La thèse comporte deux parties : I - Le commentaire sur le traité italien de danse de la Renaissance Il ballarino de Fabritio Caroso. Il est suivi d'un apparat critique. II - La traduction en langue française de l'ouvrage et la transcription musicale en édition moderne des quatre-vingt une tablatures de luth jointes aux chorégraphies. Le commentaire indique les sources françaises de l’œuvre ainsi que quelques sources en Europe, puis examine les deux parties du traité de danse. La première partie intitulée Primo trattato donne les règles expliquant les pas. La deuxième partie, intitulée Secondo trattato contient les poésies, les chorégraphies et la musique des danses en tablature italienne de luth. La dédicataire principale du livre, Bianca Cappello, ainsi que les autres dédicataires des chorégraphies, est présentée en relation avec le mécénat féminin. La vie de Caroso a été l'objet de recherches sur la place de la danse dans les cours italiennes de la Renaissance et sur le statut du maître à danser. Le commentaire retranscrit les documents historiques italiens concernant la vie du maître à danser. La thèse situe Caroso dans l'histoire plus large de la danse noble depuis le Moyen Âge et étudie ensuite les trois éléments constitutifs du traité : poésie, musique, chorégraphie. Une comparaison est établie entre les deux traités de danse de Caroso : Il ballarino (1581) et Nobiltà di dame (1600), écrit presque vingt ans plus tard. Les critères de traduction et de transcription musicale sont ensuite expliqués. Les Annexes comportent des documents d'Archives italiennes, des documents musicaux et iconographiques. III - La traduction du Ballarino se présente dans l'ordre établi par Caroso et accompagnée des gravures originales. / There are two parts to the thesis : I - The commentary on the Italian treatise of Renaissance Court dances on Renaissance Il ballerino of Fabritio Caroso. It is followed by critical notes. II - The translation of the work into French and the musical transcription into modern edition of the eighty one lute tablatures linked to the choreographies. The commentary indicates the primary French sources of the work and some other European sources, then examines the two parts of the treatise. The first one, entitled Primo trattato, gives the rules with the explanation of the steps. The second one, entitled Secondo trattato, contains the poetry, the choreographies and the lute music of the dances in Italian tablature. The main dedicatee of the treatise's Bianca Cappello, and the other dedicatees are presented in relation with the feminine patronage. The study of Caroso's life has led to research about the role go dance in the Italian courts of the Renaissance and the status of the dance-master. The commentary includes Italian historical documents about the dance-master's life. The thesis places Caroso in the wider history of court dance in Italy since the Middle Ages. It then studies the three constituent elements of the work : poetry, music, choreography. It also provides a comparison between the two dance treatise by Caroso : Il ballerino (1581) and Nobility of the ladies (1600), written nearly twenty years later. The criterions of the translation and musical edition are explained. The appendix contains Italian archive documents, musical and iconographic documents. III - The translation of Il ballerina follows the order set by Caroso. The original engravings are included into the translation.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: p. 52. / In the traditional small community, people learned how to maintain their own homes by watching activities in which the elements of their physical environment were made. This work was done out in the open, where everyone could see it as they walked by. People grew up knowing how to take 'responsibility' for the maintenance and modification of their own home. During and after the Renaissance , when these small independent communities merged with other communities, and a specialized economy developed, the integration of functions which supported learning from the environment began to disappear. This is a study of a neighborhood in Rome, where the traditional characteristics which support the transfer of knowledge, still exist . The streets are arranged in a hierarchy from most public to most private. When work places, or retail shops, or residences, occur on a public street, they are large. When they occur on a private street, they are small. 'A hierarchy of building typologies corresponds to the hierarchy of activity sizes. The buildings which are large and located in the public zone, where people are moving quickly, have large openings. The buildings which are small and are located in private zones, where people spend time in the street, have smaller openings. The result is that the building facade exposes the appropriate amount of the work process to the residents, as they use the neighborhood. With this combination of hierarchies, Trastevere supports the transfer of knowledge, from the activities to the residents of the neighborhood. / by Elizabeth Alexa Chapman. / M.Arch.

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The Roman ability to project their power and defend their empire was based on the empire having the capability to maintain a standing army. This thesis is an examination of the commissariat that supplied this army since without logistical support such an army could not survive. The basic question under consideration is how well the commissariat functioned in late antiquity, the period when it was in its most developed and best documented state. When considering the commissariat of late antiquity it is important to understand what came before and how this system came into being. Of particular importance is the office of praetorian prefect, which went from being an imperial deputy with both military and judicial functions during the Principate to the chief administrative office in the late Roman state. Once this question has been addressed it is possible to look at the late Roman commissariat. The process of supply had several different stages, from raising supplies to their storage, transport, and distribution. All of these elements must be addressed separately. The system of supply in late antiquity was not static and there were several modifications to the system over the three centuries covered, most notably the creation of new positions at the top of the supply system. Determining the quality of the commissariat from this requires contrasting the twin considerations of effectiveness and efficiency – the ability to reliably provide supplies for the army and the expenditure of the minimum amount of resources necessary towards that goal. The detailed analysis provided in this thesis supports the conclusion that the late Roman army was, in general, effectively supplied. The issue of efficiency is more difficult to assess, but it is clear that there were many areas of great inefficiency within the Roman system. This in turn implies that the emperors prioritized effectiveness over efficiency – a conclusion consistent with the importance of the army to the emperors’ position.

This thesis investigates fascist Jewish policy in Italian-occupied southeastern France between November 1942 and August 1943. The fascist government repeatedly refused to hand over to its Nazi ally or to its French enemy foreign Jewish refugees in the Italian occupation zone. This decision, which was tantamount to a refusal to collaborate in the extermination of the Jews, was partially overturned in mid-July 1943. This thesis seeks to explain the rationale for the fascist government’s decisions concerning the fates of foreign Jewish refugees in southeastern France. Current scholarship justifies the fascist government’s decisions as a manifestation either of humanitarianism or political expediency. This thesis argues instead that the Italian refusal to partake in the extermination of the Jews was ideological. As the fascist and Nazi leaderships attributed different relevance to the ‘Jewish question’, they consequently prescribed different methods to ‘solve’ it, in the context of their common military effort to win the war. Through the in-depth reconstruction of fascist Jewish policy in southern France, this thesis argues that although the fascist rulers acknowledged the existence of a ‘Jewish problem’, they never considered its solution as vital to their effort to win the war. Unlike the Nazis who considered their war against the Jew as the pivotal issue, thus rendering the physical eradication of all Jews as a conceivable action in the context of a total war, the Italians considered Jews as a secondary threat compared to communists or enemy aliens residing in their occupation zone. In turn, by analysing fascist Jewish policy in the broader geopolitical, diplomatic and military context of the occupation of southeastern France, this thesis demonstrates how, and to what extent, other ethical and practical considerations interacted with the larger ideology in operation. The overall result was a policy in which the murder of Jews was considered politically inexpedient and morally unacceptable, but which was, nevertheless, still persecutory (the Italian authorities interned foreign Jewish refugees in southern France and took measures to prevent their arrival in the Italian occupation zone). At the same time, this thesis reveals that, although the Jewish policy was consistent with the regime’s declared goal to ‘discriminate, but not persecute’ the Jews, it was not a necessary consequence of that goal. Instead, this policy could be negotiated and adjusted should the political need arise, as proved by the decision (ultimately without consequences) to surrender German Jews in mid-July 1943.

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This thesis uses images of books in Italian art of the duecento and trecento as pictorial evidence for the appearance of books and to establish a chronology for changes in the detail and style of book-bindings during those two centuries. The conclusions from the pictorial evidence is that there were material differences in the appearance of books in the duecento and trecento and that gold tooling was used to decorate books from about 1320, a hundred years earlier than previously thought. The thesis also considers how, and to what extent, medieval viewers related to images of books and whether it is possible to identify individual styles in the way artists represented books. There are four case-studies that are used to investigate how images of books were used, and what religious, social, political and psychological purposes were served. Part of the methodology is to identify and study those points of change when books appear or when the way they are shown changes. This is in the belief that when circumstances alter, the artist responds consciously and creatively rather than by imitation. A number of works of art are studied in detail and the thesis proposes new interpretations for, inter alia, the Stefaneschi Altarpiece, Guido de Graziano'sDossal of St Francis, theAnnunciation scene in the Arena Chapel, the RucellaiMadonna, and the S Caterina Polyptych. The case-studies have demonstrated that the image of a book was one of the most powerful visual signs, certainly for the period and region to which this study has been devoted. It shows that in the decades around 1300 the book became an established attribute in altarpieces, the book displaced the rotullus as the symbol of authority, and the book became the dominant attribute of the VirginMary in scenes of the Annunciation, displacing earlier formats. The book was the symbol of learning and therefore a key attribute for the mendicant orders and especially the Dominican Order.

The financialisation literature is an invaluable resource to explore the expansion of finance in modern capitalism. However, the debate focuses on the US and the UK extensively, whilst being too general with regard to other contexts. This inattention hinders a proper understanding of financialisation in its di↵erential nature across societies. To rectify such limitation, this thesis advances a theoretically controlled and historically informed study about a striking instance of financial excess outside the Anglo-American scenario: derivatives in Italy. The work argues that scholars are inattentive to the heterogeneous nature of financialisation because they conceptualise the power of finance as entrenched in socio-economic structures. As a result, they underplay the actors who adopt financialised practices di↵erentially. Premised on this critique, the thesis advances an agency-centred approach that analyses power from the perspective of agents. In so doing, it examines the diverse traits of financialisation in relation to the specific power struggles in which actors are involved. Drawing on this method, the work shows that financialisation studies fail to appreciate how key social forces deployed derivatives for political-strategic purposes in the Italian context. During the 1990s, a neoliberal-reformist alliance of pro-market technocrats and centre-left politicians got to power and pushed for Italy to join EMU. This project functioned as an external limit on the domestic political-economic establishment which relied on high public debt, the vast state-owned enterprise and the opaque corporate-governance regime. In brief, citing a slogan widely used in those days, the neoliberal-reformist coalition attempted to make Italy a ‘normal country' in Europe. Derivatives were crucial in this regard because they helped the Italian government comply with the EMU admission criteria. First, reformists encouraged hedge funds to arbitrage the interest-rate convergence between Italian and German bonds via OTC derivatives markets. Second, they arranged a currency swap that window-dressed the 1997 deficit. The thesis concludes by examining how other actors adopted derivatives to deal with the neoliberal-driven modernisation of Italy. It studies how the Agnelli family used equity swaps to secure ownership over FIAT and how municipalities manipulated budget restrictions through interest rate swaps.

This thesis examines the censorship of philosophy in Italy in the period 1450-1600, seeking to establish how the scrutiny of ideas was affected by the religious crisis of the sixteenth century. One of the primary aims of this thesis is to revise older accounts of censorship, dominant in the literature of both the history of science and Italian intellectual history traditions. These historiographies suggest that the Counter- Reformation triggered the emergence of a new and repressive attitude towards the censorship of philosophy, which grievously affected Italian intellectual and scientific culture in the seventeenth century. My thesis challenges this received view by drawing upon the insights produced by historians working in other disciplines, especially institutional historians of the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books, and historians of the Church who have challenged the older monolithic view of the „Counter-Reformation Church‟. It seeks to show that while there were indeed significant changes to the apparatus of censorship during the sixteenth century, notably the re-organisation of the Inquisition and creation of the Index, they did not signal an entirely new approach towards the censorship of philosophy, nor did it have the cataclysmic impact suggested by earlier historians. I argue that the attitudes towards philosophy maintained within these institutions represent a specific formulation of the relationship between philosophy and revealed faith, which was in fact consistent with ideas elaborated within the mendicant orders during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I argue that the implementation of these ideas as the basis for censorship can only be understood by understanding complex power struggles within the Church.

The study of Florentine artistic patronage has attracted several approaches over the last three decades, including the exploration of patron-­‐client structures and how the use of art in private and public spheres contributed to shape families’s identity. Building on past research, this work focuses on the art patronage of a prominent, yet overlooked, family, the Vespucci, to whom Amerigo, the navigator who reached the coasts of America in the late fifteenth century, belonged. Although the family’s importance was achieved through a synergy of political, religious and intellectual forces, attention is given to the Vespucci’s engagement with the arts and their key contribution to Florence’s humanistic culture between the years 1470-­1500. The family’s houses and private chapels are analysed, and three artists, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Piero di Cosimo, considered. Combining history, art history, and archival resources, new evidence and interpretations are advanced to ascribe selected artworks -­ controversially believed to be Vespucci commissions - to the private patronage of this Florentine family. Examining the Vespucci’s artistic taste in private and public settings, whilst attempting a reconstruction of partially lost painted commissions, deepens comprehension on the role that domestic and social life played in the creation of art and culture; the family’s force in shaping spaces; and the practice of buying, commissioning, and displaying as a means of signifying wealth, increasing status, and establishing identity. Power seekers, the Vespucci entered the Medici intellectual circles through which they created chains of friendship with prominent families inside and outside of Florence. As questions about shared artistic tastes and the paradigmatic role of the Medici artistic patronage have been the focus of scholarly enquiry, this study of the Vespucci provides an insight into the family’s spreading of new ideas and its interaction with the development of the visual arts. Investigation into the Vespucci’s breadth of interests helps to reframe the current knowledge of Florentine cultural exchanges and to contextualise the family’s influence beyond the geographical discoveries it has been exclusively associated with.