The spatial representation of the Blessed Mary in Italian poetry at the time of the Second Vatican Council

The representation of the Holy Virgin has long constituted one of the most important thematic lines in Italian poetry, both sacred and profane. In terms of the representation of space, the Blessed Mary was traditionally placed in faraway, celestial hierarchies. In more recent periods, this figure is often placed in the space of earthly life, with which the lyrical subject (the enunciator) is more familiar. Juri Lotman’s perspective on the space of the typological description of culture shows that divinities belong mainly to the exterior (E) space of culture. Building on these considerations, the purpose of this article is to analyse recent Marian representations – both poetic and theological – in Italian culture. I will demonstrate that, during the 20th century in Italy, Marian sacrum was moved closer to or even inside interior space (I), as the Blessed Virgin started to appear mostly in scenes of daily life and her divine traits gradually lost importance. This kind of spatiality is also found in the ecumenical dialogue. The Second Vatican Council normalized both Marian theology and the faithful’s practices, which influenced textual production and brought about further changes in the spatial placement of Mary. While the general social trend towards secularization has been increasing the distance between the human and the divine, Mary’s sanctity was transferred to the interior space (I) of everyday life – and this could be one of the factors that relaunched Marian poetry

Dei Genitrix: A Generative Grammar for Traditional Litanies

The object of the present paper is a study of two traditional litanies, Litany of the Saints and Litany of Loreto, in their most ancient attested form. We will design a narrative grammar to show how their litanic structures can be generated. We propose the notion of n-selection, a narrative rule which can\u27t be reduced to syntax or semantics: it depends on culture. We will test the grammar on the Litany to the Divine Mercy, written by Saint Faustina Kowalska in the XXth century. Our purpose is to identify the rules of the genre which allow its reproduction in more recent versions

Ex votos: Rememoration, Remediation and Relocation

In the Catholic tradition, ex votos can be considered texts that channel the cultural memory of a group, not only through specific mechanisms of material object production but also through their organization and the pragmatic modalities of their fruition. Besides their devotional positioning and function, ex votos are also subjected to operations of relocation and remediation that influence their meaning. The practice of offering ex votos as signs of gratitude for the intervention of supernatural helpers in crucial moments of an individual’s or community’s life has a long history in the Catholic tradition and can be considered a key part of a strategy to collectively process and make sense of crisis events; at the same time, modern and contemporary culture displays a growing tendency to relocate ex votos to museums, thus shifting the meaning and value of these artifacts from the traditional field of devotion to that of history, culture and art. Based on a semiotic reflection on the content, form and pragmatics of ex votos, this paper presents a transdisciplinary inquiry into the relocation of ex votos (mainly through musealization) and remediation in art and literature, in particular by examining Dino Buzzati’s collection of fictional ex votos (I miracoli di Val Morel, 1971)

La semiotica può migliorare l’apprendimento supervisionato delle reti neurali? Il caso di studio del tweet di Papa Francesco

The paper focuses on a case–study: a corpus of 1234 Italian tweets in reply to Pope Francis’ ecological tweets related to the encyclical letter Laudato si’ has been collected and labelled by the research team of the Semiotic and big data lab at the University of Turin using semiotic categories to substitute the vague notion of “subjectivity” in use in sentiment analysis. A simple neural network has been trained on the corpus to classify messages into “history” and “discourse” with a final accuracy score of 97%. The paper explores the practical and social implications of the feasibility study as well as its limitations and suggests further transdisciplinary research using semiotics as a standard vocabulary to increase cooperation between social and computer sciences. The analysis is accompanied by a historical premise and a brief analysis of the concordance between Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures and Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato si’

Il Dante che unisce

The issue brings together Dante’s literature and semiotics with the aim of exchanging ideas, presenting the state of the art of the different disciplines and making different scholars dialogue. A second intention is to re-propose the reflection on Dante to today’s semiotics, profoundly changed compared to the seventies, eighties and nineties of the twentieth century, when the leading exponents of the discipline took care of the Comedy. At the same time, semiotics aim to offer new stimuli to the current Dante interpretation

Questioni di santità: prospettive semiotiche su Dante

Il numero raccoglie interventi di letteratura e di semiotica dantesca con lo scopo di scambiare idee, presentando lo stato dell’arte delle diverse discipline e facendo dialogare diversi studiosi. Una seconda intenzione è riproporre la riflessione su Dante alla semiotica di oggi, profondamente cambiata rispetto agli anni Settanta, Ottanta e Novanta del Novecento, quando i massimi esponenti della disciplina si sono occupati della Commedia. Allo stesso tempo, i semiotici intendono offrire nuovi stimoli all’interpretazione dantesca corrente.In 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante's death is celebrated in Italy and around the world. This issue of Ocula pays homage to the Poet by renovating the rich tradition of semiotic studies devoted to his work and stimulating new reflections and directions of research. Indeed, the focus of this issue is the theme of holiness in Dante and its contemporary reception. We intend to promote and continue the dialogue between semiotics and literary and historical studies, following the example of the works by Maria Corti, Cesare Segre and D’Arco Silvio Avalle, which remain milestones in terms of the transdisciplinary approach and methodological cross-fertilization. We also recall the fundamental works by Umberto Eco on Abulafia which opened a perspective on the themes related to Jewish mysticism in Dante's work (Debenedetti Stow). Holiness represents an important part in the universe of the Comedy: not only do the saints populate Paradise, but we find a large number of miracles, hagiographies and self-hagiographies, references to intercession, and prayers also in Inferno and Purgatorio. Here the research topics we propose: - symbols of holiness, especially in Paradise; - the biography of the saint as a model for different forms of life (Fontanille); - representations of holiness (e.g. Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican); - the language and rhetoric of holiness; - the importance of the Comedy in defining the Christian image of holiness; - the Comedy in the magisterium of the contemporary Church (for example the recent Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aeternae by Pope Francis); The idea for this issue of Ocula was born within the ERC project NeMoSanctI (New Models of Sanctity in Italy (1960s-2000s) - A Semiotic Analysis of Norms, Causes of Saints, Hagiography, and Narratives. University of Turin - principal investigator Prof. Jenny Ponzo

“Quella importanza di materia”: Women and saints in Francesco Pona’s Galeria delle Donne Celebri Magdalena Maria Kubas

In his Galeria delle Donne Celebri, a collection of twelve short stories about famous female figures, Francesco Pona “depicts” four lascivious women and four chaste women from classical antiquity, and four saints from the early and medieval Christian era. Pona, a writer and medical doctor, rationally studied the Other, that is, women; his narrator in Galeria analyzes the characters’ bodies and behaviours, but almost never their psychology. In this essay, I examine the “portraits” of saints in Pona’s Galeria (Magdalene, Barbara, Monica, and Elisabeth of Hungary) and the observation of otherness by a collector who studied both the natural and miraculous aspects of female sanctity. As interest in the ancient and medieval saints was typical of the period following the Council of Trent, I investigate Pona’s short stories within the framework of the decree on saints and relics issued in 1563. I also consider the misogynistic controversy that took place in Italy between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as Pona’s treatise Della Eccellenza et Perfettione ammirabile della Donna