Letters of the Christian intellectual: Alcuin and his epistolary heritage

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-107
Author(s):  
Anastasia Ilyina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Inner World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Alcuin Of York

The article examines the epistolary legacy (numbering more than three hundred letters) of Alcuin of York, perhaps the most prominent figure of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, a famous associate of Charlemagne. Comparison of Alcuin’s letters with samples of late antique epistolography makes it possible to trace the degree of continuity of cultural and social practices of pagan Antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages. In addition, reference to Alcuin’s correspondence makes it possible to look into the inner world of a Christian intellectual, to get acquainted with the issues and problems that occupy the minds of his contemporaries, to build a scheme of Alcuin’s network communication and to understand how far his spiritual influence extended in Europe and with which social layers he communicated. Setting the goal of identifying the characteristic features of the Christian intellectual community at the turn of the VIII—IX centuries on the basis of the analysis of Alcuin’s epistolary heritage, the author of the article defines the social and geographical boundaries of the circulation of Alcuin’s letters, identifies the succession of his letters from the ancient epistolary tradition, identifies and analyzes the main problems raised in Alcuin’s letters. To achieve this goal, the article uses a historical and anthropological approach with elements of semiotic analysis. The succession of Alcuin’s correspondence from the traditions of late antique epistolography is reflected, first of all, in the form of letters, the way they were written, and the use of stable rhetorical techniques. At the same time, attention is drawn to the change in the social portrait of the address and, due to this, the expansion of the circle of addressees, which now includes not only representatives of the highest secular and church elite, but also nsufficiently educated and ignoble people, for whom Alcuin acted as a spiritual father and mentor. The analysis of the letters shows that Alcuin’s awareness of his responsibility for the fate of the addressees determines the subject matter of the letters, many of which are devoted to explaining the responsibilities of certain members of the Christian community, defining the area of responsibility of the laity and clergy, constructing of the image of an ideal clergyman or a righteous layman.

Jerome and the Sham Christians of Rome

1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Curran
Keyword(s):  
Social Background ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Family ◽  
The Social ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

scholarly journals Interpretation of acmeistic traditions in V. Shalamov’s poetry

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 177-188
Author(s):  
Daria V. Krotova
Keyword(s):  
Internal State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
Inner World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
A Chain ◽  
The One ◽  
Different Levels

The paper examines the influence of acmeistic patterns on V. Shalamov-poet’s artistic consciousness. The study involves Shalamov’s epistolary and memoirs heritage (letters to N. Mandelstam, N. Stolyarova, essay “Akhmatova,” etc.), where the author reflected on the significance of acmeistic literary tradition, as well as put forward his own understanding of acmeism — not only as an artistic direction, but also as a kind of “life teaching,” a worldview system. One may trace the inheritance of acmeistic principles in Shalamov’s work at different levels. The paper seeks to identify and systematize acmeistic influences in poet’s consciousness. First of all, we are talking about the installation on the “fight for this world” (according to S. Gorodetsky): the multifaceted representation of the phenomena of environmental reality in its colors, forms and subject details. Shalamov inherits this principle, so that the objects of reality play a paramount role in his poetry system and receive no less distinct and large embodiment than in the work of acmeists. Such an arrangement is carried out by Shalamov in contrasting aspects: on the one hand, the imprinting of terrible world in which man barely survives and to which he seeks to resist; оn the other hand, even in the most adverse circumstances of imprisonment, the poet saw and felt the harmony and greatness of nature. The connection with the acmeistic thinking in Shalamov’s works is also expressed in the fact that his images are almost always substantive and tangible (this feature manifested itself as early as in the first poem of “Kolyma notebooks”). As in the lyrics of acmeists, he often refracted the inner world through external, spiritual experiences — through the prism of the subject plan (the principle that was realized brightly in the lyrics of A. Akhmatova). It is not often that the reader finds “pure” lyrical monologues, much more typical for Shalamov`s creative tactics — to characterize the internal state through a chain of real images. Acmeistic logic could be traced in the interpretation of a number of important topics, among which the theme of creativity (characteristic features of its interpretation are shown in the article on the example of poems “Ode to Loaf,” “May it be clumsily uneven…,” “By ungainly prisoner step...”). The paper addresses such a significant aspect (also linking the poet to the acmeistic tradition) as a bodily nature of the figurative world. Finally, important feature of acmeistic thinking, which is inherited by Shalamov, is the obvious appeal of his creativity to the interlocutor, the focus on the reader (this feature is immanent, certainly, not only in the consciousness of akmeists, but it has fundamental significance in their creativity). The study concludes that among the traditions influenced Shalamov-poet, the acmeist becomes one of the most important, most significant artistic and worldview guidelines.

The Zadar Fragment of the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (or Lex Dei)

2020 ◽  
Vol 137 (1) ◽  
pp. 319-330
Author(s):  
Robert M. Frakes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The State ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
State Archives ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractA fragment from the anonymous text known as the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (The Collation of the Laws of Moses and of the Romans) or the Lex Dei (the Law of God) has recently been identified in the State Archives in Zadar, Croatia. The Collatio is a late antique collection of Old Testament strictures and passages from Roman jurists and Roman law which continues to be the subject of scholarly debate. Close examination of this new fragment in the context of the manuscript tradition of the work can give insight into the nature of the lost codex from which it came as well as shed light on the transmission of the Collatio in the Middle Ages.

The Deepest Sense

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance Classen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Healing Power ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First Time

From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical exploration. This book fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity. This approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture—the ways in which feelings shaped society. This book explores a variety of tactile realms; including the feel of the medieval city; the tactile appeal of relics; the social histories of pain, pleasure, and affection; the bonds of touch between humans and animals; the strenuous excitement of sports such as wrestling and jousting; and the sensuous attractions of consumer culture. The book delves into a range of vital issues, from the uses—and prohibitions—of touch in social interaction to the disciplining of the body by the modern state, from the changing feel of the urban landscape to the technologization of touch in modernity. Through poignant descriptions of the healing power of a medieval king's hand or the grueling conditions of a nineteenth-century prison, we find that history, far from being a dry and lifeless subject, touches us to the quick.

Ladies of the Fraternity of Saint George and of the Society of the Garter

1985 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Western World ◽  
Central Component ◽  
The Social ◽  
Chansons De Geste ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press ◽  
Status Of Women

Contemporary society has discovered—or in some cases been forced to discover—the worth of women. Historians have provided valuable insights into the social, cultural, and legal status of women in an effort to highlight the roots of attitudes that have excluded women from positions of power in the western world. Much of this research has focused upon new ways of viewing history, and the fine series of monographs Women in Culture and Society being published by the University of Chicago Press provides a prime example of the new awareness of the distaff side of history. Yet, little attention has been paid to some of the most basic assumptions of past generations of medieval historians about women and society. The claim that male chauvinist attitudes are founded in the primative Germanic concept of a warrior fraternity from which women were physiologically excluded from membership was already hoary when Fritz Kern published his classic account of medieval law and society in 1914. The comitatus band of Tacitus has been seen as a central component of the leitmotiv that produced chivalry. The chivalric love ethic has, of course, received great attention from women's historians, but the chivalric orders into which such views were distilled have been largely ignored.The traditional view of the chivalric orders as fossilized parodies of the values they espoused so eloquently advocated by Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages still holds the field. Only in the last year have the chivalric orders been rehabilitated as genuine expressions of the human values of their age. The position of women within the tradition of the chivalric orders is worth a look for the intrinsic interest of the subject and for the insights that the investigation provides into the shifts in attitudes toward females over the centuries. The chivalric orders, and the Arthurian legends that inspired them, placed a high value on women, much higher than the earlier chansons de geste. While it is true that this tradition tended to place the lady upon a pedestal from which her daughters have fought to climb down, the greatest and longest lasting of these late-medieval chivalric fraternities, the Order of the Garter, also gave women a role in its celebrations.

A Place for Experience: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Boundary, Identity, and Culture

1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
P Hoggett
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Medium ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychoanalytic Perspective ◽  
Spatial Configurations ◽  
Inner World ◽  
The Subject

Proceeding on the assumption that the ‘inner world’ is marked by an imminent catastrophe, the Kleinian tradition within psychoanalysts proposes that human development requires the existence of a benign social medium which is reliable and flexible enough for fear to be contained without being visited upon the other. Such a medium finds representation in a variety of psychological and social spaces, spaces where experience can be held on to and worked upon so that thought might occur. The author seeks to outline a number of basic spatial configurations which occur as a result of the ‘moves' made by the subject in its struggle to obtain a space for experience—some of the configurations facilitate development, some destroy it. It is suggested that such configurations are a characteristic both of internal and of external environments and offer important insights into the constitution of identities and the ordering of the social world.

scholarly journals The Narrative Structure of Ambiguity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Rizzo
Keyword(s):  
Physical Environment ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Rhetorical Figures ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social And Physical Environment ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Shed Light

This paper engages in a semiotic analysis of a tawriya-epigram by Šihāb al-Dīn b. al-yAṭṭār (d. 794/1392). Mamluk literature is renowned for its extended usage of rhetorical figures, above all the tawriya ‘double entendre’. My goal is to shed light on tawriya, taking into account the Arabic classical theory and presenting a new approach based on semiotics. The subject of my analysis is what was the most flourishing literary genre of the epoch: the epigram. Within the epigram, the tawriya plays a pivotal role. Its potential is not limited to the engendering of a twofold reading of the text but rather goes further and creates a second text out from the first, both of which cooperate with one another and shed light upon their respective meanings. Therefore, the epigram by Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār is a construction of several texts, each of which is mutually linked and deeply-rooted in the social and physical environment depicted in the poem: the ḥammām.

Gerechter Krieg?

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Just War ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Middle Ages

The question of "just war" weaves a complex historical and systematic net between Orient and Occident as well as between antiquity and the present. Christianity and Islam, poetry and philosophy are both faced with the challenge of situating justice in a phenomenon that by its very nature bears the stigma of cruelty, given diverging dogmatic or methodological premises. This volume offers a variety of perspectives on the subject, from the Greek tragedy via Plato, Aristotle and the philosophy in Rome (Cicero) and the late antique Christian discussion (Augustinus) to the question of humanitarian interventions. Another focus is the Islamic debate from the Middle Ages to the present.

SOME ASPECTS OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE ROMAN DOMUS BETWEEN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Polci
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Type ◽  
Late Roman

This essay concerns some aspects of the transformation of the Late Roman domus into the Early Medieval house and focuses on the spaces designed for reception and entertainment. First, I will consider the use and the development of the reception areas of wealthy houses, and their relationship with the growth in private patronage in Late Antiquity. Second, I will examine the transformation of this late antique model of elite housing into the new type of upper-class dwellings that emerged in Early Medieval Italy. In particular, I will focus on the transferral of reception halls and banqueting chambers to the upper story, and on the social and architectonic implications of this feature.

scholarly journals Społeczna rola antropologa — powinność a zaangażowanie

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Kaniowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Reflection ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clear Link ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The One ◽  
Engaged Anthropology

This paper on engaged anthropology is focused on several issues which, on the one hand, define the characteristic features of this current of anthropology, and, on the other, allow us to reflect on how the social role of an anthropologist can be understood today. The author begins her remarks by pointing to the ambiguity of the term “commitment” and to some of the consequences. She compares Norbert Elias’s position with the ways of understanding commitment adopted by contemporary anthropologists. She draws attention to the basic epistemological problems of engaged anthropology in regard to understanding cognition processes, and above all in regard to understanding the position of the researcher and the subject. She is then able to comment on contemporary attempts to establish the nature of an anthropologist and his or her potential social role. At the same time, she points to similarities with earlier sociological and anthropological concepts, stressing that the project of engaged anthropology shows a particularly clear link between methodology and ethical reflection.

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