JLIS.it

Traces of holiness: blessed women, holy women in the papers of diocesan archives

Gilda Nicolai — 2024-09-15

The article aims to focus attention on the study of blessed women and holy women through the documentation found in diocesan archives and belonging to the series of canonization processes. With the regulation of the process, narrative organization gave way to legal defense, confrontation to analysis, and narrative to texts that had evidentiary value, and all this gave rise to a mine of information not only about the lives of the blessed and holy women, but also about the society in which they had lived.

Female travel archives: cultural and social itineraries in Beatrice Lanza Branciforti diaries

Sara Manali — 2024-09-15

Beatrice Lanza Branciforti was a sicilian countess who lived throughout the 19th century. She traveled extensively, managed her patrimonial and personal interests and, together with Lucio Mastrogiovanni Tasca, established the house of the Counts of Almerita. Her 13 diaries, along with the other documents that constitute her travel archive, provide a window into 19th-century trends: destinations, itineraries, encounters, and leisure activities are central to this narrative through text and images.

Women writing about women. Mercede Mundula’s documents in the University Library of Cagliari

Rapetti Mariangela — 2024-09-15

The essay presents the life and documents of the Cagliari-born poet, essayist and writer Mercede Mundula (1890-1947). The documents were donated by her daughters to the University Library of Cagliari in 1997. The archive includes the work materials, the manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence relating to the successes of her works, conference texts, reviews and some of the posthumous critical literature. The manuscripts and correspondence were registered on Manus Online database, the printed materials were not. The complete list of documents is available at the Library, but the ‘non-archival’ treatment of fonds prevents a complete contextualisation and correct reading of the archive. It would be desirable, in view of the creation of an integrated information system, to proceed with an analytical description of fonds, while maintaining the order given by the producer and her heirs.

The literary events of a women's Club: the Lyceum Club of Florence

Lucia Roselli — 2024-09-15

The International Lyceum Club is a women’s cultural club active in Florence since 1908, where women meet to enrich and enhance their culture and to follow the many events of artistic, literary, musical and scientific interest organized by the Club. This study traces, in particular, some of the major events organized by the Literature section between the years 1912 to 1970. The Literature Section presented to Club members the works and thoughts of writers and poets, novels, poetry collections, children’s books, and staged plays on the Club stage. Evidence of each event is preserved in the archival papers kept in the Lyceum Club’s headquarters.

Troubles and satisfactions of a valiant librarian: new documentation about Guerriera Guerrieri from her personal archival file preserved at the Central State Archive

Fiammetta Sabba — 2024-09-15

Guerriera Guerrieri is a protagonist of the Italian cultural history of the last century, remembered for the intensity of her work and for the multiplicity of initiatives and actions that characterized her professional activity as a librarian and which still allow us today to remember her as a figure of absolute importance in Italy; among these, the development of cataloging rules, the cataloging of periodicals and the diffusion of books and reading, activities which he carried out with an awareness not only about librarianship, but also about cultural and bibliographical aspects. Guerrieri's professional and personal life, however, was not simply dotted with satisfactions and successes, but the war, some family deaths, the instability of a residence, and envy and slander exacerbated by the fact that she was a capable and esteemed woman in her own environment, forced her to resist tenaciously until she was discharged from service. To the analysis and contextualization of the information already known, this essay adds the critical presentation of others documents from the numerous documents contained in his personal file preserved in Rome at the Central State Archive.

Gender Equality in Publishing and Communication of the Vine and Wine

Alessandra Biondi Bartolini — 2024-09-15

The wine sector has historically been dominated and led by men, but in recent decades many women have started to occupy various roles, from production to marketing. However, disparities persist in terms of career progression, as well as contractual and salary treatment. Unfortunately, the available data is often fragmented and not always representative, as gender equality reports are not widespread and do not always take into account the positions in the organization chart. In wine communication women are still often represented in a stereotypical manner, although some recent articles and books have begun to denounce the existence of the gender gap and the lack of visibility for women in top roles in companies, consortia, academies, and editorial offices as well as in wine and vine events. The article presents a series of data on the presence of women in events, panels and conferences in the sector and analyzes the opportunities (existing or missed) related to visibility or to its lack in such occasions, before presenting the case of Millevigne magazine, which represents an example of female leadership in the technical publishing sector.

Women in the Metaverse and the gender data gap: a cultural approach

Rossana Morriello — 2024-09-15

The metaverse is an immersive and interconnected technological environment that we are already a part of. We live in a "meta" environment compared to reality, in which the digital world and the analog world continuously intersect in an uninterrupted flow. We are surrounded in our daily lives by digital connections and objects that connect with each other and with the real world, from which they draw data. In the metaverse, whether understood in this broad sense or in a narrow sense, social structures and gender biases are reproduced, with all the elements of intersectionality present in reality, deeply rooted in the socio-cultural context and represented in the data used by algorithmic models. The predominance of men in the fields of study and work in information and communication technologies, where algorithmic models are developed, does not facilitate the overcoming of these problems. The data underlying artificial intelligence and the metaverse reflect the gender biases present in work, education, scientific research, journalism, and many other sectors. However, digital technology, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse can offer opportunities to overcome the gender gap.

The motivations for a women's series

Annantonia Martorano — 2024-09-15

The sources often speak of the world of women in an indirect, cross-cutting way, since over the centuries women have played social, legal, economic and cultural roles that are not always evident. Only in a few cases can gender studies boast of archives and libraries of exclusively female provenance: even with reference to recent periods, their number is small, either because of conservative conduct anchored in outdated historiographical hierarchies or as a result of women's lesser aptitude for documenting their existence and their role in society, expressing a difficulty in considering themselves as agent subjects in history.

It is precisely on this side that the organization of the cycle Profiles of Women among Papers and Books was oriented, with which the aim was to illustrate to a wide audience the lives of some female figures and institutions that represent, or have represented, at several levels’ Italian society and culture through the cognitive lens of their papers and books.