The documents of the Roman Inquisition evidence the semantic embarrassment of the Inquisitors to define the members of the Church of England. The expression “of the Anglican sect of Protestants” is ...very rarely used for them. More often the British are defined as Calvinists or as Lutherans, more rarely as “Protestant heretics of England”, or as of the “mixed religion, part of Luther and part of Calvin.” The schemes crystallized in the Inquisitorial manuals present a conceptual framework that obviously did not work well for Protestants who were neither Lutherans nor Calvinists. The mechanical application of these uncertain definitions demonstrates not only the lack of a more sophisticated interpretative paradigm but also the bureaucratic nature of many of the inquisitorial proceedings.
Summary
Heart rate variability (HRV) is altered in obese subjects, but whether this is true also in underweight (UW) subjects is still under debate. We investigated the HRV profile in a sample of ...healthy adult women and its association with adiposity. Five‐minute resting state electrocardiographic activity was recorded in 69 subjects grouped according to their body mass index, 23 normal weight (NW), 23 overweight/obese (OW) and 23 UW). Body fat mass (FM) was measured by bio‐impedance. Frequency‐ and time‐domain analyses were performed. Compared to NW, UW and OW subjects showed a significant decrease in HRV indices, as revealed by spectral analysis. No differences were observed between UW and OW subjects. A second‐order polynomial regression unveiled an inverted U‐shaped relationship between FM extent and HRV indices. A decrease of HRV indices was associated with changes in FM extent, proving that in UW and OW subjects, the adaptive flexibility of autonomic cardiac function was reduced. These findings provide important clues to guide future studies addressed to determine how changes in adiposity and autonomic cardiac function may contribute to health risk.
Abstract
Piezoelectricity of organic polymers has attracted increasing interest because of several advantages they exhibit over traditional inorganic ceramics. While most organic piezoelectrics rely ...on the presence of intrinsic local dipoles, a highly nonlocal electronic polarisation can be foreseen in conjugated polymers, characterised by delocalised and highly responsive
π
-electrons. These 1D systems represent a physical realisation of a Thouless pump, a mechanism of adiabatic charge transport of a topological nature which results, as shown in this work, in anomalously large dynamical effective charges, inversely proportional to the bandgap energy. A structural (ferroelectric) phase transition further contributes to an enhancement of the piezoelectric response reminiscent of that observed in piezoelectric perovskites close to morphotropic phase boundaries. First-principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations performed in two representative conjugated polymers using hybrid functionals, show that state-of-the-art organic piezoelectric are outperformed by piezoelectric conjugated polymers, mostly thanks to strongly anomalous effective charges of carbon, larger than 5
e
—ordinary values being of the order of 1
e
—and reaching the giant value of 30
e
for band gaps of the order of 1 eV.
A Man of Intrigue but of No Virtue Villani, Stefano
Church history and religious culture,
07/2021, Letnik:
101, Številka:
2-3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
This chapter reconstructs the life of Jean-Baptiste Stouppe (1623–1692), a Huguenot of Italian origin who in the 1650s moved to England and was employed by Oliver Cromwell in important ...diplomatic / espionage missions. Passing into the service of Louis
XIV
as a soldier, he published some pro-French propaganda works aimed at Protestants, including a famous description of Dutch religious life, published in 1673, notorious for its negative portrayal of Spinoza’s philosophy. While presenting himself as a defender of Protestant orthodoxy, Stouppe was in fact a libertine with magical-alchemical interests. An unscrupulous and ambiguous figure, his intellectual trajectory is clearly inserted in what has been defined as the crisis of the European conscience.
Abstract
This chapter reconstructs the life of Jean-Baptiste Stouppe (1623-1692), a Huguenot of Italian origin who in the 1650s moved to England and was employed by Oliver Cromwell in important ...diplomatic / espionage missions. Passing into the service of Louis XIV as a soldier, he published some pro-French propaganda works aimed at Protestants, including a famous description of Dutch religious life, published in 1673, notorious for its negative portrayal of Spinoza's philosophy. While presenting himself as a defender of Protestant orthodoxy, Stouppe was in fact a libertine with magical-alchemical interests. An unscrupulous and ambiguous figure, his intellectual trajectory is clearly inserted in what has been defined as the crisis of the European conscience.
On January 3, 1661 a certain Amidei Alessandro offered to the king of England Charles II a manuscript collection of political aphorisms, that is currently preserved at the Library of Clarke ...University of California at Los Angeles. He presented himself as the author of the maxims, which in reality were copied from a printed collection of aphorisms by Guicciardini, Lottini and Sansovino edited by the latter under the title Proposition, overo Consideration in materia di cose di Stato in 1583 and republished multiple times in the following decades. A singular figure with a shifting and elusive identity, Amidei was an Italian Jew who moved to England in 1656. As an audacious plagiarist, Amidei took full advantage of the flexibility of the manuscript form, recomposing the maxims to serve his own aims. This case study helps us to understand this creative reuse of aphoristic matter as a common practice of the Baroque age.
Italian authors of the seventeenth century produced a myriad of historical texts, tragedies, oratorios and poems that dealt with the events of Mary Stuart's life. The tremendous outcry that her story ...caused all over Europe made Scotland one of the most powerful symbols of persecution of Catholics by Protestants. It was the image of Scotland as a land of martyrdom that possibly prompted the publication of two seventeenth-century Italian 'biographies', narrating the vicissitudes of the lives of two Scottish capuchins, and which ran to multiple editions down to the eighteenth century. This article explores the literary reception of Mary Queen of Scots in seventeenth-century Italian literature and, in so doing, opens up religious, cultural, and political implications, pointing to links between Scottish Catholic and European intellectuals, and the publishing networks of sympathetic Marian writing.
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