Encyclopedists, medieval

Author(s):  
Samuel Barnish

The modern encyclopedic genre was unknown in the classical world. In the grammar-based culture of late antiquity, learned compendia, by both pagan and Christian writers, were organized around a text treated as sacred or around the canon of seven liberal arts and sciences, which were seen as preparatory to divine contemplation. Such compendia, heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, helped to unite the classical and Christian traditions and transmit learning, including Aristotelian logic, to the Middle Ages. Writers in the encyclopedic tradition include figures such as Augustine and Boethius, both of whom were extremely influential throughout the medieval period. Other important writers included Macrobius, whose Saturnalia spans a very wide range of subjects; Martianus Capella, whose De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury) covers the seven liberal arts and sciences; Cassiodorus, who presents the arts as leading towards the comtemplation of the heavenly and immaterial; and Isidore, whose Etymologies became one of the most widely referred-to texts of the Middle Ages. These writers also had a strong influence which can be seen later in the period, particularly in the Carolingian Renaissance and again in the twelfth century.

1972 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
Edward J. Trayes

“A program of education for journalism should be based on a wide and varied background of competent instruction in the liberal arts and sciences.” “ACEJ (American Council on Education for Journalism) suggests about one-fourth/three-fourths as an equitable ratio between courses in journalism and courses in the arts and sciences.” “The required professional courses for a program in journalism should vary with the objective of the program or sequence, but all students should be instructed in the basic elements of reporting and editing and the theory, history, and responsibility of mass communication.”


Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy provides, twice each year, a collection of the best current work in the field of ancient philosophy. Each volume features original essays that contribute to an understanding of a wide range of themes and problems in all periods of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, from the beginnings to the threshold of the Middle Ages. From its first volume in 1983, OSAP has been a highly influential venue for work in the field, and has often featured essays of substantial length as well as critical essays on books of distinctive importance. Volume LIII contains: an article on several of Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes and the nihilist interpretation of Eudemus of Rhodes; an article on the coherence of Thrasymachus’ challenge in Plato’s Republic book 1; another on Plato’s treatment of perceptual content in the Theaetetus and the Phaedo; an article on why Aristotle thinks that hypotheses are material causes of conclusions, and another on why he denies shame is a virtue; and a book review of a new edition of a work possibly by Apuleius and Middle Platonist political philosophy.


Gesta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Armin F. Bergmeier

M. Fabius Quintilianus was a prominent orator, declaimer, and teacher of eloquence in the first century ce. After his retirement he wrote the Institutio oratoria, a unique treatise in Antiquity because it is a handbook of rhetoric and an educational treatise in one. Quintilian’s fame and influence are not only based on the Institutio, but also on the two collections of Declamations which were attributed to him in late Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian aims to present Quintilian’s Institutio as a key treatise in the history of Graeco-Roman rhetoric and its influence on the theory and practice of rhetoric and education, from late Antiquity until the present day. It contains chapters on Quintilian’s educational programme, his concepts and classifications of rhetoric, his discussion of the five canons of rhetoric, his style, his views on literary criticism, declamation, and the relationship between rhetoric and law, and the importance of the visual and performing arts in his work. His huge legacy is presented in successive chapters devoted to Quintilian in late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, Northern Europe during the Renaissance, Europe from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, and the United States of America. There are also chapters devoted to the biographical tradition, the history of printed editions, and modern assessments of Quintilian. The twenty-one authors of the chapters represent a wide range of expertise and scholarly traditions and thus offer a unique mixture of current approaches to Quintilian from a multidisciplinary perspective.


1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Derek Baker

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.


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