scholarly journals Memory and Politics in the Chronicle Lists of Princes, 12th–15th Centuries

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-488
Author(s):  
Sergei Bogatyrev

Abstract This paper examines the lists of princes that can be found in the East Slavic chronicles compiled from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, including the Primary Chronicle and the Novgorodian chronicles. For the first time in the historiography, this work studies the corpus of princely lists as distinctive texts with specific cultural functions. The lists of princes were not reference tools but rather charters that validated political arrangements and shaped collective identities. On the basis of textual and formal analysis, the article demonstrates that the chronicle lists of princes legitimised kingship and served as a form of recorded collective memory for members of princely families and their Novgorodian allies. In a group of princely lists from the first half of the fifteenth century, the genealogical concepts of the Riurikid and Danilovichi dynasties appeared for the first time in East Slavic literature. These concepts reflected intensified contacts among literati in the East Slavic republic of letters and political changes caused by the expansionism of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the growth of the principalities of Moscow and Tver’.

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.C. Rowell

This article examines the development of charitable activity in the city of Vilnius and elsewhere in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania before the middle of the sixteenth century by studying the foundation of almshouses to care for the poor and destitute and foster the memory and salvation of pious benefactors. Almshouse foundations developed from increasing forms of practical piety within the GDL from the late fifteenth century, following earlier west European and Polish models. The first, dedicated to traditional patrons of such institutions, St Job and St Mary Magdalene, was founded by a Vilnius canon and medical doctor, Martin of Duszniki with the support of the monarch, Sigismund the Old, and his counsellors between 1518 and 1522. The almshouse swiftly became an established part of the city’s sacral topography. The fashion was adopted by Eastern Orthodox parishes in Vilnius too, and later spread to other confessional groups. Twelve charters are published for the first time in an appendix.


Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 257-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza

There are many still unstudied aspects of the cultural history of early Quattrocento Rome, especially if we consider the years before 1443, the date of the more or less permanent re-entry into the civitas aeterna of Pope Eugenius IV. The nexus between the still ephemeral papacy and the emerging intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism is one of these aspects. It is hoped that this study will shed some light on this problem by presenting a document that has hitherto not been completely edited: the original will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini. As we shall see, this important witness to the fifteenth century provides valuable information on many fronts, even on the structure of the old basilica of Saint Peter. The short introduction is in three parts. The first has a discussion of the cardinal's cultural milieu with a focus on the only contemporary treatise specifically about curial culture, Lapo da Castiglionchio's De curiae commodis. The second part addresses the textual history of the will as well as some misconceptions which have surrounded it. The third part contains a discussion of the will itself, along with some preliminary observations about what can be learned from the critical edition of the text here presented for the first time.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-402
Author(s):  
ANDREW MCKENZIE-MCHARG

AbstractIn 1789 in Leipzig, a slim pamphlet of 128 pages appeared that sent shock waves through the German republic of letters. The pamphlet, bearing the title Mehr Noten als Text (More notes than text), was an ‘exposure’ whose most sensational element was a list naming numerous members of the North German intelligentsia as initiates of a secret society. This secret society, known as the German Union, aimed to push back against anti-Enlightenment tendencies most obviously manifest in the policies promulgated under the new Prussian king Frederick William II. The German Union was the brainchild of the notorious theologian Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741–92). But who was responsible for the ‘exposure’? Using material culled from several archives, this article pieces together for the first time the back story to Mehr Noten als Text and in doing so uncovers a surprisingly heterogeneous network of Freemasons, publishers, and state officials. The findings prompt us to reconsider general questions about the relationship of state and society in the late Enlightenment, the interplay of the public and the arcane spheres and the status of religious heterodoxy at this time.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hoffman

AbstractThe ability to speak coherently is essential for effective communication but declines with age: older people more frequently produce tangential, off-topic speech. Little is known, however, about the neural systems that support coherence in speech production. Here, fMRI was used to investigate extended speech production in healthy older adults. Computational linguistic analyses were used to quantify the coherence of utterances produced in the scanner, allowing identification of the neural correlates of coherence for the first time. Highly coherent speech production was associated with increased activity in bilateral inferior prefrontal cortex (BA45), an area implicated in selection of task-relevant knowledge from semantic memory, and in bilateral rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (BA10), implicated more generally in planning of complex goal-directed behaviours. These findings demonstrate that neural activity during spontaneous speech production can be predicted from formal analysis of speech content, and that multiple prefrontal systems contribute to coherence in speech.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 584-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna E. Zavyalova

The article introduces into scientific discourse, and examines a number of M.V. Dobuzhinsky’s works: it traces the process of working on them, identifies their sources (literary and visual), analyzes the stylistic features and the specifics of the graphic techniques. These tasks are performed within the context of interaction between literature and fine arts. This topic is relevant because M.V. Dobuzhinsky’s illustrations to the stories “Stationmaster” and “Squire’s Daughter”, the play “Covetous Knight”, and the poem “Magnificent City, Poor City...” by A.S. Pushkin are studied as works of fine art for the first time.The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that it introduces an experience of defining the stylistic affiliation of the said works, and reveals a number of their visual sources. The author uses the method of complex analysis, combining the source analysis of M. Dobuzhinsky’s memoirs and his letters, the works of the artist’s contemporaries devoted to the Russian art of the beginning of the 20th century, and the traditional formal analysis of his works in comparison with those of Rembrandt, A. Benois, A. Dürer, F. Tolstoy, Japanese engravings of the 18th — beginning of the 19th century. This allows a significant expansion of existing ideas about visual and literary sources of the artist’s works.The article reveals that Rembrandt’s etching “View of Amsterdam from the Northwest” influenced the artistic solution of the illustration “In the Carriage” for the story “Stationmaster”; Hiroshige’s sheets influenced the illustration “Vyrin at the Entrance of Minsky’s House” for the same story. A. Dürer’s woodcuts influenced the solution of the illustration “Scene 1” for the play “Covetous Knight”; F. Tolstoy’s silhouettes influenced the vignettes and the artistic solution of the illustrations and decorations for the story “Squire’s Daughter”. The article also finds that H.Ch. Andersen’s tales “The Old House” and “The Old Street Lamp” had predetermined M. Dobuzhinsky’s appeal to the story “Stationmaster”, and the graphic solution of St. Petersburg in the picture “View of the St. Petersburg House”. The author concludes that M. Dobuzhinsky’s illustrating of Pushkin’s works was in line with his intense creative experiments: searching for a new solution to the image of St. Petersburg in book graphics, rethinking and “quoting” the masters of the past.


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Edward Fram

This chapter discusses the publication of the Babylonian Talmud by ’the Widow and Brothers Romm’ between 1880 and 1886 in Vilna, which is considered a landmark event from the perspective of rabbinic culture. The Babylonian Talmud included almost all of the commentaries and reference tools that had become part and parcel of printed volumes of the Talmud starting in the late fifteenth century. It talks about the ’Vilna Shas,’ which was considered a far cry from talmudic texts that had been known in the age of manuscripts and the early stages of print. It also mentions the fourteenth-century vellum Munich Codex Hebraicus MS 95, the oldest complete text of the Babylonian Talmud, which was noted to have sporadic corrections and glosses in the text and margins. As printing evolved in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, publishers added more material to volumes of the Talmud.


Traditio ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 297-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Letizia A. Panizza

Gasparino Barzizza of Bergamo, a humanist educator and university professor of rhetoric at Padua and Milan in the early fifteenth century, has come down to us chiefly as a pioneer expounder of Ciceronian eloquence, the man to whom the precious old manuscript of Cicero's complete rhetorical works was confided in 1421 for transcription and divulgation. For centuries, however, his considerable contribution to Seneca studies made before this date has been almost totally neglected. But for a few excerpts from his commentary on Seneca's Letter 1 to Lucilius, tucked away in Francesco Novati's footnotes to a letter of Coluccio Salutati, nothing substantial from these commentaries and their introductory material has to my knowledge ever been printed. Judging from the scanty literature on Barzizza, one is forced to conclude that the content of these commentaries has not even been examined. Still worse, the only biography of Barzizza written in the twentieth century says they are lost. Yet Gasparino Barzizza emerges from these commentaries as a leading Seneca scholar of early fifteenth-century Italian humanism. He was the central figure of Seneca studies while at Padua, a university town with a tradition of interest in Seneca stretching back to Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato and the revival of Senecan tragedy, and continuing with Sicco Polenton and his Life of Seneca. As part of the introductory material to his Seneca commentaries, Barzizza wrote the first humanist Latin biography of Seneca using Tacitus, and developed more fully than anyone before him the image of Seneca as a religious dissimulator, calling him for the first time a ‘Nicodemus.’ In a sadly mutilated and anonymous form, it can now be shown, Barzizza's life of Seneca was the only one printed in several early editions of Seneca's works, including the 1515 and 1529 ones edited by Erasmus, and later mistakenly attributed to Sicco Polenton. Erasmus' caustic prefatory remarks on deformers of Seneca that characterize his 1529 edition are aimed, it can also be shown, at Barzizza. Barzizza's lengthy commentary on the controversial opening of Seneca's Letter 1 to Lucilius, a set piece in its own right, stands at the centre of a dispute very much alive in his own time, in which Petrarch and Salutati participated before him, and Pier Candido Decembrio, his brother Angelo, and Leonello d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, participated after him, not to mention Erasmus himself.


2006 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Townsend

The year 13-Reed [1479]. It was at this time that the people of Ame-cameca and the Chalcas Tlalmanalcas came to sing for the first time in Mexico. At that time they performed the song of the women of Chalco, the Chalca Cihuacuicatl. They came to sing for the lord Axayacatzin.The song and the dance were begun in the patio of the palace while Axayacatl was still inside in the house of his women. But in the beginning the song was poorly performed. A noble of Tlalmanalco was playing the music very clumsily, and making the great drum sound in a lazy offbeat way until finally in desperation he leaned down over it, not knowing what else to do.There, however, close to the place of the drums, was a man called Quecholcohuatzin, noble from Amecameca, a great singer and musician as well. When he saw that all was being lost and that the song and the dance were being ruined, he quickly placed himself next to the drum section. He picked up a drum and through his effort he gave new strength to the dance so that it would not be ruined. Thus Quecholcohuatzin made the people sing and dance. . . . Axayacatl who was still inside the palace, when he heard how marvelously Quecholcohuatzin played the music and made the people dance, was surprised, and his heart filled with excitement. He quickly arose and left the house of his women and joined in the dance. As Axayacatl approached the place of the dance his feet began to follow the music and he was overcome with joy as he heard the song and so he too began to dance and spin round and round.When the dance was over, the lord Axayacatl spoke, saying, “Fools, you have brought this fumbler before me, who played and directed the song. Don’t let him do it again.” The people from Chalco answered him, saying, “It is as you wish, supreme lord.” And because Axayacatl had given this command, all the nobles of Chalco became terrified. They stood there looking at each other, and it is said that truly they were very frightened.. . . But the lord Axayacatl was well pleased [with Quecholcohuatzin] and continued to take delight in the “Song of the Women of Chalco,” the Chalca Cihuacuicatl. So it was that once again he had the Chalcas, all of the nobles, return, and he asked them to give him the song and he also asked all those from Amecameca, because the song was theirs, it belonged to the tlailotlaque, the men who had returned. The song was their property, the “Song of the Warrior Women of Chalco.” Chimalpahin, Seventh Relation Ms. Mexicain 74, Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris Folios 174-176The indigenous historian Chimalpahin seemed quite certain that events on a certain day in 1479 had unfolded as he described them, though he wrote over a century later and saw it all through the refracting lens of the intervening Spanish conquest. Posterity has been the more inclined to believe him since there exists a song amongst those collected in the sixteenth century under the auspices of the Franciscans entitled “The Song of the Women of Chalco” (Chalca cihuacuicatl) in which the singer addresses Axayacatl as the conqueror of Chalco and as her own lord and master. But what can we in the twenty-first century make of these two sources? We might pursue a number of interpretive avenues. In this article I will ask specifically what we actually know about the fifteenth-century performance event, and what, if anything, we can glean from the song concerning the lives of the Nahua women in that nearly untranslatable category whom we know in English as “concubines.”


1991 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belkacem Iratni ◽  
Mohand Salah Tahi

THERE ARE SOME DATES AND EVENTS WHICH REMAIN engraved in the collective memory of a people. In Algeria these are: 1 November 1954, which sparked the eight-year long War of Liberation; 5 July 1962, which witnessed the end of French rule over the country after 130 years of colonial settlement; and 12 June 1990, which signalled the withering away of the monopoly of power exercised by the ruling party - the National Liberation Front (FLN) - following the holding of the first ever free and competitive local elections in the history of independent Algeria. No doubt, on 12 June 1990 the Constitution of 23 February 1989, which fundamentally transformed the political and social system of Algeria, achieved its most spectacular application. These elections aimed at the renewal of seats in the Councils of both APC: Assemblées Populaires Communales (constituencies), and APW: Assemblées Populaires de Wilayat (provinces). For the first time, Algerians were offered the freedom to choose their representatives from among lists of candidates sponsored by several newly-legalized parties alongside the FLN, and for the first time, the FLN tasted defeat.


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