scholarly journals Comparative Hagiology and/as Manuscript Studies: Method and Materiality

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 604
Author(s):  
Barbara Zimbalist

Although the academic study of hagiography continues to flourish, the role of comparative methods within the study of sanctity and the saints remains underutilized. Similarly, while much valuable work on saints and sanctity relies on materialist methodologies, issues of critical bibliography particular to the study of hagiography have not received the theoretical attention they deserve. This essay takes up these two underattended approaches to argue for a comparative materialist approach to hagiography. Through a short case study of the Latin Vita of Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246) written by the Dominican friar Thomas of Cantimpré (c. 1200–1270), I suggest that comparative material research into the textual history of hagiographic literature can provide us with a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of the production of any specific holy figure, as well as the evolving discourses of sanctity and holiness in general. While this suggestion emerges from my own work on medieval hagiography from the Christian Latin West, it resonates with recent arguments by Sara Ritchey and David DiValerio to call for a materially comparative approach to narratives of holy lives in any religious tradition in any time period. Furthermore, I suggest that medieval studies, and in particular medieval manuscript studies, may have much to offer to scholars of sanctity working in later periods and other settings. Offering a view of material textual scholarship as intrinsically comparative, we may expand our theoretical definitions of the comparative and its possibilities within the study of sanctity.

Author(s):  
Richard Gameson

This chapter examines the history and developments in study of medieval manuscript books in Britain during the twentieth century. The twentieth century saw the study of the manuscript book rightly move from the margins to centre stage in British medieval studies. However, much of what was accomplished was due to the heroic labours of a small number of dedicated and determined individuals rather than to coherent institutional support. In addition, Great Britain still lags behind France and Germany in manuscript book research.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 419-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Lazcano

AbstractDifferent current ideas on the origin of life are critically examined. Comparison of the now fashionable FeS/H2S pyrite-based autotrophic theory of the origin of life with the heterotrophic viewpoint suggest that the later is still the most fertile explanation for the emergence of life. However, the theory of chemical evolution and heterotrophic origins of life requires major updating, which should include the abandonment of the idea that the appearance of life was a slow process involving billions of years. Stability of organic compounds and the genetics of bacteria suggest that the origin and early diversification of life took place in a time period of the order of 10 million years. Current evidence suggest that the abiotic synthesis of organic compounds may be a widespread phenomenon in the Galaxy and may have a deterministic nature. However, the history of the biosphere does not exhibits any obvious trend towards greater complexity or «higher» forms of life. Therefore, the role of contingency in biological evolution should not be understimated in the discussions of the possibilities of life in the Universe.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-301
Author(s):  
Charlotte A. Stanford

Cathedrals are buildings of cultural weight. They have frequently drawn attention from architectural historians, especially in the medieval era, as examples of Great Churches: leaders in artistic development or pioneers in engineering technology. When one thinks of Gothic buildings in <?page nr="300"?>particular, it is the cathedral that comes foremost to mind as example. Salisbury, Canterbury, York, and their fellows continue to draw both scholarly attention and popular attraction.


Author(s):  
Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

This chapter provides a brief history of Internet jurisdiction taking account of key court decisions, legislation as well as developments in the academic thinking on the topic. In doing so, it divides the history of Internet jurisdiction into four relatively distinct phases. The discussion in the chapter highlights facts such as that: (1) law has largely been reactive, responding to technological developments; (2) the level of creativity applied in the search for workable solutions was seemingly higher in the earlier stages than in more recent times; and (3) unsurprisingly, the attitudes of courts, legislators, and the academic community have varied considerably over the time period examined.


How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.


Author(s):  
Lu Gao ◽  
Yao Yu ◽  
Yi Hao Ren ◽  
Pan Lu

Pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) records are important as they provide documentation that M&R treatment is being performed and completed appropriately. Moreover, the development of pavement performance models relies heavily on the quality of the condition data collected and on the M&R records. However, the history of pavement M&R activities is often missing or unavailable to highway agencies for many reasons. Without accurate M&R records, it is difficult to determine if a condition change between two consecutive inspections is the result of M&R intervention, deterioration, or measurement errors. In this paper, we employed deep-learning networks of a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, a long short-term memory (LSTM) model, and a CNN-LSTM combination model to automatically detect if an M&R treatment was applied to a pavement section during a given time period. Unlike conventional analysis methods so far followed, deep-learning techniques do not require any feature extraction. The maximum accuracy obtained for test data is 87.5% using CNN-LSTM.


Traditio ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas O'Loughlin

In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in hisDiatessaron— as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.


2008 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
R S Bridger

AbstractThe Naval Service has been actively involved in research on occupational stress for almost 10 years. Three cross-sectional studies have been completed during this time period. It has been shown that the prevalence rate of psychological strain amongst personnel is relatively constant at 31-34%. Several smaller studies, of personnel at sea and of the availability of support services have also been completed. In general, the research has shown that the prevalence rate of strain is higher in the NS than in the general population and is comparable to that found in similar uniformed service organisations, such as the Police.Recognising the limitations of crosssectional research methods, the decision was made, in 2006, to follow a cohort of personnel over a 6-year period in order to gain better understanding of the processes by which work demands impact on psychological health and to determine whether psychological ill-health has an adverse impact on factors such as premature voluntary retirement and medical downgrading.The paper presents the history of the research and some of the work in progress.‘Disease is a pathological process that, at least in theory, is amenable to objective, external verification. Illness, on the other hand, is by definition, a subjective state’. D. Coggan 2006(1).


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6 (104)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Kirillova

Source study is the foundation of the research work of professional historians. It became the subject of the All-Russian Scientific Conference “Source Studies in Contemporary Medieval Studies”, which was held from 28 to 29 June 2021 at the Institute of World History at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The conference, conceived as a platform for regular communication of specialists in the history of the Middle Ages, allowed the participants and numerous listeners to get acquainted with the latest research on the source study of the history of Russia, Europe, the East and America. It included reports summarizing the experience of research and outlining the prospects for further work on key problems of source study of the history of the Middle Ages.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document