Although tracing its origins back to antiquity, a distinctly new kind of alchemy emerged in mid-16th-century Europe. This new tradition developed out of the teachings of Paracelsus (1493–1541), a German medical practitioner who challenged the authority of university-trained physicians. He sought to establish a reformed kind of medicine based on first-hand experience of the natural world rather than dry scholastic texts. Alchemy was at the heart of this new medicine, a body of experimental practice and theory that not only held out the promise of improving the health of individuals but could also be applied to wider sicknesses of society.

At the end of the 15th century, Italian painters explored the new effects made possible by the use of the oil medium. They created a sense of depth and relief by following the Flemish technique of glazes, which allowed the spreading of very thin and translucent layers, rich in medium and with low pigment content. A striking example is given by the realization of the shadows in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci: the Master used the so-called ‘sfumato’ technique based on the use of glazes to obtain a ‘smoky’ aspect for the creation of flesh tones, with very subtle contours that seem to have no hard edges. Since the 16th century, his technique was famous due to the perfection of the works of art that glazes have allowed artists to reach. Analytical characterizations of painting materials have helped us to improve our knowledge about this technique. X-ray fluorescence measurements were carried out on seven paintings by Leonardo da Vinci preserved in the Louvre museum. This technique is widely used for qualitative determination of the pigments but it is very difficult to interpret the data quantitatively in the case of layered structures such as easel paintings. As well as the characterization of the palette, we obtain in-depth information on how Leonardo modelled his shadows. Comparisons between the different paintings of Leonardo highlight the specific features in the Leonardo technique.

‘How did life start on Earth?’ and ‘Why were left-handed amino acids selected for the architecture of proteins?’ A new attempt to answer these questions of high public and interdisciplinary scientific interest will be provided by this review. It will describe most recent experimental data on how the basic and molecular building blocks of life, amino acids, formed in a prebiotic setting. Most amino acids are chiral, that is that they cannot be superimposed with their mirror image molecules (enantiomers). In processes triggering the origin of life on Earth, the equal occurrence, i.e. the parity between left-handed amino acids and their right-handed mirror images, was violated. In the case of amino acids, the balance was tipped to the left – as a result of which life's proteins today exclusively implement the left-handed form of amino acids, called l-amino acid enantiomers. Neither plants, nor animals, including humans, make use of d-amino acids for the molecular architecture of their proteins (enzymes). This review addresses the molecular asymmetry of amino acids in living organisms, namely the preference for left-handedness. What was the cause for the violation of molecular parity of amino acids in the emergence of life on Earth? All the fascinating models proposed by physicists, chemists, and biologists will be vividly presented including the scientific conflicts. Special emphasis will be given to amino acid enantiomers that were subjected to chiral photons. The interaction between racemic molecules and chiral photons was shown to produce an enantiomeric enrichment that will be discussed in the context of absolute asymmetric synthesis. The concluding paragraphs will describe the attempt to verify any of those models with the chirality-module of the Rosetta mission. This European space mission contains probe Philae that was launched on board the Rosetta spacecraft with the aim of landing on the icy surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and analysing whether chiral organic compounds are present that could have been brought to the Earth by comet impacts.

This paper describes the evolution of wine in Spain from Phoenician times to the present, within a historical context. Each of the six main sections deserves more careful analysis, but the broad overview given here could be of interest to the curious (and thirsty) reader.

Modern literary history was born, together with the European nation states, in the early 19th century, encapsulating the emerging idea of literature as an articulation of the national mentality. In tandem with other national histories of art, politics, language, religion, culture and nature, literary history took part in the creation of a national identity, as did the literary texts it interpreted and canonized along a historical trajectory with the nation state as its teleological culmination. Literature and literary histories have always been a form of cultural intervention, not just texts. This is still the case, but in a modern transnational and globalized cultural environment, inherited historical paradigms are obsolete as scientific and didactic models. Nevertheless, they still play a dominant role in our educational institutions on all levels. This article discusses the resilience of the national paradigm, points to the institutional and conceptual obstacles for imposing alternative frameworks, but also exemplifies how new historiographical routes may be found.

The resurgence of World Literature must be seen in relation to the economization of all spheres of life. Traditional, ‘specialized’ literary criticism replicates literature's power to interpellate subjects characterized by attention. Both literature and state funded literary criticism in research and teaching are currently under siege because they are counter-hegemonic in relation to a lifeworld shaped by a global attention deficit syndrome, which is the bedrock of a hypertrophic consumerism. Recent proposals for writing histories and systematic descriptions of World Literature are complicit with this move because they champion, to the detriment of deep attention, the relevance, mobility, exchange value, and translatability of texts, successfully competing with traditional ‘painstaking’ practices of literary criticism for ever dwindling institutional resources.

This article discusses the theory of the Russian medievalist Dmitry Likhachov regarding the evolution of European literature. In the history of European literature, Likhachov distinguishes a number of so-called ‘megaperiods’, which each consist of a ‘primary’ and a ‘secondary’ cultural period or style. The megaperiods are: Romanesque–Gothic, Renaissance–Baroque, Classicism–Romanticism, Realism–Symbolism, Modernism–Postmodernism. Primary periods generally favour ‘realism’ and are connected with a definite ideology; secondary periods tend to decorativeness, irrationalism and various, even opposite, ideologies. The change from a primary to a secondary period is gradual, from a secondary to a primary one rather sudden. The theory makes us aware of the existence of a kind of ‘rhythm’ in the development of European literature and culture.

Literary History has changed its objectives during the last few decades. In theory as well as in literary analysis strictly demarcated approaches have given way to a worldwide perspective. The openness to the world and the ongoing dialogue with the ‘other’ resonates in recent French Literature. Academic critique can accompany and guide these evolutions. This article focuses on three central concepts: transculturalité, colinguisme and transmédialité. Special attention will be given to the 18th century French-English author William Beckford and the final word is spoken by Edouard Glissant.

Was den Kern der europäischen Identität ausmacht, ist freilich mehr der Charakter schmerzlicher Lernprozesse als dessen Ergebnis. Die Erinnerung an den moralischen Abgrund, in den uns der nationalistische Exzess geführt hat, verleiht unserem heutigen Engagement den Stellenwert einer Errungenschaft. (Jürgen Habermas1)

The author attempts a redefinition of literary epochs or periods as problematics, i.e. as constellations of problems to which individuals and groups react in many different ways. In this respect he differs from those who construct literary periods as world visions, ideologies, aesthetics or stylistics. He defines problematics from a sociosemiotic point of view: as socio-linguistic situations in which competing collective languages (sociolects) and discourses react critically and polemically to one another.

The goals and methods of a global history of literature may not always be easily reconcilable with those pertinent to local (‘national’ or ‘regional’) literary traditions; however, behind the, at times, lengthy or painstaking discussions on the criteria of selection, emphasis, and on more or less necessary nuances, there are also a number of deeper and more fundamental issues at stake in a global history of literature that can be fruitfully approached through the looking-glass of a local literary tradition. Even characteristics of a particular tradition of literature that may seem specific, even highly specific, can give rise to intriguing questions bearing on some of the wide-ranging issues tied to a global perspective on literature. More in particular, with regard to Italian literature, three issues come to the fore: the way literary history deals with the question of agency, the connections between literary history and cultural repertoires, and the question of canonicity and ideology in literary historiography.