scholarly journals In Search of the Patron: Late Antique Styles in Context

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Bente Kiilerich
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
The People ◽  
Visual Characteristics ◽  
The One

The people who commissioned artworks and monumental decorations in late antiquity are for the most part unknown. Even when names are recorded, it is often difficult to tell to what extent the demands of the patron determined the visual characteristics of a given work. Since styles were tied to workshop traditions and contentions, it can be argued that in most instances, the patron had but limited influence on stylistic properties. Evidence actually suggests that the style of a work often came about independently of the one who commissioned or purchased it. The style was conditioned by function and context. The article, therefore, proposes a functional paradigm for evaluating visual expressions, defining three main domains of representation: public monuments, religious programmes, and artworks. In search of the late antique patron, the conclusion reached is that the patron had most impact in the religious domain.

Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ophir Münz-Manor
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Biblical Poetry ◽  
Contemporary View ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
The One

The article presents a contemporary view of the study of piyyut, demonstrating that Jewish poetry of late antiquity (in Hebrew and Aramaic) was closely related to Christian liturgical poetry (both Syriac and Greek) and Samaritan liturgy. These relations were expressed primarily by common poetic and prosodic characteristics, derived on the one hand from ancient Semitic poetry (mainly biblical poetry), and on the other from innovations of the period. The significant connections of content between the different genres of poetry reveal the importance of comparative study. Thus the poetry composed in late antiquity provides additional evidence for the lively cultural dialogue that took place at that time.

Roma and Constantinopolis in Late-Antique Art From 312 to 365

1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. C. Toynbee
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Complex Problem ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
The One ◽  
Independent Existence ◽  
Res Publica

Little more than a decade after Constantine's conversion to Christianity the ancient gods and goddesses of the Graeco-Roman pantheon ceased to appear upon the official coinage and public monuments of the Empire. The personifications—Victoria, Virtus, Pax, Libertas, Securitas, etc., and the ‘geographical’ figures of Res Publica, Roma, Tellus, cities, countries, and tribes—remained. Yet some of these had, up to that very time, received, like the Olympians, their shrines and altars and other honours associated with pagan cultus; and we ask ourselves how it was that a Christian State, while rejecting the one, could retain and ‘baptize’ the other. The answer to this question, which involves the whole complex problem of the nature of pagan religious belief under the later Empire, can only be tentatively suggested here. The pantheon had eventually to go because its denizens had possessed, for the great majority of pagans, a real, objective, and independent existence.

Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?*

2020 ◽  
Vol 249 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-52
Author(s):  
Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
City Life ◽  
The People ◽  
Urban Protest ◽  
The One ◽  
The Masses

Abstract The objective of this article is to place the study of urban protest and violence in the period from about 300 to about 600 CE in a broader perspective and to subject the investigation of plebeian activism to the basic precepts of analysis of collective action developed by social scientists and historians studying other periods. Its main argument is that, contrary to wide held assumptions in the historiography, what characterized Late Antiquity was not simply the exacerbation of violence or its tighter control, but the crisis of aristocratic hegemony and the expansion of opportunities for popular intervention in city life. What has been perceived as the product fanaticism, irrationality and deprivation of the masses, of the manipulation of bishops and aristocrats or of the failure of the mechanisms of coercion was actually the result of a dramatic social change that, on the one hand, involved a new dynamic of power and, on the other, a shift in the way the people understood their role and power in local communities.

scholarly journals LATE ANTIQUE OR EARLY BYZANTINE? THE SHIFTING BEGINNINGS OF BYZANTINE LITERATURE

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panagiotis A. Agapitos
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Structural Break ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Byzantine

The aim of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, it examines the epistemological reasons behind the shifting beginnings of Byzantine literature, a shift that covers a period of four centuries (AD 300-700), as well as the methodological problems for the study of Byzantine literature resulting from the rise of Late Antiquity as a new historical period and a new field of studies. On the other hand, the paper proposes a series of four textually immanent criteria and seven internal operative principles by means of which a different methodological approach to the «beginning» of Byzantine literature can be reached. For this purpose Eusebios of Caesarea and Lactantius will be used as the textual basis for establishing a structural break in literary production in the first two decades of the fourth century. For the purpose of controlling this proposal a comparison with an important but highly debated monument (the Arch of Constantine in Rome) will be made and some final conclusions as to the course of Greek literature in early Byzantine times will be made.

Making Amulets Christian

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore de Bruyn
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The People ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

This book examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice—the writing of incantations on amulets—changed in an increasingly Christian context. It addresses three questions. First, how did the formulation of incantations and amulets change as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman Empire? Second, what can we learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them? Finally, how were incantations and amulets indebted to the rituals or ritualizing behaviour of Christians? The book analyses amulets according to types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. The book argues for ‘conditioned individuality’ in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon—by what is called ‘tradition’ in the field of religious studies.

Setting the Scene for an Environmental History of Late Antiquity

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Adam Izdebski
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Actual Experience ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
New Framework

Abstract Environmental history is a well-established discipline that until recently focused mainly on the modern era and was dominated by historians. Numerous scholars agree today that this needs to change: a focus on Late Antiquity can help this happen. To make it possible, we should concentrate our efforts on three parallel projects. First, make late antique studies more interdisciplinary, i.e. joining the efforts of historians, archaeologists and natural scientists. Second, look at Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages as a source of case studies that are relevant to the central themes of environmental history. Third, use environmental history as a new framework that has the potential to modify our vision of the 1st millennium AD, by getting us closer to the actual experience of the people who lived this past.

“O, Foolish Galatians”: Imagining Pauline Community in Late Antiquity

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd S. Berzon
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Object A ◽  
Precise Meaning ◽  
Ethnic Affiliation ◽  
Conscious Choice ◽  
The One

This essay analyzes how late antique commentators on Paul's epistle to the Galatians used the issue of theological disobedience to elaborate the precise meaning of Christian kinship and community in their own times. Paul's anger and frustration at the Galatians, in particular, provided a convenient rhetorical platform for theorizing the nature of and impediments to Christian community in late antiquity. While most Pauline exegetes of the fourth and fifth centuries read the Galatians’ disobedience as a conscious choice born of ignorance, misunderstanding, and weak-mindedness, Jerome located the source of this indiscipline in the Galatians’ ethnic or national disposition. For him, the Galatians were an ethno-theological object—a template upon which he could propose a correlation between Christian error or heresy, on the one hand, and ethnic disposition, on the other. The differences and factions that Paul described in his letters were reimagined in late antiquity as both exemplars of Christian heresy and as heresies of ethnological origin. Ultimately, however, the process of transforming Paul into a heresiologist served only to emphasize the complexity of interpretive maneuvers deployed to define the terms of Christian community vis-à-vis other types of social, political, and ethnic affiliation.

The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph W. Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The One ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Several lessons have been leant from the three volumes of PLRE. The scholarly response suggests that the most sought-after attributes of any prosopographical catalogue are clearly formulated and stated criteria for inclusion, consistency in the application of the criteria, and completeness of coverage. In sum, PLRE has caused people to rethink many of the ways in which they look at late antiquity. The development of the material demonstrates the growing diversity of the Mediterranean world: PLRE by PLRE III, one has a massive array of eastern and western non-Romans both within and outside the imperial frontiers. As a result of its increasing inclusivity, PLRE became more of a secular PLA than a PLRE. Overall, this chapter concludes that PLRE has become the one work that must be on the shelves of anyone who proposes to make a comprehensive study of the late antique world.

scholarly journals Art and Identity in Late Antique Synagogues of the Roman-Byzantine Diaspora

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Noa Yuval-Hacham
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Jewish Art ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Unique Nature ◽  
The One

Late antiquity witnessed the increased construction of synagogues in the Jewish diaspora of the Roman-Byzantine world. Although not large in number, these synagogues were impressive and magnificent structures that were certainly conspicuous in the urban landscape, especially when constructed within a central location. This paper focuses on mosaic carpets discovered at these synagogues, to discern their distinguishing features through a comparative perspective. Two focal points are examined: on the one hand, local Roman-Byzantine mosaics in civic and religious buildings, and on the other hand, Jewish mosaics carpets in Palestinian synagogues. This comparison reveals several clear distinctions between the Jewish diasporic mosaic carpets and the other two groups of mosaics, that broaden our understanding of the unique nature of Jewish art in the Roman-Byzantine diaspora in particular, and of Jewish diasporic identity in late antiquity in general.

scholarly journals Shifting Paradigms of Sadness, Brain Disease or Emotional Distress: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Late Antiquity and the 21st Century. What psychologists can learn from ascetics in Late Antiquity and why historians should or should not buy DSM 5

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaas Huijbregts ◽  
Veronika Wieser
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Current Method ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Dsm 5 ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Modern Classification ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Discourses

In this article, we address expressions of sadness, grief and social alienation from two different perspectives and on an interdisciplinary level. The various forms of perceiving these experiences and the method for classifying emotions (particularly emotional distress) in modern psychiatry represent the starting point for comparison. Special attention will be paid to the current method of classification in psychiatry―the DSM 5. This framework will be juxtaposed with a historical methodology, which will be applied to examine late antique narrative descriptions of sickness and alienating behaviour in a religious context. Combining modern psychological and historical approaches will shed light on how different cultural and historical discourses have shaped the perception and interpretation of sadness and grief down through the ages, and lead to these emotions being characterized in various ways ranging from depression to a clear sign of sanctity. Additionally, working on the intersection of religion and medicine, this article will, on the one hand, further psychologists’ understanding of how religious ideas shaped individual behaviour and vice versa in past societies, and, on the other hand, inform historians more about modern classification methods in psychiatry and how these might have influenced the way of looking at certain behaviour.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document