In Lazzaro Felice (2018), Alice Rohrwacher juxtaposes premodern Italian feudalism with contemporary capitalism to question whether conditions for agrarian workers are improving under the latter. This essay gives content to this comparison by discussing how Italian feudalism historically functioned not only as an economic system but also as a judicial system. Feudal nobles had the power and responsibility to enforce the law in their fiefs, and they used that authority to control and exploit their vassals. Lazzaro Felice’s depiction of contemporary democracy suggests that it has not fundamentally altered the judicial power of the wealthy and questions whether the powerful can still use the judicial system to control and exploit agrarian workers. In this light, Lazzaro Felice and Rohrwacher’s earlier Le Meraviglie (2014) can be seen as encouraging viewers to think about legal reform to help agrarian workers. This essay also examines Rohrwacher’s directorial strategies for depicting the sharp divide between the perspective of agrarian workers who care for nature and the perspective of entrepreneurs who see nature as a source of profit.
This article holds that compared to other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Castelvetro’s commentary is unusual in its insistence on a non-sexual but constantly loving Laura whose chaste virtue saves the speaker from desperation and vice. Castelvetro’s view of Laura as a marvel of virtue does not merely reflect the reformist bent of Castelvetro’s Protestant thought but also expresses his reconstruction of the love narrative of the Rvf, which features Laura is an active agent whose attitude towards the speaker may vacillate, but whose love for him and chaste virtue remain, importantly, constant.
Much of the scholarly research produced on Emilio Salgari (1862–1911)—the creator of innumerable adventure novels featuring memorable characters such as the Malaysian pirate Sandokan and his imperturbable sidekick Yanez—has been dedicated to releasing him from the restrictive label of writer of young adult fiction, or, more recently, to measuring the degree of Orientalism or anti-colonialism in his portrayal of “exotic” locales and peoples. While not discarding the value of these approaches, this essay seeks to move in a different direction, and to examine instead the ways in which, by setting many of his stories in the Orient, and—in the case of the Pirates of Malaysia series—specifically in India, Salgari is able to interrogate questions of nobility, honour, loyalty, love, and morality.
