The motets of Philippe de Vitry and the fourteenth-century renaissance

1993 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 119-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wathey
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Papal Legate

Towards the end of August 1350, Petrarch wrote from his home at Padua to Philippe de Vitry, chastising his friend for a letter that he had sent to their mutual patron, Cardinal Guy de Boulogne, papal legate in Italy. Vitry's mind has slowed since their first acquaintance, writes Petrarch, so that he now considers even a glorious absence from France undesirable. The man who, when asked where he was from, answered that he was a citizen of the world, now thinks any departure from France an exile. The dust of France lies too heavily on his shoes; the Petit-Pont in Paris, ‘its arch not quite in the shape of a tortoise shell’, is too appealing to him, and the murmur of the Seine delights his ear too much.

Some Thoughts About Genre in Old Javanese Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter John Worsley
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Work

Robson in 1983 and 1988 in his reconsideration of the poetics of kakawin epics and Javanese philology drew readers’ attention to the importance of genre for the history of ancient Javanese literature. Aoyama in his study of the kakawin Sutasoma in 1992, making judicious use of Hans Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation”, offered the first systematic discussion of the genre of Old Javanese literary works. The present essay offers a commentary on the terms which mpu Monaguna and mpu Prapañca, authors of the thirteenth century epic kakawin Sumanasāntaka and the fourteenth century Deśawarṇana, themselves, employ to refer to the generic characteristics of their poems. Mpu Monaguna referred to his epic poem as a narrative work (kathā), written in a prakṛt, Old Javanese, and rendered in the poetic form of a kakawin and finally as a ritual act intended to enable the poet to achieve apotheosis with his tutelary deity and his poem to be the means of transforming the world, in particular to ensure the wellbeing of the readers, listeners, copyists and those who possessed copies of his poetic work. Mpu Prapañca described his Deśawarṇana differently. Also written in Old Javanese and in the poetic form of a kakawin—he refers to his work variously as a narrative work (kathā), a chronicle (śakakāla or śakābda), a praise poem (kastawan) and also as a ritual act designed to enable the author in an ecstatic state of rapture (alangö), and filled with the power and omniscience of his tutelary deity, to ensure the continued prosperity of the realm of Majapahit and to secure the rule of his king Rājasanagara. The essay considers each of these literary categories.

Surviving Desire: Reading Ḥāfiz̤ in Colonial India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Ali Altaf Mian
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
The World ◽  
Mystical Theology

Abstract This article contributes to scholarship on Muslim humanities, Islam in modern South Asia, and the Urdu literary tradition in colonial India. It does so by contextualizing and closely reading Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī’s (1863–1943) commentary on the Dīvān of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Ḥāfiz̤. Unlike his modernist contemporaries, Ashraf ʿAlī does not read Ḥāfiz̤ through the prisms of social reform or anti-colonial nationalist struggle. Rather, in his capacity as a Sufi master, he approaches Ḥāfiz̤’s Dīvān as a mystical text in order to generate insights through which he counsels his disciples. He uses the commentary genre to explore Sufi themes such as consolation, contraction, annihilation, subsistence, and the master-disciple relational dynamic. His engagement with Ḥāfiz̤’s ġhazals enables him to elaborate a practical mystical theology and to eroticize normative devotional rituals. Yet the affirmation of an analogical correspondence between sensual and divine love on the part of Ashraf ʿAlī also implies the survival of Ḥāfiz̤’s emphases on the disposability of the world and intoxicated longing for the beloved despite the demands of colonial modernity.

scholarly journals Art. XII.—On the Cause of the external Pattern, or Watering of the Damascus Sword-Blades

1837 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 187-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Iron And Steel ◽  
The World ◽  
In The Beginning

It is well known that Damascus was formerly celebrated all over the world for its manufacture of sword-blades, and it is recorded, that when Timúr Lang conquered Syria, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, he carried off all the manufacturers of steel into Persia; since which period, the fabrication of arms has declined at Damascus, and the successors of those workmen, being dispersed over the East, are said either to have lost the secret, or ceased to make blades of more than ordinary goodness. We must, however, first divest ourselves of all prejudice in favour of the exaggerated reports of their qualities, and remember, that at the time when the natives of the East were well acquainted with the art of working in iron and steel, we, and indeed all Europe, appear to have been comparatively in a state of perfect ignorance; the ancient swords of Damascus, therefore, when opposed to those of other countries, were probably found to be infinitely superior in temper and quality; which, combined with their great external beauty, stamped them for ages with so high a character for excellence, that they are even now handed down as heir-looms by Eastern princes to their posterity. The extraordinary prices that have been offered and obtained for them, sufficiently attest the estimation in which they were held, which is certainly not warranted in the present day, when swords of equal, or superior quality, might be manufactured at one-twentieth of the expense. In addition to the foregoing observations, the strength and great dexterity of the swordsmen must be taken into consideration, and much of the apparent superiority of these blades may be undoubtedly ascribed to this cause.

Thinking Globally: Mandeville, Memory, and Mappaemundi

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-106
Author(s):  
John Wyatt Greenlee ◽  
Anna Fore Waymack
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
First Person ◽  
Unreliable Narrator ◽  
The World ◽  
Challenging Students ◽  
Person Account

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: THE TRAVELS OF Sir John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century "first-person" account of a fictional English knight's adventurous journey to Jerusalem and across the world, is difficult to teach.1 Popular with medieval European audiences, the book troubles today's students with its confusing descriptions of global geography, its treatment of non-Christian, non-European peoples, and its constant conflation of fact and fable. But, as those who have taught it can attest, it can serve as a valuable tool for challenging students' preconceptions of an isolated European Middle Ages. It introduces them to an unreliable narrator and to tensions between the doctrines of the institutional Roman church and individual faith. The author's global perspective shows students a world of diverse religions, ethnicities, races, diets, customs, and sexualities. And the Travels does this while being relatively short and entertaining, pulling the reader through the map via its engaging narrative of landscaped vignettes.

God’s Anger and the Demons Within

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-85
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Climatic Change ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Little Ice Age ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Global Cooling ◽  
The World ◽  
Major Period

The first major period of climate shock to be studied was the early fourteenth century, especially the years between 1310 and 1325. This involved a broad and lasting era of climatic change, a time of global cooling that marked the onset of the so-called Little Ice Age. Societies around the world suffered times of shocking paranoia and conspiracy-mongering. They responded with persecutions of minorities and dissidents, leading to purges and expulsions on an appalling scale. Whole populations suffered bitter times of exile and diaspora, and those changes did much to create our familiar maps of the great faiths and their geographical concentrations. In Europe, modern ideas of witchcraft were born.

The End of the World is Nigh!

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mee
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Outer Planets ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
End Of The World

Astronomy was the first science. Even in the fourteenth century, astronomers could accurately predict the date and time of an eclipse that lay one hundred years in the future. But early astronomers also developed some strange ideas which still resound today. Astrologers of the past identified conjunctions of the planets, especially the outer planets Jupiter and Saturn, with disastrous events such as floods, schisms, and pestilence. These ideas were related to the notion that world history can be understood as a series of 1,000-year cycles. This idea dates back to ancient Persian and Babylonian astrologers, but it has been perpetuated within Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity and is known today as ‘millennialism’. It is quite remarkable that the sequence of conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn was also the key that led Johannes Kepler to dedicate himself to astronomy and ultimately to transform astronomy into a modern science.

V: The Gawain Poet and Dante: A Conjecture

PMLA ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Gordon Hall Gerould
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Sir Gawain ◽  
The World ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Gawain Poet ◽  
Made In

The end of the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, was one of the periods of great accomplishment in English literature. Chaucer did not stand alone. Wiclif's prose, the admirable poetry that Gower composed in three languages, and the powerful satiric verse of Piers Plowman give ample evidence of this. Among the poets of the time no one except Chaucer was greater than the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pearl, whose name and personality are still unknown. Though a learned man of the world like Chaucer, he wrote in the dialect of northwestern England rather than of London, which must have seemed difficult to most readers even in his own time. Why he chose such an obscure dialect has never been understood. The writer of this paper calls attention to the eloquent defence of his native speech that Dante made in his Convivio, and suggests that the Gawain poet may have been inspired by it to do for his own dialect what the great Italian had done for Tuscan.

scholarly journals Alterity and Occidentalism in Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Texts: Narratives of Travel, Conversion, and Dehumanization

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-108
Author(s):  
Arngrímur Vídalín
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Peripheral Areas ◽  
Saga Literature

This article analyses five fourteenth-century Old Norse travel narratives in light of the learned geographical tradition of medieval Iceland. Three of the narratives, Þorvalds þáttr víðfǫrla, Eiríks saga víðfǫrla, and Yngvars saga víðfǫrla, focus on the travels of Nordic people to eastern Europe and Asia; while the latter two, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, tell of travels to the continent later named North America. While the travels to the East deal with pilgrimage and the search for the terrestrial Paradise in the service of individual salvation and missionary activities in Scandinavia and Iceland more specifically, the travels to the West are focused on the violent conquest and Christianization of newfound peripheral areas and their peoples. What these narratives have in common, and owe to the learned (Plinian) tradition, is their dehumanized view of foreign and strange people: the giants and monsters of the East, and the skrælingar (indigenous peoples) and einfœtingar (sciopods) of the West. In these sagas travels to the East, while dangerous, introduce heroes to courtly manners, encyclopedic knowledge, and salvation; whereas travels to the West lead to mayhem and death and all attempts at settlement there fail miserably, making Greenland the westernmost outpost of Christianity in the world. This article aims to show how this learned tradition was adapted for use in saga literature to contrast the monstrous and heathen periphery with the more central and piously Christian Iceland.

scholarly journals Western Immigration in the fourteenth-century Golden Horde: The Case of Venetian Tana

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-107
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Pubblici ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sea Of Azov ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Associative Model ◽  
Western Population ◽  
The Sea Of Azov ◽  
The World

Objective: This paper’s aim is to reconstruct the Western population of Venetian Tana in the fourteenth century, the residents’ perception of their condition as “mig­rants”, and finally this population’s interactions with the other communities who lived there. Research materials: The sources used are primarily the notarial deeds of the Venice State Archive together with the vast and excellent scholarship produced in recent decades. Research results and novelty: For over two centuries the settlement of Tana, situated in the territory of the Golden Horde, represented the easternmost outpost of the Latin emporia in the Levant. Here, the utilitarian concept of the Western urban mercantile class found itself confronted with a new experience. This group was a minority living in close contact with larger, cohesive communities whose cultural background was extremely diverse. Those who emigrated east were mainly the emerging urban bourgeoisie, but also families of ancient noble origin who had nothing in common with the world of the Steppe and its traditional roots. These citizens came to the Levant, bringing with them the urban associative model. The life of the settlement at the mouth of the river Don is an ideal basis for observing the flow of people who left Venice and its surroundings on galleys and, after months of travel, arrived on the shores of the Sea of Azov.

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