Suono e Spettacolo. Athanasius Kircher, un percorso nelle Immagini sonore.

The Society of Jesus made great propaganda efforts throughout the seventeenth century and chose the images and the play as a privileged means to communicate and persuade. Athanasius Kircher, a key figure of the seventeenth century, he decided to dominate the wild nature of sound through Phonurgia Nova, which includes a gallery of powerful symbolic images for Baroque aesthetics. The essay, through the grant of the images from the Library of the Department of Mathematics "Guido Castelnuovo" Sapienza University of Rome, aims to understand, through the pictures offered by Kircher, the sound phenomenon and the spectacle that this produces. In Phonurgia Nova a process of dramatization sound effects takes place, often through machines and "visions" applied to the theatrical reality, as experimental and astonishing environment beloved in baroque. Kircher illustrates the sound through explanatory figures, so to dominate the sound through the eyes. Sound is seen, admired and represented: its spectacle not only takes place through the implementation of sound machines or the "wonders" applied to the theater, but even through images, creating create a sense of wonder in in the erudite person of the seventeenth century

Discerning spirits: Sanctity and possession in the later Middle Ages. (Volumes I and II).

Discerning Spirits: Sanctity and Possession in the Later Middle Ages examines the responses of different cultural strata to spirit possession from the mid-twelfth through the fifteenth century in Western Europe. I argue that in Medieval Europe spirit possession was ambiguous: malignly, it was expressed as diabolic possession, while benignly it appeared as unitive mysticism. While only the former was described as spirit possession within medieval culture, unitive mystics, with their stress on the indwelling quality of their experience of God, may also be considered possessed--by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, so closely parallel were mystics and demoniacs considered to be, contemporaries had difficulty discerning one from the other. As a result, a great deal of suspicion and anxiety surrounded the vocations of unitive mystics, who often were accused of being demonically inspired. Adding to this perplexity were general ideas about body and spirit that pervaded medieval culture. Although the civilization of the Middle Ages is often thought of as dualistic in its conceptions of body and spirit, my work shows that the boundaries between the two actually were quite fluid. Spirits were conceived as having a material basis, and conversely the body, in certain areas, was thought to have a basic spiritual vitality. Tales of corpses coming back to life, and folkloric ideas about shamanistic spirit journeys, reveal a broad cultural preoccupation both with the ways in which bodies and spirits acted independently, and with the ways they interacted. By the fifteenth century, the juxtaposition between the divinely and the demonically possessed had begun to elicit responses: new demonological treatises, manuals of exorcism, and a textual tradition devoted to the discernment of spirits. Yet, the attempt to discern spirits on a purely abstract plane was doomed to failure: ultimately, one could only evaluate exterior signs of comportment, since visions and revelations were private and hence unverifiable. Thus the discernment of spirits eventually was worked out as a discernment of the body: judging the comportment and physical control of the individual became paramount. Sanctity was increasingly associated with incorporeality, while possession became defined by a connection with fallen physicality.Ph.D.FolkloreMedieval historyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligious historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129427/2/9513310.pd