Cosmopolitan and Vernacular: Petrarch at Sea

Casual readers and scholars alike celebrate Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (RVF) as an early masterpiece of vernacular lyric. Yet Petrarch directed most of his professional energies as writer to Latin composition, in the belief that Latin was the language of his most important literary models and of the literary future. This essay studies Petrarch’s life – in particular, episodes revealing his conflicted attitudes toward the sea and especially toward travel by ship – in order to comment on his attitude toward the language of literature: his respect for Latin, his enduring affection for Italian, and his work on the vernacular lyrics at the very end of his life. The essay uses Theodor Adorno’s formulation of late style (Adorno used this concept to discuss the late work of composers, in particular Beethoven) to describe Petrarch’s late work on the RVF in his last years. It argues that Petrarch’s turn to the vernacular in his final years should be read as a kind of linguistic experimentalism – fragmentary and catastrophic, as Adorno would describe it, rather than sweet, unified and harmonic – made possible when Petrarch is no longer using Latin to think about literary posterity

Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation

Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures is invested in bringing together the linguistic, literary, and historical expertise to take a European approach to medieval literature. The journal aims to establish a forum both for articles which move across literatures (plural) and also, more ambitiously, to foster reflections on a more elusive, but no longer entirely absent, object, European medieval literature (singular).In line with the journal’s scope and vision to promote integrated approaches to European medieval literatures, we begin by facing head-on the multiple challenges of devising new types of narratives about medieval textual cultures. We have invited papers which take a wider regional perspective and move across medieval Europe as well as papers which bring an explicitly European perspective to more specific topics (with a tighter thematic, chronological, geographic, or linguistic focus)

I nostri Saracini: Writing the History of the Arabs of Sicily

During the nineteenth century, Sicilian Orientalists wrote the story of Sicily’s domination by the Arabs and the Arabic-language culture of the Normans – centuries of eventful history that had been lost to the West because European historians could not read Arabic documents. In their histories, Sicilians identified an alternate origin for European modernity: the vibrant Arab culture of the medieval Mediterranean transmitted to the continent through borderland states like the Kingdom of Sicily. This essay examines the lives and scholarship of three nineteenth-century Sicilian Orientalists – Pietro Lanza, Vincenzo Mortillaro, and Michele Amari – who worked to articulate a Mediterranean origin for European modernity

Medieval Sicilian lyric poetry, poets at the courts of Roger II and Frederick II

grantor: University of TorontoDuring the twelfth century, a group of poets at the Norman court in Sicily composed traditional Arabic panegyrics in praise of the kingdoms Christian monarchs. Less than a century later, at the court of Frederick II, Sicilian poets wrote the first lyric love poetry in an Italian vernacular. This study traces the literary history of Sicily during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and engages the modern scholarly formulation known as the "Arabic theory" (the notion that Arabic literature had a formative influence on early Romance vernacular lyric), in order to refine the methodology used to read and compare Arabic and Romance love lyrics written in the colonial states of southern Europe during the Middle Ages. The introductory chapter, "Remembering Norman Sicily," sketches the fundamental issues that will inform subsequent readings of Sicilian literature: the changing relation between Sicilian culture and the mainland cultures of the Mediterranean; and the evolution of Muslim-Christian cultural communication within Sicily. "Al-Atrâbanishî and the Court Poets of the Norman Era" uses a close reading of a poem written in praise of Roger II and his Sicily to explore the Siculo-Norman cultural project. "Vernacular Culture in Sicily, ss. XII-XIII" parallels the revolutionary vernacular poetic traditions emerging in the Arabic- and Romance-speaking worlds, and examines the innovative use of the Sicilian vernaculars on coinage produced in twelfth and thirteenth century Sicily. "Giacomo da Lentini and Siculo-Italian Poetics" considers the realignment of Sicilian culture that occurred when Sicily began to be viewed as an extension of the European mainland, and Sicilian culture was reconceived as a variant of Latinate Christianity. The concluding chapter, "The 'Arabic Theory' and the Poetries of Sicily," uses the methodological interrogations of the foregoing chapters to comment on the traditional scholarly approach to conceptualizing and categorizing literary influence in the Muslim/Christian colonial states of southern Europe during the Middle Ages.Ph.D

Novel Aspects of Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae) Biology and an Improved Method for Culturing this Invasive Species with a Modified D. melanogaster Diet

Drosophila suzukii (Matsumara) (Diptera: Drosophilidae), the spotted wing drosophila, is a global pest of soft fruits now rearable on a standard D. melanogaster (Meigen) diet containing the fly\u27s own natural food: soft-skinned berries. The techniques tested here can save 40% of cultures from microbial contamination that develops after combining artificial food sources (e.g., standard drosophila media) with unsterilized host plant material (berries). A suitable ratio for mixing dietary ingredients for a vial or test-tube rearing system includes, by weight, 1 part berry tissue for oviposition, 1.5 parts dry diet media for carbohydrate, 7 parts clean water for moisture, and ∼5 grains (0.8 mg) of dry yeast for protein. One or two blackberry or blueberry fruits used by spotted wing drosophila as edible oviposition substrates doubled and tripled pupal and adult production in standard 68 mL culturing vials. To prevent mold from spoiling the diet, the exocarp of berries was sterilized in an 80 or 90% ethanol bath at room temperature for ∼5 min, followed by a thorough rinsing with deionized water to remove residual alcohol, which can be acutely toxic to D. suzukii, a highly ethanol-intolerant species. Sterilized fruit and a larger fly population in vials disrupted the growth of microbial biofilms capable of suffocating adults. Identical body size in reared adults and locally caught wild flies of D. suzukii substantiates nutritional similarity between the fruit-media-based diet and the fly\u27s own natural food (i.e., whole berries). Triethylamine (50%), a common fly anesthetic, was acutely toxic to D. suzukii adults but not to D. melanogaster adults