Once Again on Claudian's Egyptian Origin

The life of Claudius Claudian (c. 370 – c. 404 AD), the great Latin poet active during the reign of Honorius, is unknown, especially the years before his great debut in 395 AD. Communis opinio holds that he was a pagan Egyptian Greek born in Alexandria c. 370 AD, who having come to Italy in 394 AD started a career of a political poet in the service of the elites of the Western Roman Empire. This view codified by Alan Cameron (1970) was challenged by Peder G. Christiansen (1997), who asserted that Claudian was actually a Westerner. The thesis of the poet’s Egyptian origin was defended by Bret Mulligan (2007) and then again attacked by Christiansen and Christiansen (2009). This article aims to reconsider the scarce textual evidence and to put an emphasis on some points that have been underestimated so far: the possibility of Claudian’s early connections with Constantinople and the ruling circles of the eastern capital.

Rutba vs Ġāya: A Reconsideration of the Impact of the Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ on Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī

This study aims to reconsider the impact of the Rasāʾil Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ on the Rutbat al-ḥakīm (The Rank of the Sage) and the Ġāyat al-ḥakīm (The Aim of the Sage). Exclusively concerned with textual evidence taken from the three works and making extensive use of the programme Qawl, it shows that the way Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī refers to the Iḫwānian corpus in the Rutba reveals a far less familiarity with that work than at the time he writes the Ġāya. This difference of treatment suggests that, contrary to what was previously assumed, Maslama had no access to the text of the Rasāʾil before he started writing his ultimate treatise.

Viewing Orwellian Newspeak from the Angle of Linguistics: An “Economic” Redundancy

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has been widely studied, but not one of his important inventions in that novel. That is his Newspeak. From the perspective of linguistics, one of the most important characteristics of the development of language(s) is the feature of the economy, which means that language evolves in various ways to streamline and make it easier for its users to express themselves. This is not the case with the English variant "Newspeak" created by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is somehow simpler in form than standard English, which was named "Oldspeak", but "Newspeak" is actually in a sense simpler than "Oldspeak". Newspeak" is actually much more obscure than "Old speech" in a sense. The reason for this may be found in comparison with several typical language simplification movements. In order to investigate the issues, former researchers` findings would be referenced, and textual evidence would be found and discussed in the article.

From the uncertainty of violence to life after abuse: discursive transitions among female survivors of IPV in online contexts

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is undoubtedly one of the most worrying concerns in today’s global societies. Due to the many intertwined factors that explain the persistence of this reality among people from all sorts of backgrounds, finding a uniform strategy to cope with this social issue is far from unproblematic. In this study, I contribute to a growing field of research that examines the discourse of female survivors of IPV in online contexts. The main objective this research pursues is to identify relevant linguistic patterns used by these women to represent themselves and their perpetrators in a publicly-available online forum. More specifically, I seek to ascertain discursive traits that characterise women in an initial stage in contrast to a final stage within an abusive relationship. To this end, I adopt a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies approach (CADS) in a digital corpus of circa 136,000 words, which are analysed with the software tool Sketch Engine (SkE). Findings show the most salient discursive traits that characterise IPV online discourse. Additionally, and drawing from verb patterns and their semantic categorisation, I highlight relevant verbal tendencies that connect linguistic textual evidence that contributes to sustaining the power imbalances that also define this social phenomenon.

الاعتراضات على تراجم صحيح البخاري وأجوبة الحافظ ابن حجر عنها في كتابه "فتح الباري": دراسة تحليلية مقارنة من أول كتاب بدء الوحي إلى آخر كتاب الإيمان

This research aims to compile the points of contention mentioned by Al-Hāfiz Ibn Hajar in Fath Al-Barī concerning the Tarājim (Sub-Sections) of Sahīh Al-Bukharī and his respective answers to them. The research analysis of this study begins with the chapter titled ‘The Beginning of the Revelation’ until the end of the chapter entitled ‘Faith’. The answers presented by Ibn Hajar are analysed and compared to the answers of other scholars who authored commentaries on Sahīh Al-Bukharī from those scholars who preceded him or were his contemporaries. The problem addressed in this research lies in the fact that many scholars while acknowledging the authenticity of Sahīh Al-Bukharī, its high status, the excellence and superiority of its author, did not agree with al-Bukhari in all the subsidiary issues mentioned therein. In fact, some scholars disputed or objected al-Bukhari in certain issues, stating that al Bukharī erred or assumed something wrongly. At the same time, other scholars defended al Bukharī on these issues. Hence, this research aims to study these objections and analyse them to clarify what these objections are and explain the scholars' approach in responding to them. The importance of the research is that it exemplifies an aspect of the methodology used by hadith scholars in criticising the Tarājim of books and discusses the criticisms made by these scholars and the counter responses provided. Methods employed by the researcher in this study include the inductive approach to collect the objections, the descriptive-analytical method to explain the objections and clarify the answers given by Ibn Hajar on the objections, and lastly, the comparative approach to compare the answers provided by Ibn Hajar versus other scholars. The most important results of the research are summarised in the number of objections to the Tarājim of Sahīh Al-Bukharī, which Ibn Hajar mentioned in Fath Al-Barī from the chapter titled ‘The Beginning of the Revelation’ up to the end of the chapter entitled ‘Faith’, amounting to eight (8) objections distributed amongst eight (8) Tarājim out of a total of forty-one (41) Tarjimah used in this study. These objections are divided into four categories which are: disregarding textual evidence (one objection); the negation of the existence of congruence between the Tarjamah and textual evidence (five objections); repetition of a Tarjamah (one objection); and Tarjamah strengthening an incorrect view (one objection). Ibn Hajar used a varied approach in responding to these objections, namely by combining the application of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, reason, fundamentals of jurisprudence and hadith, as well as citing statements of previous commentators.

The Role of Values in Nietzsche's Metaphilosophy

The goal of this essay is to show how we might gain new insight into the meaning of Nietzsche’s metaphilosophical lessons at the start of Beyond Good and Evil. Maudemarie Clark’s interpretation of these lessons is prima facie plausible and has gained widespread acceptance in the Anglophone community of Nietzsche scholars. According to this reading, Nietzsche thinks that philosophers cannot help but project their preferred values into their theories of the world and he thinks that this is true of his own theory of the world as will to power. I argue that there are severe problems with Clark’s supporting textual evidence and that we should therefore reconsider how we usually think today about the role of values in Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy and about the epistemic status that he grants to his own philosophical theories.

Women, War and Words: a Verbal Archaeology of Shield-maidens

Scholarly discussions of the question of the participation of women in war in the Viking Age have based their arguments on a variety of evidence, including both archaeology and texts. However, even those scholars who make substantial use of the textual evidence have not paid sufficiently close attention to (a) the vocabulary used in the representations (whether historical or fictional) of women acting in the supposed male role of warrior and (b) the literary-historical contexts in which the texts were produced, including potential relationships between texts. To further these discussions, this paper proposes a method which might be called the ‘stratigraphy of texts’ to demonstrate how a careful sifting of the cumulative textual evidence can enrich discussion about this important question. With close attention to the vocabulary used by the texts, and by considering the date, genre and sources of, and – importantly – the relationships between, texts in Old Norse, the discussion will demonstrate what can and what cannot be deduced from these textual representations of female warriors in the Viking Age. The paper will focus on tracing the development of the Old Norse concept of the skjaldmær, ‘shield-maiden’, through a variety of texts in which this term occurs, and also suggest a probable origin for the concept. There will also be a brief consideration of the term ‘valkyrie’ (ON valkyrja).

Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible

In this book, Yitzhaq Feder presents a novel and compelling account of pollution in ancient Israel, from its emergence as an embodied concept, rooted in physiological experience, to its expression as a pervasive metaphor in social-moral discourse. Feder aims to bring the biblical and ancient Near Eastern evidence into a sustained conversation with anthropological and psychological research through comparison with notions of contagion in other ancient and modern cultural contexts. Showing how numerous interpretive difficulties are the result of imposing modern concepts on the ancient texts, he guides readers through wide-ranging parallels to biblical attitudes in ancient Near Eastern, ethnographic, and modern cultures. Feder demonstrates how contemporary evolutionary and psychological research can be applied to ancient textual evidence. He also suggests a path of synthesis that can move beyond the polarized positions which currently characterize modern academic and popular debates bearing on the roles of biology and culture in shaping human behavior.