Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica

Introduzione

2025-03-22T13:48:20+00:00

Questo volume vede la luce in un periodo di grande regressione politica e culturale. In Europa prevalgono i nazionalismi e anche in Italia si torna a parlare di difesa delle radici e di identità nazionale. Nel contempo, dalle periferie del mondo, masse sempre più consistenti di disperati cercano un’alternativa alla propria condizione fuggendo verso paesi che non sono disposti ad accoglierli. Eppure, molto del benessere economico del quale gode una minima percentuale della popolazione mondiale si deve all’immigrazione, ai movimenti di popoli che dalle periferie hanno portato con sé cultura e idee, inventiva e ingegno. Pochi però sono disposti ad ammetterlo.

Un “Medioevo eretico” alla periferia del Medioevo: il caso bizantino

2025-03-22T13:59:56+00:00

This article aims to investigate the role attributed to the idea of Byzantium in the construction of both the idea of the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies. Despite the increasingly pressing need for historical disciplines to adopt a “Mediterranean” perspective, the Mediterranean Sea (described as “Lago di Tiberiade” by Giorgio La Pira) remains, in many respects, even beyond to the scholarly debate, a wall, rigidly configuring zones of center – that is, continental Europe – and peripheries, including the East. Also – but not only – because of this peculiar position, that of Byzantium has become, according to a definition by Silvia Ronchey, a “heretical Middle Ages”, an object that defines the Middle Ages from the outside, by contrast, though not in a logic of sharp opposition: a
“periphery” that shapes the “center”. It seems nec essary, however, to supersede this approach and reflect on the multiplicity of peripheries (geographic, social, cultural, economic) that constitute the Middle Ages. Scholars are increasingly paying attention to these multiple peripheries, as they are persuaded that not in a homogeneous and linear narrative, but in small splinters juxtaposed to each other, a new contribution can be made to the concept of the Middle Ages.
Using some historiographical works (15th-20th centuries) as sources, this paper will address both the contrived and anhomogeneous construction of the Middle Ages and the posthumous elaboration of the Byzantine experience, which ended in 1453. The analysis of the positions of the international scholarly community in recent years will be followed by some questions about the future status of Byzantine and Medieval Studies, in order to initiate a potential and necessary debate.

Centro/periferia? Una messa in discussione attraverso le leggi antiebraiche nella scuola fascista

2025-03-22T14:05:10+00:00

Over the last few decades, especially in the international arena, the categories of “centre” and “periphery” have undergone a profound rethinking in many disciplines: from economics in the globalised world to geography, from anthropology to history. This process involved the spatial dimension, and above all the political one, which in turn posed the need to go beyond the narrative of a “centre” radiating a “periphery” and to define the two terms in the plural, emphasising their multidimensionality.
This essay starts off with the questions: is it possible to overcome these categories? Or are they still meaningful if rethought creatively? And how much are they actually used implicitly, often with new implications? Given an Italian historiographical context in which these categories largely persist, the article reflects on their validity drawing on a specific case study: the fascist school and the racist laws of 1938.

Geografie della memoria. La Shoah tra centri catalizzatori e periferie sommerse

2025-03-22T14:18:49+00:00

The Vernichtungslagern, real places, but “humanly and ethically impossible to conceive” as defined by Georges Didi-Huberman, have produced a centripetal force capable of conditioning and reshaping the role of any other element necessary for the creation of public discourse on the Holocaust. This essay aims to critically analyze the relationship between these sites and the human specimens found in anatomical collections used for educational purposes until a few decades ago, preserved by institutions that participated in medical experimentation on victims during the Nazi period and actively contributed to their deaths.
Conceivable as submerged sites, carriers of unexpected hybrid memories that are certainly external to the official discourse, these findings challenge the institutional narrative and alter the geographical network of Holocaust memory, fragmenting it and establishing complex and uncomfortable connections between the centres and peripheries they represent.

«Lo spazio del desiderio». Michel de Certeau e l’impossibile topografia dell’interiorità mistica

2025-03-22T16:49:34+00:00

The paper aims to make an overview of Michel de Certeau’s vision of modern mysticism. Particular attention will be given to selected passages of La fable mystique, de Certeau’s masterpiece published in 1982, where the author ponders upon the topography of the soul in Teresa of Avila’s Castillo interior. As an exemplum of 16th and 17th century mystical writings, the Teresian soul comes to represent a paradoxical “space of desire” structured as a labyrinth with uncertain boundaries: its empty centre is inhabited by an impossible otherness, which is simultaneously the subject and object of mystical desire. A quick analysis of some Certeau’s excerpts will make it possible to show the relationship between the spatial metaphor and mystical desire of a distant Lover, present as an echo, as an ephemeral image of a disappearance. In fact, the mystical enunciations give voice to a body of writing in which, as in an impossible cartography, everything is margin, periphery, and where space is offered as an infinite opening, as an unhealable wound in the order of discourse. The impossibility to determine an “inside” and an “outside” turns the mystical interiority into an estimité which is able to re-invent the spatial notions of “center” and “periphery”.

Disseminare il centro: artefatti otomì tra esposizione e disgregazione

2025-03-22T16:38:18+00:00

The Otomi of the Sierra Madre Orientale organize their ritual actions around the construction of ceremonial deposits (also named offerings) set up in oratories, private or communal, or in the landscape itself. Such deposits represent the core of the ritual act: the nerve centre in which the gesture turns into effective action on the world. A plural, mobile centre scattered in space and in a long
temporality. This article aims to rethink the logic expressed by the centre/periphery pair by highlighting its inadequacy in accounting for indigenous notions of spatiality and temporality. Beginning with the Otomi case and the native conception of artefacts as living beings, it then analyses the processes of constituting ethnographic collections: a movement that proceeds from the source communities toward the museum as the central, and authoritative, institution of staging Otherness.

Centri e periferie. Spazi (e) immaginari politici nell’altipiano guatemalteco

2025-03-22T16:55:45+00:00

This article examines the interactions and transformations of indigenous political spaces in the Guatemalan highlands. With the end of the internal armed conflict (1996), the emergence – and dispersion – of the Maya Movement, confronting the neoliberal turn of the new millennium, poses new challenges to familiar forms of state spatialization. The ambiguous decentralization processes are articulated with endogenous processes and global phenomena, paving the way for unpredictable and locally differentiated dynamics. These dynamics reveal how communities acquire a new “centrality” in constructing Guatemalan society and state, rooted locally but projected nationally and globally.

La protezione spagnola su Ferrara estense: un tentativo (seconda metà del XVI secolo)

2025-03-22T17:00:16+00:00

The talks for the Spanish protection upon the Este dukedom (1570-72) were one of the most important negotiations of the Este diplomacy in the Seventies of the 16th century. Although failed, due especially to the hubris and opportunistic temporizing of duke Alphonse II of Este and the well-known prudence of Philip II, these negotiations are an interesting subject of study, because they show the main characteristics of the Este diplomacy in Spain between the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) and the devolution of the capital Ferrara to the Papacy (1598).

La popolazione romana dopo il 20 settembre (1870-81)

2025-03-22T17:05:38+00:00

The article examines the Roman population during the first decade following the entry of the Italians in Rome in 1870. While historiography has explored various aspects of Rome’s nineteenth-century history, the perspectives of the population concerning the transformations following the breach of Porta Pia have not yet been fully clarified. Documentary sources, however, suggest a more nuanced scenario than the simple dichotomy between the nostalgics of the papal Rome and the supporters of the Italian state. This essay aims to provide a new interpretive framework for understanding this unique moment of suspension and
transition by analyzing the behaviors and viewpoints of the Roman population, with particular attention to the lower classes.

«Missionarie di fede». Il Movimento italiano femminile in provincia: struttura e attività (1946-56)

2025-03-22T17:11:56+00:00

The article aims to analyse the peripheral reality of the Movimento Italiano Femminile (Italian Female Movement – MIF). The MIF was a prominent neofascist organisation in Italy, founded by Princess Maria Elena De Seta Pignatelli in the aftermath of World War II. On the one hand, the women of the MIF (the so-called “Miffine”) aided the Italian fascists on the run and the ones detained until the early 1950s. At the same time, the movement was a forerunner of the political party Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement – MSI). With this in mind, the article takes a bottom-up approach and provides an overview of the organisation and activities of the MIF at a local level: the movement e established a nationwide network with sections, regional committees and a national assembly. To legitimise its presence, the organisation recruited high-ranking aristocratic women to serve as figureheads, while the real driving force came from ordinary women: Fascist believers, wives of local hierarchs, and former leaders of provincial female organisations such as Fasci Femminili. Through its charitable activities, the MIF became a focal point for former fascists and their families. Moreover, the movement provided a link between the emerging neo-fascist network and the community of fascist criminals detained in Italian prisons until the early 1950s.