Mandelstam: The Realm of Unexpectedness

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-83
Author(s):  
Svetlana S. Neretina

In the essay “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam described logic, which he defined as the “realm of unexpectedness,” which is unlike any everyday logical construction. Based on the analysis of Mandelstam’s text, it is assumed that we are talking about a tropology that arose in the Middle Ages, the principles of which can be derived from studies of St. Augustine’s treatise De Dialectica and Petrus Сomestor’s Historia Scholastica. It is this triple commonwealth (Augustine – Comestor – Dante, read by Mandelstam) that creates the multilayered logical framework of the work. Augustine created a completely different dialectic than in classical antiquity. Augustine considers dialectics as an art of discussion and describes the real steps that contribute to the emergence of speech, which corresponds to Mandelstam’s concept of conversation. According to Augustine, at the basis of any speech, is a trope-turn. In the article, attention is drawn to the sound nature of creation process. This logic, used in explaining the creation of the world according to the logos/word (tropology), assumes that, at the basis of the speech act, there is no the word as a unit of speech, but the sound itself – the sound, which was considered initially equivocal (ambiguous). In the process of pronounciation, the sound could turn into its opposite and could change the meaning of speech if the context has been changed. Dante expressed the meaning of tropology in practice. Mandelstam wrote that he had chosen Dante for the conversation (between poet and poet) “because he is the greatest and indisputable master of reversible and reversing poetic substance.” Mandelstam saw Dante as the Descartes of metaphor.

Author(s):  
Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr

The chapter explores how the Letter of James configures communities, distinguishing between the real (or historical) readers, the implied readers, and the letter’s reception history. During late antiquity and the Middle Ages the letter was perceived as a foundational instruction from James, the brother of the Lord, one of the leading figures of the Jerusalem church. At the level of the implied readers, the text makes use of the genre of Diaspora letter, which allows for the creation of a sense of common values and shared faith with the addressees. Finally, at the level of historical communities, the Letter of James appears to address a community of Jewish origins searching for a specifically ‘Christian’ identity in the midst of a dominant Mediterranean culture.


Author(s):  
Ioannis Nakas

Ship graffiti are one of the most common illustrations or vandalismsfound on the walls of medieval and post-medieval monuments in Mediterraneancountries. A multitude of vessels of various types and sizes have been carvedor drawn by the people of the Middle Ages on monuments, such as the Parthenonand the cathedral of Majorca, and humble buildings, such as cisterns and baths. Who made these graffiti? And why? Their occurrence in places of worship(churches, mosques) indicates that they were tokens of suppliance and votives,but equally common is their appearance in secular buildings, often related withwater (baths, fountains, etc.). Moreover, their quality ranges from simplistic‘banana boats’ to highly accurate representations of ship hulls and theirrigging.  This paper will examine certain case studies of medieval Mediterraneangraffiti and propose different scenarios for the nature of their engravers orpainters and the circumstances which led to their creation. Its aim is toexplore the complicated relationship between the creation of ship graffiti andthe contemporary world.


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Thompson

Throughout its history the institutionalised Church has sought in different ways to define its position with respect to the ‘world’, in order to give meaning to the injunction to be ‘in’ this world but not ‘of’ it. During the Middle Ages, the tension was acute because the Church, in its narrow definition of the clergy, claimed to be a separate, spiritual order, set apart from the temporal world. The tangible results of this dichotomy are particularly evident with respect to the real property held by ecclesiastical institutions. Property gave the Church the security to be independent from the lay power and the aristocracy; hence the Church claimed varying degrees of immunity for its property from secular jurisdictions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.


1906 ◽  
Vol 52 (219) ◽  
pp. 745-755
Author(s):  
William W. Ireland

Although the world will never again see anything like the great crusades of the middle ages, these events may be traced to causes which, though now of less force, still influence the human mind, appealing to the simplest and deepest cravings of our common nature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-82
Author(s):  
Alexandru Matei ◽  

During the Middle Ages, integumentum was a term widely used by “intellectuals” (Le Goff) in order to unfold the function of allegory: there is no story whose signification does not echo the sacred texts, and every sacred truth needs a story to bring it to life. Integumentum was a way to make this echo explicit: a sort of “poetical coat hiding a moral or philosophical truth” (John of Garland). We want to suggest that, while no one uses integumentum anymore in order to designate the rhetoric of modern and contemporary theoretical discourse, it is in ecological theory that we may rediscover its afterlives. Hence, integumentum is not only a form of telling truths, but a form of memory, as well. In this respect, Michel Serres may be considered the first “ecological” thinker, as he avoids abstract metalanguages as much as possible, relying instead on fictions and characters in his attempt to describe the world afresh. If integumentum resurfaces as the proper way of “ecologizing,” instead of modernizing (Latour), we would like to uncover, in Michel Serres’ works, the dialectic of subjects and objects.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Gurriarán Daza

Building techniques in the medieval walls of AlmeríaAlmería was one of the most important cities in al-Andalus, a circumstance that was possible thanks to the strength of its port. Its foundation as an urban entity during the Caliphate of Córdoba originated a typical scheme of an Islamic city organized by a medina and a citadel, both walled. Subsequent city’s growths, due to the creation of two large suburbs commencing in the eleventh century, also received defensive works, creating a system of fortifications that was destined to defend the place during the rest of the Middle Ages. In this work we will analyse the construction techniques used in these military works, which cover a wide period from the beginning of the tenth century until the end of the fifteenth century. Although ashlar stone was used in the Caliphate fortification, in most of these constructions bricklayer techniques were used, more modest but very useful. In this way, the masonry and rammed earth technique were predominant, giving rise to innumerable constructive phases that in recent times are being studied with archaeological methodology, thus to know better their evolution and main characteristics. 


Author(s):  
Aneta Dawidowicz

The community periodicals had accompanied the creation process of the press system in the Polish territory since the end of the 19th century. The community dimension of the press relates to both its spatial scope and the concreteness of the publishing profile. The National Democracy press was a collection of periodicals characterised by their typological diversity, in which the world presented equalled reality of the readers. From its beginnings, the National Democracy treated press in a purely utilitarian manner, as a form of dissemination of political thought and the tool which supported the achievement of political goals. The press took a multifaceted part in the development of national democratic movement.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (31) ◽  
pp. 230-238
Author(s):  
Greta Kaušikaitė ◽  
Tatyana Solomonik-Pankrašova

In the Middle Ages, interpreter was thought to be a poet, skilled in the art of composition; and an exegete, able to turn the enigmatic mode of the Scriptures into the human language. Medieval translation appertained to a hermeneutical performance, with the ‘modus inveniendi’ as its constituent part. This article aims at revealing the enigmatic mode of medieval translation in Cædmon’s ‘Hymn of Creation’. Cædmon, an unenlightened cowherd, miraculously acquired the gift to recite a Christian Song, which rendered the world ‘as a Dive work of Art’. Cædmon is re–creating the original texts by imposing his ‘enarratio poetarum’ upon the Story of Creation as manifest in the ‘Book of Genesis’, the Latin ‘Vulgate’. The novelty of the research lies in deciphering the ‘enarratio poetarum’ in Cædmon’s ‘Hymn of Creation’ as a transformation from rhetorical poetics to hermeneutics, from the ‘modus inveniendi’ to the ‘modus interpretandi’, so that the Cædmonian ‘artes poetriae’ becomes inseparable from exegesis. Most previous research1 focused on the poetic vocabulary, viz., the fusion of heroic Germanic idiom and Christian lore in the context of Anglo–Latin literature. Cædmon rendered the thirty one line of Genesis, the Act of Creation, into the nine–line ‘Hymn of Creation’, which embraces not only the Act of Creation, but adores the Creator by giving Him a variety of poetic names. By re–creating the text of the Scriptures Cædmon is becoming the ‘fidus interpres’ in the sense of faithful exegete.


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