https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/15625 2026-10-28T21:32:08Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150469 Title: Recovering women's voices : Pietro Dusina's apostolic visitation to Malta in 1575 Authors: Caruana Dingli, Petra Abstract: This essay re-examines the apostolic visitation conducted by Monsignor Pietro Dusina in Malta in 1575, with particular focus on how women feature in his report. Women were not merely the passive subjects of reform in sixteenth-century Malta, but active participants who conformed but also struggled with the changes being introduced across the Roman Church as whole. The essay first looks at the broader context of Dusina’s visit and then examines the experiences of monastic women, as well as tertiary and secular women, in relation to Tridentine reforms. In recovering these fragmentary voices, the report is revisited as a historical source through which the presence and roles of women – at once visible and obscured – and the challenges that they faced, can be more fully understood. Dusina’s visitation aimed to assess the state of the Church in Malta and to implement the decrees of the Council of Trent. This paper analyses how women were both included and excluded in Dusina’s visitation report, within the ecclesiastical and social context of the sixteenth century. Traditional historical narratives centred on male experiences and largely marginalised women. Exploring perspectives that were often sidelined, widens and enriches our understanding of the past. Recovering women’s lives and experiences can adjust our understanding of early modern Maltese society, particularly in terms of gender roles and power relations. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150170 Title: Macaronic Mediterranean : the queer fluidities of the eighteenth-century imagination Authors: Aquilina, Aaron Abstract: Taking my cue from a neglected play – Robert Hitchcock's The Macaroni. A Comedy (1773) – I explore the compelling and contradictory nuances of its titular figure, both as a particular dramatic character and as a sweeping cultural phenomenon at the latter end of the long eighteenth century. As a cultural icon, the macaronis were young men who turned themselves, through their language, mannerisms, and ludicrous fashion, into a counter-image of British self-perceptions. At a particularly volatile period in history when the Empire was invested in consolidating Britishness, the macaronis threatened to wash it all away by importing a distinctly Mediterranean perspective to bear on various facets of British identity. The macaronis' attack-by-parody took to task, especially, contemporaneous imaginaries around masculinity, and they were in turn derided, even dehumanised, for their flamboyant play with gender. Considering their provocation as one which takes the form of clashing conceptual borders (geographical, political, temporal, gendered), this article undertakes a queer-historical perspective in examining eighteenth-century British relations with the Mediterranean region, its sea, and its linguistic landscape. Ultimately, this essay examines how this relation's visual-semiotic framework foregrounds a poetics of fluidity upon which any constructed solidity is mere display. As a character, Hitchcock's macaroni, pointedly named Epicene, is an unhappy one, trapped between the demands of conventional masculinity and the appealing liquification of gender binaries. He, too, will have his say occasionally, if we can hear him against what his author intended. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149704 Title: Drifting still on reading, writing, drawing the sea Authors: Attard, Matthew; Grech, Marija Abstract: There seems to be no single word with which to properly refer to the surface of the sea as seen from below. Under surface could work, perhaps, were it not that this term takes as its orienting principle a position above water–one from which the surface remains a surface, and the below remains below. Gazed up at, this ropey ceiling that rolls and churns, that sweeps down and swells up, is not an under but an above; and if it is a surface, then it is a surface of depth– the uppermost layer of a body of water whose skin seems to move as its own separate beast: thick, viscous, full-bodied; part sea, part tumultuous sky. Perhaps this surface– this above-below, below-above of the sea–is simply an inside out, a double take, the seams of the sea made visible. [extract] 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149703 Title: Countertextualities of the sea : reading the Mediterranean Authors: Grech, Marija Abstract: The positing of a direct link between sea and text seems, at first glance, counterintuitive. The sea may very well be the subject of innumerable texts, literary or otherwise, but to claim that it might itself be textual, even if counter-textual in some way, feels somewhat odd. The sea has been described as both ‘noninscriptive’ and ‘nonsignifying’ (Jue 2020: 31; Steinberg and Peters 2015: 249; Pezzani 2014: 156)–incapable of preserving any mark on its fluid surface or holding any single true meaning. If rock served as the first textual substrate for the human–the first canvas, first parchment, first palimpsest– and will, according to recent figurations of the Anthropocene, be the last to bear its mark, then the sea supposedly knows nothing of such histories. The sea appears to dissolve, dissipate, and dispel; it does not preserve or record. Viewed from afar, its smooth uninterrupted surface could be mistaken for a solid substrate, but, in the end, it is the sea’s fluidity that always seems to win out, rushing in to smooth itself over and erase any visible mark or trace of a disturbance. [extract] 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z