The ‘robed Christ’ in pre-Conquest sculptures of the Crucifixion

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 153-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Coatsworth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Viking Period

In the nineteenth century, John Romilly Allen confidently claimed that the iconography of the Crucifixion with the robed or ‘fully draped’ Christ was a phenomenon of Celtic art, found in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, distinguishable from the ‘Saxon’ type in which Christ wore a loin-cloth. Other features of the Saxon type were the presence of the sun and moon above the arms of the cross, instead of angels as in Ireland; and the figures of the Virgin and St John at the foot of the cross, without the spear- and sponge-bearers, the latter pair appearing only exceptionally at Alnmouth, Northumberland; Aycliffe, County Durham; and Bradbourne, Derbyshire. Clearly two different versions were identified in this analysis, but no attempt was made to clarify the chronological relationship between the examples cited, and only the geographical distribution of a small number of examples was considered. Romilly Allen's confidence in distinguishing ‘Celt’ from ‘Saxon’ on the basis of art styles, even for the pre-Viking period, is not always shared today, as the continuing discussion of the origins of several important manuscripts shows. The terms ‘Insular’ and ‘Hiberno-Saxon’ used to describe much of the art from the sixth century to the eighth underline die perceived difficulties.

Epoch-Eclipse and Apocalypse: Special “Effects” in A Connecticut Yankee

PMLA ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 88 (5) ◽  
pp. 1104-1114
Author(s):  
David Ketterer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Solar Eclipse ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Heavenly Body ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

HANK MORGAN'S USE of a solar eclipse to impress upon King Arthur and his court that a magician superior to Merlin stands before them is, undoubtedly, the most impressive episode in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's time-travel version of the international novel. Arthur is at least as affected as the reader and, as a consequence, Hank istransformed from being a prisoner into being the Boss. But perhaps the reader does not appreciate that on a symbolic level, this blotting out and temporary displacement of one heavenly body by another parallels the “transposition of epochs—and bodies [human and stellar]” (p. 18) which is the donnée of the novel—the displacement of nineteenth-century America by sixth-century Britain and, subsequently, the displacement, first tentative then total, of sixth-century Britain by nineteenth-century America.1 By equating this “epoch-eclipse” with the apparent extinction of the sun, Twain is implying that the posited world transformation is an event of apocalyptic proportions. In the Revelation of John the Divine, as in traditional symbology, fire is the instrument of apocalypse and, thus, Twain's use of the sun in this context is most appropriate.2

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Twain ◽  
Daniel Carter Beard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Original Drawings

When A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. Thus what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture grew into a disturbing satire of modern technology and social thought. The story of Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American who is accidentally returned to sixth-century England, is a powerful analysis of such issues as monarchy versus democracy and free will versus determinism, but it is also one of Twain’s finest comic novels, still fresh and funny after more than 100 years. In his introduction, M. Thomas Inge shows how A Connecticut Yankee develops from comedy to tragedy and so into a novel that remains a major literary and cultural text for new generations of readers. This edition reproduces a number of the original drawings by Dan Beard, of whom Twain said ‘he not only illustrates the text but he illustrates my thoughts’.

The Latah Reaction: Its Pathodynamics and Nosological Position

1952 ◽  
Vol 98 (413) ◽  
pp. 515-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Yap
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Intrinsic Interest ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
Mental Diseases ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Unusual Symptoms

Few mental diseases have attracted the attention of medical men working in outlandish parts of the world more than Latah. This is due, not only to its intrinsic interest, showing as it regularly does the unusual symptoms of echolalia, echopraxia, and automatic obedience, but also to its remarkable geographical distribution. This illness was described by travellers to the Malay Archipelago in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but very similar reactions were later found to exist in other lands, known to the native peoples by other names. The term “Latah,” however, is the best known, and as the common features between these various reactions became apparent, it has been used as an inclusive name for them all. It is to-day employed with much the same connotation in the French, Dutch, Italian, and English literature, but the discussion of its nature betrays inadequate understanding, attempts at its nosological classification remain unsatisfactory, and speculations as to its aetology continue to be somewhat fanciful.

The Spread Wings Motif on Armenian Steles: Its Meaning and Parallels in Sasanian Art

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Compareti
Keyword(s):  
Persian Gulf ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Persian Empire ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
Armenian Literature

AbstractThis paper is a study on the so-called “spread wings”—a particular element of the Sasanian art that is attested also in other regions of the Persian Empire in Late Antiquity, including the western coast of the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus. The spread wings can be observed on Sasanian coins above the royal crowns, which are considered specific for every Sasanian sovereign, supporting astronomical elements, like the crescent, star, and, possibly, the sun. The Arabs and the peoples of the Caucasus who adopted Christianity used the spread wings element as a pedestal for the cross. In Armenian literature, there are some connections between those spread wings and glory, so that a kind of pedestal could be considered a device to exalt or glorify the element above it. The floating ribbons attached to Sasanian crowns had possibly the same meaning and were adopted also outside of proper Persia. In the same way, it could be considered correct to identify those luminaries on Sasanian crowns as divine elements connected with the religion of pre-Islamic Persia.

Ideas of the Sun in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

1970 ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
A.J. MEADOWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Sun

Revisionist Theologies of Salvation

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-118
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Liberal Theology ◽  
Existential Interpretation ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Human Liberation

What unites revisionist theologies of the cross is the rejection (sometimes with qualification) of the idea of vicarious substitution and the Anselmian analysis of its rationale. They all reject or reinterpret the doctrine of “original sin.” They propose an “existential” interpretation of the cross, and relate it to the imperative for human liberation. These ideas are in continuity with liberal theology of the nineteenth century. What is more specifically novel is their reliance on critical biblical studies and above all their acceptance of contemporary science, especially its account of human evolution.

Helium

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emission Spectrum ◽  
Mass Spectrometer ◽  
Solar Eclipse ◽  
Atomic Structure ◽  
Chemical Elements ◽  
Bright Light ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Moon ◽  
First Time

Today we learn at such a young age about the periodic properties of the elements and their atomic structure that it seems as if we grew up with the knowledge, and that everyone must always have known such basic, simple stuff. But till nearly the end of the nineteenth century no one even suspected that such things as the noble gases, with their filled electronic orbits, might exist. Helium was the first one we at Brookhaven looked for in our mass spectrometer, and the first one discovered. This was in 1868, but the discovery was ignored and the discoverer ridiculed. He didn’t care; he had other things on his mind. His name was Pierre Jules César Janssen, and he was a French astronomer who sailed to India that year in order to take advantage of a predicted solar eclipse. With the overwhelming brightness of the sun’s disk blocked by the moon, he hoped to observe the outer layers using the newly discovered technique of absorption spectroscopy. Nobody at the time understood why, but it had been observed that when a bright light shone through a gas, the chemical elements in the gas absorbed the light at specific wavelengths. The resulting dark lines in the emission spectrum of the light were like fingerprints, for it had been found in chemical laboratories that when an element was heated it emitted light at the same wavelengths it would absorb when light from an outside source was shined on it. So the way the technique worked, Janssen reasoned, was that he could measure the wavelengths of the solar absorbed lines and compare them with lines emitted in chemical laboratories where different elements were routinely studied, thus identifying the gases present in the sun. On August 18 of that year the moon moved properly into position, and Janssen’s spectroscope captured the dark absorption lines of the gases surrounding the sun. It was an exciting moment, as for the first time the old riddle could be answered: “Twinkle twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.” The answer now was clear: the sun, a typical star, was made overwhelmingly of hydrogen. But to Janssen’s surprise there was one additional and annoying line, with a wavelength of 587.49 nanometers.

The Aesthetic Mediation

2018 ◽  
pp. 143-200
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Naturalistic Realism

In the visual arts of the Romantic period the crucifixion of Christ often became a representation of the sufferings of humanity. Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings placed the cross in the context of the immensity of nature. Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was an increasing tendency to portray Jesus’ suffering in the genre of naturalistic realism. Some painters consciously attempted to incorporate the findings of modern biblical scholarship, rather than follow traditional models. Early film representations, on the other hand, tended to rely on classical types and popular piety.

Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-140
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
German Population ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Weimar Culture

This is a fascinating book, partly because of the excellent contributions, and partly because of the ways in which the editors have chosen to engage the topic and organize their volume. Marchand and Lindenfeld open the collection with a loaded question: Was there a German fin de siècle? Did Germans, in other words, share the kinds of reactions to modernity that have so fascinated historians of Austria and France? Their answer is yes and no. Many German intellectuals embraced the modernist currents Carl Schorske identified more than forty years ago in his work on fin de siècle Vienna, reacting to the depressing problems of modernization in ways similar to their Austrian counterparts. And yet much of the German population was largely unbowed by their putatively perplexing condition. As the editors argue, despite the worries of many an intellectual, “the later Wilhelmine world was characterized by enormous ambition and optimism, booming industries and bustling new urban spaces, cultural and political activism on a new scale, and the promise, if not the immediate realization, of a ‘place in the sun’ on the world stage” (p. 1). That optimism is the perplexing bit, because many of us, schooled in the dark side of Weimar culture and its intellectual antecedents, have learned to imagine Germans at the end of the nineteenth century (or at least our favorite representatives) as people caught up in a pessimistic, existential, Nietzschean funk. Indeed, the editors themselves have not avoided that position entirely.

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