Translation and Appropriation: Greek Relics in the Latin West in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 88-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne E. Lester

Following the fall of Constantinople to French, Flemish and Venetian forces at the conclusion of the Fourth Crusade, an unprecedented number of relics and other holy objects poured into the West between 1204 andc.1240. Sent as personal and diplomatic gifts, most holy objects moved in the open, with letters of authentication and identification, and not (as has often been suggested) as sacred theft. This article traces the work of translation, carried out by clerics, chaplains, monks, and laymen and women, and the mechanisms of appropriation that gave meaning to these objects in their new devotional contexts. Relics were demanding things; they needed to be enshrined, venerated, described and contextualized, and their movements needed to be accounted for and included within a broader Christian narrative that served to anchor the crusade movement to the apostolic past and to Christ's material presence in the West. Moreover, the materiality of the relics that moved from Constantinople was an important part of their significance and shaped devotional practices and connections, bridging differences between Greek and Latin culture and fostering conceptions of the material that facilitated other acts of Christian translation in the centuries to come.

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deno J. Geanakoplos

In the medieval theocratic societies of both the Byzantine East and the Latin West, where the influence of Christian precepts so strongly pervaded all aspects of life, it was inevitable that the institutions of church and state, of sacerdotium and regnum to use the traditional Latin terms, be closely tied to one another. But whereas in the West, at least after the investiture conflict of the eleventh century, the pope managed to exert a strong political influence over secular rulers, notably the Holy Roman Emperor, in the East, from the very foundation of Constantinople in the fourth century, the Byzantine emperor seemed clearly to dominate over his chief ecclesiastical official, the patriarch.


2019 ◽  
pp. 244-271
Author(s):  
Martin Pugh

This chapter discusses how, misled by Islamophobic propaganda, Britain and America were unable to come to terms with what they called ‘Islamism’. The origins of what is variously known as Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism, and radical Islamism lie in the 1960s, in the ideas of a handful of Muslims in Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran who believed that Muslims had been led astray from their religion by nationalist movements. Although some Muslims were critical of Western morality and politics, Islamism was not primarily anti-Western: it was essentially a reaction against what were widely seen as the corrupt, authoritarian, and secular regimes that controlled much of the Muslim world. The aim was to evict them, return to a purer form of Islam and re-create an Islamic state. In view of the exaggerated reputation it enjoys in the West, it is worth remembering that this movement has largely been a failure. Yet while fundamentalism appeals to only a small minority, it is also the case that large numbers of Muslims have become aggrieved by the policies of the Western powers. The explanation for this can be found in long-term frustration with the consistently pro-Israeli policy of Britain and the United States over Palestine, in addition to the proximate causes in the shape of two Afghan wars, the genocide in Bosnia, the Rushdie affair, and the first Gulf War in 1990, which made many Muslims see themselves as the victims of Western aggression and interventionism.


ALQALAM ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
MASRUKHIN MUHSIN

The word hermeneutics derives from the Greek verb, hermeneuin. It means to interpret and to translate. Hermeneutics is divided into three kinds: the theory of hermeneutics, the philosophy hermeneutics, and the critical hermenmtics. Hasan Hanfi is known as the first scholar who introduces hermeneutics in the Islamic World through his work dealing with the new method of interpretation. Nashr Hamid Abu-Zaid is another figure who has much studied hermenmtics in the classical interpretation. Ali Harb is a figure who also much involved in discussing the critism of text even though he does not fully concern on literature or art, but on the thoughts. Muslim thinker who has similar view with Ali Harab in seeing that the backwardness of Arab-Islam from the West is caused by the system of thoguht used by Arah-Muslim not able to come out of obstinary and taqlid is Muhammad Syahmr. On the other side, ones who refuse hermeneutics argue that since its heginning, hermeneutics must be studied suspiciously because it is not derived from the Islamic tradition, but from the unbeliever scientific tradition, Jews and Chrtians in which they use it as a method to interpret the Bible. Practically, in interpreting the Qur'an, hermeneutics even strengthens something, namely the hegemony of scularism-liberalism in the Muslim World that Muslims must actually destroy. Keywords: Hermeneutics, Tafsir, al qur'an


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Kai Marchal

In this essay, I argue for a historical-critical perspective on rationality. In our global age, we in the West need to come to terms with the fact that non-Western traditions have developed complex forms of practical rationality. I will first give an overview of what I call the “Confucian standards of reasoning.” Secondly, I will explain how the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) has rearticulated the earlier understanding of practical reasoning. Thirdly, I will demonstrate why a comparative perspective may enrich our reasoned engagement with individuals in the Chinese-speaking world. In developing forms of global reasoning, we should make sure that these are neither parochial nor difference-blind.


Author(s):  
Anne E. Lester

The concept of linguistic “translation” helps to understand the process by which the material culture of the Byzantine empire, taken from Byzantine churches and palaces following the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, was interpreted in new environments in the Latin West. This was a process that required input from those invested in shaping the meaning of the relics and the creation of unique works of art in the form of new reliquaries.


2001 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 139-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Lentz ◽  
Hans-Jürgen Sturm

For a vegetation geographer and an anthropologist to come together to write on the settlement histories of segmentary societies in the West African savanna is unusual or at least rare. A few words on the origin of this cooperation therefore seem appropriate. For over ten years, in the context of an interdisciplinary research program at the Universität Frankfurt am Main, archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, botanists and geographers have been working together on the history of cultures, languages, and natural environment of the West African savanna, especially the interaction between human activity and the natural environment. That one should actually be speaking in many cases of a culturally mediated “landscape” rather than a “natural environment” is one of the outcomes of the research projects, which have focused mainly on different regions of Burkina Faso (in the sahel and Sudanese zone) and the Lake Chad area of northeast Nigeria.The present paper has emerged from a botanical and an anthropological-historical project on the history of vegetation and of settlement in south and southwest Burkina Faso. This history has been shaped by the great expansion of the Dagara-speaking population. In the last two hundred years (possibly longer), small groups of Dagara patrilineages, related and allied to one another, have migrated north and northwest, probably from the region around Wa in present-day Ghana, and have founded numerous new settlements—a process of land appropriation that is still going on today, though with changed circumstances regarding land rights (see map 1).


1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Frýdmanová ◽  
Eva Zamrazilová

Czech labour market has been getting closer to standard labour market, notable growth of long-term unemployment can therefore be expected in the years to come. The level of long-term unemployment is still much lower in comparison with market economies, so that wide space still exists to stop massive growth of long-term unemployment. <P>Reviewing the West European experience shows that active employment policies can be quite helpful to cope with the problem of long-term unemployment and its social impacts. National Employment Plan declares more intensive implementation of active employment policy, its financial possibilities being, however, rather limited. Some structural problems of Czech labour market could limit effectiveness of this Plan as well.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
ASTRID H.M. NORDIN

AbstractIt has become fashionable among International Relations scholars to draw on the concept of ‘autoimmunity’, which some call ‘the ultimate horizon in which contemporary politics inscribes itself’. To these scholars, most of whom draw on the thought of Jacques Derrida, such logics open systems up to a future to come. At the same time, they tend to identify such logics with Europe, America, Western modernity, and/or democracy. Implied, and sometimes explicit, in their accounts is the denial of autoimmune logics at work outside such an imagined configuration.This article challenges that denial through arguing that the system of ‘harmony’, deployed in contemporary China, also works on an autoimmune logic. If autoimmunity opens up a system to the future, this is not only so for European democracy or its derivatives. Moreover, the expulsion of ‘non-Western’ others from accounts of autoimmunity undermines their rethinking of difference by falling back on an immunitary logic, denying China an open future. This exclusion is their condition of possibility. At the same time, this exclusion is what keeps open their promise of its future to come. Paradoxically, the exclusion of the ‘non-West’ is what keeps the idea of an autoimmune ‘Western’ or European democracy alive.


Slavic Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 391-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter H. Solomon

Years ago Harold Berman observed that for many people in the west the term Soviet law represented a contradiction. Popular imagination found little place for law or criminal justice in a society where terror or extralegal coercion played a major role. Yet, as Berman argued, even in Stalin's Russia law and force existed side by side, and there was a “surprising degree of official compartmentalization of the legal and the extra-legal.” Berman recognized that the separation of law and terror was no accident; rather it was a product of the regime's commitment to law and the functions it could perform for a stable, conservative social order. Three decades later western Sovietologists are only starting to come to terms with the conservative phase of Stalin's rule; and, despite a fine essay by Robert Sharlet, the promotion of law has yet to be incorporated into the standard portrait of Stalinism. A major reason is the continuation of doubts about the possibilities for law where terror also reigns.


1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
David Crowe

The Soviet absorption of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during World War II caused hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants to come to the West, where they established strong, viable ethnic communities, often in league with groups that had left the region earlier. At first, Baltic publishing and publications centered almost exclusively on nationalistic themes that decried the loss of Baltic independence and attacked the Soviet Union for its role in this matter. In time, however, serious scholarship began to replace some of the passionate outpourings, and a strong, academic field of Baltic scholarship emerged in the West that dealt with all aspects of Baltic history, politics, culture, language, and other matters, regardless of its political or nationalistic implications. Over the past sixteen years, these efforts have produced a new body of Baltic publishing that has revived a strong interest in Baltic studies and has insured that regardless of the continued Soviet-domination of the region, the study of the culture and history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will remain a set fixture in Western scholarship on Eastern Europe.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document