scholarly journals DOMIŠLJANJE KONTINUITETA. PROBLEM NAJSTARIJEGA TROGIRSKOG MEMORIJALNOG TEKSTA

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Basić

The oldest recorded history of the hexaconch rotunda of St. Mary de Platea in Trogir is associated with the memorial text preserved in two versions (Daniele Farlati, Petar Lučić). The written note provides information on the builder (restorer) of the church at the beginning of the 8th century, a relative of Severus the Great – the leader of the citizens of Salona who settled in Split in the 7th century. The author evaluates the validity of this note: he discusses the directions of previous research, transmission of the text, historiographical interpretations, and the archaeological, typological and stylistic context of the church. Through analysis he concludes that the memorial text is not of early medieval provenance; instead he gives a new proposal for its origin: it belongs to the artificial tradition shaped by the older historical narratives within the communal elite of Trogir in the 15th century, which was turned into a written text in the 16th century. He also defines the rotunda of St. Mary as an early medieval building from the beginning of the 9th century (without older phases) which was transformed into a communal church (ecclesia communis) of Trogir in the high Middle Ages. The author attributes to the text the function of creating the illusion of communal patronage of the church in continuity since the early Middle Ages.

Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.


2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 631-651
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka-Jeżowa

Summary Based on earlier research, and especially Tadeusz Ulewicz’s landmark study Iter Romano- -Italicum Polonorum, or the Intellectual and Cultural Links between Poland and Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1999) this article examines the influence of Rome - in its role as the Holy See and a centre of learning and the arts - on Poland’s culture in the 15th and 16th century as well as on the activities of Polish churchmen, scholars and writers who came to the Eternal City. The aim of the article is to trace the role of the emerging Humanist themes and attitudes on the shape of the cultural exchange in question. It appears that the Roman connection was a major factor in the history of Polish Humanism - its inner development, its transformations, and the ideological and artistic choices made by the successive generations of the Polish elite. In the 15th century the Roman inspirations helped to initiate the Humanist impulse in Poland, while in the 16th century they stimulated greater diversity and a search for one’s own way of development. In the post-Tridentine epoch they became a potent element of the Poland’s new cultural formation. Against the background of these generalizations, the article presents the cultural profiles of four poets, Mikołaj of Hussów, Klemens Janicjusz, Jan Kochanowski, and Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński. They symbolize the four phases of the Polish Humanist tradition, which draw their distinctive identities from looking up to the Roman model


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-132
Author(s):  
Philipp Winterhager

Abstract Traditionally, scholarship has seen the history of the diaconiae, charitable foundations in the city of Rome, in line with the alleged general trends in Roman history in the early Middle Ages, i.e. the gradual “Romanization” of formerly “Greek” elements of Byzantine origin, and the “papalization” of secular (state and private) initiatives, both taking place primarily in the mid-8th century. Although the diaconiae had come under papal control as late as the 9th and eventually the 10th centuries, this paper argues that this development took place not as an abandonment of private forms of endowments prominent in Byzantine Rome, but namely through the appropriation of “post-Byzantine” aristocratic endowment practice by the popes around the turn of the 9th century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks

The Introduction situates David Jones’s work as a poet–artist within the broader currents of high and late modernism, particularly within the context of a tradition of medievalism in twentieth-century poetry. It draws on Alexander Nagel’s conception of the medieval modern to show how Jones approaches the culture and history of the early Middle Ages as a form of live material open to play and adaptation. The Introduction also reframes our understanding of David Jones’s perception of himself as Anglo-Welsh in relation to changing attitudes to early medieval Welsh (Celtic) and English (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) history over the course of his lifetime. This discussion introduces the monograph’s central argument: as a poet of the medieval modern, Jones plays with and reworks early medieval English histories, narratives, and artefacts in order to challenge the singularity and exceptionalism of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ canon.


1985 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mildred Budny ◽  
Dominic Tweddle

This article offers an account of the components, the structure and the history of the so-calledcasulaandvelaminaof Sts Harlindis and Relindis preserved at the Church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Belgium as relics of the two sisters who founded the nearby abbey of Aldeneik (where the textiles were kept throughout the Middle Ages). The compositecasulaof Sts Harlindis and Relindis includes the earliest surviving group of Anglo-Saxon embroideries, dating to the late eighth century or the early ninth. Probably similarly Anglo-Saxon, a set of silk tablet-woven braids brocaded with gold associated with the embroideries offers a missing link in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon braids. The ‘David silk’ with its Latin inscription and distinctly western European design dating from the eighth century or the early ninth offers a rare witness to the art of silk-weaving in the West at so early a date. Thevelamenof St Harlindis, more or less intact, represents a remarkable early medieval vestment, garment or cloth made up of two types of woven silk cloths, tablet-woven braids brocaded with gold, gilded copper bosses, pearls and beads. Thevelamenof St Relindis, in contrast, represents the stripped remains—reduced to the lining and the fringed ends—of another composite textile. Originally it was probably luxurious, so as to match the two other composite early medieval textile relics from Aldeneik. As a whole, the group contributes greatly to knowledge of early medieval textiles of various kinds.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 7-35
Author(s):  
Rosamond McKitterick

Two case studies from eighth-century Rome, recorded in the early medieval history of the popes known as the Liber pontificalis, serve to introduce both the problems of the relations between secular or public and ecclesiastical or canon law in early medieval Rome and the development of early medieval canon law more generally. The Synod of Rome in 769 was convened by Pope Stephen III some months after his election in order to justify the deposition of his immediate predecessor, Pope Constantine II (767–8). Stephen's successor, Pope Hadrian, subsequently presided over a murder investigation involving Stephen's supporters. The murders and the legal process they precipitated form the bulk of the discussion. The article explores the immediate implications of both the murders and the convening of the Synod of Rome, together with the references to law-making and decree-giving by the pope embedded in the historical narrative of the Liber pontificalis, as well as the possible role of the Liber pontificalis itself in bolstering the imaginative and historical understanding of papal and synodal authority. The wider legal or procedural knowledge invoked and the development of both canon law and papal authority in the early Middle Ages are addressed. The general categories within which most scholars have been working hitherto mask the questions about the complicated and still insufficiently understood status and function of early medieval manuscript compilations of secular and canon law, and about the authority and applicability of the texts they contain.


Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 423-447
Author(s):  
YANIV FOX

Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575) was a Jewish Italian physician and intellectual who in 1554 published a chronicle in Hebrew titled Sefer Divrei Hayamim lemalkei Tzarfat ulemalkei Beit Otoman haTogar, or The Book of Histories of the Kings of France and of the Kings of Ottoman Turkey. It was, as its name suggests, a history told from the perspective of two nations, the French and the Turks. Ha-Kohen begins his narrative with a discussion of the legendary origins of the Franks and the history of their first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. This composition is unique among late medieval and early modern Jewish works of historiography for its universal scope, and even more so for its treatment of early medieval history. For this part of the work, Ha-Kohen relied extensively on non-Jewish works, which themselves relied on still earlier chronicles composed throughout the early Middle Ages. Ha-Kohen thus became a unique link in a long chain of chroniclers who worked and adopted Merovingian material to suit their authorial agendas. This article considers how the telling of Merovingian history was transformed in the process, especially as it was adapted for a sixteenth-century Jewish audience.


1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 103-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet L. Nelson

‘The church in town and countryside’ is a fruitful theme. But for early medievalists it is an especially challenging one. We first have to establish our right to participate at all. There is a classic tradition of interpreting western history, and the history of western Christianity too, in terms of an opposition between town and countryside: but according to exponents of this tradition, from Marx and Engels through Weber and Troeltsch to some contemporary historians, the early middle ages present a dull, townless void between antiquity and the eleventh or twelfth century. We have to begin then, by affirming that there were towns in the early middle ages. To justify this, we must do more than point out continuity in the terminology used by late classical and early medieval writers. We need to show that places existed which functioned as towns. Biddle has given a useful archaeologist’s list of functional criteria: defences, a planned street-system, a market, a mint, legal autonomy, a role as a central place, a relatively large and dense population, a diversified economic base, plots and houses of ‘urban’ type, social differentiation, complex religious organisation, a judicial centre.


1954 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Sullivan

One of the more fascinating problems connected with the history of the early Middle Ages is the persistence of similarities and the emergence of differences in the ideas and institutions of the eastern and western remnants of the Roman Empire. Equally intriguing is the related problem of the origins and the nature of the differences which characterize the Slavic and Germanic groups that fell under the influence of the Greeks and the Latins during the early Middle Ages. This paper will attempt to throw some light, on these problems by examining the field of missionary history. It will try to compare the methods employed by the eastern and western missionaries to convert the Slavic and Germanic groups living on the borders of Christendom in the period from about A.D. 600 to 900. Such a comparison might be revealing. It will permit one to see wherein the Greeks and the Latins acted alike or differently as each attacked the same problem. It will also allow one to detect some of the formative forces implanted in the Slavic and Germanic worlds as each underwent the fundamental experience of adopting a new religion.


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