The Confraternities of Byzantium

1986 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peregrine Horden
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Modest Contribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ultimate Purpose ◽  
Parting Of The Ways

‘The medieval drive to association’. That phrase comes from a monograph by Susan Reynolds. It is to be found in a chapter on guilds and confraternities. And it is representative of the quasi-biological vocabulary to which historians of those institutions seem especially prone. ‘How appropriate is this talk of drives? What, in this context, is the force of ‘medieval’? My ultimate purpose is to address those questions from a Byzantine perspective; to ask in effect whether evidence of confraternities from the eastern Roman empire between approximately 400 and the Ottoman conquest will sustain talk of a Byzantine ‘drive to association’. The enquiry is, however, worth a preliminary approach on a broader front. This is partly because the historiography of European confraternities shapes the questions that must be put to the Byzantine sources. It is also because, unusually, a Byzantine perspective may illuminate problems arising from the western material. Finally it is because the comparative history of confraternities may, by implication, have a modest contribution to make to the larger question of the differences between eastern and western Christianity. Much energy has been expended on accounting for the ‘parting of the ways’ - less, perhaps, on measuring the distance between them.

Muslim Contributions to the History of Religions

1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-421
Author(s):  
Ghulam-Haider Aasi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Spain ◽  
Muslim Scholars ◽  
The Middle Ages

History of Religions in the WestA universal, comparative history of the study of religions is still far frombeing written. Indeed, such a history is even hr from being conceived, becauseits components among the legacies of non-Western scholars have hardly beendiscovered. One such component, perhaps the most significant one, is thecontributions made by Muslim scholars during the Middle Ages to thisdiscipline. What is generally known and what has been documented in thisfield consists entirely of the contribution of Westdm scholars of religion.Even these Western scholars belong to the post-Enlightenment era of Wsternhistory.There is little work dealing with the history of religions which does notclaim the middle of the nineteenth century CE as the beginning of thisdiscipline. This may not be due only to the zeitgeist of the modem Wstthat entails aversion, downgrading, and undermining of everything stemmingfrom the Middie Ages; its justification may also be found in the intellectualpoverty of the Christian West (Muslim Spain excluded) that spans that historicalperiod.Although most works dealing with this field include some incidentalreferences, paragraphs, pages, or short chapters on the contribution of thepast, according to each author’s estimation, all of these studies are categorizedunder one of the two approaches to religion: philosophical or cubic. All ofthe reflective, speculative, philosophical, psychological, historical, andethnological theories of the Greeks about the nature of the gods and goddessesand their origins, about the nature of humanity’s religion, its mison dsttre,and its function in society are described as philosophical quests for truth.It is maintained that the Greeks’ contribution to the study of religion showedtheir openness of mind and their curiosity about other religions and cultures ...

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

Phoenicia in the Roman Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-124
Author(s):  
Julien Aliquot
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Traditions

This chapter traces the history of Phoenicia from the advent of Rome in Syria at the beginning of the first century bce to the foundation of the Christian empire of Byzantium in the fourth century ce. It focuses on the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. Special attention is paid to the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. The focus is on provincial institutions and cities, which provided a basis for the new order. However, side trails are also taken to assess the flowering of Hellenism and the revival of local traditions in the light of the Romanization of Phoenicia and its hinterland.

Keeping Military Discipline

2013 ◽  
pp. 311-329
Author(s):  
Stefan G. Chrissanthos
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Major Step ◽  
Roman Army ◽  
Modern System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Discipline

This chapter offers a brief history of military discipline in ancient armies, and also investigates how and to what degree societies inflicted discipline on their soldiers, and how, in various ways, soldiers imposed discipline on themselves. Then, it addresses the evolution of military discipline from Greece until eventually something similar to a modern system developed in the early Roman Empire. The death of Alexander had precipitated almost fifty years of continuous warfare that ultimately resulted in the development of the Hellenistic monarchies. The Roman army represented something completely new in ancient Mediterranean warfare. It is observed that the Principate represented a major step in the evolution of ancient military discipline.

scholarly journals The Reception of Petrarch’s Africa in Fascist Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Asad Abijuwa Agbamu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Second Punic War ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

AbstractIn his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

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