Christianity and Local Culture in Late Roman Africa

1968 ◽  
Vol 58 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Brown
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Roman Africa ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Roman

The task of this paper is, in part, an invidious one: for I shall have to begin by looking a gift-horse in the mouth. I shall have to question a group of opinions that link the rise of Christianity in Africa with a resurgence of the local culture of the area. This resurgence, it is said, explains not only the rapid collapse of Roman rule at the time of the Vandal invasion of 429, but the disappearance of Roman civilisation and of Christianity itself in Africa in the early Middle Ages.Discussion of this suggestion, however, tends to be jeopardised from the start because claims for the honour of being the resurgent local culture of Late Roman Africa have been enthusiastically advanced on behalf of two distinct and mutually-exclusive local cultures, associated with the two native languages—with Punic, on the one hand, and with ‘Libyan’ (which is often described by a convenient if perilous anachronism as ‘Berber’), on the other. What is more, these claims have been advanced by two equally distinct groups of scholars, handling different evidence. The evidence for the survival of Punic—or, so as not to prejudge the issue, of a lingua Punica—is literary: Augustine of Hippo and Procopius are the sole authorities for the period. The evidence for ‘Berber,’ by contrast, is largely confined to the interpretation of Libyan inscriptions and of traces of unchanging habits of worship and craftsmanship allegedly betrayed in the remains of the Christian Churches of Central Numidia.

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

The Foundations of Primatial Claims in the Western Church (Eleventh–Thirteenth Centuries)

2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABRICE DELIVRÉ
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One ◽  
Gregorian Reform ◽  
Late Roman

From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, many archbishops in the western Church turned to the papacy to obtain confirmation of supra-metropolitan prerogatives in harmony with the hierarchical principles of the Gregorian Reform. The study of the proofs produced by these primates makes it possible to identify distinct, contrasting encounters between local ecclesiastical structures and the False Decretals, a canonical collection (c. 836–8/c. 847–52) which was widely disseminated in the central Middle Ages. This process reveals the opposition between two types of territorial primacies, based, on the one hand, on kingdoms searching for unity or, on the other, on the civil provinces of the late Roman Empire.

scholarly journals Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos on Croats in Early Medieval Southern Pannonia (DAI, c. 30, 75–78): A Note on Concept and Method of Byzantine History Writing

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-43
Author(s):  
Hrvoje Gračanin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
C 30 ◽  
The One

The paper endeavours to discuss anew a scholarly puzzle related to the Croatian early Middle Ages and centred on a few lines from Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos’s De administrando imperio, which in English translation are as follows: And of the Croats who arrived to Dalmatia one part separated and ruled Illyricum and Pannonia. And they also had an independent ruler who was sending envoys, though only to the ruler of Croatia from friendship. Taking a different approach from the complete dismissal of the two sentences as a pure fiction or a mere literary device, the paper instead attempts to trace the concept behind this account as well as its underlying meaning. On the one hand, it seeks to detect the methods or strategies used by the royal compiler in trying to elucidate the past. On the other hand, it aims to provide a thorough historical analysis and offer a possible interpretation in opposition to the view, still largely extant in the Croatian scholarship, that this account is an evidence for an early presence of the group called Croats in southern Pannonia.

Ratramn’s Eucharistic Doctrine and its Influence in Sixteenth-Century England

1965 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
J. N. Bakhuizen Van Den Brink
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Reliable Interpretation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

In the two ninth-century treatises on the Eucharist written by Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus two opinions are expressed which seem to be in complete contradiction with each other. Both, however, are founded in the liturgy of the Church and spring from the same orthodox root. Their doctrines, therefore, do not differ from each other in every detail of the argumentation. The one may be characterised as the realistic-metabolic doctrine, the other as the symbolic doctrine. J. R. Geiselmann in his penetrating studies of the eucharistic doctrine in the early Middle Ages prefers to distinguish between three tendencies: (1) the metabolism of St Ambrose and the Gallican liturgies; (2) the realism of the Roman liturgy; (3) the dynamism of St Augustine’s more spiritual doctrine. The most diverse answers were inspired by closer inquiries into the realisation of the sacrament, i.e. the question firstly how the conversion of the elements should be understood and, secondly, how the relation should be seen between the consecrated elements and the body of Christ ascended to heaven. In these answers the terminology used is not always the same, so that a reliable interpretation offers great difficulties.

scholarly journals SIMBOLO, MIRACOLO, TENTAZIONE. IL CIBO NELLA LETTERATURA AGIOGRAFICA MEDIEVALE PRIMA E DOPO IL SECOLO XII

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Paolo Maggioni
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Food And Nutrition ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The One

The Christian religion is characterized by an ambivalent relationship with food. On the one hand, the liturgy is centered on the bread and wine, body and blood of Christ; on the other, the body, that you are forced to feed, has often been seen as an intolerable burden on the path of salvation. Despite this ambivalence, in the hagiographic literature of the early Middle Ages seems to be predominantly a negative conception of food, the trámite of every vice, to which man can not give up, while the twelfth century dominates a new idea of the body and, consequently, a different consideration of food and nutrition. Some hagiographic exempla regarding the primary foods, including bread, wine and milk, illustrate this evolution.

scholarly journals The Reception of Boethian Topics in the Early Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiorella Magnano
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Aristotelian Logic ◽  
The One ◽  
Epistemological Point

The purpose of this study is to focus on the coexistence, during the transmission of the doctrine on the Topics in the early Middle Ages, of two different interpretations: although both emerge from two commentaries on Cicero’s Topics, however, they gave rise to two different readings: the one transmitted by Marius Victorinus (ca. 280-365 AC) who thought the topics almost exclusively in the service of Rhetoric, the other conceived by Boethius (ca. 480-524 AC) who intended to restore the centrality that the Topics had in the Aristotelian Logic, by subordinating the rethorical Topics to dialectical Topics. My conclusion is that the Early Middle Ages can be considered, from an epistemological point of view, as a long boetiana aetas. Although the corpus of Boethius’s logical writings was not yet available until the second half of the 11th century, Boethius’s methodological approach on the Topics somehow continued to support the slow but constant absorption of the topical doctrine into the new Christian sensibility.

Aristotle's Unmoved Movers

Traditio ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Merlan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Picture ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Concentric Spheres ◽  
The One ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Middle Ages

According to Aristotle all heavenly movement is ultimately due to the activity of forty-seven (or fifty-five) ‘unmoved movers'. This doctrine is highly remarkable in itself and has exercised an enormous historical influence. It forms part of a world-picture the outlines of which are as follows. The universe consists of concentric spheres, revolving in circles. The outermost of these bears the fixed stars. The other either bear planets or, insofar as they do not, contribute indirectly to the movements of the latter. Each sphere is moved by the one immediately surrounding it, but also possesses a movement of its own, due to its mover, an unmoved, incorporeal being. (It was these beings which the schoolmen designated as theintelligentiae separatae.) The seemingly irregular movements of the planets are thus viewed as resulting from the combination of regular circular revolutions. The earth does not move and occupies the centre of the universe. Such was Aristotle's astronomic system, essential parts of which were almost universally adopted by the Arabic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals In the Iconographer's studio. The fashioning of the new motif types in Pre-Iconoclastic art.

1970 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Per Jonas Nordhagen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
New Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Byzantine Art ◽  
Image Creation ◽  
Pictorial Form

What was the part played by the artists (the craftsmen/painters) in the making of new iconographical types in the Early Middle Ages? Were have they given the design of what was to be illustrated all drawn up and ready for the hands of the program-makers? Or did they participate also in the work of selection from Scripture of the episode destined to be given pictorial form? This problem is rarely reflected upon in the literature on the period, yet it calls for a clarification. A cluster of newly created or revised New Testament scenes occurs in the art of Rome shortly after the year 700 A.D., a phenomenon which opens for a study of the collaboration which took place between the artists/craftsmen and the other partakers in the process of image-creation. This is the rationale for a renewed inspection of this extraordinary series of iconographical innovations, which as must be accentuated, were o leave their imprint on Byzantine art of the successive centuries.

scholarly journals On the Possibilities of Researching the Marriage Policies of the Rurikids: The Case of Mstislav Fyodor Vladimirovich Monomakhovich

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Dariusz Dąbrowski
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Source Material ◽  
The Other ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
Know How ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

The main goal of the article is to present the possibilities and methods of research on the Rurikid’s matrimonial policy in the Middle Ages on the example of a selected group of princes. As the subject of studies were chosen Mstislav Vladimirovich and his children. In total, 12 matrimonial relationships were included. The analysis of the source material revealed very unfavorable phenomena from the perspective of the topic under study. The Rus’ primary sources gave information on the conclusion of just four marriages out of twelve. The next four matrimonial arrangement inform foreign sources (Scandinavian and Norman). It should be emphasized particularly strongly that – save for two exceptions of Scandinavian provenance – the sources convey no information whatsoever as regards the political aims behind this or that marriage agreement. It appears, then, that the chroniclers of the period and cultural sphere in question did not regard details concerning marriages (such as their circumstances or the reasons behind them) as “information notable enough to be worth preserving”. Truth be told, even the very fact of the marriage did not always belong to this category. Due to the state of preservation of primary sources the basic question arises as to whether it is possible to study the Rurikids’ matrimonial policy? In spite of the mercilessly sparse source material, it is by all means possible to conduct feasible research on the Rurikids’ marriage policy. One must know how to do it right, however. Thus, such studies must on the one hand be rooted in a deep knowledge of the relevant sources (not only of Rus’ provenance) as well as the ability to subject them to astute analysis; on the other hand, they must adhere to the specially developed methodology, presented in the first part of the article.

scholarly journals Onnipotenza divina e ordine naturale nel Medioevo

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Possamai
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
The One

The present essay aims, on the one hand, to recall the reasons of anti-naturalism, intended in a metaphysical perspective, of a large part of medieval philosophical and theological reflection and, on the other hand, to show how the same type of problems, specifically those concerning the possible mutability or immutability of the past, can be employed in favour of various conflicting positions on the matter. To demonstrate this, reference was made to some thinkers who could represent emblematic positions on the theme, in particular: Pliny the Elder for the ancient world, Augustine of Hippo, Peter Damian, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas for the medieval era.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document