Translating between the Lines: Medieval Polemic, Romance Bibles, and the Castilian Works of Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 113-139
Author(s):  
Ryan Szpiech
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Significant Source ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alfonso Of Valladolid ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Direct Use

The Hebrew works of convert Abner de Burgos/Alfonso de Valladolid (d. ca. 1347) were translated into Castilian in the fourteenth century, at least partly and probably entirely by Abner/Alfonso himself. Because the author avoids Christian texts and cites abundantly from Hebrew sources, his writing includes many passages taken from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. The Castilian versions of his works translate these citations directly from Hebrew and do not seem to make any direct use of existing Romance-language Bibles (although his work might have relied indirectly on Jewish Bible translations circulating orally in the fourteenth century). Given the abundance of citations, especially in Abner/Alfonso’s earliest surviving work, the Moreh ṣedeq (Mostrador de justicia), his writing can serve as a significant source in the history of Hebrew-to-Romance Bible translation in the fourteenth century. The goal of this article is to consider the impact of polemical writing on Bible translation in the Middle Ages by analyzing these citations in Abner/Alfonso’s Castilian works.

Camera Papae: problems of Papal Finance in the later Middle Ages

1953 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Peter D. Partner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Private Person ◽  
History Of

Boniface VIII probably spent some half a million gold florins on the acquisition of lands for the Caetani. But of that money not a word is said in the Introitus and Exitus volumes, the main account books of the Apostolic Chamber. Where was it accounted for and from whence did it come? The pope had certain special sources of income which would not ordinarily be reckoned in the main account books, and of these, some could properly be termed his fortune as a private person, while others attached to his office as pope. There was the private fortune which he had before he assumed the tiara. There were the incomes of benefices personally reserved to him, gifts made him by prelates and laymen, legacies, sometimes the goods of deceased prelates, and the so-called ‘private visitations’ and ‘secret services’. Later in the fourteenth century many other sources were tapped for the benefit of a secret fund, and all in all the sums which it disposed of were formidable and sometimes enormous. The ends to which the money was directed were as various as the characters and policies of the pontiffs: it was used for nepotistic ends on a princely scale, as a mere convenient subsidiary to the main financial machine, as a war account, as a means of making enormous loans to lay rulers, or simply as a petty cash account. The earliest records of the secret accounts to survive are from the midfifteenth century, but the large sums involved, and its covert but great importance in papal policy in general make the earlier history of this institution as interesting as it is obscure.

The Urban Environment and Medieval Social Strategies

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9 (107)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Irina Variash
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The Public ◽  
Crown Of Aragon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Call To Prayer

The article discusses the issue of the so-called segregation norms against Muslims that emerged in the fourteenth century in Christian Law. The author analyzes source material relating to the history of the Crown of Aragon and raises the following question: is it possible to trace any connection between the urban environment and those social strategies that were applied to the infidels in the Middle Ages? Such research optics makes it possible to distinguish several types of segregation laws, some of which were a product of the urban environment and urban culture, which is substantiated by the author on the basis of the royal ordonnances, capitulae of the Valencian Cortes, Fuero of Valencia. The author discusses new legal norms that contradicted the early privileges for Muslims (12th — 13th centuries) and regulated Muslims’ appearance (a distinctive sign on clothes, a special hairstyle), their right to live together or next to Christians, their work on Sundays and Christian holidays, and also prohibited the public call to prayer. Paradoxically, these norms, being aimed at restricting the rights of the infidels (i.e. the Others), were formulated under the influence of the urban environment, in a settlement that was heterogeneous in its genesis and diverse in its nature. The Iberian-Latin civilization, which accumulated the human capital of the Muslim civilization in the course of the Reconquista, began to change its own social strategies in the management of Muslims in the fourteenth century. The experience of the cities was crucial in this process.

The Virtues of Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Distinct Role

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.

scholarly journals NATIONALHISTORIE EFTER MODERNISMEN - FOLKEBEGREBET I LYSET AF EUROPAS STORE FORTÆLLINGER

1970 ◽  
Vol 42 (117) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Michael Böss
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Main Role ◽  
National History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY AFTER MODERNISM: THE HISTORY OF PEOPLEHOOD IN LIGHT OF EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES | The purpose of the article is to refute the recent claim that Danish history cannot be written on the assumption of the existence of a Danish people prior to 19th-century nationalism. The article argues that, over the past twenty years, scholars in pre-modern European history have highlighted the limitations of the modernist paradigm in the study of nationalism and the history of nations. For example, modernists have difficulties explaining why a Medieval chronicle such as Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum was translated in the mid-1600s, and why it could be used for new purposes in the 1800s, if there had not been a continuity in notions of peoplehood between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Of course, the claim of continuity should not be seen as an argument for an identity between the “Danes” of Saxo’s time and the Danes of the 19th-century Danish nation-state. Rather, the modern Danishness should be understood as the product of a historical process, in which a number of European cultural narratives and state building played a significant role. The four most important narratives of the Middle Ages were derived from the Bible, which was a rich treasure of images and stories of ‘people’, ‘tribe’, ‘God’, King, ‘justice’ and ‘kingdom’ (state). While keeping the basic structures, the meanings of these narratives were re-interpreted and placed in new hierarchical positions in the course of time under the impact of the Reformation, 16th-century English Puritanism, Enlightenment patriotism, the French Revolution and 19th-century romantic nationalism. The article concludes that it is still possible to write national histories featuring ‘the people’ as one of the actors. But the historian should keep in mind that ‘the people’ did not always play the main role, nor did they play the same role as in previous periods. And even though there is a need to form syntheses when writing national history, national identities have always developed within a context of competing and hierarchical narratives. In Denmark, the ‘patriotist narrative’ seems to be in ascendancy in the social and cultural elites, but has only partly replaced the ‘ethno-national’ narrative which is widespread in other parts of the population. The ‘compact narrative’ has so far survived due the continued love of the people for their monarch. It may even prove to provide social glue for a sense of peoplehood uniting ‘old’ and ‘new’ Danes.

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Medieval Rhetoric ◽  
Social Contracts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Aristotelian Rhetoric ◽  
The Middle Ages

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

The History of the Treatment of Mental Illness

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Lauren Mizock ◽  
Zlatka Russinova
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
Shock Therapy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Models Of Care ◽  
People With Mental Illness ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Chapter 1 reviews the history of psychiatric treatment of people with mental illness in the United States and Western Europe, highlighting past perspectives in care, such as ancient trephination and exorcism during the demonology era, humorism in early Greek and Roman thought, a return to demonological perspectives in the Middle Ages, as well as mesmerism and psychoanalysis in the 19th and 20th centuries. The 20th-century biological perspective is described, including the use of insulin shock therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and lobotomy. Next, the development of more humane treatment approaches is discussed, such as the moral treatment movement of the 1800s. The ex-patient’s movement of the 1970s is reviewed, leading up to the contemporary recovery-oriented and psychosocial rehabilitation models of care. The impact of stigma on the acceptance of serious mental illness is explored throughout this history. Discussion questions, activities, and diagrams are also included.

III. Loans to the Lancastrian Kings: the Problem of Inducement

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. B. McFarlane
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
History Of

The problem that I am going to discuss this afternoon is one which must surely have exercised the minds of all those who have given a moment's thought to the financing of the Hundred Years' War. What conclusions have been reached it would be hard to say. For apart from two or three illuminating though hardly conclusive pages by Mr A. B. Steel, to whom my indebtedness should soon be obvious, nothing seems to have been printed on this subject in recent times. Yet unless we have some idea why men lent large sums of ready money to the English kings of the later Middle Ages, we must approach the political history of the period at a considerable disadvantage. To an increasing extent as the fourteenth century advanced and preponderantly throughout the course of its successor these lenders were natives and drawn from all sections of the propertied classes. The king's treatment of his creditors was therefore bound to affect his relations with his most powerful subjects. It would be surprising if his success or failure in meeting his obligations did not markedly influence their attitude towards his rule.

The Historiographical Legacy of Salo Wittmayer Baron: The Medieval Period

AJS Review ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Impact

The impact of Salo Wittmayer Baron on the study of the history of the Jews during the Middle Ages has been enormous. This impact has, in part, been generated by Baron's voluminous writings, in particular his threevolume The Jewish Community and–even more so–his eighteen-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews. Equally decisive has been Baron's influence through his students and his students' students. Almost all researchers here in North America currently engaged in studying aspects of medieval Jewish history can surely trace their intellectual roots back to Salo Wittmayer Baron. In a real sense, many of Baron's views have become widey assumed starting points for the field, ideas which need not be proven or irgued but are simply accepted as givens. Over the next decade or decades, hese views will be carefully identified and reevaluated. At some point, a major study of Baron's legacy, including his influence on the study of medieval Jewish history, will of necessity eventuate. Such a study will have, on the one hand, its inherent intellectual fascination; at the same time, it will constitute an essential element in the next stages of the growth of the field, as it inevitably begins to make its way beyond Baron and his twentieth-century ambience.

History of the Portuguese Lexicon

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Pöll
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Western World ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Lower Extent ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Vocabulary

The basic vocabulary of Portuguese—the second largest Romance language in terms of speakers (about 210 million as of 2017)—comes from (vulgar) Latin, which itself incorporated a certain amount of so-called substratum and superstratum words. Whereas the former were adopted in a situation of language contact between Latin and the languages of the conquered peoples inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula, the latter are Germanic loans brought mainly by the Visigoths. From 711 onward, until the end of the Middle Ages, Arabic played a major role in the Peninsula, contributing about 1,000 words that are common in Modern Portuguese. (Classical) Latin and Greek were other sources for lexical enrichment especially in the 15th and 16th centuries as well as in the 18th and 19th centuries. Contact with other European languages—Romance and Germanic (especially English, and to a lower extent German)—led to borrowings in several thematic fields reflecting the economic, cultural, and scientific radiance that emanated from the respective language communities. In the course of colonial expansion, Portuguese came into contact with several African, Asian, and Amerindian languages from which it borrowed words for concepts and realia unknown to the Western world.

A Portal to Knowledge

Nuncius ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-55
Author(s):  
Nurit Golan
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Important Change ◽  
The South ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Monumental Sculpture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Significance

Abstract This article engages with the Creation cycle (hexaemeron) sculpted on the vault of the south portal of the choir of the Holy Cross Church at Schwäbisch Gmünd (1351–1377). Several reliefs depict the cosmological creation, which was a rather rare topic in monumental sculpture on public display during the Middle Ages. Being based on cosmological theories, taught at the universities, but not expected to be shared with the laity, it is a unique intellectual cultural phenomenon. The article seeks to interpret anew the full scientific significance of these unprecedented iconographic cosmological depictions. The choice of topic and location of the cosmological reliefs will be explained in relation to the town’s socioeconomic and political developments that brought to substantial changes in the lives of the burghers. Presenting these novel ideas to the medieval public in an ecclesiastic context suggests an important change in the intellectual history of the region in the late fourteenth century.

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