This study is concerned with filling the gap that exists in our understanding of Venetian diplomacy. Historical works on Renaissance diplomacy have tended to be general, and the experience of Venice in the fifteenth century has been largely overlooked (partly because of the lack of extant diplomatic material). Yet this period is of key importance in the history of diplomacy; it was during the mid-fifteenth century that Italian states first used resident ambassadors, something which became accepted practice in sixteenth century Europe. My approach has been to carry out a prosopographical analysis of every patrician who was appointed by Venice as an ambassador between 1454 and 1494. This has allowed investigation into their economic standing, family connections, intellectual interests, and political importance. Such a socio-political approach not only tells us much about diplomatic practices, but also casts light on the development of elite groups in Venice. The first chapter of the study is introductory, explaining the chronological context of the study and outlining the debate over residency and the use of prosopography. Chapter two discusses elites, describes the personnel who manned Venetian missions, and explains the pattern of Venetian representation. Chapter three compares the theory and the reality of Venetian diplomatic practices. Chapters four and five focus more closely on the prosopography and consider the importance of family connections for ambassadors, their humanist interests, their political standing. The final chapter looks at the development of resident and permanent diplomacy in Venice. I argue that Venetian ambassadors were drawn from the highest echelons of Venetian society and that their elevated status affected the nature of Venetian diplomacy. The type of men appointed by the Republic meant that Venice lagged behind many of its neighbours (especially the Princely states) in the use of resident ambassadors. This was primarily due to the nature of the Republic itself; Venice did not encourage long absences abroad or diplomatic specialisation. The Venetian experience shows that the speed at which Italian states responded to changes in diplomacy varied considerably and was closely related to their own cultural and political values.

This dissertation aims to study the reception of the Latin poet Horace in the Italian Renaissance, taking into consideration works composed in several different genres both in Latin and Italian vernacular between 1498 and 1600. This thesis follows five main pathways of investigation: 1) to study the Renaissance biographies of the poet; 2) to analyse several exegetical works both in Horace’s single texts and his whole corpus; 3) to study the Italian translations written both in prose and verse which were made during the Cinquecento; 4) to study in depth those who imitated Horace in their lyrical and satirical poems composed in Italian; and 5) to examine those Neo-Latin poetical works (mainly pertaining to the lyrical and satirical genres). This dissertation points out that the numerous and various forms of Horatian reception help to evaluate the real flourishing of sixteenth-century interest in the Latin poet, interest that reflects the fact that Horace was part of the new Renaissance canon of classical authorities. Within the sixteenth-century conflict of cultures, Horace appears as one of the main protagonists of the critical and literary scenes, as is shown by the attention that his works received from the point of view of editions, commentaries, and translations respectively, as well as by the fact that his texts were placed at the centre of several literary imitative practices, his example being able to offer the Renaissance one important basis upon which to found part of its new culture. Indeed, Horace allowed the emergence of an ethical strain to the Renaissance lyric, as well as contributing to the provision of rules for sixteenth-century literary criticism.

This thesis explores the last decades of legal paganism in the Roman Empire of the second half of the fourth century CE through the eyes of Symmachus, orator, senator and one of the most prominent of the pagans of this period living in Rome. It is a religious biography of Symmachus himself, but it also considers him as a representative of the group of aristocratic pagans who still adhered to the traditional cults of Rome at a time when the influence of Christianity was becoming ever stronger, the court was firmly Christian and the aristocracy was converting in increasingly greater numbers. Symmachus, though long known as a representative of this group, has only very recently been investigated thoroughly. Traditionally he was regarded as a follower of the ancient cults only for show rather than because of genuine religious beliefs. I challenge this view and attempt in the thesis to establish what were his religious feelings. Symmachus has left us a tremendous primary resource of over nine hundred of his personal and official letters, most of which have never been translated into English. These letters are the core material for my work. I have translated into English some of his letters for the first time. The thesis is organised in the main thematically, looking at Symmachus’ religious language, pagan religious ritual, the changing religious topography of Rome itself – and the clash with the Christian establishment specifically with Bishop Ambrose of Milan over the Altar of Victory Affair. The last chapter, although still thematic, looks at Late Antique Paganism through a series of personal events in Symmachus’ life; but is also chronological in the sense that it covers the last seventeen years of it. There are six appendixes, tables and illustrations.

The purpose of this study is to examine the birth of a translation industry in Italy during the fascist regime, and describe how, despite the fact that translations became the focal point for questions of cultural and political prestige, the regime took very little action to hinder their influx until the last few years before its collapse. Chapter One sets the historical background of this study with a brief examination of how the regime was put in place, the system of censorship that was applied, the regime's attempts to cultivate a fascist culture, and the developments that took place within the publishing industry. Chapter Two presents a detailed statistical view of the translation industry in Italy and compares it to other countries, particularly France and Germany. It is important when considering the debate surrounding translation and the political value that translations were to acquire to be able to have a sense of the empirical reality that the rhetoric and bluster often disguised. Chapter Three describes the birth of translation as industry and the campaign against translations that this sudden flourish in translation provoked. This chapter also looks at the relatively flexible censorship policies that were adopted towards translations. Chapter Four describes the second campaign against translations which took place after the Ethiopian war and in a political climate that was increasingly xenophobic. It also looks at how the regime made its first moves to hinder the publication of translation and the ways in which publishers attempted to resist these measures. Chapter Five looks at the final years of the regime, when anti-Semitic legislation was put in force and as a consequence books underwent a thorough "revision". It looks at how the translation question became a matter of national prestige and how the publishers were obliged to collaborate in applying a quota that would limit their number.

This thesis investigates how health officials sought to preserve or recover good health during plague epidemics in Mantua, from 1463-1577. Scholarship on health boards in Italy has focused primarily on larger cities such as Milan, Florence and Venice, while many smaller cities and states which formed part of the wider network of interdependent health offices have yet to receive significant attention. This study attempts to address this imbalance by focussing on Mantua, a hitherto neglected area in the heart of northern Italy. Historians have shown by the sixteenth century health offices had wide-ranging responsibilities, yet their most important function remained tackling plague outbreaks through measures including trade and travel bans, quarantine periods and lazaretti. An analysis of the Mantuan health office’s actions and reactions reveal that it does not fit neatly with the health board model historians have established elsewhere in northern and central Italy. I will argue that while the hallmarks of the ‘Italian system’ of public health procedures are evident, closer examination of their organisation and composition reveals that they were shaped by the incidence and severity of outbreaks. Above all, however, they were dependent upon and defined by the evolving state apparatus and by participation of the wider community, both lay and ecclesiastic. Contrary to the view that permanent Italian health offices enforced plague regulations uniformly, there was a degree of flexibility in application within the structures created to fight plague. Further, it will be argued that by examining in detail symbolic acts, such as processions, in conjunction with practical methods we see with greater clarity how civic and ecclesiastical authorities worked together in the attempt to restore the city to good health. By exploring the dialogues between civic authorities, the people they governed and interactions between specific health agencies across the peninsula, this thesis contributes to the understanding of the Gonzagan state-building process and concepts of public health in Renaissance Italy.

The thesis explores how far enclosure was pivotal in shaping the female Franciscan spirituality in thirteenth-century Umbria as cloistered and contemplative. It focuses on how enclosure influenced the development of representations of female urban sainthood, with particular reference to three Umbrian saints; Clare of Assisi, Clare of Montefalco and Angela of Foligno. The issue of enclosure came to the fore because of the success of the Franciscan movement in promoting the apostolic life, which emphasised the itinerant life, evangelisation and participation within the urban community. However, women who aspired to follow these values were instead directed towards introspective, contemplative seclusion. The claustration of Clare of Assisi exemplified this type of response. Using a combination of a wide range of sources, the nature of enclosure and the processes by which claustration was consistently articulated and promoted are reconstructed. My research reveals that the creation of the cloistered ideal was a negotiated process. The first, chapter, Challenging the stabilitas loci, examines the significance of hagiographic sources, in the form of vitae and canonisation proceedings, in revealing the nature of enclosure for religious women, and, by utilising a wide number of saintly examples, shows how often enclosure was in reality broken by women. The following two chapters concentrate on the construction of male textual authority and the importance they placed on the seclusion for religious women. Chapter 2, The regularisation of chastity: between doctrine practice, examines the theological arguments that were put forward in the development of monastic rules for women and how they reflected a trend that assumed that professed religious women ought to remain within the cloister. In doing so, the regularisation of the cloister emphasised the preservation of the chastity of nuns, through their affiliation to established orders, their supervision and material provision.

This thesis examines representations of Roman female suicide in a variety of genres and periods from the history and poetry of the Augustan age (especially Livy, Ovid, Horace, Propertius and Vergil), through the drama and history of the early Principate (particularly Seneca and Tacitus), to some of the Church fathers (Tertullian, Jerome and Augustine) and martyr acts of Late Antiquity. The thesis explores how the highly ambiguous and provocative act of female suicide was developed, adapted and reformulated in historical, poetic, dramatic and political narratives. The writers of antiquity continually appropriated this controversial motif in order to comment on and evoke debates about issues relating to the moral, social and political concerns of their day: the ethics of a voluntary death, attitudes towards female sexuality, the uses and abuses of power, and traditionally expected female behaviour. In different literary contexts, and in different periods of Roman history, writers and thinkers engaged in this same intellectual exercise by utilising the suicidal female figure in their works.

The thesis sets out to examine the little studied phenomenon of translating and rewriting children’s literature during Fascism. Under Mussolini’s rule, books for children had to perform the important task of forging the ‘new Italians’. For this reason, the presence of foreign literature on the Italian book market became increasingly problematic, as the regime attempted to achieve cultural and economic autarchy. This research aims to show how, rather than merely reflecting dominant ideologies, the translation of books for children was a site for negotiation, allowing different, and sometimes conflicting narratives and discourses to be identified and fruitfully examined. By adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, where theories from Translation Studies, Children’s Literature, and studies on Fascism, are integrated, translations and rewritings of books for children are employed as hermeneutic tools to explore the multifaceted nature of the regime’s ideology and cultural production, beyond the official façade of unity and consistency. Central questions concerning the construction and defense of Fascist identity are addressed through a selection of case studies, showing different strategies and functions of translating and rewriting for children. The Fascist rewritings of Collodi’s Pinocchio are analysed in relation to Fascism’s relationship with tradition, focusing on the ways in which the past was ‘rewritten’ at different phases of the dictatorship. The challenges of translating a book that had been openly condemned by Fascist institutions are examined by looking at the two translations of Alice in Wonderland which appeared during the 1930s. The complex reception and the controversial success of American comics is investigated, where the different strategies of translation and re-creation reveal complex dynamics of interactions between imported and native products. Finally, the process of rewriting an apparently timeless and universal tradition is observed in the book series ‘La Scala d’Oro’, which was highly regarded by official culture, despite publishing mostly foreign titles.

This thesis asks how stereotypical images of a foreign country are reinforced or contested through translation in the context of the contemporary consumer book market. Taking Italy and the British publishing market as its focus, it sets out to examine the translation process for one popular genre of Italian fiction and two Italian bestsellers published in Britain after 2000. Gomorra by Roberto Saviano (2006) and Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire by Melissa P. (2003) and the so-called ‘new Italian crime fiction’, are three recent Italian publishing phenomena that have been selected for translation into English. Once translated and distributed in the British market, they attracted significant commercial and critical attention in the literary field. How important was the association with stereotypical images of Italy in determining the success of these texts in Britain, a market that is famously resistant to translation? How was the idea of Italy re-negotiated and re-imagined throughout the translation process? In order to provide an answer to the above questions, both the translation and the paratranslation of the Italian texts are investigated. The translation of new Italian crime fiction is examined with a focus on the Italian and the British history of the genre and on its paratranslation. The fascinating implications of the new branding of the author Roberto Saviano, which emerged in the British literary field when Gomorra was translated into English, are explored in the context of both translation and paratranslation. Finally, in analysing the translation of Cento colpi I have focused on the work of the translator, Lawrence Venuti, and particularly on the implicationsthat his ideology of translation has on the idea of Italy and on that of “cultural difference” as they emerge from the target text. This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, in which theoretical understandings from Translation Studies, Italian Studies, studies of the contemporary book market and media culture are integrated. It uses translation as a method to look into the workings of the contemporary book market and, more generally, to shed light on contemporary representations of Italy that circulate in the large mass mediated textual space through the mirror of translation.

This study is about discourses of bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, and what they reveal about language, identity, hegemony and the production of social space. The theoretical and methodological framework I use is Nexus Analysis and Geosemiotics: approaches developed by Scollon and Wong Scollon (2004 and 2003, respectively). These approaches have revealed how and why place names, their public placement, Fascist-era monuments and bilingual education maintained a constant presence, under broader discourses on bilingualism, during the research period. Nexus Analysis focuses on social action and Geosemiotics pays meticulous attention to fundamental aspects of signs, including where they are in the material world, and how social actors interact with them. This has led to an investigation of the historical past, and how this is represented, understood and indexed in the present by those who align (or not) to ideologies of language and nation. In the complex multilingual context of this study, this approach has revealed how such ideologies are mobilized to contest ownership of geographic place and to make social space. I have traced discourses across disparate discursive genres, to reveal the complex interrelationships between language and other social semiotic data in discourses on bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen through time, and across space.