ORDEAL AS A METHOD OF DETERMINING GUILT: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL ASPECT

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-15
Author(s):  
Вадим Леонидович Афанасьевский
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The People ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Middle Ages

В статье рассматривается ордалия в качестве историко-культурного феномена. Автор исходит из установки, согласно которой ордалия представляет собой определенный культурный текст, несущий конкретное содержание, позволяющее получить знания о функционировании предправа традиционных обществ. В Древнем мире и Средневековье судьи для определения вины/невиновности прибегали к процедуре ордалии: жребий, судебный поединок, испытание раскаленным железом, кипятком, водой. Сама процедура ордалии имела своим основанием глубоко религиозное сознание человека Древнего мира и Средних веков. Люди Средневековья были убеждены в том, что за всеми явлениями природного мира стоят сверхъестественные, трансцендентные силы, которые и вершат судьбы природных стихий, человека и человечества. Именно поэтому процедура ордалии предполагала, что вынесение судебного решения, особенно по запутанным делам, необходимо передать в руки божественных сил, то есть должен свершиться так называемый «божий суд». Смысл ордалии коренился в убеждении «Бог всегда на стороне правого!». Соответственно исход поединка и результаты различных испытаний представляют собой божественную волю, реализацию справедливости и правоты. Именно поэтому результаты ордалии по своей сущности сакральны. В связи с этим феномен ордалии органично вписывается в реальность Древнего мира и Средневековья. The article considers ordalia as a historical and cultural phenomenon. The author proceeds from the position that the ordalia is a certain cultural text that carries a specific content that allows you to gain knowledge about the functioning of the pre-rule of traditional societies. In the period of antiquity and the Middle Ages, judges resorted to the ordeal procedure to determine guilt/innocence: a lot, a judicial duel, a test with hot jelly, boiling water, water. The ordeal procedure itself was based on the deeply religious consciousness of the man of the Ancient world and the Middle Ages. The people of the Middle Ages were deeply convinced that behind all the phenomena of the natural world there are supernatural, transcendent forces that decide the fate of the natural elements, man and humanity. That is why the ordeal procedure assumed that the adjudication of court decisions, especially in complicated cases, must be transferred to the hands of divine forces, that is, the so-called «God's judgment» must take place. The meaning of the ordeal was rooted in the belief «God is always on the side of the right!». Accordingly, the outcome of the duel and the results of various tests represent the divine will, the realization of justice and rightness. That is why the results of the ordeal are essentially sacred. In this regard, the phenomenon of Ordalia fits seamlessly into the reality of the Ancient world and the Middle Ages.

Apocalypticism and Globalization in the Early Modern World: A Medievalist’s Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Rubenstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
World History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract The apocalyptic belief systems from early modernity discussed in this series of articles to varying degrees have precursors in the Middle Ages. The drive to map the globe for purposes both geographic and symbolic, finds expression in explicitly apocalyptic manuscripts produced throughout the Middle Ages. An apocalyptic political discourse, especially centered on themes of empire and Islam, developed in the seventh century and reached extraordinary popularity during the Crusades. Speculation about the end of world history among medieval intellectuals led them not to reject the natural world but to study it more closely, in ways that set the stage for the later Age of Discovery. These broad continuities between the medieval and early modern, and indeed into modernity, demonstrate the imperative of viewing apocalypticism not as an esoteric fringe movement but as a constructive force in cultural creation.

Espiritus de Invierno

2020 ◽  
pp. 36-56
Author(s):  
Yannick Cormier
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Basque Country ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Wild Man ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Middle Ages

In many parts of Europe and especially in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and the Basque Country), archaic and mysterious figures regularly haunt carnival rites since the Middle Ages (but referring, according to some specialists like A. Darpeix, member of the historical and archaeological society of Perigord, to a distant shamanic and Neolithic antiquity). They are masks adorned with skins of animals, vegetables, and straw, surrounded by bells and bones, often crowned with horns and pieces of wood. Thus arises the wild man within modern paganism to symbolize the rebirth of nature emerging from winter. The figures are essentially ambiguous, at the crossroads of nature and culture. The masks always speak of the mysteries of existence: in traditional societies, they were or still are the figures of ancestors and spirits of the dead, that of protective or evil spirits.

scholarly journals NATIONALHISTORIE EFTER MODERNISMEN - FOLKEBEGREBET I LYSET AF EUROPAS STORE FORTÆLLINGER

1970 ◽  
Vol 42 (117) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Michael Böss
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Main Role ◽  
National History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY AFTER MODERNISM: THE HISTORY OF PEOPLEHOOD IN LIGHT OF EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES | The purpose of the article is to refute the recent claim that Danish history cannot be written on the assumption of the existence of a Danish people prior to 19th-century nationalism. The article argues that, over the past twenty years, scholars in pre-modern European history have highlighted the limitations of the modernist paradigm in the study of nationalism and the history of nations. For example, modernists have difficulties explaining why a Medieval chronicle such as Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum was translated in the mid-1600s, and why it could be used for new purposes in the 1800s, if there had not been a continuity in notions of peoplehood between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Of course, the claim of continuity should not be seen as an argument for an identity between the “Danes” of Saxo’s time and the Danes of the 19th-century Danish nation-state. Rather, the modern Danishness should be understood as the product of a historical process, in which a number of European cultural narratives and state building played a significant role. The four most important narratives of the Middle Ages were derived from the Bible, which was a rich treasure of images and stories of ‘people’, ‘tribe’, ‘God’, King, ‘justice’ and ‘kingdom’ (state). While keeping the basic structures, the meanings of these narratives were re-interpreted and placed in new hierarchical positions in the course of time under the impact of the Reformation, 16th-century English Puritanism, Enlightenment patriotism, the French Revolution and 19th-century romantic nationalism. The article concludes that it is still possible to write national histories featuring ‘the people’ as one of the actors. But the historian should keep in mind that ‘the people’ did not always play the main role, nor did they play the same role as in previous periods. And even though there is a need to form syntheses when writing national history, national identities have always developed within a context of competing and hierarchical narratives. In Denmark, the ‘patriotist narrative’ seems to be in ascendancy in the social and cultural elites, but has only partly replaced the ‘ethno-national’ narrative which is widespread in other parts of the population. The ‘compact narrative’ has so far survived due the continued love of the people for their monarch. It may even prove to provide social glue for a sense of peoplehood uniting ‘old’ and ‘new’ Danes.

The General History of the Middle Ages at the V. Babeş University of Cluj (1951-1952)

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Ionuț Costea
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Teaching Staff ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The People ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Middle Ages

"The General History of the Middle Ages at the V. Babeş University of Cluj (1951-1952). The 1948 education reform represented, besides a new institutional architecture transposed in accordance with the model of the soviet universities, a process of recycling professors. The process of changing the teaching staff was carried out on at least two levels – the definitive or temporary elimination (sometimes accompanied by incarceration) from the education system on the one hand, and the exertion of severe surveillance and intimidation, thus remodelling the discourse and the behaviour in the spirit of the socialist realist “cultural revolution” on the other hand. The study shed light on a method that led to the expulsion of the professors was the public defamation, the accusation of immorality and of their lack of understanding of the new political transformations of the country, thus labelling the professors as “enemies of the people”. The atmosphere of fear and humiliation was sustained through press campaigns of defamation. Especially the younger university professors were instructed to attack, in the press, the more professionally well reputed and publicly well-known professors. These articles contained not only analyses of the professors’ works and ideas, but also their dismantling, their “exposé” and their human undermining. This paper is a case study on a professor from medieval department of Cluj university, Francisc Pall at the beginning of 1950s years. Keywords: Communism, Romania, education reform, cultural revolution, violence, surveillance. "

The Marais

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Reader
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Andre Malraux ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages

This book explores the history and the vicissitudes of one of Paris’s most extraordinary areas, the Marais. Centrally located on the Right Bank, this neighbourhood was from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century the most fashionable in the city, headquarters of the nobility who endowed it with resplendent architecture. The Court’s move to Versailles and the Revolution of 1789 led to the quartier’s decline, so that in the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth it was in parlous shape, its fine buildings run down and often severely overcrowded. It escaped wholesale destruction in the post-War frenzy of modernization largely thanks to André Malraux, who as Culture Minister fostered the restoration of the area. Malraux’s efforts were, however, not immune from criticism, sometimes seen as a form of socio-economic cleansing with concomitant fossilization, and thus emblematic of the problems faced by a city which has always been torn between the preservation of its past and the need to adapt to social and historical change. The book focuses particularly on literary, cinematic and other artistic reproductions of the quartier, of which it attempts to provide a comprehensive overview, and foregrounds particularly its importance as home to and base of two highly significant minorities – the Jewish and the gay communities.

The Seminary (Presidential Address)

1989 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Owen Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Educational Test ◽  
The People ◽  
Educated Person ◽  
The Middle Ages

The language of the liturgy will always be a little different from the language of common speech, however carefully the drafters of ritual aim to make it understood by the people. It has in it a strand of poetry, and the nature of reverence carries inside itself a healthy dislike of bathos. Therefore: if ministers of a liturgy are expected to preach to the people, they will need instruction in how best to teach or to speak, not to mention education so that they have something to say and are not windbags. But even if a minister of a liturgy is not expected to preach, but is only there as voice to go through the set text, it will be done better if he does it with understanding; and therefore the minister will need the education to understand what is read, which in the western centuries where all this started would be in Latin. The minister also needs instruction on how not to drop the baby at baptism, and how to behave with a coffin, and what to do to a dying person. It is therefore expected that this will be an educated person, even if for much of the Middle Ages the sort of education for many ministers would be that which we should think specially appropriate to a sacristan rather than to a professional preacher. And since some such qualification was essential to do the job, bishops hardly liked to ordain persons who could not pass some sort of an educational test.

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