scholarly journals Coins and Flowers: Some Images of the Textual Authority in the Works of Isidore of Seville

Author(s):  
С.А. Воронцов

В статье обсуждается значение авторитета цитируемого текста в свете дихотомии авторитет текста / авторитет личности в культуре последних веков Поздней Античности на Латинском Западе на материале наследия Исидора Севильского. На основании анализа метафор, связанных с фигурой благоразумного читателя (prudens lector), а именно – собирания цветов и экспертизы монет, делаются следующие выводы: 1) авторитет цитируемых текстов позволяет произведению репрезентировать традицию, а его автору-епископу – «образ отцов церкви». Это определяет символический характер авторитета личности церковного учителя, требующий, в то же время, воспроизведения первообраза; 2) цитируемые тексты образуют поле возможных альтернатив, из которых «разумный компилятор» осмысленно выбирает необходимые для воздействия на читателя; 3) читатель при этом, применяя монашеское искусство памяти, на основании накопленных коннотации использовал авторитетные высказывания для созидания новых смыслов. Таким образом, авторитет текста на рубеже Поздней Античности – Раннего Средневековья скорее оказывается средством обоснования и производства новых смыслов, чем ограничивающей их рамкой. The article considers the function of the authority of the quoted text through the lens of the dichotomy of personal / textual authority. The study is focud on the last ages of Late Antiquity and particularly on the works of Isidore of Seville. By consideration of the images related to the prudent reader (prudens lector) the article comes to the following conclusions. The extensive use of the authoritative quotations allows the text to represent the tradition, while its author as religious leader represented the Apostles and fathers of the Church. Thus, the authority of this leader turns out to be essentially symbolical. Relatively wide range of texts were considered authoritative. Making his own text, a prudent compiler (prudens compilator) as a prudent reader (prudens lector) chose the quotations not randomly, but according to the presupposed effect of the compilation. The reader of this kind of text, according to the monastic craft of the thought, produced new ideas by mediation upon the quotations, i.e. remembering all the connotations and relating them to the situation of the reader. Thus, the main function of authority of the quotations was to give an impetus to the thought in terms of tradition and not to suppress it.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 333-337
Author(s):  
Natalia Teteriatnikov

The present volume is a tribute to Marlia Mango on the occasion of her retirement from the University service of Kings College, Oxford University. All essays, written by her students, offer the result of their research and express a profound gratitude to their teacher. The essays tackle a wide range of subjects covering a vast territory from Constantinople to its periphery as well as Italy. Chronologically diverse, research materials span from late antiquity to the late Byzantine period.


Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy annually collects the best current work in the field of medieval philosophy. The various volumes print original essays, reviews, critical discussions, and editions of texts. The aim is to contribute to an understanding of the full range of themes and problems in all aspects of the field, from late antiquity into the Renaissance, and extending over the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Volume 6 includes work on a wide range of topics, including Davlat Dadikhuda on Avicenna, Christopher Martin on Abelard’s ontology, Jeremy Skrzypek and Gloria Frost on Aquinas’s ontology, Jean‐Luc Solère on instrumental causality, Peter John Hartman on Durand of St.‐Pourçain, and Kamil Majcherek on Chatton’s rejection of final causality. The volume also includes an extended review of Thomas Williams of a new book on Aquinas’s ethics by Colleen McCluskey.


Author(s):  
Clive D. Field

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, this book focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of ‘active church adherence’ is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of ‘diffusive religion’, demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author’s previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization – Britain’s Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880–1980. [250 words]


Traditio ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas O'Loughlin

In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in hisDiatessaron— as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-143
Author(s):  
John C. Scott

The goal of focal articles in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice is to present new ideas or different takes on existing ideas and stimulate a conversation in the form of comment articles that extend the arguments in the focal article or that present new ideas stimulated by those articles. The two focal articles in this issue stimulated a wide range of reactions and a good deal of constructive input.


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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-328
Author(s):  
John C. Scott

The goal of focal articles in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice is to present new ideas or different takes on existing ideas and stimulate a conversation in the form of comment articles that extend the arguments in the focal article or that present new ideas stimulated by those articles. The two focal articles in this issue stimulated a wide range of reactions and a good deal of constructive input.


2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Polanco ◽  
Thomas Buhse ◽  
Vladimir N Uversky

Proteins in the post-genome era impose diverse research challenges, the main are the understanding of their structure-function mechanism, and the growing need for new pharmaceutical drugs, particularly antibiotics that help clinicians treat the ever- increasing number of Multidrug-Resistant Organisms (MDROs). Although, there is a wide range of mathematical-computational algorithms to satisfy the demand, among them the Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship algorithms that have shown better performance using a characteristic training data of the property searched; their performance has stagnated regardless of the number of metrics they evaluate and their complexity. This article reviews the characteristics of these metrics, and the need to reconsider the mathematical structure that expresses them, directing their design to a more comprehensive algebraic structure. It also shows how the main function of a protein can be determined by measuring the polarity of its linear sequence, with a high level of accuracy, and how such exhaustive metric stands as a "fingerprint" that can be applied to scan the protein regions to obtain new pharmaceutical drugs, and thus to establish how the singularities led to the specialization of the protein groups known today.


Numen ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kocku von Stuckrad

AbstractIn late antiquity astrology held a key position among the accepted and well-reputed sciences. As ars mathematica closely connected with astronomy, it made its way into the highest political and philosophical orders of the Roman Empire and became the standard model of interpreting past, present, and future events. Although this is widely acknowledged by modern historians, most scholars assume that the application of astrological theories is limited to the 'pagan mind,' whereas Jewish and Christian theology is characterized by a harsh refutation of astrology's implications. As can easily be shown, this assumption is not the result of careful examination of the documentary evidence but of a preconceived and misleading opinion about the basic ideas of astrology, which led to an astonishing disregard of Jewish and Christian evidence for astrological concerns. This evidence has been either played down - if not neglected entirely - or labeled 'heretic,' thus prolonging the polemics of the 'church fathers' right into modernity. After having reviewed the biases of previous research into monotheistic astrology and its crucial methodological problems, I shall propose a different approach. Astrology has to be seen as a certain way of interpreting reality. In this regard it is the very backbone of esoteric tradition. I shall sketch the different discourses reflected in some late antiquity's Jewish and Christian documents. It will be shown that the astrological worldview of planetary and zodiacal correspondences was common to most of the sources. Examples will be presented for illustrating different adoptions of this attitude, namely the discourse of cult theology, the magical and mystical application of astrological knowledge, the debates concerning volition and determinism, and, finally, the use of astrology for political and religious legitimization.


Author(s):  
Bettina Leitner ◽  
Stefan Prochazka

Abstract The primary aim of this paper is to explore the functions of the word /fard/ in Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic. The study is based on the analysis of various text corpora and the elicitation of further examples from native speakers of the varieties investigated. The analysis of these data has shown that /fard/ is a polyfunctional item. Its various functions are the result of several grammaticalization processes. In the first stage, the noun “individual” has become a quantifier that expresses singularity. From this stage it developed into an intensifier, a marker of approximation and the scalar adverb “only.” It has been demonstrated that, from its use as a presentative marker, it developed toward an indefinite article. In contrast to the definite article, which is a grammatical category in nearly every variety of Arabic, the use of an indefinite article is rarely found in spoken Arabic. In Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic, /fard/ is an indefinite article that possesses a wide range of applications and only a limited set of constraints. Its use, however, remains optional to a very high degree. Its main function is that of a presentative—i.e., introducing a new referent into a discourse. In addition, it also functions as an individuation marker, as a marker for expressing the speaker’s epistemic status (knowledge/ignorance) regarding a referent, and indicating free choice from a set of potential referents. Related to this last function is its use as a mitigating device in imperatives and polite requests.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document