Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture. Edited by JulianWeiss and SarahSalih. King's College London Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies. 2012. xxxvi + 250pp. £50.00.

History ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 99 (337) ◽  
pp. 674-675
Author(s):  
Leonie Hicks
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6 (104)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Kirillova

Source study is the foundation of the research work of professional historians. It became the subject of the All-Russian Scientific Conference “Source Studies in Contemporary Medieval Studies”, which was held from 28 to 29 June 2021 at the Institute of World History at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The conference, conceived as a platform for regular communication of specialists in the history of the Middle Ages, allowed the participants and numerous listeners to get acquainted with the latest research on the source study of the history of Russia, Europe, the East and America. It included reports summarizing the experience of research and outlining the prospects for further work on key problems of source study of the history of the Middle Ages.


Author(s):  
Oleg I. Maliugin

The article is devoted to the study of the scientific and pedagogical activities of the famous Slavist A. N. Yasinsky in the last – Moscow-Minsk – period of his life based on the materials of the Belarusian archives. Revolutionary events of 1917–1921 forced him, like many other representatives of the capital’s intelligentsia, to look for work in new provincial universities. Since 1922 he has been teaching at the Belarusian State University, becoming one of the founders of Belarusian Medieval and Slavic studies. In 1928 he was elected an academician of the newly created Belarusian Academy of Sciences, where he continued his studies of both the Czech Middle Ages and the history of Belarus in the Middle Ages. However, external circumstances did not allow A. N. Yasinsky to create his own scientific school in Belarus, and his research of the 1920’s remained little known to specialists.


Author(s):  
Ángel Narro

Resum: El present treball analitza comparativament els principals tòpics retòrics presents als pròlegs de textos hagiogràfics bizantins i catalans. El punt de partença és la consolidació del gènere hagiogràfic com a tal en la literatura grega tardo-antiga i d’època bizantina i la seua influència sobre el desenvolupament de l’hagiografia en Occident, primer en llatí i després en les llengües romàniques a partir de l’Edat Mitjana. En aquest sentit, podrem observar l’ús d’un mateix repertori de caràcter retòric per presentar i embellir el text i analitzarem l’explicació d’aquest fenomen i les perspectives d’estudi a explorar.    Paraules clau: hagiografia, literatura bizantina, literatura catalana, vides de sants.   Abstract: This article is aimed to compare the main rhetorical topoi of the prologues of both Byzantine and Catalan Hagiographical texts. The starting point is the consolidation of Hagiography as a literary genre in Late Antique Greek and Byzantine literature and its influence on the development of Hagiography in the West, first on Latin and then on Romance texts from the Middle Ages. In this way, we will observe the use of similar rhetorical resources to introduce and embellish the texts and analyze the explanation of this issue and the different approaches to explore.   Keywords: hagiography, byzantine literature, catalan literature, lives of saints.  


Author(s):  
Thomas A. Prendergast ◽  
Stephanie Trigg

As a disciplinary formation, Medieval Studies has long been structured by authoritative hierarchies and conservative scholarly decorums; the associated fear of error in medieval studies dates back to the Renaissance and the Protestant reformation. In contrast, medievalism increasingly celebrates creative play and imaginative invention. Such invention inevitably produces anxiety about historical accuracy. Popular scholarship and journalism in turn are often attracted to the abject otherness of the Middle Ages, especially the torture practices associated with its judicial systems. Such practices are designed to solicit the truth, and so, like illness, mortality and death, they are a useful double trope through which to analyse the relationship between medieval and medievalist approaches to the past.


2021 ◽  
pp. 22-57
Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

Chapter 1 traces the millennial length of a theoretical discourse about affectio that begins with Cicero’s De inventione before turning to a tradition of stylistic teaching that arose in parallel with that speculative rhetorical thought and that was to have much more profound consequences for medieval rhetorical practice. Cicero’s De inventione was the main Latin rhetorical treatise, along with Rhetorica ad Herennium, that the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity. Cicero treats emotion (affectio) as a topic of invention, and understands it in philosophical terms as a perturbation of the soul. That philosophical approach was elaborated in medieval commentaries. The chapter then turns to late antique handbooks of style. Style came to constitute a separate study; through these influences, style also became the main conduit for teaching emotion and rhetorical persuasion.


Ramus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Middleton

There is increasing interest in what might be thought ‘special’ about late antique poetry. Two volumes of recent years have focused on Latin poetry of this time, Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity edited by Scott McGill and Joseph Pucci (2016) as well as The Poetics of Late Latin Literature edited by Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (2017), while it has become increasingly acceptable to remark on late antiquity as a cultural period in its own right, rather than a point of transition between high antiquity and the middle ages. Greek poetry of late antiquity has yet to receive the level of attention offered to Latin literature of this time, and so it is to help answer the question of what may be thought special about late antique Greek poetry that I here discuss the poetics of later Greek ecphrasis.


The Making of the Middle Ages arises from a series of lectures organized by the Liverpool Centre of Medieval Studies and is sponsored by the University of Liverpool. The following essays, largely concerned with the period from the eighteenth century onwards, provide a thoughtful consideration on how and when the scientific study of the Middle Ages has had an impact on more popular perceptions, and include the work of historians, historian-philologists, and students of art, architecture and literature.


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