Latin Christendom Research Articles

„Митология“ и „религия“ в латинската християнска литература на IV–V в.

Christianity illuminated the world in the age of Antiquity but it differed significantly from the life of the ancient world. The Christian writers of IV–V cc. treat the ancient mythology in a negative way. The present article discusses the characteristics of ancient mythology which were unacceptable from a Christian point of view. Why are the concepts of ‘mythology’ and ‘religion’ opposed in the minds of the Christian writers? Christian literature depicts a different world. What are the characteristics of this world? What demonstrates its reality and veracity? The answers to these questions are given in the article “Mythology and Religion in Latin Christian Literature of IV–V cc.”

Някои съвременни рецепции на раннохристиянската литература в България и техните етически значения

In this paper, when I use the concept of ‘early Christian literature’ I mean the body of texts from Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages that affects the controversies around the issue of God’s Grace and the role of free human will in the context of making a choice in a strict ethical sense. For that reason, firstly, here I analyze the problems that arose with relation to the doctrine of Pelagius. Secondly, in this paper, by ‘recent receptions of this early Christian literature in Bulgaria’ I mean those receptions – in a theological, literary, and ethical sense - that we encounter in current studies of Christian Latin literature done by the promising young researcher Rosen Milanov. Thirdly, the present study attempts to answer the question of the ethical connotations of those same receptions in the present-day moral controversies in Bulgaria – a country rich in conservative views of Eastern Orthodox nature, concerning contemporary ethical issues such as those related to the ratification of the Istanbul Convention last year. In this way it may be possible to obtain a more clear outlook on how such distant historical events as the Pelagian controversy about the value of free moral choice could still influence the modification processes in the sociocultural layers of modern Bulgarian society with its Eastern Orthodox heritage.

Christianizing the Planetary Week and Globalizing the Seven-Day Cycle

Early Christians adopted a numeric week from Judaism, but wherever their communities spread they encountered the planetary week invented by Hellenistic astrologers. Greek Christians replaced that week with their own in the fourth century C.E., but Latin Christians were only partly successful in doing the same. A timeline for the Christianization of the planetary week between the third and seventh centuries is provided by a database of Greek and Latin documents dated by both an annual calendar and one of the two weeks. The documentary evidence is supplemented by analyses of literary and legal references to the two weeks from the same period. These show that Greek authors were accommodating toward the planetary week while Latin authors were often hostile. Latin hostility was engendered by the presence of non-Christian social practices tied to the planetary week that threatened Christian religious identity. These practices included worship of the planetary deities, rest on the Day of Jupiter rather than on the Lord's Day, and the reservation of activities like marriage, travel, and personal grooming to certain planetary weekdays. A brief survey of the spread of the two weeks throughout much of Afro-Eurasia contextualizes the changes occurring in the Mediterranean and shows that the Latin conflict was unique. That conflict was likely a product of the relatively slow pace of Christianization in some parts of Western Europe and the integration of the planetary week into the Roman calendar to produce a coherent cycle of pagan time which was difficult to replace.

Thirty Years of the ‘Jeweled Style’

In seventh-century Wiltshire, a scholar-monk began to write classicising Latin poetry. In bold terms he describes himself as the first of the Germanic peoples to write Latin poetry (‘neminem nostrae stirpis prosapia genitum et Germanicae gentis cunabulis confotum in huiuscemodi negotio [i.e. poetry] ante nostram mediocritatem tantopere desudasse’). His programmatic statements cite Virgil explicitly, and allude to Prudentius and Sedulius. His is a poetry that sets out a stall for the beginning of something new, but does so by making clear his predecessors. For Aldhelm, as for much of the Middle Ages, the canonical models of Latin poetry included classical Latin authors as well as the Christian Latin poets of Late Antiquity.

The Place of the Saint Ladislaus’ Monarchy in the Medieval Europe according to the Western Chroniclers at the time of the First Crusade

The present article examines the First Crusade’s passage through the Kingdom of Hungary. Basing on the two main narrative sources: the Historia Ierosolimitana of Albert of Aachen and the chronicle of the William of Tyre the author comments on the relationship between the king of Hungary, Coloman the Learned, and Western European crusaders, which is the starting point to discuss a wider problem of opinion on newly christianizeed Hungary from the post-Carolingian Europe’s point of view. As it has been shown, the Kingdom of Hungary at the time of the First Crusade was perceived as a member of Latin Christendom. Furthermore there is no evidence in contemporary Latin narrative sources for the chroniclers’ negative approach towards Hunagarian Monarchy.

Hexaplaric Excavations

Abstract This article introduces ten Hexaplaric readings that are cited in Greek and Latin Christian literature that is not exegetical or treats a biblical book other than the one the Hexaplaric reading relates to.

Ideas on Language in Early Latin Christianity: From Tertullian to Isidore of Seville, written by Tim Denecker

Ideas on Language in Early Latin Christianity: From Tertullian to Isidore of Seville, written by Tim Denecker

Bodies of Knowledge, Bodies of Mystery: Recent Work in the History of Bodies, Genders and Sexualities

A few years ago, a historian friend who is also a novelist asked for information on how medieval women managed their periods. To my shame, I was not able to give a definitive answer. A quick survey of available publications on medieval medical and cultural discourses, such as authoritative studies by Monica H. Green, dealt in admirable detail with ages at menarche and menopause, menstruation’s causes, its benefits and drawbacks, its role in signalling fertility, its subjection to religious taboo, its various treatment in Latin Christian, Byzantine, Jewish and Muslim contexts – indeed, its centrality to medieval perceptions of women’s health and spiritual status.1 But they said little or nothing about simple hygiene. My friend and I speculated about use of linen rags, fleece, sphagnum moss, temporary confinement, and the possibility that women simply bled onto their underclothes. I came up with a couple of textual fragments. Heloise’s third letter to Peter Abelard written in the 1130s implied that the nuns of her abbey should be supplied linen, rather than woollen, undergarments during ‘the monthly purgings of their superfluous humours’.2 Béatrice de Planissoles’s 1320 testimony to inquisitor Jacques Fournier, defending herself against charges of heresy and witchcraft, demonstrated that a scrap of linen ‘blouset’ had been used to collect her daughter’s menstrual blood though in this case for the purpose of producing a love potion; her daughter had initially bled onto her slip.3 Yet my failure to respond readily with a bundle of examples was salutary, a lesson in just how opaque to historical view some of the most mundane aspects of human bodily experience can be.

«Un démon dans mon ventre». Cortezia, amour, hérésie avant la Croisade albigeoise

«A Demon in My Belly». Cortezia, Love and Heresy before the Albigensian Crusade. In 1222 a pregnant adolescent girl named na Aimerzens Viguier was mocked by two «good women » for having a demon in her belly. The «good women » (or «good ladies ») were fugitive heretics and their insult was recalled by na Aimerzens two decades later for the inquisition in Toulouse. In the twelfth century there was no «heresy of the good women » or «heresy of the good men » between the Garonne and Rhone. Indeed, there were no heretics anywhere in Latin Christendom in the twelfth century, Waldensians included, if by that category we mean any individual purposely choosing to be labelled as hereticus or knowingly putting themselves at risk of persecution and punishment on account of what they believed or practiced. Of course, there were feverish accusations of heresy polluting the lands of the count of Toulouse by Latin Christian intellectuals in the twelth century, but such polemics, while sometimes efforts at explaining actual phenomena, were not, as modem scholars all too frequently read them, journalistic reportage. This does not mean I do not take such polemics seriously, I just do not think accusations of heresy, however sincerely believed by those making them, is the same as heresy actually existing as a historically verifiable entity. Moreover, accusations of heresy between the Garonne and the Rhône in the twelfth century rarely focused on the good men and good women, the targets being counts, bishops, abbots, wandering preachers, hermits and mercenaries. This diverse landscape of “heresy” is lost when we read backwards from the thirteenth century. This essay evokes the world of the good men and good women before the Albigensian Crusade, when they embodied cortezia, when they were not yet heretics, ultimately suggesting what it meant for an adolescent girl to be mocked in a time of holy war for having a demon in her belly.

Croch ~ cros ‘крест’: о латинских дублетных заимствованиях и развитии христианской метафорики в Ранней Ирландии

Croch ~ cros ‘крест’: о латинских дублетных заимствованиях и развитии христианской метафорики в Ранней Ирландии

The construction of a primary source. The creation ofItinerarium Peregrinorum 1

The so-called “Itinerarium Peregrinorum 1”, so named by Professor Hans E. Mayer in his 1962 study, is a contemporary Latin Christian record of events leading up to the Third Crusade (1189-1192) and covering the first fifteen months of hostilities. It appears to be a medley of sources forming a loose narrative of events in the kingdom of Jerusalem between May 1187 and November 1190. It includes martyrdom accounts, letters, and eye-witness material. Yet comparison to other contemporary sources reveals that the author adapted his narrative to present a particular message to his readers. This article considers for what purpose IP 1 was compiled.

Barbarian or Greek?: The Charge of Barbarism and Early Christian Apologetics by Stamenka E. Antonova

Reviewed by: Barbarian or Greek?: The Charge of Barbarism and Early Christian Apologetics by Stamenka E. Antonova Jörg Ulrich Stamenka E. Antonova Barbarian or Greek?: The Charge of Barbarism and Early Christian Apologetics Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 187 Leiden: Brill, 2019 Pp 336. $138.00. Originating in the author's doctoral thesis at Columbia University, this book examines the use of the word "barbarian" or "barbarism" in the literary debates of the first centuries c.e. The—rather surprising—result is that there is a wide variety of implications connected with the use of the term "barbarian," and this applies to both pagan and Christian authors. In the second chapter (the first chapter is a short prologue), Antonova contextualizes the material within ancient rhetorical practices and explains her theoretical framework, which rests on postcolonial theories and on literary constructions [End Page 675] of identity ("self" and "other"). Relevant examples from Aristotle and Quintilian are thoroughly examined, whereas examples from early "Second Sophistic" authors are not included here. The context of the "Second Sophistic," however, plays some role in the analysis of Philostratus and Lucian of Samosata in the following chapter. Chapter Three then examines the conceptualizations and representations of the "barbarian" in Greco-Roman literature. For the Latin tradition the author takes a look at authors such as Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus, and Seneca; for the Greek tradition, the author turns to Aristides, Dio Chrysostom, Philostratus, and Lucian. Antonova should have paid attention to the Middle Platonic philosopher Kelsos's True Logos here (a text which can be extracted from Origen, which was excellently done in recent works: Horacio E. Lona, Die Wahre Lehre des Kelsos: Übersetzt und erklärt [Freiburg: Herder, 2005]; and Johannes Arnold, Der Wahre Logos des Kelsos: Eine Strukturanalyse [Münster: Aschendorff, 2016]). However, it can be shown that the use of the term "barbarian" covers a wide range of meanings, including low social class, low education, immorality, and criminality, and above all foreign-ness in language and ethnic descent. This insight helps us to understand why nearly all of the Christian apologists in the first centuries saw themselves forced to react in one way or another as soon as the term "barbarian" was used as a charge against early Christianity. Chapters Four and Five represent the major part of the book. Both examine how the apologists deal with the charge of "barbarism." It was certainly a wise decision to concentrate on some selected authors from the second to the early fourth centuries here, and also to divide the analyses into one chapter on the Greek and another one on the Latin writers. Proceeding chronologically, Antonova begins with the Greek authors (Chapter Four) and presents short studies on Justin, Tatian, Clement, Origen, and Eusebius of Caesarea. For the use of the term "barbarian," it is possible to identify five major significations: first, it serves as a reference to foreign origin and tongue; second, as a reference to the contents and style of scripture; third, it is connected with criticism of certain features of Christian language; fourth, it has the sense of belonging to a low and uneducated segment of society; fifth, it implies sub-human behavior. This wide range of implicit and explicit accusations connected with the term "barbarian" is sometimes sustained by the apologists, sometimes re-defined, and sometimes even turned into a counter-charge or a positive argument. In Justin Martyr's argument, for example, the "barbarian" character of Christian preaching actually proves the fact that the rise of Christianity cannot be due to human efforts, but evidently owes itself to the godly spirit instead. For the Latin Christian texts, Antonova chooses Tertullian, Arnobius, and Lactantius as her major references. As a result we find (similar to the Greek apologetic tradition) an enormous semantic range in the term "barbarian," both in pagan charges against Christians and in apologetic refutations of these charges. However, at least in Tertullian, the construction of the "other" by using the term "barbarian" reaches fantastic and nearly unrealistic dimensions, maybe due to the author's tendency to rhetorical exaggeration. But interestingly enough, in Tertullian we also find an example for an "inner-Christian" use of [End Page...

GREEK LOAN-WORDS IN THE VULGATE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LATIN APOSTOLIC FATHERS

Early Latin Christian documents translated from Greek (e.g., Latin translations of the Greek New Testament) contain a large number of Greek loan-words. This article attempts to collect and catalogue the Greek loan-words found in the Vulgate New Testament and the early Latin versions of the Apostolic Fathers. In this literature I have identified some 420 loan-words. The purpose of this article is to systematically categorize, analyze, and comment on these loan-words. In the main section of the article the loan-words are divided into discrete content groups based on their origin and/or meaning. These groups include: (1.) words that originated in Hebrew or Aramaic Vorlagen and that were then transliterated into Greek and then Latin; (2.) words with biblical or ecclesiological orientation that are found exclusively or predominantly in early Christian Latin writings; (3.) words that fall into distinct categories of items, persons or places (e.g., “animals,” “items of clothing,” “gems and minerals,” “human occupations”); and (4.) words of a general character that do not fit in any of the above categories. In this section of the article are listed, for each loan-word: first, the Latin word; second, the Greek Vorlage; third, the meaning(s) of the Latin word; and fourth, one example of a passage in the Vulgate New Testament or the Latin Apostolic Fathers in which the Latin word may be found. Loan-words with special characteristics (e.g., Latin hapax legomena) are commented on individually.

Translation of Latin Christian Works into Bulgarian - Questions and Challenges

Translation of Latin Christian Works into Bulgarian - Questions and Challenges

Using the Carolingian Past in a Society of Transformation: The Case of Early Medieval Septimania/Catalonia in the Long Tenth Century (900-1050)

The north-eastern region of the Iberian Peninsula, which later became medieval Catalonia, and the adjacent French region, then called Septimania, formed an intermediary zone of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, social, political, and religious transition and brokerage between the Mediterranean and central European worlds, interfacing with the Christian north and Muslim south. Consequently, the double region Septimania/Catalonia is an ideal subject for a comparative view of transformation processes in the Carolingian Empire. My paper – giving an interim report on ongoing research – analyses how this still-underestimated periphery of the Carolingian Empire transformed into a central region of Latin Christian Europe between the late ninth and the middle of the eleventh century, through exploring its imported and autochthonous manuscript production and its position as a border society. In doing so, I show that the societal and religious circumstances of this intermediary zone favoured the concerted selection, introduction and implementation of the core results of the Carolingian Church reform, as well as its well-balanced adaptation to a post-Roman, post-Visigothic and post-Carolingian society under reconstruction. My reflections allow us to assess the quality of »Carolingian« culture as an imperial, i.e. overarching, eclectic and flexible concept of amalgamation of cultural and political semantics, from a peripheral rather than a central European perspective.

On What Were Oaths Taken in Christian Latin Europe in the High Middle Ages (12th-Early 14th Centuries)?

It is not surprising that oaths were used in all legal systems and in very broadly understood public and social relationships in Christian Latin Europe in the Middle Ages. The oath was commonly presented in various aspects of community life, that is, in political, constitutional, legal, economic, commercial, private, corporation, and religious matters.1 The oath as such and its use can be examined in a great number of contexts. But, in this paper we will solely focus on one of these. The topic discussed here are objects (paraments) on which oaths were taken. Lots of information about this issue is provided by iconography and written sources. These objects were subject to notable changes depending on the time and territory. This article focuses on such territories as England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Sweden, Bohemia, Poland, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the period of more than two centuries of the High Middle Ages, from the twelfth to the early fourteenth century.

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature by Rebecca Davis

Religion & Literature 198 in thematic terms that the book hangs together as a whole. As for intertextuality and influence, the first reason, Pollmann deals with an impressive range of authors and issues. As is often the case in studies of late antique poetry, the focus is Roman rather than Greek (the only exception is the aforementioned chapter on Euripides and the Christus patiens). But within the ranks of late Latin writers, Pollman discusses a wide variety, from the beginnings of late Latin and early Christian poetry down into the Middle Ages, including Walafrid Strabo and Sigebert of Gembloux. She has divided the chapters into three major sections: “The Poetics of Authority in Early Christian Poetry”; “Christian Authority and Poetic Succession”; and “Poetic Authority in Rivalling Cultural and Theological Discourses.” I will focus here on two of the several key themes that emerge throughout the essays. First, in order to understand the social function of late Latin poetry, and particularly Christian Latin poetry, it is essential to grasp that it is poetry with a cultural agenda; the poet—whether Proba or Prudentius, Arator or Avitus—wants you, the reader, to do something. That is, the poems are intended to force a choice on the reader, to interrogate and bring about to a decision. Neutrality in the face of the text’s demands is foreclosed before the text has even begun. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matthew 12:30). This is the impulse that informs Christian poetry. What is the reader to do? He is to accept Christianity and reform his life. It is a theme that has been explored in other recent works as well, such as Marc Mastrangelo’s The Roman Self in Late Anquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul (2008). The production of Christian poetry, then, is an act consisting of the aggrandizement of authority. Scripture preeminently, and the lives of the saints secondarily, are the authorities that explicitly underwrite the poets’ claims. Second, however, and relatedly, the Christian poet has to deal with a different canon as well: the canon of pagan authors. The best mode of posture toward the pagan past was, throughout late antiquity, in the process of constant renegotiation by Christian writers. Augustine resolved the question most famously through his notion of “spoiling the Egyptians” in Book 2 of De doctrina christiana, but he was neither the first nor the last to make an attempt, nor is his model without rivals. Pollmann treats various possibilities in chapters on Cassiodorus and Venantius Fortunatus and on the cento of Proba. Of Cassiodorus (a prose author, of course), Pollmann argues convincingly for his attempt to “Christianize pagan erudition” (77) through a “manipulative engagement of canonical...authorities,” in which he uses Augustine selectively to forge his own (different) program, “thus BOOK REVIEWS 199 camouflaging a de facto discontinuity by pretending continuity” (97-98). Proba, on the other hand, rewrites in a different way, claiming to find a hidden message of Christian salvation that was locked in the Vergilian poems all along, awaiting only the hand that could draw them out (112); this is set in contrast to Ausonius’ saucy use of the same authority in the Cento nuptialis. On both scores, Christian writers have to find a way to deal with their own “secondariness,” with writing what Gerard Genette (to whom Pollmann refers) calls “literature in the second degree” under the stern stare of their literary ancestors who, in the words of W. H. Auden, “challenge, warn and witness.” Pollman deals with the phenomenon admirably, whether the source text in view is the Bible, a prose Vita of a saint, or a poetic forebear. One further type not covered, but meriting further research in the future, is how to approach authors who transform their own texts, giving different versions in verse and prose; significant here is Sedulius’s foray into the opus geminatum: the Carmen paschale (in verse) and Opus paschale (in prose). But one cannot cover everything, and what Pollmann covers she covers thoroughly. We live in the best time for reading late Latin poetry...

Ideas on language in Early Latin Christianity: From Tertullian to Isidore of Seville. By Tim Denecker

This article reviews Ideas on Language in Early Latin Christianity: From Tertullian to Isidore of Seville 978-90-04-34987-2€ 149.00

Central-Eastern Europe in the Global Context

L’article examine d’abord la notion d’Europe centrale et orientale en tant que région qui, ayant rejoint l’Europe chrétienne latine peu avant l’an 1000, lutte depuis des siècles pour « rattraper » l’Occident. Pourtant, dans le même temps, cette région a facilité l’émergence globale de l’Occident en fournissant un modèle pertinent d’économie dépendante « proto-coloniale », à travers le commerce de blé dans la mer Baltique. De plus, sa conquête s’est avérée cruciale pour la montée des empires des Habsbourg et de la Russie et leur statut de grandes puissances. Bordant la steppe tatare et l’Empire ottoman, l’Europe centrale et orientale a également contribué aux contacts avec l’Islam, dont la longue tradition ne se limitait pas à la guerre.

Friaries as the Cradle of the Profit Economy in the Early Modern Urban Society in Eastern and Central Europe? A Case of the Franciscans in the 17–18th Century Vilnius

[article in English; abstract and key words in English and Lithuanian]
 This paper analyzes the economic activities of the Conventual Franciscans in the early modern urban society of Vilnius from the second part of the 17th until the end of the 18th centuries. We ask the key question whether the Franciscans had embraced the “profit economy” in a similar way that Lester K. Little famously portrayed them do in the Latin Christendom at the end of the medieval ages. This paper will look at the economic model of the Franciscan order based on their income and expenses books, and it will delve into their key economic activities: financial services and property management.