scholarly journals GLOSSA ORDINARIAANDGLOSSA HEBRAICAMIDRASH IN RASHI AND THEGLOSS

Traditio ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 179-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Northern France ◽  
Glossa Ordinaria ◽  
Biblical Commentaries ◽  
Hugh Of Saint Victor ◽  
Wide Dissemination ◽  
Shed Light

An assiduous interest in the plain sense of Scripture and shared interpretations of particular biblical passages can be observed in certain twelfth-century Jewish and Christian commentaries composed in northern France. While Hugh of Saint Victor and Rashbam engaged in independent endeavors to shed light on thesensus literalisand thepeshatof Scripture, Andrew of Saint Victor attributed his knowledge of particular rabbinic interpretations to encounters with contemporary Jews. Yet points of convergence in Jewish and Christian exegesis can be observed even before the work of the Victorines and Rashi's disciples. The purpose of this study is to examine the midrashic interpretations transmitted in northern France around the beginning of the twelfth century in both theGlossa Ordinariaand Rashi's biblical commentaries. Interpretations are found in both corpora on occasions when their late-antique sources, such as Midrash Genesis Rabba and Jerome'sHebrew Questions on Genesis, themselves transmit similar insights. By analyzing an exposition found in both Rashi and theGloss, the narrative of Abraham in the fiery furnace, this study seeks to clarify the nature and extent of this relationship. It thereby enables a more detailed understanding of the ways that midrash reached twelfth-century Jews and Christians and of how Rashi and theGlossensured the wide dissemination of these interpretations.

The Conductus Collections of MS Wolfenbüttel 1099, Part 3

10.31022/m013 ◽  
1980 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Significant Source ◽  
Northern France

The polyphonic conductus appeared in northern France in the late twelfth century and continued to flourish until the mid-thirteenth century as one of four main polyphonic genres of the time. The manuscript Wolfenbüttel 1099 (W2) is a significant source for these works. This edition includes modern transcriptions of the thirty conductus in the W2 fascicles, as well as ten contrafacta and ten alternate readings. All known manuscript versions of this important twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century repertory were consulted in the preparation of this edition.

Nomadic Populations and the Challenge to Political Legitimacy: Three Cases from the Medieval Islamic West

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Hopley
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter examines the responses of three important medieval Maghribī dynasties to the dilemmas posed by nomadic populations dwelling in their midst. These dynasties include the Almoravids in al-Andalus in the twelfth century, the Almohads in the Maghrib in the thirteenth century, and the Ḥafṣids, successors to the Almohads in Ifrīqiya, during the fourteenth century. The aim is to shed light on the challenges that nomadic populations posed to political legitimacy, and to suggest, paradoxically perhaps, that the presence of unruly nomads in the medieval Islamic west, and the effort to contain them, served an important role in each dynasty's attempt to gain political legitimacy in the eyes of the Muslim community.

Jewish and Roman Law: A Study in Interaction

2020 ◽  
pp. 379-393
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
New Information ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter discusses the laws regulating usury (ribbit). In the course of studying ribbit, more specifically, the problem of personal surety in usury contracts, certain peculiar developments in Provençal halakhic thought came to the author's attention which were not explainable by indigenous forces. The geographical distribution of the discussion seemed oddly disproportionate, the fictions too blatant, the types of problem that were raised seemed inappropriate for the period, and the terminology was occasionally alien. The author was compelled to look outside Jewish law for possible stimuli. Placing the Jewish developments within the context of twelfth-century Provençal law shed light on a number of seemingly inexplicable points. The Jewish literature, on the other hand, provided new information about the Gentile law of the time and yielded fresh corroboration for theories of the penetration of Roman law in Provence. However, at the same time this material seemed to point to an earlier date for certain legal developments than is generally accepted. It is these findings that the author wishes to bring to the attention of the scholars of Provençal law.

These Things I Have Not Betrayed: Michael Psellos' Encomium of His Mother as a Defense of Rhetoric

2004 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Walker
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Sophistic Rhetoric ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Abstract Michael Psellos' encomium of his mother, regarded by the twelfth-century scholar Gregory of Corinth as one of the four best speeches ever composed, exemplifies what the Byzantine rhetorical tradition thought “good rhetoric” was made of. The stylistic and aesthetic values usually attributed to Byzantine rhetoric seem insufficient to account for Gregory's opinion. This essay argues that, by offering a “figured” defense of his career as a “Byzantine Sophist,” Psellos' encomium functions as a culturally significant instance of antilogy, and thus reprises not only the forms of late-antique sophistic rhetoric, but also and more importantly its intellectual ideal, within the terms of Byzantine high culture.

Propaganda for War the Dissemination of the Crusading Ideal in the Twelfth Century

1983 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Morris
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Technical Aspect ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Total Absence ◽  
Northern France ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Military

It was accepted in western Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that there was an obligation upon the military classes, and indeed on Christians generally, to take up arms in defence of the Holy Sepulchre, or to participate in other expeditions authorised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. War ceased to be, for Christians, a regrettable necessity, and became a virtue, and armies were summoned by the trumpet-blasts of the Prince of Peace. There has been a great deal of work by historians in recent decades on the transformation of earlier Christian ideology, and we now understand much more about the origins of crusading ideas, the discussion of warfare by theologians and canon lawyers, and the profound changes in spirituality which accompanied the rise of militarism. There is however a technical aspect of the subject which is less often considered: the actual methods by which the new ideals were communicated to western society generally. By any standards, it was a remarkably successful exercise in publicity. It was also, in the first instance, very rapid. Urban II announced the expedition to Jerusalem at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, and he fixed the date of departure as 15 August 1096. The summons was heard by groups far wider than the princes and their households, and by Easter 1096 an army led by Peter the Hermit had already arrived in Cologne on its way from northern France. Within a few months, therefore, and well in advance of the papal deadline, the message had spread to all levels of society over a wide geographical area. A system of communication as effective as this deserves our respect and study. It would be a mistake to conclude from the total absence of modern technology that the control of opinion was unimportant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

scholarly journals Reading the Book of Nature after Nature

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Holsinger Sherman
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Book Of Nature ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Hugh Of Saint Victor

Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledge—including knowledge about God—against the exigencies of history and culture, but as theorists such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and others have argued, today this assumed dualism of nature and culture is both ecologically and critically suspect. What might it mean to read the book of nature in a time of ecological precarity, what many have called the Anthropocene? I will argue that premodern theological traditions of the book of nature, such as one finds in the twelfth century Hugh of Saint Victor, have something extremely important to add to a postmodern ‘terrestrial’ hermeneutics of nature, precisely because the premodern book of nature already performs the construal of nature as culture (and of culture as nature) so often recommended today by critics such as Latour, Haraway, and others. On such an account, nature is neither a fantasy object to be ignored or fled, nor a stable text to be tamed, rationalized, and epistemically leveraged, but rather the changing concept and experience of nature is a symbol illuminated in a book we half receive, and half create, a symbol open to both critique and contemplation, which gives rise to thought, action, and the sort of novel moral intuitions we need now more than ever.

scholarly journals PETER COMESTOR'S LECTURES ON THE GLOSSA “ORDINARIA” ON THE GOSPEL OF JOHN THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY IN THE TWELFTH-CENTURY CLASSROOM

Traditio ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 203-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER ANDRÉE
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Traditional Account ◽  
Glossa Ordinaria ◽  
The One ◽  
Alternative Understanding

The traditional account of the development of theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is that the emerging “academic” discipline of theology was separated from the Bible and its commentary, that the two existed on parallel but separate courses, and that the one developed in a “systematic” direction whereas the other continued to exist as a separate “practical” or “biblical-moral” school. Focusing largely on texts of an allegedly “theoretical” nature, this view misunderstands or, indeed, entirely overlooks the evidence issuing from lectures on the Bible — postills, glosses, and commentaries — notably the biblical Glossa “ordinaria.” A witness to an alternative understanding, Peter Comestor, master and chancellor of the cathedral school of Paris in the second half of the twelfth century, shows that theology was created as much from the continued study of the Bible as from any “systematic” treatise. Best known for his Historia scholastica, a combined explanation and rewrite of the Bible focusing on the historical and literal aspects of sacred history, Comestor used the Gloss as a textbook in his lectures on the Gospels both to elucidate matters of exegesis and to help him deduce doctrinal truth. Through a close reading of Comestor's lectures on the Gospel of John, this essay reevaluates the teaching of theology at the cathedral school of Paris in the twelfth century and argues that the Bible and its Gloss stood at the heart of this development.

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