Orality and Visible Language

Author(s):  
Paul Saenger

This chapter discusses the transition from the predominantly oral or aural reading of antiquity to the more visual act of reading that emerged in Late Antiquity along with the codex. It argues that readers of codices first began to introduce visual elements to aid in reading, such as numbered sections and chapters, as well as word separation, marginal symbols, and graphic signs of various sorts (e.g., puncutation). A shift towards visual access to the text occurred in the Middle Ages, allowing private understanding unmediated by aural cues. The author discusses the role of non-Latin speakers in this change, and observes that by the beginning of the fifteenth century the manuscripts took their most modern form, that of a text designed for private, silent reading.

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zana Rama

Late Antiquity, known as a transitory phase between Antiquity and the Middle Ages that encompasses the 4th-6th centuries, was characterized by major historical events that led not only to political and administrative changes, but also social, cultural and religious changes. This paper will elaborate the impact of these changes in the province of Dardania, of which the central territory corresponds to today’s Kosovo, with a specific focus on the spread of Christianity and Christian architecture and changes in settlement patterns, as people moved from field settlements to hillforts. Moreover, it will present architectural features and the role of fortifications in Late Antiquity.


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.


Gesta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Armin F. Bergmeier

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Derek Baker

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Marcel Bubert

AbstractAlthough the medieval period was not part of Michel Foucault’s seminal study on ‘The Order of Things’, there are good reasons to believe that the learned cultures of the Middle Ages were to a certain degree based on specific epistemic orders, general organizing principles which were unconsciously presupposed in concepts of reality. Nevertheless, the extent as to which these concepts are in fact committed to the assumption of a metaphysically determined measuring of reality, is not altogether clear. This article aims to discuss this question in general, based on recent views of the role of the ‘subject’ in epistemic orders.


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