A look at the alterity between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. The perception of the other in some medieval and modern texts (1200-1600)
Marica COSTIGLIOLO
Original title: Uno sguardo sull’alterità tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna. La percezione dell’altro in alcuni testi medievali e moderni (1200-1600)
Published in Mirabilia Journal 34
Keywords: Alterity, Colonialism, Diversity, Islam, Middle Ages, New World, Renaissance.
The concept of otherness is complex and layered. To understand how the Western world has received, rejected, or dominated the Other is crucial for the understanding of the construction of the Western cultural identity and for trying to find the motivations that have brought Europe to a politics of colonialism that has characterized social, economic, and political relations up to modern times. In this short essay I analyse some medieval and modern works to trace the textual strategies that testify the passage from the perception of difference as a possible source of threat, of danger, to its delegitimization to existence and consequently to the “justified” dominion over the other.
Musical Palimpsestism in the Sephardic traditions in the profane/sacred context in the transmission of knowledge and the perpetuation of traditions
Antonio Celso RIBEIRO
Original title: O Palimpsetismo musical nas tradições judaicas sefarditas no contexto profano/sacro na transmissão do conhecimento e perpetuação de tradições
Published in
Keywords: Alterity, Authorship, Bakhtin, Dialogism, Jewish, Knowledge Transmission, Music, Palimpsestic, Sacred, Secular.
The aim of the present work is to analyze the reuse of secular traditional melodies from the Sephardic culture with sacred texts adapted for liturgical service, hypothesizing that this procedure works well for knowledge transmission and perpetuating traditions. Disregarding any insinuation or intention of profanity in making this interchange of melody/text, profane/sacred, a convention enshrined by a custom consecrated since the Middle Ages, the main scope of this paper, both among Christians and Jews, I resort to the analogy with the technique of palimpsest – reutilization of parchment whose primitive text has been scraped or washed off to give way to another – to understand the migration of meanings between the profane/sacred genres covering en passant the concept of authorship, alterity and dialogism of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin.
