In May 1630, the Dominican priest Tommaso Martinelli desecrated the tomb of Francesco Petrarca, which had been arranged in a church in the village of Arqua for centuries, by removing some of the bones of the poet's right hand. This aroused the indignation of the European literary world, which referred mainly to its degrading symbolism. In the nineteenth century, this distant seventeenth-century crime spurred a narrative that was constantly revived, especially at the frequent openings of the poet’s sarcophagus, which were justified for scientific and literary reasons. The crime of the seventeenth century was stigmatized to indirectly highlight the positive value of a renewed interest in the poet’s remains. Thus, this certainly artificial narrative was consolidated, silencing new and more important desecrations and excavations. The fairytale stamp was given to the story in 2003, when, after another opening of the tomb, it was established that the skull that had been preserved there belonged to a woman who had lived about a century before Francesco Petrarca. It was inevitable to decipher the previous narratives in order to reveal what had happened in the past, and above all to understand how the narrative was actually consolidated with distinctly fairy-tale and imaginative tones.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2617555
Franc Miklošič was undoubtedly one of the most educated, internationally renowned and influential Slovene intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century and is foremost regarded as a philologist, linguist and one of the founders of Slavic studies. However, Miklošič’s intellectual versatility also led to his engagement with history, ethnography, anthropology and law, predicated on interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. Apart from a few translations of Austrian legislation into Slovene, Miklošič did not devote himself to legal matters, with the exception of blood feud in Die Blutrache bei den Slaven (1887), one of the key works on the topic at the time. Although he agreed with the evolutionist and legal positivist views of his time on the State as the pinnacle of civilization, compared to the supposed chaos of prior societies (which continue to remain popular), in Blutrache Miklošič also presented the characteristics of the customary system of conflict resolution in kinship-based societies, which attest to the complexity of social relations in premodern Europe. It is with the help of Miklošič’s work that this paper reconstructs the customary ritual of conflict resolution, which was known to all premodern European societies, and presents the attitude of his and later times towar ds blood feud.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1596549
The article addresses the axolotl, the human fish and the deep see squid, their living environments and the relationships with man or man with these animals that live in different worlds than man, but that at the same time inhabit the same planet, where we coexist in mutual dependence. The author examines the human approaches to these animals, which expand from exhibiting the fear of the "power of Nature", the theoretical admiration and the exercises of human dominance, be it in the form of hero fairy tales or the biopower of regenerative medicine. All of these "classical" attitudes have been very much actual in the modern age and many still are today. The author furthermore questions the eventual posthumanist perspective, which leads to the comprehension of the functional living and non-living systems as connected machines. While the classical relationships between man and animals are based on non-equal power forces and are anthropocentric, the recognition of the environments of different species, which first marked the alienation particularly of some species from man, is at the same time the key to finally recognize the operationality of various systems, which are actually connected. The paper has been written along the art project Neotenous Dark Dwellers - Lygophilia, in which Robertina Šebjanič researches the culturalisations of Mexican Axolotl and the Slovenian Proteus anguinus as the animals that love the darkness and the places inhospitable for humans.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2048091876