Quintilian: The Biographical Tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 6-23
Author(s):  
Marc Van Der Poel
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
General Outline ◽  
Biographical Tradition

In addition to the biographical testimonies in Martial (Epigrams 2.90.2), Ausonius (Professors of Bordeaux 1.7), and Jerome (Chronicon, notes at year 68 and 88), there are some autobiographical remarks in Quintilian’s Institutio, most of which are difficult to mark with a date. Using this scant evidence, scholars from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards have attempted to construct the life of Quintilian. The most extensive and probably most influential biography is Henry Dodwell’s 109-page-long Annales Quintilianei (1698), which offers a chronologically very detailed but fundamentally speculative account of Quintilian’s life. This chapter discusses, after a general outline of the biographical tradition from Poliziano (1481) to Clarke (1967) and Kennedy (1969, revised edition 2013), the suggestions which have been made throughout the centuries to fill out the gaps in our knowledge of Quintilian’s life, focusing on his birth (it is possible that he was born in Rome, not Calagurris), his early life and education, his career as teacher and orator, his retirement and death, and the chronology of the writing of the Institutio. It also explains the origin of the erroneous claim, still often repeated today, that Quintilian was the first teacher of rhetoric who had a public chair of rhetoric in Rome, and gives a summary of the long debate on whether Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus is Quintilian’s lost treatise De causis corruptae eloquentiae, and on the authorship of the two collections of Declamationes.

The Mediæval Legend of Judas Iscariot

PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-632
Author(s):  
Paull Franklin Baum
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Greek Myth ◽  
Judas Iscariot ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

The legendary Life of Judas the Betrayer, based, it is usually said, on the Greek myth of Œdipus, is found in almost every language and country of mediæval Europe. It was written down in Latin as early as the twelfth century. By the end of the thirteenth century it was turned into the vernacular in lands as far apart as Wales, Catalonia, and Bohemia. At the close of the Middle Ages it had become the possession of the folk, and since that period—to some extent even during the fifteenth century—it has spread northward and eastward into Scandinavia, Finland, Russia, and Bulgaria. It was related in Greek, probably in the Middle Ages, although the manuscripts are of a much later date. It was still told orally in Galicia at the end of the last century. As a regular part of the ecclesiastical literature of the West it received canonization, so to say, late in the thirteenth century, in the great legendary of Jacopo da Voragine; but, on the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that in the Middle Ages, so far as I have been able to learn, none of the reputable church writers (with the exception of Jacopo) recognized or even mentioned it. And furthermore, mediaeval sculptors and carvers of wood and ivory, who gave themselves with so much zeal to the plastic representation of legendary matter, completely eschewed or overlooked the ‘early life’ of Judas. Not indeed that either the church writers or artists sought to avoid contact with such a wicked character; on the contrary, they devoted considerable space to him, rejecting only his apocryphal career. However this omission may be explained, the fact must be recognized as of some interest.

Northern Frontiers

2021 ◽  
pp. 277-290
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Northern Ghana ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Horse Riding ◽  
Volta Basin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Northern Territories

This chapter recounts the early life and death of Gandah, a naa or 'chief', of Birifu, a dispersed settlement of traditional mud-walled compounds located near the bank of the Black Volta River in the northwestern corner of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. It narrates the final stages of Gandah's life as a renowned healer and accumulator of ritual 'medicines'. The chapter investigates how Gandah's story encapsulated key themes in the history of death and the dead in the Northern Territories in the first half of the twentieth century. This was a region that was in many ways quite distinct from the Akan forest and Gold Coast to the south. Historically, connections between the Akan world and the peoples of the middle Volta savannas did exist. Yet in terms of ecology, culture and political structure, the savanna, as the Akan perceived it, was another realm. The chapter outlines the emergence of a complex of kingdoms forged by horse-riding migrants who from the fifteenth century entered the savannas of the Volta basin straddling present-day Burkina Faso and northern Ghana.

Giovanni Bellini: Birth, Parentage, and Independence*

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 783-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Wallace Maze
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Late Summer ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Gentile Bellini ◽  
Civil Laws

AbstractA number of longstanding questions have surrounded the early life of the fifteenth-century Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516), generally believed to have been the son of Jacopo Bellini (ca. 1400–70/71) and the younger brother of Gentile Bellini (1429/35–1507). The artist’s year of birth and the legitimacy of his birth have been the subjects of debate for well over a century. By reevaluating Bellini-related legal documents under the relevant fifteenth-century Venetian civil laws, this article makes a case that Giovanni Bellini was not Jacopo Bellini’s son, but rather his half-brother, and that they were both sons of Nicolò Bellini; that Giovanni was therefore Gentile Bellini’s uncle rather than his brother; and that he was born legitimate between the late summer of 1424 and 13 September 1428, several years earlier than the birth year of ca. 1435 (or later) favored by many contemporary Bellini specialists. The ramifications of situating Bellini’s birth year in the mid- to late 1420s are then considered.

Training Methods With Clinicians and Students—A Personal Story and Change: Narrative Therapy for Stuttering

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Leahy
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Therapy ◽  
Evidence Based Practice ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Training Methods ◽  
Sense Of Control ◽  
Case Description ◽  
General Outline ◽  
Personal Story ◽  
Fluency Disorders

Abstract Educating students and informing clinicians regarding developments in therapy approaches and in evidence-based practice are important elements of the responsibility of specialist academic posts in universities. In this article, the development of narrative therapy and its theoretical background are outlined (preceded by a general outline of how the topic of fluency disorders is introduced to students at an Irish university). An example of implementing narrative therapy with a 12-year-old boy is presented. The brief case description demonstrates how narrative therapy facilitated this 12-year-old make sense of his dysfluency and his phonological disorder, leading to his improved understanding and management of the problems, fostering a sense of control that led ultimately to their resolution.

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