Aaron Aboulrabi and “The Straight One”

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-232
Author(s):  
Eric Lawee
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century

The fifteenth-century Sicilian-born commentator, Aaron Aboulrabi, marks something new in the Commentary’s reception: the emergence of a tradition of rhetorically vehement resisting reading. His awareness of Eleazar Ashkenazi is up for some debate, but more than one passage strongly suggests he consulted him. He certainly knew the Book of Strictures. While sharing the incapacity for prevarication characteristic of Ashkenazi and Pseudo-Rabad, Aboulrabi was more eclectic in his convictions and appreciated elements of Rashi’s midrashic hermeneutic. He evaluates the Commentary in the first instance on the basis of consonance with the plain sense and frequently finds it wanting. He also promotes an approach nourished by rationalist convictions. Nor does he scruple to hurl invective at “the Straight One,” as he calls Rashi, and his rabbinic forerunners. In all of this, Aboulrabi carried on exegetical, theological, and rhetorical trends known to him from the writings of Abraham ibn Ezra while still occasionally putting himself in step with Rashi’s midrashic legacy.

Pittenweem Priory and the conventuality question

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Lodge
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
New Mother ◽  
Set Up ◽  
And Control

Pittenweem Priory began life as the caput manor of a daughter-house established on May Island by Cluniac monks from Reading (c. 1140). After its sale to St Andrews (c. 1280), the priory transferred ashore. While retaining its traditional name, the ‘Priory of May (alias Pittenweem)’ was subsumed within the Augustinian priory of St Andrews. Its prior was elected from among the canons of the new mother house, but it was many decades before a resident community of canons was set up in Pittenweem. The traditional view, based principally on the ‘non-conventual’ status of the priory reiterated in fifteenth-century documents, is that there was ‘no resident community’ before the priorship of Andrew Forman (1495–1515). Archaeological evidence in Pittenweem, however, indicates that James Kennedy had embarked on significant development of the priory fifty years earlier. This suggests that, when the term ‘non-conventual’ is used in documents emanating from Kennedy's successors (Graham and Scheves), we should interpret it more as an assertion of superiority and control than as a description of realities in the priory.

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