Interjections: Does Affect have Grammar?

Author(s):  
Mark Amsler

This chapter first explores early grammarians’ accounts of the interjection and then elaborates on thirteenth-century grammarians’ analysis of interjections, communication rather than formal grammar, and the role of affectus, feeling, and emotion within grammar and semantics. The grammarians stretched the idea of verbal meaning to include both cognitive and affective signification as understood in specific contexts. Priscian (Institutiones, 2.15) provided grammarians with a framework for contrasting assertive sentences referring to substances with nonassertive sentences or interjections signifying mental dispositions or affects. These grammarians situated grammar and usage within interpersonal speech contexts.

Author(s):  
Ruth Gamble

Chapter 2 examines lineages in Tibetan society and the Buddhist tradition and explains how they influenced the development of Tibet’s reincarnation lineages. It begins by explaining the role of family lineages in thirteenth-century Tibet, describing how lineages helped form identities, created links between people, and served as a mechanism for inheritance. It then examines the three main forms of Buddhist lineages—monastic, Mahāyāna, and Tantric—and shows how these lineages were often intermingled with Tibetan family lineages and inheritance practices. The chapter ends by outlining how lineages associated with manifestation, particularly lineages associated with Avalokiteśvara, underpinned claims by Tibetans to be the manifestation of this bodhisattva and other celestial beings. This chapter also explains how the Karmapas’ reincarnation lineage, traditions, and institutions were presented not as a break from other lineages but as an extension of them, and it highlights the close relationship between lineages and specific places.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Nahyan Fancy ◽  
Monica H. Green

AbstractThe recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.


2021 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-392
Author(s):  
Leore Sachs-Shmueli

AbstractThis article discusses Maimonides’s rationale for the incest taboo and traces its reception in Christian and kabbalistic traditions in the thirteenth century. Tracing the reception of Maimonides’s view enables recognition of the resemblance between Maimonides and Aquinas, the ambivalent stance toward Maimonides’s explanation expressed by Nahmanides, and the incorporation of Maimonides’s reasoning in one of the most systematic and enigmatic works of kabbalistic rationalization of the commandments, the Castilian Kabbalist Joseph of Hamadan’s The Book of the Rationales of the Negative Commandments. R. Joseph’s acceptance of Maimonidean principles and his integration of them in the theurgic Kabbalah reveal a conflict in the heart of its system and teach us about an important aspect of the theory of sexuality in Kabbalah. The inquiry offered here examines the inter-relations between divergent medieval religious trends in constructing the role of sexuality. Instead of the common presentation of Kabbalah as diverging from the ascetic positions of Jewish philosophy and Christianity, this analysis will elucidate Kabbalah’s continuity with them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.


Vivarium ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 320-339
Author(s):  
Joke Spruyt

Abstract Thirteenth-century views on consequences have not yet received much attention. Authors of this period deserve closer scrutiny, because of their profound interest in the nature of consequence. The fundamental feature of a consequence was captured in the claim that its antecedent is the cause of its consequent. At the same time authors systematically discussed consequences in terms of truth-preservation. This paper considers the requirements of syllogistic argument and consequences in general, including the role of ‘cause’ in the identification of syllogisms proper, looks at different descriptions of consequence, moves on to discussions of the syncategorema ‘si’ – in syncategoremata treatises by Peter of Spain, Henry of Ghent, Nicholas of Paris and William of Sherwood, as well as some sophismata tracts – and explores what thirteenth-century authors make of the truth-functional characterisation of consequence, showing how it clashes with the authors’ insistence on a causal connection between antecedent and consequent.


Author(s):  
Jens Haugan

Norwegian and Scandinavian languages in general have grown quite popular among Polish students in recent years and more and more Polish universities are trying to offer Bachelor’s and even Master’s programmes in a Scandinavian language. Based on experience as a teacher of a Norwegian grammar course at the University of Szczecin and as a teacher of grammar at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences which in 2016/2017 hosted around twenty Erasmus+ students from Szczecin, some of the challenges for Polish students of academic Norwegian will be reflected upon, as well as some of the challenges for a teacher of Norwegian who has very little knowledge of Polish. The main purpose of this paper will be to argue for the importance of grammar skills in language education and especially in language teacher education. This study is a contribution to the Educational Role of Language network.


Author(s):  
Cailah Jackson

This chapter initially focuses on two manuscripts – a small Qur’an and a monumental Masnavi of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Both were produced in 1278, soon after Rum was formally incorporated into the Ilkhanid empire. After discussing their visual properties in depth, the author uses the manuscripts’ production information to analyse the nature of production and patronage in late medieval Konya. This chapter introduces many key themes that are developed throughout the rest of the book, including the role of the Mevlevis in artistic production, the itinerancy of artists, and cosmopolitan nature of Rum’s towns. Based on the examination of these manuscripts, the chapter contends that several currently unidentified or misidentified manuscripts were also produced in Konya. Through an illuminated copy of Ibn Bibi’s Seljuk chronicle produced around 1282, the chapter also considers the part that Ilkhanid officials played in manuscript patronage in Rum.


Author(s):  
Sten Ebbesen

‘Averroism’, ‘radical Aristotelianism’ and ‘heterodox Aristotelianism’ are nineteenth- and twentieth-century labels for a late thirteenth-century movement among Parisian philosophers whose views were not easily reconcilable with Christian doctrine. The three most important points of difference were the individual immortality of human intellectual souls, the attainability of happiness in this life and the eternity of the world. An ‘Averroist’ or ‘Radical Aristotelian’ would hold that philosophy leads to the conclusions that there is only one intellect shared by all humans, that happiness is attainable in earthly life and that the world has no temporal beginning or end. Averroists have generally been credited with a ‘theory of double truth’, according to which there is an irreconcilable clash between truths of faith and truths arrived at by means of reason. Averroism has often been assigned the role of a dangerous line of thought, against which Thomas Aquinas opposed his synthesis of faith and reason. The term ‘Averroism’ is also used more broadly to characterize Western thought from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries which was influenced by Averroes, and/or some philosophers’ self-proclaimed allegiance to Averroes.


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