Invoking the Authority of the Middle Ages in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The ‘Irish Crosses’ of Earley & Powells

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-206
Author(s):  
Colleen M. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The Middle Ages

This essay challenges the claim of the antiquarian artist Henry O’Neill that the publication of his 1857 book on early medieval crosses in Ireland sparked the nineteenth-century Celtic cross industry. While acknowledging O’Neill’s contribution as a founding researcher of medieval high cross scholarship, it argues that the design and significance of Celtic crosses developed in Victorian Ireland through social networks of antiquarians, monument makers and their culturally diverse, elite clients. Highlighted is the Irish ecclesiastical decorating firm, Earley & Powells, which began producing Celtic cross monuments in the 1860s. The significance of the Celtic cross silhouette which featured in landscape paintings alongside medieval ruins is considered in view of the conflicted relationship between landscape and Irish aristocracy. The essay concludes with a discussion about two of Earley & Powells’ clients and the monumental Celtic crosses they commissioned.

Muslim Contributions to the History of Religions

1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-421
Author(s):  
Ghulam-Haider Aasi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Spain ◽  
Muslim Scholars ◽  
The Middle Ages

History of Religions in the WestA universal, comparative history of the study of religions is still far frombeing written. Indeed, such a history is even hr from being conceived, becauseits components among the legacies of non-Western scholars have hardly beendiscovered. One such component, perhaps the most significant one, is thecontributions made by Muslim scholars during the Middle Ages to thisdiscipline. What is generally known and what has been documented in thisfield consists entirely of the contribution of Westdm scholars of religion.Even these Western scholars belong to the post-Enlightenment era of Wsternhistory.There is little work dealing with the history of religions which does notclaim the middle of the nineteenth century CE as the beginning of thisdiscipline. This may not be due only to the zeitgeist of the modem Wstthat entails aversion, downgrading, and undermining of everything stemmingfrom the Middie Ages; its justification may also be found in the intellectualpoverty of the Christian West (Muslim Spain excluded) that spans that historicalperiod.Although most works dealing with this field include some incidentalreferences, paragraphs, pages, or short chapters on the contribution of thepast, according to each author’s estimation, all of these studies are categorizedunder one of the two approaches to religion: philosophical or cubic. All ofthe reflective, speculative, philosophical, psychological, historical, andethnological theories of the Greeks about the nature of the gods and goddessesand their origins, about the nature of humanity’s religion, its mison dsttre,and its function in society are described as philosophical quests for truth.It is maintained that the Greeks’ contribution to the study of religion showedtheir openness of mind and their curiosity about other religions and cultures ...

Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Late Roman

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring that question, this book offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high Middle Ages, the period bridging Europe’s primitive past and its modern present. It critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deeper prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. It argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. It delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. The book reveals that kinship in the Middle Ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor is it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by “the most righteous principle of love.”

Ritual and reality in the early medieval ordines

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Know How ◽  
Full Picture ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies, not any private man’s writings.’ John Selden’s maxim, which surely owed much to his own pioneering work as a liturgist, shows a shrewd appreciation of the significance of the medieval ordines for the consecration of kings. Thanks to the more recent efforts of Waitz, Eichmann, Schramm and others, this material now forms part of the medievalist’s stock in trade; and much has been written on the evidence which the ordines provide concerning the nature of kingship, and the interaction of church and state, in the middle ages. The usefulness of the ordines to the historian might therefore seem to need no further demonstration or qualification. But there is another side to the coin. The value of the early medieval ordines can be, not perhaps overestimated, but misconstrued. ‘The liturgies’ may indeed tell us ‘what was generally believed’—but we must first be sure that we know how they were perceived and understood by their participants, as well as by their designers. They need to be correlated with other sources, and as often as possible with ‘private writings’ too, before the full picture becomes intelligible.

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.

A brief history of suicidal behaviour

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Navneet Kapur ◽  
Robert Goldney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Suicidal Behaviour ◽  
Social Influences ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Systematic Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter places suicide and suicidal behaviour in a European historical context. Although suicide has been documented throughout history, its meaning and functions have varied over time. In the Middle Ages, suicide was regarded as sinful but, subsequently, was conceptualized in terms of social influences or mental illness. Systematic research into suicidal behaviour has been undertaken for more than two centuries. The contributions of Morselli, using statistical and epidemiological techniques, were particularly notable. Many of the accepted social and psychiatric antecedents of suicide we talk about today were well described by the nineteenth century.

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