This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cam…[Read more]

Women’s literary expression in Latin America started as a crossroads of rhetorical practices and textual devices that included the knowledge and transmission of oral traditions, visual iconic narratives, tangible systems of record keeping, and the incorporation of the alphabetic script. I propose to look at the written production of Indigenous w…[Read more]

Num dos envelopes do espólio pessoano, encontram-se 56 folhas dactilografadas, quase sem emendas, com o que aparenta ser boa parte de uma peça teatral em inglês. O problema: não há indicação de título, nem de autor. Será um inédito de Fernando Pessoa? Uma tradução inglesa de uma peça olvidada de outro dramaturgo português? Num momento em qu…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]

Kathleen Fitzpatrick analyses the sudden isolation graduate students find themselves in during the dissertation process. In the humanities, she observes, graduate students are regularly habituated into an anxiety of intellectual independence whereby sharing ideas, collaboration and publishing work in progress is to be considered suspect and…[Read more]

In early seventeenth century, Francisco de Avila, Huarochiri’s extirpator of idolatries, and Guaman Poma de Ayala rejected the mestizo either for personal convenience or as a matter of concern for the fate of the Andean race. This article examines the places of enunciation from which these and other authors categorized some individuals as u…[Read more]

This essay studies the textual and visual representation of “the Indians of Peru” and their place in the illustrated edition of the Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) by José de Acosta, prepared by the sons of publisher Theodore De Bry. Such edition was published in 1601-1602 as the ninth volume of The Great Voyages. This essay disc…[Read more]

Based on a critical and reflective reading of Guaman Poma’s “New Chronicle and Good Government” (1615) [Nueva corónica y buen gobierno], this essay departs from the understanding of Waman Poma’s work as an “Opera Aperta” (Quispe-Agnoli 2020). Visual and written texts are understood initially as written-visual semantic fields that stimulat…[Read more]