Music, Architecture, Proportion and the Renaissance Way of Thinking

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Vasco Zara
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Universal Truth ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Middle Ages

During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantitative paradigm of proportion with its qualitative one. The language of proportion as a compositional tool reveals the shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: while the Medieval tèchne based on modular thinking provides beauty and universal truth using the technique of repetition, the Humanist paradigm of variety produces pleasure and individual truth – a condition typical of the premodern.

Mega-structures of the Middle Ages: the construction of religious buildings in Europe and Asia,c.1000–1500

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten Prak
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modular Design ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Construction Work ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Modern Engineering ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractHow did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.

Style

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maura Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Poetic Style

Poetic style may be analyzed by starting with the smallest measurable units of poetry. Style has two aspects that are often contradictory: the particular and the general. The notion of style underwent numerous changes over the years between Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Wyatt. This article examines the question of style by juxtaposing three poets, three centuries, and two literary-historical periods. It considers the relationship between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as embeddedness of Chaucer, Wyatt, and John Lydgate in those periods in stylistic terms and describes an alternative way of thinking about literary style that reveals the secretive manner that history works in art. It discusses the troublesome poetic terrain of stresses, absences of stress, feet, and meter as a way of scrutinizing the “styles” of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Wyatt in “Truth,” “The World is Variable,” and “What Vaileth Trouth,” respectively.

The Fading Influence of the Medieval Ars Dictaminis in England After 1400

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Letter Of Credit ◽  
Ars Dictaminis ◽  
The Middle Ages

The influence of dictaminal treatises in England was weak throughout the Middle Ages and largely restricted to a limited number of royal clerks and a few academics. Most practitioners were royal chancery clerks who dealt with foreign and ecclesiastical powers. This article focuses chiefly on the use of dictaminal letters by middle class English citizens in the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. These letters show little significant influence of continental or English dictaminal theory but are chiefly either sprawling news bulletins like the Paston letters or, more commonly, imitations of the royal missives from the Signet or Privy Seal offices. As the fifteenth century ended even these vestigial dictaminal forms were replaced among the middles classes by business formats, such as the letter of credit, although they retained some use among the upper classes into the sixteenth century and in some royal missives into the eighteenth century. The article concludes with suggestions on ways contemporary genre theory might be usefully applied to analyze the rise and decline of the ars dictaminis.

Clothing and Female Reclusion in The Life of Mary of Egypt and The Life of Christina of Markyate

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Holy Women ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
Mary Of Egypt ◽  
The Middle Ages

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.

Mandelstam: The Realm of Unexpectedness

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-83
Author(s):  
Svetlana S. Neretina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Logical Framework ◽  
Creation Process ◽  
The Real ◽  
Logical Construction ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the essay “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam described logic, which he defined as the “realm of unexpectedness,” which is unlike any everyday logical construction. Based on the analysis of Mandelstam’s text, it is assumed that we are talking about a tropology that arose in the Middle Ages, the principles of which can be derived from studies of St. Augustine’s treatise De Dialectica and Petrus Сomestor’s Historia Scholastica. It is this triple commonwealth (Augustine – Comestor – Dante, read by Mandelstam) that creates the multilayered logical framework of the work. Augustine created a completely different dialectic than in classical antiquity. Augustine considers dialectics as an art of discussion and describes the real steps that contribute to the emergence of speech, which corresponds to Mandelstam’s concept of conversation. According to Augustine, at the basis of any speech, is a trope-turn. In the article, attention is drawn to the sound nature of creation process. This logic, used in explaining the creation of the world according to the logos/word (tropology), assumes that, at the basis of the speech act, there is no the word as a unit of speech, but the sound itself – the sound, which was considered initially equivocal (ambiguous). In the process of pronounciation, the sound could turn into its opposite and could change the meaning of speech if the context has been changed. Dante expressed the meaning of tropology in practice. Mandelstam wrote that he had chosen Dante for the conversation (between poet and poet) “because he is the greatest and indisputable master of reversible and reversing poetic substance.” Mandelstam saw Dante as the Descartes of metaphor.

On the Psychology of the Crusades

1906 ◽  
Vol 52 (219) ◽  
pp. 745-755
Author(s):  
William W. Ireland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
Common Nature ◽  
The Middle Ages

Although the world will never again see anything like the great crusades of the middle ages, these events may be traced to causes which, though now of less force, still influence the human mind, appealing to the simplest and deepest cravings of our common nature.

Protestant Rivalry — Metaphysics and Rhetoric in Germany c. 1590–1620

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Middle Ages

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

scholarly journals Michel Seress’ Integumentum, or Why Ecology Lies (Also) Beyond Arguments

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-82
Author(s):  
Alexandru Matei ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ecological Theory ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
The World ◽  
The Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, integumentum was a term widely used by “intellectuals” (Le Goff) in order to unfold the function of allegory: there is no story whose signification does not echo the sacred texts, and every sacred truth needs a story to bring it to life. Integumentum was a way to make this echo explicit: a sort of “poetical coat hiding a moral or philosophical truth” (John of Garland). We want to suggest that, while no one uses integumentum anymore in order to designate the rhetoric of modern and contemporary theoretical discourse, it is in ecological theory that we may rediscover its afterlives. Hence, integumentum is not only a form of telling truths, but a form of memory, as well. In this respect, Michel Serres may be considered the first “ecological” thinker, as he avoids abstract metalanguages as much as possible, relying instead on fictions and characters in his attempt to describe the world afresh. If integumentum resurfaces as the proper way of “ecologizing,” instead of modernizing (Latour), we would like to uncover, in Michel Serres’ works, the dialectic of subjects and objects.

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