The Saint as an Astute Heroine

Mnemosyne ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelies Bossu ◽  
Koen De Temmerman ◽  
Danny Praet
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Specific Area ◽  
General Assumption ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Thematic Area ◽  
Traditional Patterns

This article provides a detailed analysis of character construction in the fifth century passio Caeciliae (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina 1495 – 1495a – 1496). Our analysis sets out to challenge the general assumption that character construction in the late antique passions can correctly be described in terms of stereotypes. The passio Caeciliae appeals to and inverts reader expectations based upon traditional patterns in erotic narrative. We also argue that it individuates the different characters (Caecilia and her fellow martyrs) by documenting one specific area of their representation, namely rhetorical ability. In this thematic area, Caecilia is set apart from her husband Valerianus: unlike him, she displays elaborate rhetorical aptitude which allows her to obtain the dominant position in the marriage and to achieve her aims. But the art of rhetoric is also a skill that can be learned as is shown by the character of Valerianus whose rhetorical approach changes in the course of the passion. Our analysis suggests that this passion from a literary point of view constitutes a more interesting text than is generally assumed.

Female Asceticism in Late Antique Georgian Literature

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Shota Matitashvili
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
Typical Representative ◽  
In The Beginning

Abstract This article examines the forms of female asceticism preserved in the so-called extended recension of the Life of St. Nino – a young Christian Virgin who converted the eastern Georgian kingdom of Iberia in the beginning of the fourth century. This study attempts to reinterpret the traditionally-established point of view about the origins of this composition and investigates several aspects of early Georgian Christianity. According to traditional scholarly opinion, the Vita of St. Nino was composed during the eighth and ninth centuries in order to reinforce the cult of the holy virgin who converted Iberia but the contextualization of the vita into the literary realm of late antiquity reveals more ancient origins of various episodes and layers of the vita. We see martyrs, missionaries, miracle workers, prophets and apostles in the images of Nino and her fellow women. Nino is a typical representative of the female ascetic community formed in early Christendom. Apparently, after the invention of the Georgian alphabet, the literary interactions between Georgians and other eastern Christian peoples intensified. As the Martyrdom of the holy Queen Šušanik reveals, already in the fifth century Georgians had translated the acts of martyrs which certainly influenced the subsequent development of Georgian literature. Of course, the Life has an overwhelmingly legendary and fictional character but its ‘sacred fictions’ originated much earlier than has generally been thought in scholarship.

scholarly journals Thirty-four Years after "Leda Christiana". Misery and Splendour of the First Century of Coptic Art History

1970 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 217-251
Author(s):  
László Török
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Egyptian Culture ◽  
The Impact

The course of the research of Egyptian Late Antique art was influenced for more than seven decades in a most unfortunate manner by the erroneous intrepretation of the archaeological context of the foruth century AD mythological reliefs discovered in the 1890s by Édouard Naville at Heracleopolis Magna (modern Ahnas). The misinterpretation of the find circumstances led to the postulate of a Christianisation of pagan themes in Coptic art and of their employment in the decoration of Christian churches. The actual architectural and iconographic context of mythological reliefs from Ahnas and other Egyptian Late Antique sites was identified by Hjalmar Torp in a 1969 paper in which he suggested that the mythological reliefs, as well as the contemporary carvings with Christian themes, came from pagan and Christian funerary edifices. Torp also pointed out the impact of Roman funerary iconography on the decoration of third-fifth century Egyptian tomb chapels. The present study discusses the trends prevailing in the research of Egyptian Late Antique art before and after 1969 from the special point of view of Torp’s seminal work. Particular attention is paid to the interconnected issues of chronology, social-cultural context, and quality stratification. The analysis of individual groups of sculptures, paintings, and luxury textiles presents new data for the assessment of the international context of Egyptian art in the Late Antique and early Byzantine periods as well as for the investigation of the transfiguration of Egyptian culture in Late Antiquity.

Bipartisanship as Possible Alternative of Russian Political System Evolution

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 256-265
Author(s):  
Konstantin V. Simonov ◽  
Stanislav P. Mitrakhovich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Political System ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Practical Advice ◽  
Simultaneous Separation

The article examines the possibility of transfer to bipartisan system in Russia. The authors assess the benefits of the two-party system that include first of all the ensuring of actual political competition and authority alternativeness with simultaneous separation of minute non-system forces that may contribute to the country destabilization. The authors analyze the accompanying risks and show that the concept of the two-party system as the catalyst of elite schism is mostly exaggerated. The authors pay separate attention to the experience of bipartisan system implementation in other countries, including the United States. They offer detailed analysis of the generated concept of the bipartisanship crisis and show that this point of view doesn’t quite agree with the current political practice. The authors also examine the foreign experience of the single-party system. They show that the success of the said system is mostly insubstantial, besides many of such systems have altered into more complex structures, while commentators very often use not the actual information but the established myths about this or that country. The authors also offer practical advice regarding the potential technologies of transition to the bipartisan system in Russia.

A Wolf in the City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Arruzza
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
The City ◽  
Shed Light

A Wolf in the City is a study of tyranny and of the tyrant’s soul in Plato’s Republic. It argues that Plato’s critique of tyranny is an intervention in an ancient debate concerning the sources of the crisis of Athenian democracy and the relation between political leaders and the demos in the last decades of the fifth century BCE. The book shows that Plato’s critique of tyranny should not be taken as a veiled critique of the Syracusan tyrannical regime but, rather, as an integral part of his critique of Athenian democracy. The book also offers an in-depth and detailed analysis of all three parts of the tyrant’s soul, and contends that this approach is necessary to both fully appraise the complex psychic dynamics taking place in the description of the tyrannical man and shed light on Plato’s moral psychology and its relation with his political theory.

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

Secular Monograms, Social Status, and Authority in the Late Roman World and Early Byzantium

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Noble Identity ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter examines the use of monograms as graphic signs of imperial authority in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire, from its appropriation on imperial coinage in the mid-fifth century to its employment in other material media in the following centuries. It also overviews the use of monograms by imperial officials and aristocrats as visible signs of social power and noble identity on mass-produced objects, dress accessories, and luxury items. The concluding section discusses a new social function for late antique monograms as visible tokens of a new Christian paideia and of elevated social status, related to ennobling calligraphic skills. This transformation of monograms into an attribute of visual Christian culture became especially apparent in sixth-century Byzantium, with the cruciform monograms appearing in the second quarter of the sixth century and becoming a default monogrammatic form from the seventh century onwards.

KE KONKURENCI GENITIVU POSESIVNÍHO A INDIVIDUÁLNĚ POSESIVNÍCH ADJEKTIV V SOUČASNÉ MLUVENÉ ČEŠTINĚ

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Martin Janečka ◽  
Tereza Kouklíková
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Semantic Relation ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Dominant Position

Abstract This article deals with the linguistic competition of the possessive genitive and possessive adjectives in contemporary spoken Czech language. It focuses on the differences between the constructions of the type Barbořin byt (Barbora’s flat), byt (naší) Barbory (the flat of (our) Barbora) and (naší) Barbory byt ((our) Barbora’s flat). The paper’s aimis to find out which of the possessive structures are preferred by speakers (and alternatively for what reason) or whether the frequency of their usage is equal. At first, both ways of expressing the possession with all their restrictions are described from the theoretical point of view. Moreover, the semantic relation of possessivity is specified. The next section suggests the influences which may govern the preference of the speaker. Within empirical research, data from the corpus of spoken Czech (ORALv1) are examined and it is seeked for explanation of factors that influence the choice of the structure. This also demonstrates whether one of the possessive structures has a dominant position or whether they occur in similar numbers.

The Brain as Treasury and as Aqueduct

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-566
Author(s):  
Jessica Wright
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Motor Nerves ◽  
Architectural Structures ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Brain

In late antique theological texts, metaphors of the brain were useful tools for talking about forms of governance: cosmic, political, and domestic; failed and successful; interior discipline and social control. These metaphors were grounded in a common philosophical analogy between the body and the city, and were also supported by the ancient medical concept of the brain as the source of the sensory and motor nerves. Often the brain was imagined as a monarch or civic official, governing the body from the head as from an acropolis or royal house. This article examines two unconventional metaphors of the brain in the work of the fifth-century Greco-Syrian bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus—the brain as a treasure within the acropolis, and the brain as a node in an urban aqueduct—both of which adapt the structural metaphor of governance to reflect the changing political and economic circumstances of imperial Christianity. Drawing upon medical theories of the brain, Theodoret expands upon the conventional governance metaphor of brain function to encompass the economic and the spiritual responsibilities of the bishop-administrator. Just as architectural structures (acropolis, aqueduct) contain and distribute valuable resources (treasure, water) within the city, so the brain accumulates and redistributes nourishing substances (marrow, blood, pneuma) within the body; and just as the brain functions as a site for the transformation of material resources (body) into spiritual goods (mind), so the bishop stands as a point of mediation between earthly wealth and the treasures of heaven.

On the readability of leaders in boundary labeling

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-132
Author(s):  
Lukas Barth ◽  
Andreas Gemsa ◽  
Benjamin Niedermann ◽  
Martin Nöllenburg
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
User Study ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Practical Point ◽  
Subjective Preference ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Preference Ratings ◽  
Boundary Labeling

External labeling deals with annotating features in images with labels that are placed outside of the image and are connected by curves (so-called leaders) to the corresponding features. While external labeling has been extensively investigated from a perspective of automatization, the research on its readability has been neglected. In this article, we present the first formal user study on the readability of leader types in boundary labeling, a special variant of external labeling that considers rectangular image contours. We consider the four most studied leader types (straight, L-shaped, diagonal, and S-shaped) with respect to their performance, that is, whether and how fast a viewer can assign a feature to its label and vice versa. We give a detailed analysis of the results regarding the readability of the four models and discuss their aesthetic qualities based on the users’ preference judgments and interviews. As a consequence of our experiment, we can generally recommend L-shaped leaders as the best compromise between measured task performance and subjective preference ratings, while straight and diagonal leaders received mixed ratings in the two measures. S-shaped leaders are generally not recommended from a practical point of view.

The wall-top of the Late-Roman defences at Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges: interim report

2002 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 297-309
Author(s):  
Jason Wood
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Interim Report ◽  
General Survey ◽  
Principal Objective ◽  
Architectural Survey ◽  
Sw France ◽  
Late Roman

Between 1993 and 2001 a British team led by S. Esmonde Geary, M. J. Jones and the author examined the Late-Roman defences of the ‘ville haute’ of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges (SW France). The project fell within the overall theme of studying the transition from the classical to the late antique/early mediaeval town, a principal objective of the international Trojet Collectif de Recherches’ at Saint-Bertrand. The primary aim of the British investigation was to document and analyse the construction of the Late-Roman defences and their subsequent development through a combination of architectural survey and excavation. During the nine seasons of fieldwork, the architectural remains of the entire wall circuit were analysed and 11 separate trenches excavated. The evidence obtained from these excavations dates the wall's construction to the early years of the 5th c.The architectural survey included collating old photographs and unpublished excavation records; preparing a plan showing the surviving original and rebuilt stretches of the walls; making a general survey of the principal external and internal elevations, and recording the outline of all visible Roman facing and corework, vertical and horizontal breaks, offsets, tile courses, drains, re-used masonry and later building and repairs; making stone-by-stone drawings of the best surviving elevations and features; making a detailed analysis of the wall fabric, interpreting its building periods and phases of construction, and identifying changes in alignment of the defences, the presence of external towers, work-gang divisions, and so on. For ease of reference, the circuit was divided into 26 sectors on the basis of criteria such as change of alignment and state of preservation.

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