Experimental polyphony, ‘according to the… Latins’, in late Byzantine psalmody

1982 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitri Conomos

No-one has ever seriously questioned the exclusively monophonic character of medieval Byzantine ecclesiastical chant. The introduction of the drone, or ison singing, so familiar in contemporary Greek, Arabic, Romanian and Bulgarian practice, is not documented before the sixteenth century, when modal obscurity, resulting from complex and ambiguous chromatic alterations which appeared probably after the assimilation of Ottoman and other Eastern musical traditions, required the application of a tonic, or home-note, to mark the underlying tonal course of the melody. Musicians in Constantinople and on Mount Athos were probably oblivious of the rise of polyphony in the West, particularly after the formal break between the two Churches in the eleventh century, which was preceded by a long period of increasing estrangement. And with the Latin occupation of a part of the Byzantine Empire between 1204 and 1261, there was a general distaste for and rejection of the culture of the ‘Franks’.

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deno J. Geanakoplos

In the medieval theocratic societies of both the Byzantine East and the Latin West, where the influence of Christian precepts so strongly pervaded all aspects of life, it was inevitable that the institutions of church and state, of sacerdotium and regnum to use the traditional Latin terms, be closely tied to one another. But whereas in the West, at least after the investiture conflict of the eleventh century, the pope managed to exert a strong political influence over secular rulers, notably the Holy Roman Emperor, in the East, from the very foundation of Constantinople in the fourth century, the Byzantine emperor seemed clearly to dominate over his chief ecclesiastical official, the patriarch.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 378-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald F. Jackson

AbstractThe fact that a number of printed editions of Greek physicians appeared during the sixteenth century is clear evidence that publishing houses of the time believed that a substantial interest in such texts existed. What is most surprising is that, until the last decade of the fifteenth century, a prevailing shortage of Greek medical manuscripts had not at all troubled the scholarly and medical communities. This essay shows how minor a niche Galen and other Greek medical writers occupied in the West for a long period of time, until some significant occurrences brought them to the forefront in the 1490s.


Author(s):  
Dimitar Dimitrov ◽  
◽  
◽  

The article explores changing attitudes to western Europeans in the Byzantine Empire from the eleventh century until the Fourth Crusade and for some time after it. Special attention is paid to the development of old stereotypes and the emergence of new ones. More active contacts between the two halves of Christendom from the eleventh century onwards did not result in an expected rapprochement, but rather led to hatred and resentment. The article focuses on a number of texts by Byzantine authors, such as Michael Psellos, Anna Komnena, John Kinnamos, Eustathios of Thessaloniki, and Niketas Choniates. In my view, the changes in Byzantine perceptions of the west could be represented in terms of the following metaphorically named stages: Calm, Menace, and Bitterness and Despair.


2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-367
Author(s):  
Jennifer Birch ◽  
John P. Hart

We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.


1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Hussey

John Mauropous, an eleventh-century Metropolitan of Euchaïta, has long been commemorated in the service books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion for the Office of Orthros on 30th January, the day dedicated to the Three Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, tells how the festival was instituted by Mauropous and describes him as ‘the well-known John, a man of great repute and well-versed in the learning of the Hellenes, as his writings show, and moreover one who has attained to the highest virtue’. In western Europe something was known of him certainly as early as the end of the sixteenth century; his iambic poems were published for the first time by an Englishman in 1610, and his ‘Vita S. Dorothei’ in the Acta Sanctorum in 1695. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars were really able to form some idea of the character and achievement of this Metropolitan of Euchaïta. Particularly important were two publications: Sathas' edition in 1876 of Michael Psellus' oration on John, and Paul de Lagarde's edition in 1882 of some of John's own writings. This last contained not only the works already printed, but a number of hitherto unpublished sermons and letters, together with the constitution of the Faculty of Law in the University of Constantinople, and a short introduction containing part of an etymological poem. But there remained, and still remains, one significant omission: John's canons have been almost consistently neglected.


1955 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams

The island of Trinidad was discovered by Columbus on the third voyage in 1498. One of the largest and most fertile of the West Indian islands, for many years it remained on the fringe of European activity in the Caribbean area and on the coasts of Venezuela and Guiana. A Spanish settlement was founded there in 1532, but apparently it disintegrated within a short time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Berrio and Raleigh fought for possession of the island, but chiefly as a convenient base for their rival search for El Dorado, or Manoa, the Golden Man and the mythical city of gold. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explorers, corsairs, and contraband traders, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, passed near its shores, and many of them may well have paused there to refresh themselves and to make necessary repairs to their vessels. But the records are scanty and we know little of such events or of the settlements that existed from time to time.


1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Phillips

On 24 December 1144 'Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, captured the Christian city of Edessa. This was the most serious setback suffered by the Frankish settlers in the Levant since their arrival in the region at the end of the eleventh century. In reaction the rulers of Antioch and Jerusalem dispatched envoys to the west appealing for help. The initial efforts of Pope Eugenius in and King Louis VII of France met with little response, but at Easter 1146, at Vézelay, Bernard of Clairvaux led a renewed call to save the Holy Land and the Second Crusade began to gather momentum. As the crusade developed, its aims grew beyond an expedition to the Latin East and it evolved into a wider movement of Christian expansion encom-passing further campaigns against the pagan Wends in the Baltic and the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula. One particular group of men participated in two elements of the crusade; namely, the northern Europeans who sailed via the Iberian peninsula to the Holy Land. In thecourse of this journey they achieved the major success of the Second Crusade when they captured the city of Lisbon in October 1147. This article will consider how this aspect of the expedition fitted into the conception of the crusade as a whole and will try to establish when Lisbon became the principal target for the crusaders. St Bernard's preaching tour of the Low Countries emerges as an important, yet hitherto neglected, event.


Zograf ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Dragan Vojvodic

In the katholikon of the monastery of Praskvica there are remains of two layers of post-Byzantine wall-painting: the earlier, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and later, from the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the conclusion based on stylistic analysis and technical features. The portions of frescoes belonging to one or the other layer can be clearly distinguished from one another and the content of the surviving representations read more thoroughly than before. It seems that the remains of wall-painting on what originally was the west facade of the church also belong to the earlier layer. It is possible that the church was not frescoed in the lifetime of its ktetor, Balsa III Balsic.


2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Crowe

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.


1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Nicholls

Ever since Lucien Febvre, in his classic essay on the origins of the French Reformation, characterized the sixteenth century as ‘ a long period of magnificent religious anarchy’, the nature of this ‘anarchy’ has remained somewhat puzzling. The question posed by Febvre - if Calvinist churches were only organized in the late 1550s, who were the protestants before this date?-retains all its interest while inevitably raising other problems. Can one make sense of this anarchy? When, if at any time in the sixteenth century, did it come to an end? Professor Mandrou has recently situated the period of anarchy between the first French manifestations of the Lutheran revolt in the early 1520s and the affair of the placards in 1534, with Calvinism bringing order to the general confusion between 1536 and 1540. But it is now established that Antoine Marcourt's placards, though important in the popular and official reactions they provoked, did not reveal protestant organization or doctrinal unity. Nor was Calvinism in a position to impose such uniformity until a much later date if at all. The rigours of Calvinist theology may have represented the logical culmination for the spiritual odyssey of a Farel or a de Bèze, but this was not necessarily so for the lower clergymen, artisans and even peasants who were attracted by one aspect or another of reformed ideas. Febvre pointed out the confusion of contemporaries, most of whom had no idea precisely what the different varieties of protestantism were: a confusion perhaps best shown in Florimond de Raemond's characterization of Lefèvre d'Étaples, Farel and Roussel as ‘Lutheran Zwinglians’. If the evangelical humanist intellectuals of the Meaux group caused such incomprehension, then how much more bewildering must have been the unsystematic beliefs and sceptical criticisms of the menu peuple, especially before the literate among them had the opportunity to read the French edition of Calvin's Institutes in 1542.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document