Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Antonio Manzoni was an Italian poet, novelist and philosopher. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed (1827), generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language. Manzoni also contributed to the stabilization of the modern Italian language and helped to ensure linguistic unity throughout Italy. He was an influential proponent of Liberal Catholicism in Italy. His work and thinking has often been contrasted with that of his younger contemporary Giacomo Leopardi by critics.
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced “firs’ light” Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted.
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. The inflections are often changes in the ending of a word, but can be more complicated, especially with verbs.
Philo of Alexandria, also called Philo Judaeus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt.
In Christian liturgy, the credo is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed – or its shorter version, the Apostles' Creed – in the Mass, either as a prayer, a spoken text, or sung as Gregorian chant or other musical settings of the Mass.
Maria Teresa Goretti was an Italian virgin martyr of the Catholic Church, and one of the youngest saints to be canonized. She was born to a farming family. Her father died when she was nine, and the family had to share a house with another family, the Serenellis. She took over household duties while her mother and siblings worked in the fields.
The Betrothed is an Italian historical novel by Alessandro Manzoni, first published in 1827, in three volumes, and significantly revised and rewritten until the definitive version published between 1840 and 1842. It has been called the most famous and widely read novel in the Italian language.
Ad fontes is a Latin expression which means "[back] to the sources". The phrase epitomizes the renewed study of Greek and Latin classics in Renaissance humanism, subsequently extended to Biblical texts. The idea in both cases was that sound knowledge depends on the earliest and most fundamental sources.
Regional Italian is any regional variety of the Italian language.
Tuscan is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance spoken in Tuscany, Corsica, and Sardinia.
The Summa Theologiae or Summa Theologica, often referred to simply as the Summa, is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a scholastic theologian and Doctor of the Church. It is a compendium of all of the main theological teachings of the Catholic Church, intended to be an instructional guide for theology students, including seminarians and the literate laity. Presenting the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West, topics of the Summa follow the following cycle: God; Creation, Man; Man's purpose; Christ; the Sacraments; and back to God.
Francis of Assisi founded three orders and gave each of them a special rule. Here, only the rule of the first order is discussed, i.e., that of the Order of Friars Minor.
Czech orthography is a system of rules for proper formal writing (orthography) in Czech. The earliest form of separate Latin script specifically designed to suit Czech was devised by Czech theologian and church reformist Jan Hus, the namesake of the Hussite movement, in one of his seminal works, De orthographia bohemica.
Matthew 15:11 is a verse in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament.
The Trial of Joan of Arc was a 15th century legal proceeding against Joan of Arc, a French military leader under Charles VII during the Hundred Years' War. During the siege of Compiègne in 1430, she was captured by Burgundian forces and subsequently sold to their English allies. She was prosecuted by a pro-English church court at Rouen, Normandy in 1431. The court found her guilty of heresy and she was burned at the stake. The verdict was later nullified at Joan's rehabilitation trial, which was overseen by the Inquisitor-General, Jean Bréhal, in 1456. Considered a French national heroine, she was declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1920. The trial is one of the most famous in history, becoming the subject of many books and films.
Ugolino Brunforte was an Italian Friar Minor and chronicler, known principally as the author of the Fioretti or Little Flowers of St. Francis.
"Angelus ad virginem" is a medieval carol whose text is a poetic version of the Hail Mary and the Annunciation by the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.
Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, an influential philosopher and theologian, and a jurist in the tradition of scholasticism from the county of Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily.
Sister Virginia Maria was an Italian nun. She gave birth to two children fathered by a local aristocrat, and had connived in the murder of another nun to cover up the affair. This took place in Monza, in northern Italy, at the beginning of the 17th century. Following this scandal she became widely known as the Nun of Monza. Her life inspired one of the characters in Alessandro Manzoni's novel The Betrothed, which has also been dramatized several times.
The thought and poetics of the Italian poet, novelist and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni encompass the entirety of the writer's poetic, stylistic, linguistic ideas and ideological convictions as they evolved from his Jacobin and neoclassical beginnings until his death. After the neoclassical period, which saw Manzoni engage in odes and other poetic production until 1810, he joined the Romantic movement from that year, becoming one of its leading exponents. During the so-called Quindicennio creativo (1812-1827), Manzoni produced literary, poetic, theatrical, and nonfiction works that profoundly changed the genetics of Italian literature and his own literary language, imposing himself as a milestone in the history of Italian literature. Between 1827 and his death in 1873, Manzoni continued his research, writing historical-literary essays in contrast to his early ones and, at the same time, reflecting on the nature of the "living" Italian language in the context of the new Kingdom of Italy.
