scholarly journals Publication and the Papacy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samu Niskanen

This Element explores the papacy's engagement in authorial publishing in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The opening discussion demonstrates that throughout the medieval period, papal involvement in the publication of new works was a phenomenon, which surged in the eleventh century. The efforts by four authors to use their papal connexions in the interests of publicity are examined as case studies. The first two are St Jerome and Arator, late antique writers who became highly influential partly due to their declaration that their literary projects enjoyed papal sanction. Appreciation of their publication strategies sets the scene for a comparison with two eleventh-century authors, Fulcoius of Beauvais and St Anselm. This Element argues that papal involvement in publication constituted a powerful promotional technique. It is a hermeneutic that brings insights into both the aspirations and concerns of medieval authors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Ramus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Middleton

There is increasing interest in what might be thought ‘special’ about late antique poetry. Two volumes of recent years have focused on Latin poetry of this time, Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity edited by Scott McGill and Joseph Pucci (2016) as well as The Poetics of Late Latin Literature edited by Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (2017), while it has become increasingly acceptable to remark on late antiquity as a cultural period in its own right, rather than a point of transition between high antiquity and the middle ages. Greek poetry of late antiquity has yet to receive the level of attention offered to Latin literature of this time, and so it is to help answer the question of what may be thought special about late antique Greek poetry that I here discuss the poetics of later Greek ecphrasis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-22
Author(s):  
Enrico Maria Di Palma

The aim of this articole is to discover traces of humanitas in late antique and mediaval literature. Starting from the classic meaning of this notion, the paper finds three meaningful episodes: the controversy between Ambrosius and Symmachus about the Altar of Victory, the Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian by Peter Abelard and the spread of the Life of Balaam and Josaphat. Through these examples, the article builds a new idea of humanitas, free from historical restricion, a blend of literary passion, acceptance of diversity and multiculturalism.


Numen ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 326-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danuta Shanzer

This article discuses the fate of a special class of child, the unborn, in the afterlife, as well as the gradual criminalization of abortion in Antiquity. Particular attention is paid to a possible prohibition of abortion in Orphism that may underpin the nekyiai in P. Bon. 4. and Vergil Aen . 6. Then it turns to depictions of the aborted in the Apocalypse of Peter and its late antique off spring to show how the aborted fetus gradually acquires a visible body and an articulate voice. At the same time, the theology of sentiment works out its solutions to mitigate the problem of the innocent in hell. The fate of the almost bodiless fetus in the Resurrection became a bone of contention by the early 5th C. The satirical questions posed Christians about the resurrection of the unborn may first have been raised by Porphyry. His interest in the embryo and its ensoulment in the Pros Gauron are adduced as evidence. Attention is drawn to Augustine's doubts about the status and fate of the human embryo, and some reasons are suggested about why he hesitated to adopt an unambiguous “human from conception” position. In the 5th C., after the Pelagian controversy, attention began to shift from the unborn to the unbaptized, who dominate the nekyiai of the Middle Ages. The rise of the Mizuko kuyō cult in Japan shows astonishing parallels to what happened in Late Antiquity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Adam Izdebski

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.


Author(s):  
Luis Ramon Menendez Bueyes ◽  
Alfonso Fanjul Peraza ◽  
Patricia Arguelles Álvarez ◽  
Diana Vega Almazán

Desde su descubrimiento en 1957, el Pico Castiello de Fozana ha sido interpretado como uno de los principales castros del centro de Asturias. La presencia de fragmentos de terra sigillata en relación con otras piezas toscas, a mano, típicamente del periodo medieval hace necesaria una revisión mediante el estudio de estas piezas, que hacen que este denominado «castro», pudiera tener una fortificación vinculada a otra realizad, más cerca de establecimientos fortificados en la tardo antigüedad con un origen medieval. En este estudio se analiza la colección de piezas cerámicas de Fozana para ofrecer nuevos datos cronológicos en su contexto cultural, siguiendo posibles paralelismos existentes en este tipo de depósitos del Norte de la Península Ibérica.AbstractSince its discovery in 1957, we have interpreted the Picu Castiello of Fozana as one of the great forts from the center of Asturias. The presence of some sigillata ceramic fragments appeared in collusion with some typically medieval period and other thick hand forms. It is required a thorough review of the small set of materials to the suspicion, that like other so-called «hill-forts», we were fortified to a different reality, closer to the fortified settlements of late antiquity and the origin of the Middle ages. In this paper we analyze the physical pottery collection of Fozana proposing a new chronological and cultural context, following in parallel the existing problems regarding this type of deposits in Northern Iberia.


Author(s):  
Jack Tannous

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.


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