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In the small town of Assisi in Italy, there is a chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalen. This well known figure from the New Testament Gospels is an anomaly. To many she is the prostitute turned disciple: to others she is a key witness to the resurrection. The frescoes show this Magdalen, but they also show her in strange scenes not found in the Bible. The Gospels tell us that Mary Magdalen was with Jesus in his ministry, at the crucifixion and at the resurrection. Early church fathers picked up on this and linked her with other unnamed women in the Gospels to develop an ideal model of discipleship. From there, legends developed this conflated Magdalen into the embodiment of chastity, penitence and devotion. As such, she became the focus of one of the greatest cult followings of the Middle Ages and her relics where at the heart of the fourth most visited pilgrimage site in Christendom. In the thirteenth century, a young man, Francis of Assisi helped to revolutionise and revive the life of the Church by his personal example of poverty, benevolence and pure devotion; virtues embodied by the Magdalen. It is then understandable that a chapel dedicated to her should be found in the basilica built to honour Francis. However, the reasons behind the chapel's existence and location also have a great deal to do with the power and influence of the secular (Angevin) and religious establishment of the time as well as the controversies burgeoning within the Franciscan Order including the roles of second order women and the influence of the two factions of Franciscanism, Spirituals and Conventuals. Finally, it must not be forgotten that the Magdalen chapel, a means of theological and political dogma, was also a very tangible and real visual sermon to the masses of pilgrims who flocked to visit the shrine of Francis. This project is an attempt to uncover the identity of the woman in and the meaning of the Magdalen Chapel in the Lower Church of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi.

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This thesis studies the reception of Aristotle's political thought in sixteenth-century Italy. It focuses on Aristotle's discussion of the dissolution of constitutions in Book 5 of the Politics and aims to show how Aristotle's political thought remained central to late Renaissance political discourse. No comprehensive study of the topic exists. Modern historiography on Renaissance political thought generally downplays the importance of Aristotle in the history of sixteenth-century Italian political thought and emphasises the Roman tradition over the Greek. This research aims to fill the gap in modern scholarship and revise modern interpretation of Renaissance political theory. This thesis is essentially divided into three parts, each part containing two chapters. Part I is largely introductory. Chapter 1 offers a historiographical review of modern scholarship on the reception of Aristotle in the Renaissance and early-modern political thought. Chapter 2 explores the revival of Greek studies in the fifteenth century and the changing perception of Aristotle's Politics in the Renaissance. Part II focuses on Aristotle and Machiavelli. Chapter 3 examines the similarities between Aristotle's analysis of the means of preserving tyranny and Machiavelli's discussion of how to mantenere lo stato in The Prince. Chapter 4 explores the effects that these similarities between Aristotle and Machiavelli had on the reception of Aristotle in Renaissance political thought. Part III centres on Aristotle in the republican and vernacular traditions. Chapter 5 explains the importance of Aristotle's discussion of the dissolution of constitutions to Renaissance republican political thought. Chapter 6 underlines the continuous relevance of Aristotle's Politics in the second half of the sixteenth century. The conclusion sums up the central argument of each chapter and invites us to explore the influence of Aristotle on reason of state literature.

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This thesis examines labour migration as an outcome of the interaction between the state and the informal economy, by considering the trends of contemporary labour migration from Ukraine to Southern Europe. It contends that in both the sending and receiving countries, migration policies either disregard or severely limit labour migration, while their informal economies facilitate the development of migration. This basic contradiction sustains migration flows over time. The main argument of the thesis is that migration develops within the system of interacting informal economies. I demonstrate the embeddedness of migration in the informal economy by using the case of Ukrainian migration to Italy. / The role of the informal economy in the development of migration is examined across several dimensions. First, I argue that the recent labour migration from Ukraine emerged as a strategy of the informal economy, continuing the previous strategies of cross-border trading and short-term migration to Central Europe. These economic practices were the innovative responses of the population to the decline of the state economy and to the absence of economic reforms. Migration developed in the space between the state and the market economy. / Second, the flows of labour migration were 'invisible' to states, and developed outside state control and regulation. This thesis demonstrates that the migration policies of the Ukrainian state disregarded the process of out-migration of Ukrainian citizens. Similarly, Italian immigration policies did not recognise the existing flows of labour migration. The informal economy of the receiving state resolved the contradiction between the economic demand for migrant workers and restrictive migration policies and enabled access to the receiving economy. / However, access to the receiving labour market through the informal economy contributed to the disadvantaged incorporation of migrants and prevented their integration into the receiving society. The analysis of economic incorporation demonstrates that the informal economy channelled Ukrainian migrants to the secondary labour market with low earnings, a lack of benefits, and no possibility of professional advancement. The mode of access to the receiving economy and the resulting illegality heavily influenced the position of Ukrainian migrants in the labour market. / Finally, the analysis of Ukrainian labour migration to Italy demonstrates that alternative migration-facilitating institutions were developed in the absence of the state recognition of labour migration. These institutions paralleled the institutions of the official labour markets and allowed migrants to implement income-generating projects. In addition, migration was facilitated by the supporting institutions of the receiving society, which counteracted the restrictive immigration laws and political controls on migration. The migration-supporting institutions were predicated on the strategies of circumventing state control which developed from participation in the informal economy of the sending country. Labour migration from the former Soviet Union would not be possible without these informal practices and the culture of avoiding state control in economic activities. / The proposed analysis answers the challenge posed by the recent Ukrainian labour migration to conventional theories on migration, whose approaches usually omit references to the meso-level of migration processes, and consider either the structural-economic or the micro- determinants of migration. This thesis presents the informal economy both as a structural factor which enables migration and as a characteristic of the migrant agency that facilitates it. / By doing that, the thesis also complements the literature on migration to Southern Europe and argues that migrations are not simply encouraged by the informal economies of the receiving countries, but they emerge from, and are facilitated by, the informal economies of the sending countries. To perpetuate migration migrants creatively use the resources of the informal economy in conjunction with strategies of circumventing the state. This argument holds for a number of ex-Soviet countries, which suffered severe economic crises during the disintegration of the state-controlled socialist economies, and consequently produced significant labour migrations to Western Europe.

Questa dissertazione e imperniata sulla parola masca, che denota un personaggio popolare e antichissimo di genere femminile, riscontrabile esclusivamente nel folclore e nella letterature della regione italiana del Piemonte. Si attribuisce a questo personaggio la facolta rarissima di esercitare tanto il bene che il mate, a seconda de¡ casi. / La tesi si basa su ricerche storiche e linguistiche che traggono i loro dati dai recessi piu remoti della civilta celtica in territorio piemontese, dove essa e prosperata dall'inizio del 4° secolo a.C. fino al 1° secolo della nostra era, epoca alta quale questa regione fu inglobata dall'impero romano. / Basandosi su dati storici e archeologici, la ricerca prende atto di un substrato celtico persistente e profondo nella cultura e nella tradizione piu antiche del Piemonte. In modo particolare si concentra l'attenzione sulla derivazione dei personaggio della masca da una figura religiosa dei Druidi, venerata fervidamente dai Celti, i quali attribuivano a questa divinita il dualismo tipico (bene-male) che si riscontra nel personaggio oggetto di questo studio. / In seguito si traccia il discrimine tra la masca e le streghe demoniache con cui la prima e spesso e del tutto erroneamente confusa ed associata. Una volta tracciata questa distinzione si possono riallacciare i legami tra la masca e il suo sacrale pristino ove ('equilibrio sotteso tra bene e mate e permanente e inestricabile dagli attributi fondamentali della dea celtica centrale, la Grande Madre. / Le ricerche etimologiche per appurare l'origine della parola masca non fanno che confermare la dualita e l'equilibrio tra il bene e il mate inevitabilmente compresente in questa parola e nel personaggio ch'essa denota. / Si passa in rassegna la tradizione orale e la letteratura del Piemonte (tanto in lingua piemontese che in lingua italiana) per, inventariare i diversi significati che possono assumere questa parola e questo personaggio. Si perviene a dimostrare che la dicotomia di valori e di poteri contrastanti insiti nella religione dei druidi rimane ad un dipresso la stessa nel personaggio delta masca. Ci si puo imbattere in questo dualismo di valori opposti e antitetici anche in altri personaggi del folclore piemontese, strettamente connessi alta masca, quali il mascon, i1 setmin o anche in personaggi mitologici, come la faja, il faunet e il servan. / La somma di queste prove letterarie, folcloriche, archeologiche e filologiche avalla l'attribuzione di un carattere unico, non demoniaco, al personaggio della masca, che riannoda strettamente la letteratura e la tradizione orale del Piemonte alta religione dei druidi e al passato celtico, fornendo altresi scorci preziosi su uno dei capitoli piu oscuri del passato delle etnie europee.