Calfurnio's Identification of Pseudepigrapha of Ognibene, Fenestella, and Trebizond, and His Attack on Renaissance Commentaries

1988 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Monfasani
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Dionysius The Areopagite ◽  
Large Influence ◽  
Corpus Hermeticum ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
The Middle Ages

Literary forgeries and pseudepigrapha have played an important role in Western culture since antiquity. One thinks of the large influence exercised in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the Corpus Hermeticum, the Zohar, the Pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de causis, the Pseudo- Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, the correspondence between St. Paul and Seneca, and the vast sea of pseudonymous hagiographical literature. However, in the Renaissance the situation changed somewhat because printing did more than merely provide a new medium for the diffusion of pseudonymous literary works; it increased greatly the possibility of financial profit for the publishers, printers, and, eventually, authors of such works.

scholarly journals The Influence of the Renaissance on Richard Hooker

Perichoresis ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116
Author(s):  
Egil Grislis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Early Church ◽  
European Context ◽  
Dionysius The Areopagite ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hermes Trismegistus ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
The Middle Ages

ABSTRACT Like many writers after the Renaissance, Hooker was influenced by a number of classical and Neo-Platonic texts, especially by Cicero, Seneca, Hermes Trimegistus, and Pseudo-Dionysius. Hooker’s regular allusions to these thinkers help illuminate his own work but also his place within the broader European context and the history of ideas. This paper addresses in turn the reception of Cicero and Seneca in the early Church through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Hooker’s use of Ciceronian and Senecan ideas, and finally Hooker’s use of Neo-Platonic texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and Dionysius the Areopagite. Hooker will be shown to distinguish himself as a sophisticated and learned interpreter who balances distinctive motifs such as Scripture and tradition, faith, reason, experience, and ecclesiology with a complex appeal to pagan and Christian sources and ideas.

scholarly journals The Parish Clergy of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: The Alexander Prize Essay, 1911–12

1912 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 89-128
Author(s):  
H. G. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
Parish Priests ◽  
Prize Essay ◽  
The Middle Ages

Until the thirteenth century records touching the parish clergy are scanty, but thereafter they increase in bulk and, with the fourteenth century, there exist, side by side, a number of literary works which afford more than a passing glance at their lives and deeds. The parish priests and clerks of these centuries were not perhaps typical of the mediaeval period, since no century or centuries will afford a type of any class or institution which will be true for the whole of the Middle Ages; and it is possible that the tenthcentury parish and its people resembled the parish and people of the fourteenth century as little—or as much—as the Elizabethan parish resembled the parish of the present day. The changes that affected so profoundly the organisation of the manor during the course of the Middle Ages did not leave its counterpart, the parish, unaltered; and the same economic forces that helped to make the villein a copyholder and serfdom an anachronism, helped also to raise the chaplain's wages from five to eight marks within thirty years of the Black Death. But although the

Casting Out Nines: An Explanation and Extensions

1990 ◽  
Vol 83 (8) ◽  
pp. 661-665
Author(s):  
Murray Lauber
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Mathematics Curriculum ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Computer Code ◽  
Modular Arithmetic ◽  
Mathematical Basis ◽  
Decimal System ◽  
Electronic Calculator ◽  
Mathematical Operations ◽  
The Middle Ages

The method of casting out 9s has been used for centuries, perhaps even as long as a millenium, for checking computations with integers involving the four mathematical operations. According to Eves (1980, 160–68) it was used by Hindu-Arabic scholars in the Middle Ages. It appears to have been imbibed by Western culture as a part of the decimal system of representation of numbers. With the invention of the electronic calculator its practical value has diminished. However, it is still an intriguing application of modular arithmetic that can be generalized to arithmetic in other bases. This article explains how casting out 9s is done, examines some reasons for including it as a topic for exploration in the mathematics curriculum, and uses modular arithmetic to explore its mathematical basis and its generalizability to computations in bases other than ten. A method of detecting errors in the transmission of computer code with some affinities to its analogues is also explored.

‘Artuswelt’ and ‘Gralwelt’: Shame Culture and Guilt Culture in ‘Parzival’

Traditio ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 32 (S1) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Joseph Szövérffy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Shame Culture ◽  
The Middle Ages

‘To judge by the profusion of scholarly works that have appeared in the last two or three decades, Wolfram's Parzival has enjoyed an extraordinary popularity,’ says Henry Kratz in his recent book, which he calls ‘An attempt at a total evaluation.’ Wolfram's romance remains the center of interest, but any ‘total evaluation’ runs the risk that it will be considered only on certain levels of interpretation, in spite of the fact that literary works, especially those of the Middle Ages, often display a combination of interpretative levels which, though seemingly contradictory, still do not necessarily exclude one another.

Pseudo-Dionysius (fl. c. AD 500)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannes Jarka-Sellers
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Orientation ◽  
World View ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Dionysius The Areopagite ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Christian World View

‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ was a Christian Neoplatonist who wrote in the late fifth or early sixth century and who presented himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian converted by St Paul. This pretence – or literary device – was so convincing that Pseudo-Dionysius acquired something close to apostolic authority, giving his writings tremendous influence throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. The extant four treatises and ten letters articulate a metaphysical view of the cosmos, as well as a religious path of purification and perfection, that are grounded in the Neoplatonism developed in the Platonic Academy in Athens. Although this strand of Neoplatonist thought, in contrast to that developed at the school in Alexandria, was deliberately pagan in its religious orientation, Pseudo-Dionysius used its conceptual resources (drawing especially on Proclus) to give precision and depth to the philosophical principles of a Christian world view. Cardinal points of Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought are the transcendence of a first cause of the universe, the immediacy of divine causality in the world and a hierarchically ordered cosmos.

Carolingian renaissance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marenbon
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
The Middle Ages

The ‘Carolingian renaissance’ is the name given to the cultural revival in northern Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries, instigated by Charlemagne and his court scholars. Carolingian intellectual life centred around the recovery of classical Latin texts and learning, though in a strictly Christian setting. The only celebrated philosopher of the time is Johannes Scottus Eriugena, but the daring Neoplatonic speculations of his masterpiece, the Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature) are not at all characteristic of the time and are based on Greek sources (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) generally unknown to his contemporaries. The mainstream of Carolingian thought is important for the history of philosophy in three particular ways. First, it was at this time that logic first started to take the fundamental role it would have throughout the Middle Ages. Second, scholars began to consider how ideas they found in late antique Latin Neoplatonic texts could be interpreted in a way compatible with Christianity. Third (as would so often again be the case in the Middle Ages), controversies over Christian doctrine led thinkers to analyse some of the concepts they involved: for instance, the dispute in the mid-ninth century over predestination led to discussion about free will and punishment.

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