scholarly journals The Influence of the Renaissance on Richard Hooker

Perichoresis ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116
Author(s):  
Egil Grislis

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.

1922 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 323-405
Author(s):  
Gustav Krüger

In the introduction to my first article (Harvard Theological Review, October 1921) I have already remarked that it is neither necessary nor possible to present the literature of mediaeval church history with the fullness which is desirable for the history of the early church. In a general survey everything that has only a local interest must be omitted, and even in what remains the wheat must be winnowed from the chaff. The reviewer need not complain of lack of material; indeed what is valuable greatly exceeds in amount what is unimportant. This is especially true of those comprehensive treatises which deal either with the Middle Ages as a whole or with special periods.


Author(s):  
Dirkie Smit

In this contribution the seemingly straightforward slogan espoused by Biblica, namely, “Transforming lives through God’s Word” is complicated by placing it within the context of the rich, multi-layered and complex history of Bible-reading. Fully aware that it is an impossible task to construe the history of the reading of the Bible, offers a few broad strokes describing Biblical reception and interpretation, beginning with the complex genesis of the Bible, extending through the Early Church, the Middle Ages, The Renaissance and Reformation, the time of Enlightenment and rise of Modernity, the emergence of ecumenical hermeneutics in the 20th century, and the contemporary conflicts in hermeneutic perspectives. Throughout the essay, the question is asked – in various ways and with different responses – what “Transforming lives through God’s Word” could mean.


Author(s):  
John Marenbon

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.


Author(s):  
Joseph Dan

It is surprising to realize that no historian of Judaism wrote a history of the Middle Ages in Jewish history. Between 1923 and 1926 a Jewish historian, Shlomo Bernfeld, wrote a three-volume historical work, consisting mainly of an anthology of sources, entitled Sefer ha-Demaot, ‘The Book of Tears’. These volumes present a history of the Middle Ages up to the ‘Age of Reason’, which the author hoped would be the beginning of a new age in which the fate of the Jews would be different, yet this hope, he states in the end of his work, seems to have been unfounded. This article examines such narratives: the way narratives shape the chronological boundaries of the Middle Ages; their consequences concerning the examination of the relationships between Jews and non-Jews in the medieval world; and the place of history of ideas in the descriptions of the Middle Ages.


1988 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Monfasani

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.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton

Author(s):  
Jack Tannous

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
D.X. Sangirova ◽  

Revered since ancient times, the concept of "sacred place" in the middle ages rose to a new level. The article analyzes one of the important issues of this time - Hajj (pilgriamge associated with visiting Mecca and its surroundings at a certain time), which is one of pillars of Islam and history of rulers who went on pilgrimage


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document