scholarly journals Parish or Synaxaria? To the Basic Elements of Religious Self-Identity of Ethno-Confessional Communities of the Christian Orient

2020 ◽  
pp. 272-283
Author(s):  
Anton Voytenko
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
System Analysis ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
History Of ◽  
Coptic Church

Introduction. The article focuses on the issues of the basic elements of keeping ethno-religious identity in the communities of the Christian Orient, which found themselves either as a minority under the dominance of another religious tradition, or within the almost complete external isolation suggesting a significant reduction of the former religious tradition and / or excluding its reactivation. The actual basis for the analysis is the history of the Coptic Church (from the period of the late Antiquity / early Byzantium to the modern period), as well as the history of the Alans / Ossetians from the 13th – 14th to the mid 18th centuries. Methods. The system analysis is used as the main research approach. Religious communities of the Christian Orient are regarded as closed, self-replicating systems. The paper aims to identify inside these systems the elements that make up the “content” or “superstructure” (preserved and translated to prevent assimilation with the dominant religious tradition and loss of their former identities), and basic elements that provide essential conditions for their successful survival. Analysis and Results. Studies of the cultural and religious rise of the Coptic community in the Middle Ages and New Times manifest that the basic elements of its identity preservation and transmission in the new conditions may be found in the transformation of churches / parishes and monasteries into a communicative space and area of religious socialization. The study of the religious situation of Alans / Ossetians in the conditions of almost complete external isolation and reduction of the Orthodox tradition to “popular Christianity” suggests that the sacred space of Christian churches becomes (already as an archetypical model) a point of the syncretic “content” formation, which has a certain strength and defines the cultural and religious identity of the Ossetians for a long time.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Sources Of Authority ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Periods

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.

The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Programme ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

M. Fabius Quintilianus was a prominent orator, declaimer, and teacher of eloquence in the first century ce. After his retirement he wrote the Institutio oratoria, a unique treatise in Antiquity because it is a handbook of rhetoric and an educational treatise in one. Quintilian’s fame and influence are not only based on the Institutio, but also on the two collections of Declamations which were attributed to him in late Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian aims to present Quintilian’s Institutio as a key treatise in the history of Graeco-Roman rhetoric and its influence on the theory and practice of rhetoric and education, from late Antiquity until the present day. It contains chapters on Quintilian’s educational programme, his concepts and classifications of rhetoric, his discussion of the five canons of rhetoric, his style, his views on literary criticism, declamation, and the relationship between rhetoric and law, and the importance of the visual and performing arts in his work. His huge legacy is presented in successive chapters devoted to Quintilian in late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, Northern Europe during the Renaissance, Europe from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, and the United States of America. There are also chapters devoted to the biographical tradition, the history of printed editions, and modern assessments of Quintilian. The twenty-one authors of the chapters represent a wide range of expertise and scholarly traditions and thus offer a unique mixture of current approaches to Quintilian from a multidisciplinary perspective.

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 Triumph of the Mule

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter starts as the Roman Empire fragmented, encompasses the emergence of Christianity and Islam, and explores the donkey’s place in the history of the Middle Ages, as well as what Fernand Braudel termed ‘the triumph of the mule’ in the ensuing early modern period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Being closer in time to the present, historical documents are generally richer and more plentiful than for earlier periods, but archaeological excavations and surveys—especially of post-medieval sites and landscapes—are still undeveloped in many regions. Inevitably, therefore, what I present draws as much on textual sources as it does on them. I look first at the symbolic value of donkeys and mules in Christianity and Islam. Next, I consider their disappearance from some parts of Europe in the aftermath of Rome’s collapse and their re-expansion and persistence elsewhere. One aspect of this concerns their continuing contribution to agricultural production, another their consumption as food, a very un-Roman practice. A second theme showing continuities from previous centuries is their significance in facilitating trade and communication over both short and long distances. Tackling this requires inserting donkeys and mules into debates about how far pack animals replaced wheeled forms of transport as Late Antiquity gave way to the Middle Ages. Wide-ranging in time and space, this discussion also provides opportunities for exploring their role in human history in areas beyond those on which I have concentrated thus far. West Africa is one, the Silk Road networks linking China to Central Asia a second, and China’s southward connections into Southeast Asia a third. According to the New Testament Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday seated on a donkey (Plate 20). The seventh-century apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew also envisages donkeys carrying His mother to Bethlehem, being present at the Nativity, and conveying the Holy Family into temporary exile in Egypt. Donkeys thus framed both ends of Jesus’ life and, given their importance in moving people and goods in first-century Palestine, must have been a familiar sight. But the implications of their place in Christianity’s narrative were originally quite different from those that are generally understood today.

The Comparative Study of “Scholasticism” in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians

AJS Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam H. Becker
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer. This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly, and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch. The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.

scholarly journals Byzantino-Slavic and Bulgarian Middle Ages in the Recent Works by Scholars from the University of Lodz

2021 ◽  
pp. 305-316
Author(s):  
Dmitry Polyvyannyy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
International Colloquium ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
History Of ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
Academic School ◽  
The University

The review considers the recent works by Polish academicians from two departments of the University of Lodz – History of Byzantium and Slavic Philology dedicated or related to the history and culture of medieval Bulgaria and the entire Byzantino-Slavic community of the 10th – 15th c. aiming to represent them to Russian audience, to reveal their contributions to the mentioned fields and to appreciate the current achievements of the forming academic school of the University of Lodz. Its beginning cannot be divided from the name of the disciple of prominent Polish Byzantinist Professor Halina Ewert-Kappesowa (1904–1985), Professor Waldemar Ceran (1936–2009), whose research and organizational activities led to the establishment of “Byzantina Lodziensia” book series (39 volumes published in 1997–2020), and in 2003 – to the Department of the History of Byzantium opening. These foundations met resonance and support from a new trend of the research activities in the University of Lodz – Old Slavonic literature studies – initiated by highly skilled paleoslavist Professor Georgi Minczew who began his work at the Department of Slavic Philology in the middle of the 1990s. The growing synergy of the Byzantine and Slavic trends resulted in the creation in 2011 of Ceraneum – the Centre of Research in History and Culture of Mediterranean and South-Eastern Europe named after W. Ceran (Centrum Badań nad Historią i Kulturą Basenu Morza Śródziemnego i Europy Południowo-Wschodniej im. prof. Waldemara Cerana, Ceraneum). Under its aegis the University of Lodz is editing annual scholarly journal “Studia Ceranea” (10 issues in 2011–2020) and since 2019 convenes in the historical venue of Bidermann Palace, the residence of the centre, annual international colloquium “Colloquia Ceranea” which attracts leading Polish and international scholars in Byzantine, Slavic and Bulgarian medieval history and culture. The author critically reviews monographs and miscellanies published by academicians of the University of Lodz in the recent five years and concludes upon the main research directions, results and perspectives of the University of Lodz school of Byzantine, Medieval Slavic and Bulgarian research.

Cultural Exchange

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Shatzmiller
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Christian Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archival Documentation ◽  
Artistic Values

Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, this book combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and material culture. The book focuses on communities in northern Europe, Iberia, and other Mediterranean societies where Jews and Christians coexisted for centuries, and it synthesizes the most current research to describe the daily encounters that enabled both societies to appreciate common artistic values. Detailing the transmission of cultural sensibilities in the medieval money market and the world of Jewish money lenders, the book examines objects pawned by peasants and humble citizens, sacred relics exchanged by the clergy as security for loans, and aesthetic goods given up by the Christian well-to-do who required financial assistance. The work also explores frescoes and decorations likely painted by non-Jews in medieval and early modern Jewish homes located in Germanic lands, and the ways in which Jews hired Christian artists and craftsmen to decorate Hebrew prayer books and create liturgical objects. Conversely, Christians frequently hired Jewish craftsmen to produce liturgical objects used in Christian churches. With rich archival documentation, the book sheds light on the social and economic history of the creation of Jewish and Christian art, and expands the general understanding of cultural exchange in brand-new ways.

Prophecy, Fate and Memory in the Early Medieval Celtic World

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Career Researchers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Turn ◽  
The Middle Ages

Prophecy, Fate and Memory in the Early and Medieval Celtic World brings together a collection of studies that closely explore aspects of culture and history of Celtic-speaking nations. Non-narrative sources and cross-disciplinary approaches shed new light on traditional questions concerning commemoration, sources of political authority, and the nature of religious identity. Leading scholars and early-career researchers bring to bear hermeneutics from studies of religion and literary criticism alongside more traditional philological and historical methodologies. All the studies in this book bring to their particular tasks an acknowledgement of the importance of religion in the worldview of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Their approaches reflect a critical turn in Celtic studies that has proved immensely productive across the last two decades.

The conquest of Antioch by the Persians and the beginning of the geopolitical catastrophe of Byzantium in the East

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-633
Author(s):  
Yu.V. Buzanakov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Military History ◽  
Persian Wars ◽  
Coordination Center ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regional Centers ◽  
The Military ◽  
The City

The article discusses the military history of Antioch, one of the regional centers of the Byzantine state from the 4th to 7th centuries. The author analyse the role of the city in the Byzantine-Persian wars. The characteristic of the history of the conquest of the Byzantine East is given. Being the capital of the province of Syria, Antioch was a major economic, political and religious center. In addition, Antioch has a rich military history. From the 4th century until the beginning of the Arab conquests, the Syrian Province was one of the centers of the Byzantine-Persian wars. As a rule, the city, in this war, played the role of a supply and coordination center for troops, but history knows examples when Antioch went on to experience direct enemy attacks. With the beginning of the era of Arab conquest, neither Byzantium nor Persia, exhausted by the war with each other, were unable to withstand the new threat. As a result of this, the Persian power ceased to exist, and Byzantium lost its vast territories in the East, including Antioch. It is worth noting that Antoch did not suffer a single major siege, neither in the period of Late Antiquity nor in the Middle Ages.

Rome's Holy Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Moralee
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Remote Past

Rome’s Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire’s holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome’s most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This book follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill’s tonnage of marble- and gold-bedecked monuments but, rather, an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh century CE. During this time, the triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill’s different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill’s role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state’s disintegration in the fifth century were the hill’s associations with the raw power of Rome’s empire.

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