The World on a Fingernail: An Unknown Byzantine Map, Planudes, and Ptolemy

Traditio ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 177-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippomaria Pontani
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Greek Scholar

MS Vat. Gr. 915 (bombyc., ca. 266 × 170 mm, 258 fols.) is a most interesting collection of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek poetry (from Homer and Hesiod to Pindar, from Theocritus and Lycophron down to Moschus and Musaeus) put together during the early Palaeologan Renaissance, more exactly between the last years of the thirteenth century and 1311 (theterminus ante quemis provided by the subscription on fol. 258v). The contents of this codex as well as the textual facies of several of its items have led various scholars, each from a different perspective, to conclude that it was produced in the circle of Maximus Pianudes, the most outstanding Greek scholar of his age (of which he is also in a sense the “eponymous hero”); more on this will be said below in §3.

Penitents and the Institutionalization of Penitential Life in the Thirteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison More
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Care ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich

The first chapter focuses on the wider spiritual context from which penitential movements developed. The rich and vibrant spiritual climate of the early thirteenth century saw the emergence of a number of new expressions of religious life. These new forms of devotion were predominantly characterized by a desire to live according to the gospel while remaining in the world. Throughout Europe, groups of laywomen ran alms houses, cared for lepers and practised other forms of active charity. From the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, the fact that these women did not fit traditional categories was seen as increasingly controversial. Consequently, those responsible for the spiritual care of such groups encouraged them to adopt many external signs of religious life such as a recognized habit, a rule, and even some degree of enclosure.

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.

The Theory of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Contribution of the Canonists

Traditio ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 179-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Watt
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

The work of the medieval canonists has always formed a significant chapter in the histories of medieval political thought. The law of the Church and its attendant juristic science forms the proper source material for the examination of the system of ideas which lay behind the functioning of papal government. Ecclesiastical jurisprudence was the practical branch of sapientia Christiana. It was concerned with a constitution and the exercise of power within its terms; with an organization and the methods by which it was to be run. It had of necessity to be articulate about the nature of the papacy, the constitutional and organizational linchpin. In consequence the canonists were the acknowledged theorists of papal primacy. To them rather than to the theologians belonged that segment of ecclesiology which treated of the nature of the Church as a visible corporate society under a single ruler. In that period of nearly a century which lay between the accession of Alexander III and the death of Innocent IV, canonists were required to register the increasingly numerous and more diverse applications of papal rulership to the problems of Christian society. The concept of papal monarchy came to be reexamined in academic literature because of the accelerating tempo of papal action. Under the stimulus of an active papacy, the canonists were led to examine many of the assumptions on which the popes based their actions and claims. The world of affairs conditioned the evolution of a political-theory, which in turn helped to shape the course of events.

Abruptly Dogen

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kidder Smith
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Full Moon ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
The Way

In the thirteenth century Dogen brought Zen to Japan. His tradition flourishes there still today and now has taken root across the world. Abruptly Dogen presents some of his pith writings—startling, shifting, funny, spilling out in every direction. They come from all seventy-five chapters of his masterwork, the Eye of Real Dharma (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏), and roam through mountains, magic, everyday life, meditation, the nature of mind, and how the Buddha is always speaking from inside our heads. An excerpt from chapter 1, “A Case of Here We Are”: Human wisdom is like a moon roosting in water. No stain on the moon, nor does the water rip. However wide and grand the light, it still finds lodging in a puddle. The full moon, the spilling sky, all roosting in a single dewdrop on a single blade of grass. A man of wisdom is uncut, the way a moon doesn’t pierce water. Wisdom in a man is unobstructed, the way the sky’s full moon is unobstructed in a dewdrop. No doubt about it, the drop’s as deep as the moon is high. How long does this go on? How deep is the water, how high the moon?

Excerpt from “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Walker Bynum
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
Imitatio Christi ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The World ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Women Mystics

In this chapter the renowned medievalist scholar Caroline Walker Bynum brings our attention to a striking historical occurrence: in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe the concern with and attachment to Eucharistic devotion was overwhelmingly female. Why this gender bias, and at that time? Christian women were predominantly “inspired, compelled, comforted and troubled by the Eucharist” and in many different forms—from miraculous apparitions, to experiences of ecstasy connected to the attendance and ingestion of the Eucharist, to the showing of sensorial excesses in its presence. Bynum shows how material and physical receptions of the body of Christ were expressed not only as forms of ecstasy but also as gendered modes of living the Imitatio Christi. This thirteenth-century corporeal, female experience of the Eucharist is connected to a particular moment in the life of Christ—the transition between life and death. Positioned as “brides” and hence as the erotic counterparts of Christ, women and female mystics exploited the full potential of Christ’s own corporeality rather than his otherworldly nature. Bynum’s work constitutes a formative reference point for scholars of Catholicism across a range of disciplines for the obvious reason that it deals so elegantly with themes of substance, gender, bodies, and devotional forms of Catholic practice. Her work continues to be an original source of inspiration for anthropologists because of its remarkable sensitivity to religion as an embodied, practice-generative engagement with the world. Bynum should also be considered as important for the “new” anthropology of Catholicism for her pioneering work on the gymnasticity of gender and for the attention it draws to the sublimated erotic tension that exists between institutional doxa and mystical aesthetics.2 In Bynum’s work, gender is not presented as merely one among a number of potential analytical foci for elaboration of Catholicism; rather, it is the very ontological architecture of the religious, and hence an essential topic for scholars seeking to understand Catholicism as a translocal force.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 276-284
Author(s):  
Adam J. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Social Reciprocity ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Conducive Environment

This epilogue reflects on the manifold ways that charitable institutions benefited from commerce—whether from their own commercial activities or those of their patrons. Church reformers criticized hospitals for accepting donati, who were permitted to receive room and board without taking vows. The reality, however, was that the donati at times brought in valuable resources that could be used to serve the poor and sick. In addition, the increased commercialization of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century society, particularly in a region like Champagne, may have contributed to the idea of a moral economy, including the obligation of charitable giving and service. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century social conditions that created a conducive environment for the flourishing of commerce were also advantageous for fostering charity and pious giving more generally. During a period of urban transformation, which created greater prosperity for some but also increasing poverty and insecurity for many others, the medieval hospital opened up new opportunities for social reciprocity and mutual assistance. For those with various kinds of needs, the hospital served as a source of physical, social, and material support in this earthly world, with all of its vagaries and vulnerabilities. In addition, though, the medieval hospital held out the promise of spiritual redemption in the world to come.

Glimmers of the World Soul in Kabbalah

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-150
Author(s):  
Jeremy P. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

Brown interrogates the status of the world soul in medieval and early modern Kabbalah. He advances a critical distinction between stronger and weaker fields for determining this inquiry, namely, between (a) the kabbalists’ explicit uses of the Platonic term “world soul,” which are rare and begin primarily during the sixteenth century, and (b) Kabbalah’s hypostatic psychology. The latter dates back to the infancy of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century. While sharing affinities with Neoplatonic cosmo-psychology, it does adopt its technical terminology. Special attention focuses on attempts during the Renaissance to render the teachings of Isaac Luria into the philosophical idiom of the world soul, and in particular, a nexus of Lurianic speculation that related the distillation of the primordial ether from the abyssal depth, or ʾEn Sof. Conclusion explores the dynamics of Kabbalah’s uneasy relationship with this facet of the Platonic philosophical heritage.

Old Norse Mythology as Sacred Narrative

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-102
Author(s):  
John Lindow
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Deep Sea ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Norse Mythology

This chapter presents a case study of one myth that we have from pictorial sources in the Viking Age, from poems almost certainly composed in the Viking Age, and from thirteenth-century sources, namely the encounter between the god Þórr (Thor) and his cosmic enemy, the World serpent, a beast that encircles the earth, in the deep sea. In this myth, Þórr fishes up the serpent, and depending on the variant, Þórr may or may not kill the serpent. I present and analyze the texts in more or less chronological order, from the older skalds through the Eddic poem Hymiskviða, through Snorri Sturluson in Edda, and compare the texts to the rock carvings that portray the myth. I argue that the issue of the death or survival of the serpent is less important than the simple fact that Þórr had the serpent on his hook.

Averroism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sten Ebbesen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Faith And Reason ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

‘Averroism’, ‘radical Aristotelianism’ and ‘heterodox Aristotelianism’ are nineteenth- and twentieth-century labels for a late thirteenth-century movement among Parisian philosophers whose views were not easily reconcilable with Christian doctrine. The three most important points of difference were the individual immortality of human intellectual souls, the attainability of happiness in this life and the eternity of the world. An ‘Averroist’ or ‘Radical Aristotelian’ would hold that philosophy leads to the conclusions that there is only one intellect shared by all humans, that happiness is attainable in earthly life and that the world has no temporal beginning or end. Averroists have generally been credited with a ‘theory of double truth’, according to which there is an irreconcilable clash between truths of faith and truths arrived at by means of reason. Averroism has often been assigned the role of a dangerous line of thought, against which Thomas Aquinas opposed his synthesis of faith and reason. The term ‘Averroism’ is also used more broadly to characterize Western thought from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries which was influenced by Averroes, and/or some philosophers’ self-proclaimed allegiance to Averroes.

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