Beyond Mimesis: Aristotle's Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 583-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla Mallette
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
National Literatures

La imagen que un solo hombre puede formar es la que no toca a ninguno. … El tiempo, que despoja los alcázares, enriquece los versos.—Jorge Luis Borges, “La busca de Averroes” (586)The image that a single man can form touches no one. … Time, which despoils fortresses, enriches poetry.How should literary historians aiming to describe literary traditions that predated the modern nation use the methodological tool kit developed contemporaneously with the European nationalisms? Can philology be separated from the logic of the nation and from the teleological vanishing point—the languages and literatures of (for instance) modern France, Spain, or Italy—that has traditionally provided a rationale for readings of medieval literature (and jobs for philologists)? Medieval literary historians have known for some time that we must get out of the habit of thinking in terms of the national literatures that would emerge centuries after the texts we study were written. And we have absorbed the lesson that the nineteenth-century philologists on whose shoulders we stand worked (frequently, if not systematically) under the influence of the nationalizing movements emerging as they wrote, so that their pronouncements on medieval texts must be read with appropriate caution. We have not, however, yet produced new geographic and historical formulations to replace the narrative that traces the origin of the modern European nations to a medieval Latin Christian crucible.

scholarly journals In the Camp and on the March: Military Manuals as Sources for Studying Premodern Public Health

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-60
Author(s):  
G. Geltner
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Medical Tradition ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Preventative Healthcare

Historians tend to view public health as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, enabled by the emergence of representative democracies, centralised bureaucracies and advanced biomedicine. While social, urban and religious historians have begun chipping away at the entrenched dichotomy between pre/modernity that this view implies, evidence for community prophylactics in earlier eras also emerges from a group of somewhat unexpected sources, namely military manuals. Texts composed for (and often by) army leaders in medieval Latin Europe, East Rome (Byzantium) and other premodern civilisations reflect the topicality of population-level preventative healthcare well before the nineteenth century, thereby broadening the path for historicising public health from a transregional and even global perspective. Moreover, at least throughout the Mediterranean world, military manuals also attest the enduring appeal of Hippocratic and Galenic prophylactics and how that medical tradition continued for centuries to shape the routines and material culture of vulnerable communities such as armies.

scholarly journals In the Camp and on the March: Military Manuals as Sources for Studying Premodern Public Health

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Geltner
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Medical Tradition ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Preventative Healthcare

Historians tend to view public health as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, enabled by the emergence of representative democracies, centralized bureaucracies and advanced biomedicine. While social, urban and religious historians have begun chipping away at the entrenched dichotomy between pre/modernity that this view implies, evidence for community prophylactics in earlier eras also emerges from a group of somewhat unexpected sources, namely military manuals. Texts composed for (and often by) army leaders in medieval Latin Europe, East Rome (Byzantium) and other premodern civilizations reflect the topicality of population-level preventative healthcare well before the nineteenth century, thereby broadening the path for historicizing public health from a transregional and even global perspective. Moreover, at least throughout the Mediterranean World, military manuals also attest the enduring appeal of Hippocratic and Galenic prophylactics and how that medical tradition continued for centuries to shape the routines and material culture of vulnerable communities such as armies.

The global/local tension in the history of anthropology

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Anthropology ◽  
The World ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
History Of

AbstractIn the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with ‘global’ visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label ‘globalization’ generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on ‘the global’ within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplinary debates, and wider historical junctures.

Debating World Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hendrik Birus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Literary Systems ◽  
National Literatures

Abstract Since the turn of the millennium the idea of “World Literature” has experienced a boom. This development is closely connected with the increasingly rapid globalization process, which began during the first few decades of the nineteenth century and led to the co-emergence of Weltliteratur and Littérature comparée in 1827. Goethe’s proclamation of the “Epoch of World Literature” created the impression that existing national literatures were to be supplanted; instead, however, the same period simultaneously witnessed the latter’s triumphant proliferation. Beecroft’s typology of the evolution of literary systems may assist in overcoming the rather pointless antithesis between world literature and national literatures. Since literary translation now plays an increasingly important role, it has become an indispensable factor contributing to the flourishing of world literature.

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