Joseph Szövérffy. Secular Latin Lyrics and Minor Poetic Forms of the Middle Ages: A Historical Survey and Literary Repertory from the Tenth to the Late Fifteenth Century

1998 ◽  
Vol 08 ◽  
pp. 248-251
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Moser, Jr.
1983 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dahmus

Bernd Moeller concludes in his often-quoted study of late medieval German piety that ‘one could dare to call the late fifteenth century in Germany one of the most churchly-minded and devout periods of the Middle Ages’. In his review of Moeller's work, W. D.J. Cargill Thompson points out that the ‘profound conservatism’ of this religiosity, which included devotion to the mass, veneration of saints and their relics, and the reading of vast amounts of religious literature, poses a problem for our understanding of the causes of the Reformation. How does one reconcile this traditional churchliness with the ‘remarkable suddenness’ of its collapse after 1520? One would have expected greater resistance to Lutheran ideas than actually occurred.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten Prak

AbstractHow did medieval builders manage to construct some of the tallest structures in the world without access to modern engineering theories? Construction drawings were limited to details and, with only a handful exceptions, manuals for builders only appeared in the late fifteenth century. By implication, the relevant knowledge had to be transferred on a personal basis. Its underlying principles must therefore have been reasonably simple. This article shows how a modular design, combined with on-site experimentation, guided much of the construction work on large projects such as European cathedrals, Middle Eastern mosques, Indian temples, and Chinese pagoda towers.


1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
John O. Ward

Abstract: It is often asserted nowadays that the medieval period “fragmented” the classical rhetorical inheritance, while the Renaissance restored it to its former coherence. The story of the assimilation in the Middle Ages and Renaissance of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory is examined here in order to demonstrate the problems inherent in such a position. It is argued that the full utilization of the text of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory in the Renaissance, along with the discrediting of the Ad Herennium (as a work of Cicero) that is associated with the name of Raffaello Regio in the last decade of the fifteenth century, are not the instances of the “recovery” of antiquity and supersession of “medieval philology” that they are often thought to be. Instead the opposite seems to be the case. The philological “recovery” of Quintilian led away from the incorporation of the Institutes into contemporary rhetorical practice and towards philology for its own sake. This, together with the bitter professional jealousies among the Italian schoolmen of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, led, almost “accidentally” as it were, to a “sundering” of the “whole” that the Middle Ages had put together out of rhetorical fragments from antiquity. The medieval period, less concerned with philological niceties than with the practical utility of good advice from the past, constructed a new kind of rhetorical text from an amalgam of old texts: the Ad Herennium commentary, made up of the text of the Ad Herennium, explanations, summaries, and discussions from the medieval schoolroom, and portions of Boethius' De differentiis topicis, Quintilian's Institutes, and other classical sources. This serviceable “unity” the Renaissance “sundered” by (a) discrediting the Ad Herennium as an authoritative Ciceronian text, and (b) placing the Institutes far beyond the practical capabilities of contemporary rhetorical training courses by restoring it to its original length (vis-à-vis the abridgements and assimilations of the medieval period). In this process of turning the classical texts into icons, the Renaissance scholars were predictably unable to re-create the kaleidoscopic, one-thousand-year reality of rhetorical attitudes and texts in antiquity, from the fragments that the Middle Ages had used to build up their new form of integrated text. Much had been lost, but what had been gained?


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Gurriarán Daza

Building techniques in the medieval walls of AlmeríaAlmería was one of the most important cities in al-Andalus, a circumstance that was possible thanks to the strength of its port. Its foundation as an urban entity during the Caliphate of Córdoba originated a typical scheme of an Islamic city organized by a medina and a citadel, both walled. Subsequent city’s growths, due to the creation of two large suburbs commencing in the eleventh century, also received defensive works, creating a system of fortifications that was destined to defend the place during the rest of the Middle Ages. In this work we will analyse the construction techniques used in these military works, which cover a wide period from the beginning of the tenth century until the end of the fifteenth century. Although ashlar stone was used in the Caliphate fortification, in most of these constructions bricklayer techniques were used, more modest but very useful. In this way, the masonry and rammed earth technique were predominant, giving rise to innumerable constructive phases that in recent times are being studied with archaeological methodology, thus to know better their evolution and main characteristics. 


Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny

From about the late fifteenth century onwards, literature and learning acquired increased importance for the social position of noble and elite-commoner families in France. One reason is the expansion and rise to prominence of the royal office-holder milieu, which had no exact equivalent in, say, England, where the aristocracy was much smaller than the French nobility and where there was no equivalent of the French system of venality of office. In France, family literature often helped extend across the generations a relationship between two families—that of the literary producer and that of the monarch. From the late Middle Ages, the conditions for family literature were made more favourable by broad social shifts. Although this study focuses mainly on the period from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, it is likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers thrived especially up to the Revolution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Adamo ◽  
David Alexander ◽  
Roberta Fasiello

This work is focused on an issue scarcely examined in the literature, concerning the analysis of the relationship existing between time and accounting practice. The aim is to highlight how changes in the interpretation of the concept of time influenced the development of accounting practices and contributed to the rise of periodical accounting reporting from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. The socio-economic context existing in Italy in the Middle Ages, the development of commercial partnerships among merchants ( compagnie) and the international trade created the conditions for the development of periodical reporting. The relevance assigned to time in economic activity is one of the crucial factors of the rise of accounting information related to recurring accounting periods. Furthermore, the article shows how the concept of time is important and its significance widely underestimated, in a variety of further applications.


1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Murphy ◽  
Michael Winterbottom

Abstract: Fifteenth-century rhetoricians inherited from the Middle Ages the belief that Cicero was the author of the work generally known as theRhetorica ad Herennium. This assumption was challenged in 1491 in a shortQuaestio by Raffaele Regio (1440?-1520). He refutes the three main arguments advanced for Cicero's authorship, but in the end declares that he will leave the matter undecided. Regio's claims did not settle the matter,which was still being debated two centuries later.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Vasco Zara

During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantitative paradigm of proportion with its qualitative one. The language of proportion as a compositional tool reveals the shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: while the Medieval tèchne based on modular thinking provides beauty and universal truth using the technique of repetition, the Humanist paradigm of variety produces pleasure and individual truth – a condition typical of the premodern.


2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNE WALTERS ROBERTSON

Abstract God's dramatic curse of Adam, Eve, and the serpent, as recorded in Genesis 3:14–15, contains a theological ambiguity that played out in the visual arts, literature, and, as this article contends, music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Translations of this passage leave in doubt whether a male, a female, or both, will defeat sin by crushing Satan's head (“caput”). This issue lies at the heart of the three Caput masses by an anonymous Englishman, Johannes Ockeghem, and Jacob Obrecht, and the Caput Motet for the Virgin by Richard Hygons from the Eton Choirbook. Fifteenth-century discussions of the roles of Christ and Mary in confronting sin, often called the “head of the dragon,” help unravel the meaning of these works. The Caput masses are Christ-focused and emphasize the Savior or one of his surrogates suppressing the beast's head, as seen in illumination, rubric, and canon found in the masses. Folklorically based rituals and concepts of liturgical time are similarly built around the idea of the temporary reign of the Devil, who is ultimately trodden down by Christ. Hygons's motet appears after celebration of the Immaculate Conception was authorized in the late fifteenth century. This feast proclaimed Mary's conquest of sin through her own trampling on the dragon; the motet stresses Marian elements of the Caput theology, especially the contrast between the Virgin's spotlessness and Eve's corruption. Features of the Caput tradition mirror topics discussed in astrological and astronomical treatises and suggest that the composer of the original Caput Mass may also have been an astronomer. The disappearance of the Caput tradition signals its lasting influence through its progeny, which rise up in yet another renowned family of polyphonic masses. Together, the Caput masses and motet encompass the multifaceted doctrine of Redemption from the late middle ages under one highly symbolic Caput rubric.


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