Formal Parallels Research Articles

What Are the Odds?

Abstract This article critiques prior epistolary analysis of the Mar Saba Clementine done by Jeff Jay in comparison with a variety of other Greek and Latin epistles. As a closer match, it brings forward Serapion’s letter on the Gospel of Peter apud Eusebius. Due to a pair of formal and conceptual parallels, combined in the Historia ecclesiastica, the article hypothesizes that Morton Smith’s discovery is a modern forgery, which he based upon Eusebius’s excerpt of Serapion in Hist. eccl. 6.12 and upon Eusebius’s paraphrase of the authentic Clement in Hist. eccl. 6.14.

Examining the Position of Wright’s Fallingwater in the Context of His Larger Body of Work: An Analysis Using Fractal Dimensions

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the world’s most famous architects, produced several masterworks in his career, possibly the most celebrated of which is the Kaufmann House, better known as Fallingwater. One of the common arguments historians make about this house is that it is unique in Wright’s oeuvre, as it is not similar to other designs he produced in the three major styles that dominated his career: the Prairie, Textile-Block and Usonian styles. In this paper, the derived fractal dimensions (D) using the standard architectural variation and application of the box-counting method are developed for the elevations and plans of Fallingwater. Using the measurements derived from a set of 15 Prairie, Textile-Block and Usonian houses, this paper tests whether Fallingwater is indeed an outlier in his body of work, as some historians suggest. The results indicate that, contrary to the standard view, Fallingwater has D measures that are broadly similar to those of his other styles, and on average, Fallingwater has formal parallels to several aspects of Wright’s Usonian style.

Ephraim of Ainos at work: a cycle of epigrams in the margins of Niketas Choniates

Abstract This article offers the first critical edition of a cycle of epigrams found in the margins of six manuscripts of Niketas Choniates’ History. This paper also proposes the attribution of the poems to Ephraim of Ainos, an author mainly known for his verse chronicle, which has Niketas Choniates as a source. Our poems occur in a group of manuscripts which we already knew Ephraim had used for his chronicle. Many formal parallels between the epigrams and the chronicle point to the same author and a book epigram connects one important manuscript with the city of Ainos. This paper reassesses the manuscript tradition of the epigrams with special emphasis on the marginalia of Niketas Choniates. The critical text of the poems is accompanied by two apparatuses and an English translation. The edition is preceded by some methodological considerations and followed by two appendices and three indices.

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

‘Time and space in the depiction of workers’ leisure in Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness, People on Sunday and Kuhle Wampe’

ABSTRACT This article comparatively assesses the representation of workers’ leisure in Berlin in three significant examples of experimental German cinema from the late Weimar Republic: Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness, dir. Piel Jutzi, 1929), Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, dir. Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930), and Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World?, dir. Slatan Dudow, 1932). There are distinct thematic and formal parallels between this set of nearly contemporaneous, generically hybrid films, and the article assesses the inter-related functions of time and space in the films’ depiction of leisure experiences in Berlin. Focal points include the depiction of urban space, especially the tenement block and the ‘semi-public’ space of the courtyard; the Freibad or lakeside bathing resort; the worker sports movement; and the comparative relevance of the work of the Berlin artist Heinrich Zille. The article approaches the films in the historical context of the workers’ movement and working-class culture, and is further informed by insights into urban space developed within the sociological discipline of leisure studies.

It’s an American! It’s an Alien! It’s the Enigma of Superman

This essay explores American conceptions of otherness and national identity via comparative case studies of Superman in Action Comics #1 (1938, June 1) and twentieth century cartoons and comic strips that featured immigrant characters. While it is generally acknowledged amongst Superman scholars that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were avid comic strip fans, formal parallels between Superman and his cartoon precedents have escaped study. Recognizing Siegel’s and Shuster’s childhood love of immigrant comics strips enables scholars to see the connection between Superman and this earlier tradition of immigrant cartoons and comic strips. Such comparisons highlight the nationalistic struggles that occupied American politics and society during the early twentieth century and impacted the creations of Superman in 1933 (apocryphal) and 1938 (canonical). Interwar Superman (1933 and 1938-40) paradoxically presented himself as a paragon of Americana and as a foreign immigrant. Superman’s simultaneous embodiment of two nationalistic extremes—the Rooseveltian mind and immigrant body—imbued him and his allegory with a nationality crisis.

Die Ausmalungen der Wiener Virgilkapelle. Die visuelle Kultur in Byzanz, im Kaukasus, in Syrien und Nordmesopotamien

This case study of the aniconic wall paintings – red-colored, monumental crosses from the mid-thirteenth century – in Vienna’s subterranean Chapel of St. Virgil demonstrates that, in the absence of written sources, artifacts can serve as historical documents. The article offers an alternative approach to the quest for historical context, exploring transcultural, cross-media, and diachronic visual comparisons. Since late antiquity, cross decorations with surrounding zigzag patterns were common in Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Georgia. Formal parallels survive on the facade of the Armenian basilica of Ereruk and among the many red-colored paintings in the cave churches of Cappadocia. Brick ornaments with crosses in blind arches from the eleventh through the fourteenth century offer the most striking visual correspondences to St. Virgil. Compelling examples can be seen on the facades of the eleventh- and thirteenth-century churches of Nea Moni and the Panagia Sikelia on Chios and on the fourteenth-century facade of the Orhan Gazi Camii in Bursa. The paintings of the Viennese chapel are thus likely to refer to the ornate brick facades of Middle Byzantine architecture.

Жанровая система русских сатирических журналов XVIII века

Satirical magazines are a unique form of the XVIII century literature. Standing outside the dominant in the XVIII century normative poetics, they share its didactic intent. They develop a specific genre system consisting of short literary forms. The research aims to create a structural model of this system. It involves multiple factors: the literary forms it includes are defined on several irredundant criteria. Its main genres are the editor’s essay, the reader’s letter, and parodies. The editor as the subject of an essay is a fictional character. Readers’ letters, whoever their real authors might be, coexist with editor’s essays in a common fictional space. Such genres as newspaper articles, recipes, dictionaries are objects of parody. A character sketch is the basic element of the system. Compressed or extended, it can appear as a description or a narrative. A character sketch as well as other genre modes may take the shape of essays, letters, parodies. Many short forms show a tendency towards cyclization. The magazine as a whole is a literary unity held together with the help of several mechanisms: the editor’s and readers’ personae, formal and thematic parallels between texts, sometimes a common constructive principle or even a single plot. The diversity of simultaneous structuring principles makes the genre system of the satirical magazines complex and flexible, so as to vary aesthetic impressions for the sake of a common didactic goal.

Mycenaean and Egyptian faience beads discovered in southern Poland

Four faience beads discovered in southern Poland, in graves dated to roughly 1600–1100 BCE, have been the object of an archaeometric study, four with the LA-ICP-MS method and one additionally with the EPMA method. Two beads have good formal parallels from territories associated with Mycenaean culture. The material of which they were made combines features of the previously distinguished groups A and B of Mycenaean faience. The faience discovered in Poland ties it in with faiences of group A by the use of soda-rich plant ashes as a fluxing agent, whereas a similar cobalt ore colorant links it to group B. The other two beads were made most probably in Egypt, considering the use of a similar alkali raw material (halophyte plant ash) and an alum (source of cobalt) as colorant in one case. The beads must have reached the territory of Poland from the Eastern Mediterranean most probably through Italy and up the so-called Amber Road.

A Sureth Version of the East-Syriac Dialogue Poem of Mary and the Gardener

In the present paper, a Sureth version is published of the dialogue poem of Mary and the Gardener . As a first attempt to reconstruct the history of this text, the poetic version in the vernacular is compared with five manuscript witnesses of the Classical Syriac original. The poem is presented as part of an intertextual web of Classical Syriac hymns for Easter and Pentecost that are preserved in late liturgical collections and appear to be narrative and rhetorical expansions of John 20:11-17. Formal and thematic parallels to the poem are then found in the broader framework of Christian and Jewish hymnography written in varieties of Late Aramaic.

Writers as Leaders of Nation: Typological Convergence of I. Franko and P. Kulish

The article draws a parallel between P. Kulish’s and I. Franko’s disposition to the age-related ideological autorevision. It is argued that, experiencing evolution of the worldview and creative work, revising his own early radical social impulses caused by the ‘national radical stage’ (Franko’s definition) of liberation movement in Halychyna, mature Franko in 1896 – 1907 got closer to the views of P. Kulish, especially those of the late period of his life (1874 – 1897). Like the latter, Franko defended the right to worldview evolution and changing views. These typological coincidences consisted also in the movement from the center-left forces to the right-centered ones; the transition to the primacy of the national idea over the social one; the drastic national self-criticism and simultaneous emphasis on the nation-building and state-building; gradual reorientation from the idea of social revolutionary development of society to evolutionary progress and moderate “means and ways of acting and speaking” (as Franko called it); the warnings against admiring communist illusion, against ochlocracy; and, finally, in the focus on the leading role of the nationally conscious Ukrainian intellectuals in the liberation struggle. Ideological and formal parallels between Franko and Kulish were revealed not only in the letters and journalism, but also in Franko’s practice of grounding his works on the materials of the national, biblical and Christian history and mythology (i. e. literary historicism and mythologism, focused on the present, the future and the author’s personality; symbolic autobiography). From this point of view it is worth to compare: “Pisnia Budushchyny” (“Song of Future”) – “Try Braty” (“Three Brothers”); “Pokhoron” (“Funeral”), “Ivan Vyshenskyi” – “Velyki Provody” (“Great Farewell Procession”), “Marusia Bohuslavka”, “Dramovana Trylohiia” (“Drama-like Trilogy”); “Moisei” (“Moses”) – “Mahomet i Khadyza” (“Muhammad and Hadiza”), “Duma-Perestoroha, Velmy na Potomni Chasy Potribna” (“Warning Refl ections that will be Needed in Future”); “Strashnyi Sud” (“The Last Judgement”) – “Kulish u Pekli” (“Kulish in Hell”); “Slavianska Oda” (“Slavic Ode”) – “Tsarski Slova” (“Royal Words”).

Velum ormiańskie ze zbiorów Muzeum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego

The Armenian Veil of the Jagiellonian University Museum RepertoryThe Jagiellonian University Museum stores an Armenian liturgical veil made of thin cotton fabric decorated with silk and metal thread embroidery. Before the veil came into the possession of the Museum in 1945, it had been stored in Schlesisches Museum für Kunstgewerbe und Altertümer in Wrocław which had previously purchased it from dr Dorothea Willers in 1936. The analysis of the inscription on the fabric gave the following results: the veil was a gift from townsfolk, probably from Chars (Moush province), for St John the Baptiser Monastery in Moush (in Taron, an ancient Armenian province). For Armenians the Monastery used to be one of the most frequently visited pilgrimage sites before it was destroyed during genocide in 1915. Some of its possessions were moved to Ejmiatsin and later to Moscow. There they got dissipated after the October Revolution and have never returned to their rightful owners. The veil shows the following iconography: an image of light ray-crowned Agnus Dei typical for Armenian chalice veils, Salvor Mundi image of enthroned Christ, images of St Stephen and St John the Baptiser widely worshipped in the Armenian Church, and St Hripsime. The form is typical for Eucharist-themed Christ images (the chalice and Arma Christi symbols). Stylistically, the embroidery reflects the Eastern Armenian art characteristic in its decorative and ornamentation qualities. There are formal parallels between the veil and Armenian chalice veils from the 19th century, which allows to date the Jagiellonian Museum veil at that century.

Neither History nor Book

Neither History nor Book Seth Kimmel A central paradox of the history of the book is that it is neither simply a subfield of history nor concerned only with books. To study the history of the book is to examine the codex as one among myriad textual technologies. The “book” is in this sense a placeholder for a broader concern with the materiality of text and reading. “History” too is a placeholder. At stake in contemporary accounts of the book and its history is a vision of how and what to read in the present and the future. These questions moreover occupy literary critics, anthropologists, economists, politicians, media studies scholars, and bookish students and teachers at all levels, in addition to professional historians. Its name notwithstanding, the history of the book is interdisciplinary and forward-looking. In its most robust conceptualization, it is a debate about the humanities themselves. Despite an emphasis on particular artifacts in their unique spaces and times, a trans-historical wager nevertheless undergirds research in the history of the book. The hope is that those who mine digital corpora or theorize electronic reading and those who investigate medieval manuscript culture or early printed pamphlets—to take just a few among many possible examples—might learn from each other’s approaches to textual presence. This study of the materiality of text in its multiple manifestations has paradoxically revealed the fact that across diverse media and at varied moments the histories of books echo each other. There are patterns that characterize a book’s lifecycle—its “communications circuit,” as some scholars call it. Like formal parallels among otherwise dissimilar artifacts or the shared ambitions and anxieties that characterize revolutions in textual technologies, these patterns become visible only by balancing a focus on particular artifacts and archives with a broader historical consciousness. The history of the book lures its practitioners outside their disciplinary homes as well as beyond their periods of specialization. Acceptance that the material qualities of the book and the meaning of the text shape each other occasions entry into the chemistry of ink and paper, techniques of sewing and sculpture, and families of computational as well as Romance or other languages. The production, acquisition, display, defacement, recycling, selection, exchange, preservation, and piracy of textual artifacts together establish the conditions for interpretation. In their theorization and examination of the lives of such multifaceted artifacts, book historians have deployed the research practices and [End Page 1] genetic editing techniques traditionally associated with philology. Characterized by an attention to variation among multiple manuscript copies or printed editions of a single text, as well as an acute sense for how languages change over time, this philological approach does not demarcate the methodological limit of book history any more than the codex delimits the book historian’s object of study, however. So long as they seek mutual intelligibility, scholars employing diverse methodologies have found homes in the history of the book. The key to cultivating this mutual intelligibility is to train an analytical eye on the poem or the play even while reconstructing the workings of the printer or the playhouse, which are themselves comprehensible only as part of social, political, and even environmental ecosystems. Distinct communities of historians of the book, traditionally focused on some subset of this hierarchy of research concerns, increasingly investigate each other’s archives. They do so in order to pose new questions of the archives they already know, to mine unfamiliar archives in new ways, and to develop a more subtle account of the history of archival practice in the various ages of information overload that have preceded our own. Contemporary scholarship on the history of the book is in this regard central to ongoing debates about the humanities not simply because all humanities disciplines are concerned to some degree with books, imagined in their most expansive sense. Such scholarship is central also because the interwoven textual and material elements of books render their examination a necessarily interdisciplinary project drawing on a multiplicity of archives. The history of the book exemplifies the broader trend in humanistic inquiry toward dialogue, if not collaboration across disciplines. Given this relationship between the history of the book and the...

Chaucer’s Non-Debt to Langland

Piers Plowman is commonly cited as a major influence on Chaucer, despite the absence of any mention or translation of it in his poetry, the conventional character of those features shared in common, and the fact that none of the formal parallels identified (e.g., their questioning response to the dream vision genre) necessitates influence. The supposed historical evidence, too - they both lived in London, the Peasants’ Revolt shows that everyone knew Langland’s poem - is weaker than has been assumed. Much has been made of the fact that Langland inaugurated the figure of the good plowman, who had always been a negative figure, but the work of Edward Wheatley has undermined that assumption as well. There are no more reasons to believe that Chaucer was influenced by Langland than that he was influenced by the Pearl-poet.

The internal preconditions of the secularization of the Teutonic Order in Livonia

The internal preconditions of the secularization of the Teutonic Order in LivoniaIn 1562 the last Master of the Teutonic Order in Livonia Gotthard Kettler dissolved the Order in Livonia and became as a vassal of the kingdom of Poland the first Duke of Curonia. Formal parallels with the Grand Master Albrecht of Brandenburg and duchy of Prussia are evident, although Kettler operated in totally other preconditions. In the course of Livonian War most of Livonia was already lost for Kettler, when he finally secularized the land. The aim of this paper is to survey the dynamics of the Teutonic Order as a corporation during these fatal years in Livonia and to establish the turning points. The Order had to cope with melting of its property as well as with internal disagreements concerning the means to confront peril. In these circumstances Kettler made his career, sometimes with dubious methods. But he remained the head of the corporation, who had to take account the wishes and attitudes of his fellow officials, which could be seen in the decisions of the chapter in April 1560. The real possibility for secularization opened up for Kettler only in autumn the same year, when the most of his potential rivals were killed or imprisoned in battle or retired.

Kierkegaard and Johannes Tauler on Faith, Love, and Natural Desire for God: A Way beyond a Catholic/Protestant Impasse

For almost a century, an intermittent battle has been waged in Kierkegaard studies concerning the Dane's understanding of the Christian life and salvation. One way of posing the contentious question is this: on the issues of faith and love, justification and sanctification, and nature and grace, was Kierkegaard more Lutheran, or was he more Catholic? This article argues that this ambiguity about Kierkegaard's soteriological predilections is understandable, for his writings do not fall into the neat categories defined by post-Tridentine Catholicism or scholastic Lutheran orthodoxy. Rather than advocating for either of those doctrinal positions, his writings on justification and sanctification, nature and grace, and eros and agape continue a more nuanced trajectory rooted in some of the spiritual writers of the Middle Ages and extended later by the pietists. That trajectory defies the polemical binary classifications typical of the late sixteenth century. To clarify this alternative orientation, we will sketch the basic contours of Kierkegaard's scattered remarks about soteriology, and then explore their similarity to many of themes of Johannes Tauler (1300–1361), one of the most influential spiritual writers of the late medieval period. Tauler used a more metaphysical vocabulary to express a theological vision that exhibited significant formal parallels to Kierkegaard's later subversion of Catholic and Lutheran scholastic dichotomies. For both Tauler and Kierkegaard, the attractive beauty of God's self-giving love serves as the foundation for a theological vision that unites faith and love, justification and sanctification, and nature and grace.

FISHER'S GEOMETRIC MODEL OF ADAPTATION MEETS THE FUNCTIONAL SYNTHESIS: DATA ON PAIRWISE EPISTASIS FOR FITNESS YIELDS INSIGHTS INTO THE SHAPE AND SIZE OF PHENOTYPE SPACE

The functional synthesis uses experimental methods from molecular biology, biochemistry and structural biology to decompose evolutionarily important mutations into their more proximal mechanistic determinants. However these methods are technically challenging and expensive. Noting strong formal parallels between R.A. Fisher's geometric model of adaptation and a recent model for the phenotypic basis of protein evolution, we sought to use the former to make inferences into the latter using data on pairwise fitness epistasis between mutations. We present an analytic framework for classifying pairs of mutations with respect to similarity of underlying mechanism on this basis, and also show that these data can yield an estimate of the number of mutationally labile phenotypes underlying fitness effects. We use computer simulations to explore the robustness of our approach to violations of analytic assumptions and analyze several recently published datasets. This work provides a theoretical complement to the functional synthesis as well as a novel test of Fisher's geometric model.

From scrapbook to Facebook: A history of personal media assemblage and archives

This study surveys recent research on print-era scrapbooks and contemporary social media to highlight commonalities between the two formats, both in terms of the practices they have historically promoted for users, and the methodological challenges they produce for researchers. It argues that scrapbooks and social media can be conceptualized as sites of personal media assemblage and personal media archives, a designation that highlights the simultaneously social and archival dimensions of each form. After discussing these formal similarities, the author identifies three shared functions: (1) documenting friendship, (2) navigating new media abundance, and (3) communicating taste and building cultural capital. By drawing functional and formal parallels between the two media, the goal is to observe how these ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies might mutually shed light on each other’s neglected social and archival dimensions, offering scholars a wider range of angles from which to approach them as cultural and biographical texts.

George Eliot and the 'Expressiveness of Opera'

At a time when opera, like many musical genres, drew inspiration from the internalized, non-dramatic form of the novel, the novel was also drawing very profitably on opera. Operatic allusion and formal parallels with opera play an interesting role in George Eliot's development of the realist novel. The emphasis in this essay is on what opera offers Eliot as a writer and on what it offered, and still offers, to her readers. I also consider the conceptions of ‘opera’ that have informed critical assessments of Eliot's work. The three works that I discuss in this light are the early novella ‘Mr Gilfil's Love Story’ (1857), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876).

Identity in Place: Lord Byron, John Clare and Lyric Poetry

This essay presents the case that during the later stages of his writing career, John Clare's poetic voice is developed through an engagement with Lord Byron's lyric verse, including the Hebrew Melodies but also the lyricised narrative of Don Juan. In particular, it argues that Byron's precedent enables Clare to articulate a distinctive concern with female figures in faraway places (namely Jerusalem and Greece) and that Byron provides Clare with a way of staging a dramatic lyricism. Byron and Clare have already been the subject of a number of discussions in academic studies, but this essay provides a fresh focus on links between the two poets by concentrating on as yet unexamined thematic, textual and formal parallels in their lyrical verse. The essay makes a case for Byron as a lyricist while attending to some lesser-known lyric poems by Clare that allow readers to see more coherence in Clare's asylum-period verse than has often been assumed.