scholarly journals Non-compliant Reading and Annotating in the Ruthenian Reformation: Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogical Catechisms from Szymon Budny’s Library

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-121
Author(s):  
Maria Ivanova

While the works of the Antitrinitarian thinker and religious leader Szymon Budny (ca. 1530-93) have been the subject of extensive scholarly research, his library, marginalia, and reading practices have been significantly less examined. Following the discovery of a copy of Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogical Catechisms (Vienna, 1560) belonging to Budny, I analyze Budny’s notes and comments regarding the Latin translation of Cyril’s text as a case study of Budny’s attempt to recover the Church Father from the Catholic post-Tridentine agenda and his own subsequent re-appropriation of Cyril for his radical non-adorantist program. By exploring Budny’s subversive reading and annotating strategies, I demonstrate Budny’s original contributions to the development of Antitrinitarian thought in Europe. I also illustrate how marginalia and paratexts reflect not only the history of the book in which they are found, but also how they throw light on religious and intellectual history.

AJS Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-357
Author(s):  
Adam Shear

In the last several decades, the study of reading, writing, and publishing has emerged as a lively field of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Historians and literary scholars have engaged with a number of questions about the impact of changes in technology on reading practices and particularly on the relationship between new technologies of reading and writing and social, religious, and political change. The new field of the “history of the book,” merging aspects of social and intellectual history with the tools of analytical and descriptive bibliography, came to the fore in the second half of the twentieth century at the same time that the emergence of new forms of electronic media raised many questions for social scientists about the ways that technological change have affected aspects of human communication in our time. Meanwhile, while the field of book history emerged initially among early modernists interested in the impact of printing technology, the issues raised regarding authorship, publication, relations between orality and the written word, dissemination, and reception have enriched the study of earlier periods.


Author(s):  
Charles Hefling

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.


1984 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-667
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

It is commonplace to observe that the history of thought reveals certain recurring patterns whose mode of expression changes according to context. It is equally apparent that to chart the salient characteristics of an influential way of thinking – to give concrete, clearly defined shape to the usually tangled fundamental impulses informing a cast of mind – is a complex, difficult task which calls for attention from (at least) the historian, the psychologist, the philosopher and, in the case of religious figures and movements, the theologian alike. With regard to the manner of thinking embodied in the theological doctrines of Martin Luther such a task is fraught with more than the usual number of pitfalls. In the first place, following recent Luther scholarship, we must be wary of assuming that the great Reformer held fast to a single set of theological opinions throughout his long career. We shall not, therefore, attempt to reach conclusions applicable to Luther's thought as a whole, but rather shall focus exclusively on a number of key early expositions of the Theologia Crucis. Here, between about 1514 and 1520, we find, according to our argument, enough thematic unity to warrant the search for underlying principles. A second, less easily disposed of difficulty is the lack of a working consensus as to how and with what aims in mind one should even begin an historical analysis of Luther's texts. For example, to the believer who regards Luther's basic tenets as in a straightforward sense divinely inspired, the attempt to extract from his writings the ingredients of a certain thoroughly human way of thinking will seem doomed to inadequacy from the start. Likewise, for different reasons, many of today's.


BUILDER ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 288 (7) ◽  
pp. 86-88
Author(s):  
Jan Rabiej

The subject of this article is the problem of the antinomy of longevity and temporality in architecture. Excluding the so-called temporary structures, man designs and creates buildings with the assumption of their longevity. This presupposition is not undermined by architectural concepts, exposing functional and spatial solutions, opened to potential flexibility – variability. Also, ultra-modern designs of "self-adapting" architecture to the changing conditions of the context assume, indeed, the extension of its "vitality" – longevity. The aim of the research synthesis presented in the article is to specify the criteria which in shaping architecture make it possible to overcome the tension inherent in the antinomy of longevity and temporality. These analyzes, summarized with conclusions, were carried out in two complementary approaches: theoretical: based on the characteristics of the relationship between architecture and time, with particular emphasis on their exposure in the Christian sacred architecture; practical: based on the case study of the sequence of transformations of the church of St. Joseph Worker in Bytom over a period of approximately 100 years.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 689-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
HERMAN PAUL

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy'sDe Israëlieten te Mekka(The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.


Author(s):  
Ewa Wipszycka

The Canons of Athanasius, a homiletic work written at the beginning of the fifth century in one of the cities of the Egyptian chora, provide us with many important and detailed pieces of information about the Church hierarchy. Information gleaned from this text can be found in studies devoted to the history of Christianity of the fourth and fifth centuries, but rarely are they the subject of reflection as an autonomous subject. To date, no one has endeavoured to determine how the author of the Canons sought to establish the parameters of his work: why he included certain things in this work, and why left other aspects out despite them being within the boundaries of the subject which he had wished to write upon. This article looks to explore two thematic areas: firstly, what we learn about the hierarchical Church from the Canons, and secondly, what we know about the hierarchical Church from period sources other than the Canons. This article presents new arguments which exclude the authorship of Athanasius and date the creation of the Canons to the first three decades of the fifth century.


Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Emily R. Stewart

Because the significance of a sacred text comes not only from its content but also its format and materiality, the rise of digital formats is especially a concern for the Jewish community, the ‘people of the book’ (Am ha-Sefer) whose identity is rooted in the Torah. Drawing together scholarship on the history of the book in its changing formats and an illuminative case study of the Jewish Torah in its digital iterations, the Jewish case presented here is instructive but certainly not unique. Despite dramatic changes in reading technology throughout history, readers have time and again used a new technology to perform the same functions as that of the old, only more quickly, with more efficiency, or in greater quantity. While taking advantage of the innovation and novelty which characterize digital formats, a concerted effort to retain much older operations and appearances continues to be made in this transition as well. The analysis in this article aims to further dispel the misguided notion of technological supersession, the idea that new reading technologies ‘kill’ older formats in a straightforward model of elimination.


1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.


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