Donatella Pallotti, Paola Pugliatti (general editors). Alessandro Arcangeli, And Korhonen (eds), Journal of Early Modern Studies 6: A Time of Their Own. Experiencing Time and Temporality in the Early Modern World.

This volume explores the ways in which, in various early modern cultural contexts, time was culturally constructed; more particularly, the ways in which people managed and conceptualised both time and temporality incorporating them into their understanding of the specific cultural context(s) in which they lived. In Part One (‘Reading Temporality in History’), the essays consider, respectively: reading both as a cultural practice affected by contextual material conditions that determined the time and circumstances of its performance, and as an act that offered readers a time experience of their own; the different ways in which the Renaissance conceptualised time in historical works of various genres, and the multiplicity of temporal conceptions which they express (from a Christian interpretation, through partial secularization, to the emergence of the notion of inheritance and focus on the present); the contexts and ways in which, contrary to what has been assumed, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women adopted clock-time in their daily occupations, albeit mixing it with circadian rhythm and an understanding of temporality as task-oriented. In Part Two (‘Case studies’), issues connected with time in different geographic and cultural contexts are investigated from various points of view, adopting different approaches: gifts exchanged on the occasion of the New Year – dated objects that may have both reflected and encouraged the perception of this cyclical moment as significant, in a symbolically charged celebration of the ritual year; the impressive exercise of self-discipline performed by an eighteenth-century Englishwoman in a painstakingly accurate monitoring of her own daily activity; the temporal meaning of the French word ennui as adopted by the English in strong correlation with social rank and lifestyles; the understanding of time in the writings of Giordano Bruno and Michel de Montaigne, which reveal a complex interplay between the human mind and body. In the final essay, attention is again devoted to history-writing, with scrutiny and cross-examination of two seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collections of historical exempla from early modern Scandinavia, where the principle of historia as magistra vitae dominates to such an extent that the narratives are not ordered chronologically, but rather in the form of a lexicon of virtues that pupils were expected to learn from knowledge of the past. As in other issues of the journal, an ‘Appendix’ offers the reader an ample selection of texts from Antiquity to our own times, which, both within the field of literary invention and in other discursive contexts, explore the experience of time.