scholarly journals And We cast upon his throne a mere body: A Historiographical Reading of Q. 38:34

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.O. Klar

This paper focuses on Q. 38:34 from the perspective of early and medieval works of Islamic historiography and collections of tales of the prophets: the early tenth century works of cUmāra b. Wathīma and Ṭabarī, the eleventh century Tales of the Prophets by Thaclabī, the twelfth century folkloric collection of Kisāↄī, along with Ibn cAsākir's History ofDamascus, the thirteenth century world history by Ibn al-Athīr, and the fourteenth century historiographical work by Ibn Kathīr. These various works are viewed not as any particular stage in the development of a genre, but as variations on a (Qur'anic) theme, and the avenue of medieval historiographers and storytellers is utilised as a bridge to explore various possible interpretations of the Qur'anic passage. Historiographers and storytellers provide us with an illustration of how lessons of admonition implied in the Qur'anic text were perceived in medieval Islamic society. They also, as will become clear, provide a picture of Solomon that is consistent with the Qur'anic figure as a whole.

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Marjorie Chibnall

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.


Author(s):  
George Garnett

Chapter 5 analyses three genres of historical writing about England in the later middle ages: histories of individual churches, universal histories, and histories of the kingdom. It confirms the provisional judgement reached in Chapter 4: that with respect to the Conquest and earlier England, historical writing fossilized. There were, however, exceptions, most of which could be categorized in the first genre. These are examined in great detail, and follow on from the treatment of the unusual episodes recorded during the thirteenth century at St Augustine’s, Canterbury and Burton Abbey which were considered in Chapter 4. The first is the problematic, neglected Historia Croylandensis attributed to (Pseudo-)Ingulf, which is for the most part a fabrication of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but which masquerades as the work of the abbot at Crowland at the end of the eleventh century, and therefore as contemporaneous with the great post-Conquest histories of England. The second is the early fourteenth-century Lichfield Chronicle, written by Alan of Ashbourn. The third is a general history of England conventionally attributed to John Brompton, abbot of Jervaulx in the early fifteenth century, and perhaps written at the abbey. All three pay a great deal of attention to (different) twelfth-century compilations of Old English and immediately post-Conquest law. This unusual characteristic accounts for their exceptional interest in the Conquest. The chapter also includes a briefer discussion of the more conventional histories into which condensed earlier discussions of the Conquest were inserted.


Author(s):  
Russell Hopley

This chapter examines the responses of three important medieval Maghribī dynasties to the dilemmas posed by nomadic populations dwelling in their midst. These dynasties include the Almoravids in al-Andalus in the twelfth century, the Almohads in the Maghrib in the thirteenth century, and the Ḥafṣids, successors to the Almohads in Ifrīqiya, during the fourteenth century. The aim is to shed light on the challenges that nomadic populations posed to political legitimacy, and to suggest, paradoxically perhaps, that the presence of unruly nomads in the medieval Islamic west, and the effort to contain them, served an important role in each dynasty's attempt to gain political legitimacy in the eyes of the Muslim community.


Traditio ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 428-443
Author(s):  
Frank Pegues

The fourteenth century was the great century of college-founding in western Europe. The previous century and a half had witnessed the origins and early growth of the great studia generalia in Italy, France, England and Spain. This previous age had also seen the creation and endowment of the first colleges within the universities, a development which was to make the college system the dominant organizational characteristic of the medieval universities. The College des Dix-Huit was set up at Paris in the last years of the twelfth century; the most celebrated of all colleges, the Sorbonne, was endowed in the thirteenth. Almost at the same time, Merton College came into being at Oxford. But what had been a slow growth in the thirteenth century became a phenomenal expansion and multiplication of colleges in the fourteenth century. These colleges, vastly increased in number, were almost invariably and naturally attached to the old centers. The college founded by Aubert de Guignicourt at Soissons is almost unique simply because it was a provincial college. Because provincial colleges were so rare, this particular foundation deserves examination.


2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Pereira

AbstractAlchemical writings of Arabic origin introduced into the Latin natural philosophy of the twelfth century a cosmological issue that was at variance with Aristotelian cosmology: the idea of a subtle substance that stood at the origin of the four elements and encompassed heaven and earth. In this article, I consider the links of this notion with Hermetic and Stoic thought; its association with the technical process of distillation; its emergence in some philosophical texts of the early thirteenth century; and finally its full development in two fourteenth century alchemical treatises, the Testamentum attributed to Raimond Lull and the Liber de consideratione quintae essentiae written by John of Rupescissa.


Author(s):  
Israel M. Ta-Shma

This chapter traces the history of the Jews in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Poland. Jewish traders of Ashkenazi origin passed through Poland on their way to Russia on business as early as the first half of the eleventh century. The Jewish traders who passed through Poland in the twelfth century included scholars and other individuals versed in religious learning. By the last quarter of the twelfth century, there was a well-established Jewish community in Cracow, probably a direct descendant of the community whose existence was recorded some 150 years earlier. The chapter then considers a variety of Hebrew sources that reveal more about the existence of an admittedly sparse Jewish presence, including Jews well versed in Torah, in thirteenth-century Poland; about the continuous existence of this presence throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and, above all, about its Ashkenazi origins and its special, ongoing contacts with the circles of ḥasidei Ashkenaz in Germany. The extent of the links between Russia–Poland and Ashkenaz, particularly eastern Ashkenaz, was much greater than believed up to the present. Moreover, these links were essentially persistent and permanent, rather than a series of random occurrences.


1995 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 257-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Brainerd Slocum

Professional musicians first appeared in medieval Europe during the tenth century. These jongleurs, or minstrels, earned a precarious living by travelling alone or in small groups from village to village and castle to castle, singing, playing, dancing, performing magic tricks and exhibiting trained animals. These itinerant performers were often viewed as social outcasts, and were frequently denied legal protection as well as the sacraments of the church. With the revival of the European economy and the growth of towns during the twelfth century the opportunity for more stable living conditions emerged, and the minstrels began to organise themselves into brotherhoods or confraternities, eventually developing guilds of musicians. By forming corporations and thus voluntarily placing themselves under the power of rulers or civic authorities, the musicians could achieve a modicum of social acceptance and legal protection.


Vivarium ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 340-366
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Martin

Abstract The history of thinking about consequences in the Middle Ages divides into three periods. During the first of these, from the eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century, and the second, from then until the beginning of the fourteenth century, the notion of natural consequence played a crucial role in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The first part of this paper traces the development of the theory of natural consequence in Abaelard’s work as the conditional of a connexive logic with an equivalent connexive disjunction and the crisis precipitated by the discovery of inconsistency in this system. The second part considers the accounts of natural consequence given in the thirteenth century as a special case of the standard modal definition of consequence, one for which the principle ex impossibili quidlibet does not hold, in logics in which disjunction is understood extensionally.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 307-350
Author(s):  
Jesse D. Billett

AbstractLondon, British Library, Add. 56488, fols. i, 1–5, is a fragment from a monastic breviary of the first half of the eleventh century, probably made at or for Muchelney Abbey (Somerset). It is here argued on palaeographical, musical and liturgical grounds that this breviary represents a liturgical tradition separate from that of Æthelwold’s network of reformed houses, which imitated the northern French monastery of Corbie. The fragment’s liturgy is based instead on a local ‘secular’ (non-monastic) liturgical tradition that has been minimally supplemented and rearranged to agree with the requirements of the Regula S. Benedicti. The scribe apparently compiled the breviary from several separate exemplars (a collectar, a bible, a homiliary, and what seems to have been a ‘secular’ antiphoner), which may indicate that the liturgy at Muchelney was ‘Benedictinized’ much later than might have been assumed. The same secular tradition seems to be preserved, beneath subsequent layers of modification, in a thirteenth-century Muchelney breviary (London, British Library, Add. 43405–6) and a fifteenth-century ordinal of St Mary’s Abbey, York (Cambridge, St John’s College D. 27). These later sources, while not representing the Benedictine liturgy of the lost ‘old books of Glastonbury’ under Dunstan (as suggested by McLachlan and Tolhurst), are valuable potential witnesses to the otherwise largely unattested Office liturgy used in English minsters before the ‘Benedictine Reform’ of the tenth century.


1989 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-297
Author(s):  
Valerie Horsman ◽  
Brian Davison

Excavations in the New Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster, between 1972–4, have illuminated the development of this historic site on the northern periphery of the medieval palace. The Yard was first laid out in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century over previously marshy land at the edge of Thorney Island. In the central area of the Yard, part of the foundation of a magnificent fountain, known historically as the Great Conduit was found. Built in the mid-fifteenth century, the conduit formed a major landmark until its demolition some two hundred years later. Preserved within its foundation were the fragmentary redeposited remains of a high quality fountain of polished Purbeck marble, dated to the late twelfth century. Due to the enormous scale of the building works significant environmental evidence was recovered allowing elucidation of the topographical development of this important site, from the prehistoric period to the creation of the Yard in the late thirteenth century.This paper is published with the aid of a grant from the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England.


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