Retrieving the History of Women Biblical Interpreters

Author(s):  
Joy A. Schroeder

Since the early 2000s, scholars have begun to retrieve the history of women biblical interpreters. They have identified hundreds of writings by Jewish and Christian women who worked prior to the twentieth century, some of whom offered protofeminist or early feminist perspectives on scripture. This essay provides a survey of recent scholarship on the topic, as well as a historical overview of women interpreters active in late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth century. Since most of these women interpreters are from Western Europe and the United States, consisting mainly of Roman Catholics and Protestants, future directions should include a more global, inclusive account of women’s contributions. Diverse voices discussed include Rivkah bat Meir of Prague, Ethiopian Orthodox nun Walatta Petros, Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Afro-Peruvian mystic Ursula de Jesús, and Indian scholar Pandita Ramabai.

Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.


M. Fabius Quintilianus was a prominent orator, declaimer, and teacher of eloquence in the first century ce. After his retirement he wrote the Institutio oratoria, a unique treatise in Antiquity because it is a handbook of rhetoric and an educational treatise in one. Quintilian’s fame and influence are not only based on the Institutio, but also on the two collections of Declamations which were attributed to him in late Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian aims to present Quintilian’s Institutio as a key treatise in the history of Graeco-Roman rhetoric and its influence on the theory and practice of rhetoric and education, from late Antiquity until the present day. It contains chapters on Quintilian’s educational programme, his concepts and classifications of rhetoric, his discussion of the five canons of rhetoric, his style, his views on literary criticism, declamation, and the relationship between rhetoric and law, and the importance of the visual and performing arts in his work. His huge legacy is presented in successive chapters devoted to Quintilian in late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, Northern Europe during the Renaissance, Europe from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, and the United States of America. There are also chapters devoted to the biographical tradition, the history of printed editions, and modern assessments of Quintilian. The twenty-one authors of the chapters represent a wide range of expertise and scholarly traditions and thus offer a unique mixture of current approaches to Quintilian from a multidisciplinary perspective.


Author(s):  
Peter Mitchell

This chapter starts as the Roman Empire fragmented, encompasses the emergence of Christianity and Islam, and explores the donkey’s place in the history of the Middle Ages, as well as what Fernand Braudel termed ‘the triumph of the mule’ in the ensuing early modern period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Being closer in time to the present, historical documents are generally richer and more plentiful than for earlier periods, but archaeological excavations and surveys—especially of post-medieval sites and landscapes—are still undeveloped in many regions. Inevitably, therefore, what I present draws as much on textual sources as it does on them. I look first at the symbolic value of donkeys and mules in Christianity and Islam. Next, I consider their disappearance from some parts of Europe in the aftermath of Rome’s collapse and their re-expansion and persistence elsewhere. One aspect of this concerns their continuing contribution to agricultural production, another their consumption as food, a very un-Roman practice. A second theme showing continuities from previous centuries is their significance in facilitating trade and communication over both short and long distances. Tackling this requires inserting donkeys and mules into debates about how far pack animals replaced wheeled forms of transport as Late Antiquity gave way to the Middle Ages. Wide-ranging in time and space, this discussion also provides opportunities for exploring their role in human history in areas beyond those on which I have concentrated thus far. West Africa is one, the Silk Road networks linking China to Central Asia a second, and China’s southward connections into Southeast Asia a third. According to the New Testament Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday seated on a donkey (Plate 20). The seventh-century apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew also envisages donkeys carrying His mother to Bethlehem, being present at the Nativity, and conveying the Holy Family into temporary exile in Egypt. Donkeys thus framed both ends of Jesus’ life and, given their importance in moving people and goods in first-century Palestine, must have been a familiar sight. But the implications of their place in Christianity’s narrative were originally quite different from those that are generally understood today.


Author(s):  
Lauren Mizock ◽  
Zlatka Russinova

Chapter 1 reviews the history of psychiatric treatment of people with mental illness in the United States and Western Europe, highlighting past perspectives in care, such as ancient trephination and exorcism during the demonology era, humorism in early Greek and Roman thought, a return to demonological perspectives in the Middle Ages, as well as mesmerism and psychoanalysis in the 19th and 20th centuries. The 20th-century biological perspective is described, including the use of insulin shock therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and lobotomy. Next, the development of more humane treatment approaches is discussed, such as the moral treatment movement of the 1800s. The ex-patient’s movement of the 1970s is reviewed, leading up to the contemporary recovery-oriented and psychosocial rehabilitation models of care. The impact of stigma on the acceptance of serious mental illness is explored throughout this history. Discussion questions, activities, and diagrams are also included.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonči Burić

Late medieval graves in the Kaštela region have been found to contain, in addition to jewelry, decorative-functional elements of clothing and footwear, termed Gothic according to the stylistic period then in fashion. These are finds from graves that were then on the territory of the commune districts of Split and Trogir. Finds are taken into consideration here that belong to remains of footwear, which so far in Croatia have not even been recognized as such, and which can be stratigraphically and typologically placed in the late Middle Ages (14th-15th cent.). These are objects of a utilitarian character that at the same time have clear stylistic traits, and they have been discovered in the past two decades during systematic excavation of medieval cemeteries in Kaštela. These are large parish cemeteries that grew up around early medieval churches; the cemetery around the church of St. George of Putalj and the cemetery around the church of St. George of Radun. The Putalj cemetery was the graveyard for the inhabitants of medieval Sućurac for more than four centuries (12th-16th cent.), and the Radun cemetery belonged to part of the village of Radun and had an even longer continuity of burial (11th-16th cent.). The first examples were found at these sites, some of them in situ, which enabled a more precise functional determination of them through stylistic-typological parallels and also among dislocated finds in graves with multiple burials, as well as parallels at cemeteries in neighboring regions in central Dalmatia. Finds to the present of shoe buckles can be classified to two typological variants (Pl. I:1-3), one of them called the Radun type according to the eponymous site (Pl. I:1, 3). They are all chronologically coherent and belong to those strata of the cemeteries that are dated according to determined parameters (stratigraphy, typology of the finds) to the 14th and beginning of the 15th centuries, when the Gothic style in art was already completely developed. They can thus be attributed as artistic craft products of the artisan workshops in Split and Trogir at that time, which were distributed throughout the area of the urban districts of those communes. Finds of functionally identical objects have been recorded on the territory of Roman Salona and its broader vicinity, but in the period of late antiquity, while in the early modern period (16th-18th cent.) finds of iron hobnails for shoes or boots have been registered at a large number of sites in the hinterland of central Dalmatia. In addition to the rare and generalized tiny depictions of shoe buckles in the artistic sources of the Gothic and Renaissance (paintings, frescoes, sculptures) in Western Europe, references to them can also be found in written sources. One notarial document from the 16th century in Zadar mentions shoe buckles under the term fiube da scarpe. The investigation of this segment of material culture is just beginning, and new data can be expected to be discovered in documents and works of art, and above all in new archaeological finds of buckles for footwear, which will considerably improve our knowledge of this interesting attire detail from the Gothic and Renaissance periods.


Author(s):  
Jacek Soszyński

The article deals with the development of graphical systems of presenting history in universal chronicles on the instances of Eusebius of Caesarea and Jerome in late antiquity, Martinus Polonus in the thirteenth century, and Werner Rolevinck at the break of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. With the translation of the Eusebius’ Chronikoi Canones performed by Jerome, the synchronistic table was introduced into the Western historiographical tradition. This form of presenting history became firmly rooted in Latin chronicles, in particular within the genre of universal chronicles, which endeavoured to recount the history of mankind from Adam to the Final Judgement, and were very popular well into the early modern period. The author argues that the chronicles of Eusebius/Jerome and Martinus Polonus simply utilized synchronicity, in their pursuit to produce encyclopaedic works, aimed at the scholarly reader. In their intention, the synchronistic table was a technical means for a more effective presentation of past events. With Werner Rolevinck the case was different. The layout introduced by him was no longer asynchronistic table, but an attempt at visualizing history, with very little attention paid to precise dating of various events and persons. He constructed his complicated graphical system for religious purposes, to contemplate the magnificence of God’s creation, in accordance with the ideas of the devotio moderna, and destined his work for a much wider audience than scholars.


Author(s):  
Frederic Clark

The First Pagan Historian traces the reception history of a text that is now largely neglected but once occupied a central role in the ancient canon—the De excidio Troiae historia or History of the Destruction of Troy of one Dares Phrygius, who claimed to have been an eyewitness observer of the Trojan War. From late antiquity (when most scholars today now agree that the extant Latin version of the text was written) to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, this study charts the many surprising twists and turns in the afterlife of an author long considered the first of the pagans to write history. It examines the subversive challenge that Dares posed to other ancient canonical traditions (especially the poetry of Homer and Virgil), and the manner in which Dares’s bold rewriting of the Troy story enabled centuries of postclassical readers to forge their own—sometimes radical—visions of the distant past. In doing so, The First Pagan Historian moves back and forth between the ancient world itself and various moments in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The book uses the fortunes of a forged text to interrogate approaches to history, fiction, myth, philology, criticism, authorship, and numerous other topics of profound importance to the interplay between antiquity and modernity.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Irene Fosi

AbstractThe article examines the topics relating to the early modern period covered by the journal „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“ in the hundred volumes since its first publication. Thanks to the index (1898–1995), published in 1997 and the availability online on the website perpectivia.net (since 1958), it is possible to identify constants and changes in historiographical interests. Initially, the focus was on the publication of sources in the Vatican Secret Archive (now the Vatican Apostolic Archive) relating to the history of Germany. The topics covered later gradually broadened to include the history of the Papacy, the social composition of the Curia and the Papal court and Papal diplomacy with a specific focus on nunciatures, among others. Within a lively historiographical context, connected to historical events in Germany in the 20th century, attention to themes and sources relating to the Middle Ages continues to predominate with respect to topics connected to the early modern period.


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