The figure of the flâneur is attracting growing interest among sociologists. The question that has stimulated this research is the following: which is the “role” of the flâneur in the social system? After having briefly expounded the Theory of Roles, we examine some sociological works which seem particularly useful to formulate a response. Our analysis is primarily focused on the works of Walter Benjamin, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, and Giampaolo Nuvolati, taken as paradigmatic cases of four possible perspectives.

The study reviews the circumstances under which fiction was published in Romania under the 50 years of communism – censorship, writers’ associations, publishing houses – and illustrates them with Norman Manea’s essays in his volume On Clowns: the Dictator and the Artist.

In the last 25 years, polemics about Constantin Noica multiplied. For a significant part of the Romanian intellectual élite, he is an exceptional philosopher, maybe the most representative of the Romanian culture in the 20th century. For a little one, his work and his activity represent the “embodiment” of all the critical problems of Romanian culture in the last century. A few scholars criticize philosopher’s ideological options, toward authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
In my paper, I present an intellectual profile of the philosopher by revisiting his ontology. I strongly agree with Ion Ianoşi, who stressed that the philosophy of Noica is mainly based on the traditionalism. From this perspective of interpretation, Noica remains a controversial author, but reveals himself as one of the most consistent Romanian philosopher from the last century, who preserved his views till the end of his life.
 

The MS Ludwig XIV:2 (Getty Center, Los Angeles), from ca. 1170-1180, is a luxury manuscript containing Gratian’s Decretum. The appearance of Ludwig XIV:2 have caused art historians to compare it with a group of manuscripts prepared in Sens for members of Thomas Becket’s exile court. The present paper focuses on the three texts preserved in Ludwig XIV:2: the main text, the marginal notes, and the interlinear annotations. It detects several details proper not only to confirm the art historians’ suggestion of the manuscript’s origin, but also to link the three texts to Thomas Becket. – Also, all three texts have ties to the Old French translation of Decretum.
 

In the 18th century thinkers of the French Enlightenment discover Russia, whose institutional reforms replace their traditional utopian topics. The myths of Peter the Great and of Catherine II as Minerva of the North are created. Russia also becomes a peculiar laboratory of Enlightenment incarnate. Francesco Locatelli, the author of the Muscovian Letters, who between 1733 and 1735 spent two years in Russian prisons, attempts to deconstruct these myths. His book, which enjoyed an immense popularity in Europe, is an accusation of arbitrariness and inhumanity of the Russian regime.

The article deals with three connected “Turkish” novels by Pierre Loti [a pen name of Julien Viaud] (1850–1923), a French writer deeply enamoured with Turkey (although at the close of the end of the Ottoman Empire). The main object is to present Turkish words, phrases and sentences that Loti used often in order to enrich his works by local elements. The second aim is to show Polish (yet pre-war) translations of those novels, paying special attention to their Turkish elements.