek in the diaspora was both blessing and burden, and explores how these migrants’ newfound ‘Greekness’ enabled them to create distinctive positions for themselves while promoting group cohesion. These Greek personas reflected Latin understandings of who the Greeks ‘really’ were but sometimes also undermined Western paradigms. Greece Reinvented reveals some of the cultural tensions that bubble under the surface of the much-studied transmission of Greek learning from Byzantium to Italy.

This volume, edited by Natasha Constantinidou and Han Lamers, investigates modes of receiving and responding to Greeks, Greece, and Greek in early modern Europe (15th-17th centuries). The book's seventeen detailed studies illuminate the reception of Greek culture (the classical, Byzantine, and even post-Byzantine traditions), the Greek language (ancient, vernacular, and 'humanist'), as well as the people claiming, or being assigned, Greek identities during this period in different geographical and cultural contexts.Discussing subjects as diverse as, for example, Greek studies and the Reformation, artistic interchange between Greek East and Latin West, networks of communication in the Greek diaspora, and the ramifications of Greek antiquarianism, the book aims at encouraging a more concerted debate about the role of Hellenism in early modern Europe that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, and opening ways towards a more over-arching understanding of this multifaceted cultural phenomenon.Contributors: Aslıhan Akışık-Karakullukçu, Michele Bacci, Malika Bastin-Hammou, Peter Bell, Michail Chatzidakis, Federica Ciccolella, Calliope Dourou, Anthony Ellis, Niccolò Fattori, Maria Luisa Napolitano, Janika Päll, Luigi-Alberto Sanchi, Niketas Siniossoglou, William Stenhouse, Paola Tomè, Raf Van Rooy, and Stefan Weise.

The Latin Poems of Manilius Cabacius Rallus of Sparta presents the poetic oeuvre of a forgotten poet of Renaissance Rome. A Greek by birth, Manilius Cabacius Rallus (c. 1447–c. 1523) spent most of his life far from his motherland, unable to return. Through his poems, composed in a range of metres and genres, Rallus engaged with some major events and personalities of his time, including Angelo Poliziano, Ianus Lascaris, and Pope Leo X. His poems also reflect on timeless human experiences such as helplessness in the face of fortune and nostalgia for what is lost. Han Lamers edited the Latin text of Rallus’ poems (most of them printed for the last time in 1520) and added annotations and an English prose translation.