/library/oar/handle/123456789/47801 2025-11-12T01:52:58Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/47908 Title: Fort Manoel : the design and construction of an 18th-century Hospitaller fort [book review] Editors: Ciappara, Frans Abstract: This is the latest publication in the online series of ARX Occasional Papers published by Military Architecture.com. In this 208-page study, Dr. Spiteri examines the design and construction of the last of the major bastioned works of fortification built in Malta by the Hospitaller knights of St John. This Baroque fortress was designed by French military engineers in the early 1720s, to the conventions of the French school of military architecture inspired by the genius of Pagan, Vauban and Cormontaigne. 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/47906 Title: The social and religious history of a Maltese Parish : St Mary's Qrendi in the eighteenth century [book review] Editors: Ciappara, Frans Abstract: A writing of history 'from below', this work focuses on the humble lives of common people within the micro-setting of a small village in eighteenth-century Malta. It marks a departure from traditional chronological narratives of surface events, background institutions and power classes, and directs its attention to the obscure and unsung masses who emerge in vivid snatches through the pages of this book. Rather than embracing literary evidence at face value, the author digs up a wealth of quantitative data from a wide range of archival sources, and analyses it against that of other eighteenth century communities in order to project a picture of how common people lived and inter-acted within the cultural, religious and social milieu of a Maltese village community. 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/47867 Title: Magdalene nuns and Penitent prostitutes, Valletta [book review] Abstract: I first came across the Magdalenes while reading for aPh.D at the University of Cambridge. It was a fleeting encounter, as the encounters of most men with these women in the early modem period tended to be. I was going through a document from the Tribunal of the Roman Inquisition of Malta dated 1606. The person under investigation was none other than the Spanish Hospitaller Chaplain Fra Pietro Rea Camarasa, Prior of the Conventual Church of St John.!t was alleged that some years before, when this priest was the confessor to the Nuns of St Ursula (not far from the Magdalene's church and monastery), his behaviour had been far from ideal. He had sex with the nuns, including the Mother Superior and among other things he enjoyed letting the nuns comb his beard. At one point - presumably because of his behaviour he was transferred away from the nuns of St Ursula to the Magdalenes, to the institution for repentant women. Whether from a seventeenth- or twenty- first-century perspective, it seems hardly the most sensible decision for a man of his inclinations; as one can imagine, his behaviour with the Magdalenes was similar as what it had been with the nuns of St Ursula. 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/47865 Title: Mattia Preti : beyond the self-portrait [book review] Abstract: This book contains two creative and thoughtful essays, the first by Giuseppe Valentino, 'Configurations of a Social Comeback. The Taverna Diaspora and the Self-Portrait', and the second by Sandro Debono, 'Brushwork of Identity. The Politico- Religious in Mattia Preti'. The essays are introduced by an astute, shorter "resume and critical evaluation" by Giorgio Leone who begins his review with: 'These essays have literally ravished me'. 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z