Making Examples of Women: Juan Luis Vives' The Education of Christian Women

Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) composed “The Education of a Christian Woman” in order to cement his patronage relations with the Queen of England, Catherine of Aragon and to lay the foundations of his own social thought. Scholars have been divided about the extent to which the work may be regarded as conservative, this article points to those areas of textual tension that give rise to contradictory evaluations of “The Education”. The essay analyses the use of pagan, Christian and contemporary exempla in order to demonstrate that Vives formulates a bourgeois notion of marriage which he wishes to impose on aristocratic women. His attacks on court life, the emphasis on frugality and the diatribes against conspicuous consumption lend support to a view of a women remaining invisible in the home. A queen is the test case for such an assessment and Vives attempts to diminish her autonomy as far as possible

The social mission of medical education: Ranking the schools

The study proposes a new method of ranking medical schools through the creation of a social mission score, reflecting that many believe that medical schools should be accountable to society and have a social mission to train physicians to care for the population as a whole, taking into account such issues as whether schools produce physicians who practice primary care, work in underserved areas, and represent the diversity of the population

"Changing places: space in Sibilla Aleramo's Una Donna."

C1 - Journal Articles Referee

Vladimir Mayakovsky as Exemplary Character: Two Interpretations by Dario Fo and Carmelo Bene

This article contributes to the mapping of the role played by the Russian poet, playwright, artist and performer Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) in the Italian context of the 60s and 70s, concentrating on Dario Fo’s L’operaio conosce 300 parole, il padrone 1000, per questo lui è il padrone (1969), and Carmelo Bene’s TV production of Bene! Quattro modi di morire in versi (1974, broadcast in 1978). Mayakovsky appears here as a character, constructed as an exemplary figure for the role of the artist. After framing exemplarity theoretically as a strategy that effaces the intrinsic discrepancy between example and rule, the article will map the presence of this rhetorical move in the two texts. It will discuss the ways in which they share a series of common features, forming in both cases an implicit agenda of legitimization at a time when both Fo and Bene were shifting the context of their practice. In this sense, this contribution argues that Fo’s L’operaio and Bene’s Quattro modi both introduce a programmatic element that defines a specific poetic and politics, and at the same time attempt at performing the very poetic that is being presented