Writing the Jews out of History: Pseudo-Hegesippus, Classical Historiography, and the Codification of Christian Anti-Judaism in Late Antiquity

Scholarly narratives of the development of Christian anti-Jewish thinking in antiquity routinely cite a number of standard, well-known authors: from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr in earlier centuries to Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Hegesippus, to whom is attributed a late fourth-century Latin work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), rarely appears in such discussions. This has largely to do with the fact that this text and its author are effectively unknown entities within contemporary scholarship in this area (scholars familiar with Pseudo-Hegesippus tend to be specialists in medieval Latin texts and manuscripts). But “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a critical contribution to the mosaic of Christian anti-Jewish discourse in late antiquity. De Excidio's generic identity as a Christian piece of classical historiography makes it a unique form of ancient anti-Jewish propaganda. This genre, tied to De Excidio's probable context of writing—the wake of the emperor Julian's abortive attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, resurrect a robust Judaism, and remove Christians from public engagement with classical culture—renders De Excidio an important Christian artifact of both anti-Judaism and pro-classicism at the same time. This article situates Pseudo-Hegesippus in a lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historical thinking, argues that De Excidio codifies that discourse in a significant and singular way, frames this contribution in terms of its apparent socio-historical context, and cites De Excidio's later influence and reception as testaments to its rightful place in the history of Christian anti-Judaism, a place that modern scholarship has yet to afford it. As a piece of classical historiography that mirrors not Christian historians—like Eusebius and others—but the historians of the broader “pagan” Greco-Roman world—like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus—De Excidio leverages a cultural communicative medium particularly well equipped to undergird and fuel the Christian historiographical imagination and its anti-Jewish projections.

L'esemplarità di Tisbe nel De mulieribus claris di Boccaccio

Chapter XIII of De mulieribus claris is devoted to the biography of Thisbe. For his narration, Boccaccio uses as his main source the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses although at certain times he modifies the Latin work. For instance, the suffering of Pyramus is no longer equal to that of Thisbe, and the Babylonian maid is the main victim of the love narrated: firstly because of the prohibition of her parents and later for the delay of Pyramus’s arrival at the agreed appointment. Considering all these peculiarities, this paper analyses chapter XIII of the De mulieribus claris and its main character with the purpose of reflecting on their originality and trying to determine if, taking these specificities into account, the Babylonian girl can be considered as an exemplary woman in Boccaccio’s work and why. Il capitolo XIII del De mulieribus claris è dedicato alla biografia di Tisbe. Per la sua narrazione, Boccaccio utilizza come fonte principale il quarto libro delle Metamorfosi ovidiane sebbene in certi momenti si distacchi dall’opera latina. Ad esempio, la sofferenza di Piramo non è più all’altezza di quella di Tisbe, e la fanciulla babilonese è la principale vittima dell’amore narrato: in primis per la proibizione dei propri genitori e in un secondo momento per la tardività di Piramo nell’arrivare all’appuntamento accordato. Considerando queste particolarità, questo articolo analizza il capitolo XIII del De mulieribus claris e la sua protagonista con lo scopo di riflettere sull’originalità e di cercare di determinare se, tenuto conto di queste specificità, la ragazza babilonese possa considerarsi un personaggio esemplare all’interno della silloge e perché.

George of Trebizond

George of Trebizond (born in Crete, very probably in Candia [modern Heraklion], 4/5 April 1396; died, Rome, after 28 November 1473) was one of the most significant figures of the Renaissance. He emigrated to Venice in 1416 and established himself with remarkable rapidity as a teacher of Latin and rhetoric in Venice and the Veneto. In the late 1430s he entered the papal court, then resident in Florence. In 1444, after the papacy had returned to Rome, he gained the office of papal secretary and spent the rest of his life, apart from some notable absences, in the Eternal City. Already by 1434 he had published what became one of the classic Neo-Latin texts of the Renaissance, the Rhetoricorum Libri V, to which in Florence in the late 1430s he added the Isagoge Dialectica, which in turn became a best seller to the mid-16th century. Once arrived in Rome, however, George embarked on a new career as a translator from the Greek, becoming in the end one of the greatest of Renaissance translators. Between 1442 and 1459, he translated most of the Aristotelian corpus, Plato’s Laws and Parmenides, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Demosthenes’ Oration on the Crown, and the Church Fathers Basil the Great, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebiusof Caesarea, Gregory Nyssenus, and John Chrysostom. Then, in the 1450s and 1460s, he got involved in the Renaissance Plato-Aristotle controversy, writing the first major Latin work in the controversy, the Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis, which is a passionate defense of Aristotle and condemnation of Plato and the spread of Platonism in the Latin West. Underlying George’s attack on Plato was an apocalyptic vision that demonstrably motivated him from the 1430s to the 1460s, when he went to Constantinople to convert Mehmed the Conqueror to Christianity in order to save the world from the onslaught of Gog and Magog. Upon his return to Rome in 1466, his extravagant praise of Mehmed resulted in his spending four months in jail under suspicion of treason. In August 1469, his great opponent, Cardinal Bessarion (b. 1403–d. 1472), came out with the In Calumniatorem Platonis, which successfully set the parameters of the Plato-Aristotle controversy for the rest of the Renaissance. George outlived Bessarion and remained famous throughout the Renaissance, but because the unique 1523 printing of his Comparatio was so miserably done (based on an enormously flawed manuscript to which the editor added a new set of errors), in the end he lost the one great intellectual-theological battle of his life.

Calcidius (c. 4th century AD)

The Platonist Calcidius (sometimes less correctly spelt Chalcidius) was the author of a Latin work containing a partial translation of, and partial commentary on, Plato’s Timaeus. Although of uncertain date, the doctrinal content of his commentary reflects the thought of the Middle Platonist era (c.50 bc–ad 200).

Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327/8)

More than any other medieval thinker, Eckhart has received widely divergent interpretations. The controversies stem from the fact that his writings fall into two distinct groups, works written in the vernacular and works written in Latin. The German writings, which were intended for a wide audience, established Eckhart’s long-standing fame as a mystic. Another, more academic Eckhart emerged when his Latin work was rediscovered in 1886. The study of Eckhart’s thought today centres on the unity of the scholastic (Latin) and the popular (German) work.

Old Polish and Spanish Penitentials as a Source of Knowledge on Folk-paganism in a Christian Society

Some interesting conclusions on folk-paganism are drawn here from a comparison of 16th, 17th and 18th-century confessional handbooks (libri poenitentiales) originating in the Iberian Peninsula and Polish Commonwealth. Four penitentials which include large lists of sins and the penances prescribed for them are the main object of comparison: the 13th-century Latin work Summa de confessionis discretione by Brother Rudolf, the penitential from 1633 Instrución de confesores, como han de administrar el Sacramento de la Penitencia by Spanish Jesuit Antonio Fernandez de Cordoba, El fuero de la conciencia by Valentín de la Madre de Dios from 1704, and the Polish penitential from 1753 entitled Kolęda duchowna parafianom od pasterzów [The Pastoral Visit] authored by Marcin Józef Nowakowski. It proved that the structure and contents of the analysed texts are very similar and remained practically unchanged: despite the lapse of time they continued to play the same role.

Conclusion: What You Find When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There

Our readers will surely have noticed two “I’s” in this book: two speakers with distinct voices but a perhaps surprising degree of agreement in substance between them. This book is the product of the confluence of two projects that we were working on respectively about five years ago. Barton was studying the Roman sacrificial system (to which she will now return), and Boyarin was tracing the genealogy of “Judaism” (to which he will now return). At a certain point, reading each other’s early drafts, we realized that the propaedeutic for both projects was similar: a close study of the ancient Latin and Greek terms later taken to mean “religion” was a necessary foundation for both our projects. Barton, a Roman historian, took on the Latin work. She had long wrestled with the meanings of ...

The Arabic original of (ps.) Māshā'allāh's Liber de orbe: its date and authorship

Liber de orbe, attributed to Māshā'allāh (d. c.815), a court astrologer of the Abbasid dynasty, was one of the earliest Latin sources of Aristotelian physics. Until recently, its Arabic original could not be identified among Arabic works. Through extensive examination of Arabic manuscripts on exact sciences, I found two manuscripts containing the Arabic text of this Latin work, although neither of them is ascribed to Māshā'allāh: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. oct. 273, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania University Library, MS LJS 439. In this paper, I describe these two manuscripts in great detail, so that I confirm their originality of the Liber de orbe, and then by analysing the contents of the Arabic text, I deny the attribution to Māshā'allāh, and identify the title and author as Book on the Configuration of the Orb by Dūnash ibn Tamīm, a disciple of Isaac Israeli (c.855–c.955).

"De bello italico". La guerra d'Italia

«In such confusion of affairs, likely to lead to new disturbances, began the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-four […], a most unhappy year for Italy and in truth the beginning of the years of misfortune, because it opened the door to innumerable, horrible calamities.». This is the opening of the sixth chapter in the first book of the famous History of Italy by Francesco Guicciardini which, for the events of that unhappy year and those that immediately followed, draws extensively on the incomparably less well-known and popular De bello italico by Bernardo Rucellai, as demonstrated by his autograph summary of the Latin work and certain coincidences. In many ways a forerunner of the later great historical works, traversed by a line of thought and by reflections of undeniable modernity, the story of the descent into Italy of the 'monster' Charles VIII, seen through the eyes of a Florentine oligarch nostalgic for the regime of Lorenzo and hostile towards Piero de' Medici and his insane politics, deserves to be rediscovered. Based on the only existing manuscript, Rucellai's work is presented here for the first time in a modern edition, representing the very first Italian translation.