scholarly journals Sites of Controversy: Jews Debating Philosophy between Iberia and Occitania in the Fourteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 631-648
Author(s):  
Tamar Ron Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Communal Norms ◽  
Letter Collection

AbstractThe extant sources of the Maimonidean controversies demonstrate that medieval Jewish intellectual culture was sited in actual encounters and interactions. Such interactions often took place around the practices of writing, conveying, receiving, and discussing letters, social activities governed by communal norms. Whether in the course of collaborating with co-writers, seeking signatories in support of a proposition contained in the letter text, or congregating at an established meeting to discuss a newly arrived letter, those involved in the controversies were actively, socially engaged in addressing the problems raised by the incompatibility of the Greco-Islamic rationalist tradition with rabbinic principles. Through a careful examination of the rich letter collection Minḥat Qenaʾot from the Maimonidean controversy of 1304–1306, this paper details the modes of encounter among discussants in the acrimonious cultural debate.

“Ridiculousness and Risibility”

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-149
Author(s):  
Eric Lawee
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Jewish Intellectual

The religiocultural setting that looms largest in tracing critical receptions of the Commentary is the veritable Babel of Jewish intellectual and literary expression in the eastern Mediterranean. Something unprecedented occurs in the writings of scholars with certain or highly probable eastern Mediterranean (Byzantine) affiliations: the Commentary is subjected to intense and at times systematic criticism from a position of frank superiority. The critics focus on two things: misguided exegesis, especially as expressed in the Commentary’s surfeit of midrash, and thse scandalously unscientific understanding of the Torah that Rashi is charged with promoting. The main focus in this chapter falls on Revealer of Secrets (Ṣafenat pa‘neaḥ), a Torah commentary by the fourteenth-century Eleazar Ashkenazi, who stands as the earliest datable figure to adopt a stance of arrant scorn toward Rashi. Study of his work provides a window into a world of rhetorically intense resistance to Rashi elaborated more fully by other scholars.

Changing Patterns of Medical Study Before 1800

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Neville Bonner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
University Graduates ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Classical Study ◽  
Medical Study ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Changing Patterns ◽  
The Rich

For the traditional physician of the eighteenth century, medicine was above all a humane study, mastered largely through books and the careful examination of medicine’s past and leavened now by a growing concern to know something firsthand of the feel of the human body in sickness and in health. To be a French or German or British physician in these years was to be a member of a cultural elite who, like other university graduates, found the truth in the rich treasures of ancient Greek and Latin writings. A degree in medicine was a testament of higher learning, not merely a professional qualification, and Latin was the visible symbol of that learning. Medicine was valued not so much for its efficacy in curing patients as for the knowledge it implied about the universe and humankind. Such notable figures as Quesnay, who had a medical degree, and Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau studied medicine as an integral part of a broad, humanistic culture. The character of a physician, wrote an English practitioner in 1794, “ought to be that of a gentleman, which cannot be maintained . . . but by a man of literature. He is much in the world, and mixes in society with men of every description.” Students were easily converted to the idea of the centrality of classical study in their lives. A young man in Edinburgh, for example, ridiculed his medical professors in 1797 for their ignorance and that of their students, who “could not translate the easiest passage in Latin.” On the Continent, a Munich professor offered at about the same time to instruct a whole class of medical students in liberal studies, since “their knowledge of the Latin language, philosophy, logic, and other general branches of education” brought “shame” to the faculty. Such complaints were frequent by 1800, revealing the growing tension between the ideal and the real in the classical training of students and professors. What kind of education, then, was suitable for a late-eighteenth-century physician? The mastery of ancient literature and medical texts was still essential to one’s status as a gentleman but was no longer regarded as the sole qualification for success as a physician.

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bowe
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Guittone D'arezzo ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Perspective

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante’s works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy before and contemporary with Dante. The second part of the book uses this reconstruction to demonstrated Dante’s engagement with and indebtedness to the dynamics of exchange that characterized the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument of the book, for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition, is underpinned by a conceptualization of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’, and as sense of ‘performative’ speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts (such as Dante’s Commedia).

Crossing the Borders of Art and Society: Toledo as a Meeting Place of Cultures 1150–1350

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-85
Author(s):  
Jane S. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Political Borders ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Art And Society ◽  
The Many

This chapter focuses on how Toledo's Jews formed an integral part of a city defined by diverse languages, cultures and peoples. Toledo, situated in the heart of Muslim territory, was the first Andalusian city to fall to the Christians in 1085. It discusses a new Castilian identity emerged out of the embers of Andalusia and the ongoing clashes of the Reconquest. The chapter highlights the New Jewish identities developed, the reconfiguration of political borders and population shifts on a grand scale. It explores how Toledo became the meeting place as well as a prime battleground for the many competing social and intellectual currents in Christian and Jewish circles. It argues that the migration of the Jews from Muslim to Christian Spain in the twelfth century did not spell the end of the rich culture that Jews had created in Andalusia. Jews continued to speak Arabic well into the fourteenth century and to cultivate Arabic-inspired arts. These formed an essential part of their identity. Ultimately, the chapter explains how the Sephardim responded to the new challenges of the Reconquest and the attacks on their tradition with the artistic vocabularies of the surrounding cultures.

On Some Italian Renaissance Caskets with Pastiglia Decoration

1946 ◽  
Vol 26 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 123-137
Author(s):  
W. L. Hildburgh
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Outer Surface ◽  
Plastic Material ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Level Surface ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Repeated Pattern ◽  
The Rich

The minor arts of the Renaissance in Italy included the ornamentation of small wooden boxes with reliefs moulded in a plastic material which was applied while yielding and hardened subsequently to the firmness of a soft stone. Although persons of a romantic turn of mind like to call such boxes ‘jewel-caskets’, it would seem more probable that they were made for the use of persons of moderate means, as substitutes for the caskets of precious materials such as were used by the rich, to contain trinkets and small oddments rather than gems or jewellery. In the fourteenth century and during a great part of the fifteenth the pastiglia covered the whole, or almost the whole, of the outer surface of its wooden foundation, was in most cases modelled smoothly in gentle gradations of relief, and was painted with colours which accentuated the forms of its comparatively large figures and supplied details of the decoration. In the second half of the fifteenth century, and continuing into the sixteenth, the decoration, in both its figures and its conventionalized ornament, was on a much smaller scale and in much sharper relief, and was applied to a level surface which might itself be a kind of pastiglia, either plain or marked all over with a regular repeated pattern.

scholarly journals On some Pogonophora from the north-east Atlantic, including two new species

1958 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve C. Southward ◽  
A. J. Southward
Keyword(s):  
New Species ◽  
Continental Slope ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
East Atlantic ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Muddy Bottom ◽  
Two New Species ◽  
Siliceous Sponges ◽  
The Rich

In the course of dredging for the rich epifauna of the continental slope near 48° 30′N., 10° W. (Southward & Southward, 1958b) in May 1957, several hauls were made by chance on a muddy bottom at 500–700 fin. depth. At the time, these hauls were examined only cursorily after sieving, and the con-tents immediately preserved. One of the hauls contained several damaged siliceous sponges, and a recent careful examination disclosed a number of pogonophore tubes entangled among the threads and spicules of the sponges.

Hidden Gems

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Adena Tanenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
The World

Abstract Unlike the Hebrew maqāma from Iberia, the Hebrew maqāma from Yemen has received little attention. This article brings the reader into the world of the Yemeni Hebrew maqāma between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries with such works as Aluʾel’s “Dispute Between the Calf and the Slaughterer,” the seemingly related “Parable of the Rooster,” “Haman’s Epistle,” al-Ḍāhirī’s Sefer ha-musar (roughly, “Book of adab”), Ḥarazi’s “Paths of Faith,” and Manṣura’s “Book of Thought.” Al-Ḍāhirī’s monumental work, for example, builds on diverse sources such as the maqāmāt of al-Hamaḏānī and al-Ḥarīrī, al-Ḥarīzī’s Taḥkemoni, and Immanuel of Rome’s Maḥberot and, like other maqāma collections, reworks many existing genres (folk tales, homilies, poems, letters, riddles, travelogues, dialogues, debates, and mystical writings). As such, it is a poignant testimony to Jewish intellectual culture in Yemen writ large.

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