The Kitāb al-Taswi'a or Book of Reprobation by Jonah ibn Janāḥ. A revision of J. and H. Derenbourg's edition

2000 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
María A. Gallego
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Important Development ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abū I-Walīd Jonah ibn Janāḥ is undoubtedly one of the greatest Hebrew grammarians. Born in Al-Andalus at the end of the tenth century he was active during the eleventh century, but his exact dates are not known. His best known works, a grammar, Kitāb al-Lumaՙ (The book of variegated flowerbeds) and a dictionary of biblical Hebrew, Kitāb al-'Uṣūl (The book of roots), represented the most important development in the knowledge of Hebrew of the Middle Ages. Other important works on grammar include Kitāb al-Taswi'a (The book of annexation), a short grammatical treatise which he composed as a response to critics of a previous work entitled Kitāb al-Mustalḥaq (The book of annexation).

scholarly journals Las técnicas constructivas en las murallas medievales de Almería

X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Gurriarán Daza
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Rammed Earth ◽  
Construction Techniques ◽  
Typical Scheme ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Middle Ages

Building techniques in the medieval walls of AlmeríaAlmería was one of the most important cities in al-Andalus, a circumstance that was possible thanks to the strength of its port. Its foundation as an urban entity during the Caliphate of Córdoba originated a typical scheme of an Islamic city organized by a medina and a citadel, both walled. Subsequent city’s growths, due to the creation of two large suburbs commencing in the eleventh century, also received defensive works, creating a system of fortifications that was destined to defend the place during the rest of the Middle Ages. In this work we will analyse the construction techniques used in these military works, which cover a wide period from the beginning of the tenth century until the end of the fifteenth century. Although ashlar stone was used in the Caliphate fortification, in most of these constructions bricklayer techniques were used, more modest but very useful. In this way, the masonry and rammed earth technique were predominant, giving rise to innumerable constructive phases that in recent times are being studied with archaeological methodology, thus to know better their evolution and main characteristics. 

The Athelstan Gift Story: Its Influence on English Chronicles and Carolingian Romances

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-537
Author(s):  
Laura Hibbard Loomis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Chanson De Roland ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
William Of Malmesbury

To saints and their relics in the Middle Ages great men did great reverence. The mighty Charlemagne zealously collected and distributed relics of Christ and the saints; so, too, did the noble King Athelstan of England, who was, to his own contemporaries, something of “an English Charlemagne.” Certain tales relating to these two famous rulers and the holy relics acquired by them, are full of interest in themselves and in the relationship, at special stages, of the stories to each other. The Continental Carolingian narratives—the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, the Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus clavum et coronam Domini a Constantino poli Aquis Grani detulerit, the Fierabras tell how Charlemagne, either on a fabulous journey to the East, or by warfare in Spain, got a hoard of precious relics which included some from the Crucifixion but never, in the oldest versions of these stories, any part of the Passion Lance. An ancient story, of English origin, tells how Athelstan received, as a gift from France, a hoard which likewise included some Passion relics. Among the gifts was the Passion Lance which was said to have belonged to Charlemagne; there was also the vexillum of St. Mauricius. For the Carolingian stories named above there is no extant text that antedates the latter half of the twelfth century, no conjectured source that antedates the latter half of the eleventh century. The Athelstan Gift Story, as we shall call it, was first set forth in an Anglo-Latin poem eulogizing the English king (d. 939). This panegyric was quoted and summarized by William of Malmesbury (1125) and is now accepted, though it was long ignored, as an authentic tenth century source. It may have been this almost unknown poem which inspired in the Chanson de Roland, in that earliest Anglo-Norman copy known as the Oxford Roland, four concepts connected with Charlemagne's reported possession of a bit of the Passion Lance. Our concern here, however, is not with the ancient Latin poem, but with the version of its Gift Story by William of Malmesbury. To it he gave new life, new currency; its influence can be traced in various chronicles and in certain English Carolingian romances. It throws new light on their development and relationships. Strangely enough, it was in these English Carolingian stories and not in their Continental sources and analogues that the idea that Charlemagne had once possessed the Passion Lance took root and flourished.

Early Medieval Poetry

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-176
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Medieval Poetry ◽  
The Middle Ages

This, the first of four chapters on the Middle Ages, explores the rise of vernacular verse from the fifth to eleventh centuries. There is a little surviving evidence for oral poetry in the vernacular languages prior to the fifth century, and the first written example comes from the beginning of that century. The story of Caedmon’s inspired poetry is examined, as is Bede’s ‘death song’ and other evidence for poetic activity in England in the seventh and eighth centuries. Several Old High German poems of the ninth century are considered, as well as Alfred the Great’s interest in poetry. Beowulf, dated somewhere between the late seventh and the eleventh century, includes scenes of poetic performance and may be itself an example of the kind of poem it depicts in performance. Also discussed are the Old English poems Deor and Widsith and the Viking and Viking-influenced poems of the tenth century.

“The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-188
Author(s):  
Brandon Katzir
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Medieval Rhetoric ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Arabic Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Traditions ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article explores the rhetoric of medieval rabbi and philosopher Saadya Gaon, arguing that Saadya typifies what LuMing Mao calls the “interconnectivity” of rhetorical cultures (Mao 46). Suggesting that Saadya makes use of argumentative techniques from Greek-inspired, rationalist Islamic theologians, I show how his rhetoric challenges dominant works of rhetorical historiography by participating in three interconnected cultures: Greek, Jewish, and Islamic. Taking into account recent scholarship on Jewish rhetoric, I argue that Saadya's amalgamation of Jewish rhetorical genres alongside Greco-Islamic genres demonstrates how Jewish and Islamic rhetoric were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the article analyzes the rhetorical significance of Saadya's most famous treatise on Jewish philosophy, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, which I argue utilizes Greco-Islamic rhetorical strategies in a polemical defense of rabbinical authority. As a tenth-century writer who worked across multiple rhetorical traditions and genres, Saadya challenges the monocultural, Latin-language histories of medieval rhetoric, demonstrating the importance of investigating Arabic-language and Jewish rhetorics of the Middle Ages.

Stages in Diplomatic Production

2020 ◽  
pp. 610-618
Author(s):  
Olivier Guyotjeannin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter examines administrative documents of the Middle Ages and the major scholarly studies of them. It surveys the number of preserved documents and the problems surrounding the lack of documents in different periods and places. The author discusses the role and influence of the Church in the increased production and preservation of documents beginning in the eleventh century, leading to an enormous increase in the production of documents during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages.

Vir Dei: secular sanctity in the early tenth century

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Derek Baker
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Life Crisis ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Middle Ages

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.

Muslim Roma in the Balkans

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Crowe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Wild Animals ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Roma entered the Balkans from India during the Middle Ages. They reached Persia sometime in the ninth century and by the eleventh century had moved into the Byzantine Empire. According to the eleventh-century Georgian Life of Saint George the Athonite, the Emperor Constantine Monomachus asked the Adsincani to get rid of wild animals preying on the animals in his royal hunting preserve. Adsincani is the Georgian form of the Greek word Atsínganoi or Atzínganoi, from which the non-English terms for Roma (cigán, cigány, tsiganes, zigeuner) are derived. Adsincani means “ner-do-well fortune tellers” or “ventriloquists and wizards who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown.” “Gypsy” comes from “Egyptian,” a term often used by early modern chroniclers in the Balkans to refer to the Roma. Because of the stereotypes and prejudice that surround the word “Gypsy,” the Roma prefer a name of their own choosing from their language, Romani. Today, it is preferable to refer to the Gypsies as Rom or “Roma,” a Romani word meaning “man” or “husband.” Byzantine references to “Egyptians” crop up during this period as Byzantine political and territorial fortunes gave way to the region's new power, the Ottomans. There were areas with large Roma populations in Cyprus and Greece which local rulers dubbed “Little Egypt” in the late fourteenth century.

The Easter Sepulchrum in its Relation to the Architecture of the High Altar

PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 664-712
Author(s):  
John K. Bonnell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Middle Ages

By the term ‘sepulehrum’ is designated that device or structure employed in churches—especially in the middle ages—to symbolize, or in more complete manner to represent, the tomb of Christ. This sepulchrum, so named in the liturgy, first appears in connection with the ancient office of the Depositio Crucis, or burial of the cross, which after mass on Good Friday typified the burial of Christ. Complementing and completing the Depositio was another office, privately celebrated by the priest and clergy before matins on Easter Sunday, typifying the resurrection, and called the Elevatio Crucis. When, after the tenth century, troping of the Introit for Easter morning—the famous Quem Quaeritis—developed into a little liturgical play with the impersonation of the angel or angels, and of the three Maries coming to anoint the body of the Lord, there was naturally a development of the heretofore symbolic sepulchrum in the altar, into what resulted finally in a separate structure.

Inland Waterways and Coastal Transport: Landing Places, Canals and Bridges

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Water Transport ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Indirect Evidence ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Inland Waterways ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
Marine Culture ◽  
The Middle Ages

Transport by water was the quickest and cheapest method to move goods in the Middle Ages, and linked together people even in distant parts of England. Trading places could arise in almost any place where boats could be hauled ashore, on either rivers or coastal estuaries. These were all potential places where people on land could come together to trade with those arriving by boat and ship. It is no coincidence that the rise in both inland and coastal transport dates to the tenth century, the period from which England became increasingly commercialized.The discussion of water transport is not limited to indirect evidence. Archaeological work has identified canals dug to allow the movement of boats up rivers and in marshland, and landing places where boats could be brought to the banks of rivers and the shore. The development of water-transport led to the development of a ‘marine culture’, a change in attitudes to the sea and ships.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document