Medieval Tradition Research Articles

Heidegger's argument for fascism

AbstractHeidegger's ontological theories, his observations about liberalism and fascism, and his evaluation of Being are three premises of an argument for fascism. The ontological premise is that integrated wholes and instruments or objects of will are ontologically superior, as Being and Time suggests in discussing Being‐a‐whole and using tools. The social premise is that fascist societies are wholes integrated by dictatorial will, while liberal societies are looser aggregates of free individuals, as Heidegger describes in his 1930s seminars. The evaluative premise, shared with the medieval tradition and expressed in his notebook remarks about war, is that ontological superiority makes things better. The conclusion that fascism is better than liberalism should be rejected along with the evaluative premise.

Heavens of Knowledge: The Order of Sciences in Dante’s Convivio

The essay focuses on Dante’s divisio scientiae presented in the second book of his Convivio. As a first step, it offers a fresh reading of Dante’s description of knowledge and the cosmos, emphasizing its deeply visual nature. The article then presents an overview of the Medieval tradition of the divisio scientiae, culminating with divisions that are geographically and chronologically close to Dante’s Florence. In relation to Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica and Tresor, new evidence is provided to elucidate his peculiar division of logic. Ultimately, Dante’s divisio and its objectives are reassessed in light of their historical background, underscoring their cosmological and totalizing scope. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the findings consider cognitive practices, such as diagrams, and examine a wide array of sources within their historical and institutional context, highlighting their transmission and dissemination.

Our Heritage: Hungarian Protestant Antiphons

During the Middle Ages, the seemingly diverse liturgical practices across Europe were actually rooted in stable centers with long-standing traditions, with the Hungarian archbishopric center, Esztergom, notably contributing its own variant known as the Esztergom rite. This regional custom became the basis of liturgical practice in all of Hungary until it was replaced by the official Roman liturgy in 1630. The Esztergom rite, characterized by a blend of European and Hungarian traditions, influenced Hungarian Protestantism, leading to the development of vernacular plainchant, particularly flourishing from the mid-16th century onward. This resulted in a unique repertoire of Protestant vernacular chant, primarily found in gradual books. Research confirms that the majority of Hungarian Protestant graduals were not influenced by foreign models, but can be traced back to local medieval traditions, especially those of Esztergom. Keywords: antiphon, Hungarian Protestant Gradual-books, medieval Hungarian tradition, Esztergom/Strigonium rite.

False Religion and Hypocrisy in Signorelli's Antichrist

This article discusses the iconography of Luca Signorelli's Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist (c.1502–3) in the Cappella Nuova at the cathedral of Orvieto. A combined investigation of the Antichrist's subject matter, Signorelli's literary and visual sources, as well as his discarded drawings for the entire fresco decoration of the Cappella Nuova, brings fresh insights to the thematic intentions of the artist and his advisers. Signorelli's entire view of eschatology marked a renewed interest of Italian artists in the apocalyptic sublime. It also signified a revival of the medieval tradition of the Antichrist as the arch-hypocrite, and his reign as an apocalyptic age of hypocrisy. At the same time, the artist's treatment of the subject matter indicates an ambiguous stance toward religious hypocrisy characterized by a suppression of the anti-clerical and millenarian aspects of the Antichrist myth.

„Diplomaţia conferinţelor” sau intelectualizarea politicii externe a RPR sub regimul lui Gheorghiu-Dej

Once Romania came under the influence of the Soviet Union, the new regime established in 1948 was integrated into the diplomatic system created by the Kremlin. The party-state in Bucharest participated in youth festivals, the world women's movement, intellectuals' conferences, the Christian Peace Movement, and particularly the World Peace Congress. All of these events served as propaganda instruments to discourage a more assertive Western anti-Sovietism. Since 1954, Khrushchev initiated a shift in Soviet policy, one focused on peaceful coexistence rather than confrontation between the two formerly irreconcilable political camps. The Romanian People's Republic, along with other state socialist countries, emulated this novel approach in Moscow. The article explores the impact of the new course on Romania’s cultural diplomacy in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. To establish credible diplomatic efforts, there was a need to rethink socialist culture and revalue the pre-communist heritage. This new culture was based on the Leninist principle of “the new culture, national in form, socialist in content”. It signaled that the regime had moved beyond de-Stalinization, and now possessed internal legitimacy that no longer relied on the presence of Soviet troops in the country. However, this socialist culture drew inspiration from postwar autochthonized Bolshevik (Stalinist) nationalism. The medieval tradition rediscovered by Soviet cultural studies (such as Dmitry Likhachev, Viktor Lazarev, or Boris Rybakov) fueled anti-Soviet sentiments in Bucharest, leading, by 1964, to a significant distancing from Moscow. This article traces the diplomatic efforts of the Romanian People's Republic during this period of latent learning of the new rules of the political game within the socialist camp.

CONCEPTE FUNDAMENTALE PENTRU O FENOMENOLOGIE A TRANSFORMĂRII EXPERIENȚEI

In this paper, I aim to phenomenologically analyze the transformation of experience, which can be epitomized both by religious conversion and phenomenological reduction. In so doing, I propose a definite set of concepts such as: self-dislodgement and relodgement (dislocare-relocare), open and closed experience, consolidation of experience, hierarchy of relevance and others. I show the clarifying potential of this terminology by putting it at work in a phenomenological reading of some excerpts from Augustine’s Confessions. Moreover, I argue that this conceptuality is deeply rooted both in the medieval tradition of self-understanding of the believer—such as Hildegard of Bingen—and in the Romanian phenomenological tradition, exemplified by Alexandru Dragomir.

The colorful facade decorations of the secession style in Sofia. Sofia mineral baths and the recovering of missing elements

The report presents the national specific of the Secession style in the colourful ceramic decoration of some buildings in Sofia. The most representative between them are the church of St ?Nikolay Novi Sofiiski?, buildings of the Synodal Palace, the Central Mineral Baths, and the Higher Theological School at the Holy Synod, built and decorated between 1900 and 1922. They are the works of the architects Friedrich Gr?nanger, Yurdan Milanov and Petko Momchilov. The accent of the research is the ceramic decoration of the facades of the Central Mineral Baths in Sofia, by the project of Haralampi Tachev. The details of the types of ornaments are presented and analysed. The graphic designs for the restoration of the missing elements were considered. The impact of colour in the design of the facades is analysed. The peculiarities in the decoration and the connection of this style with the medieval elements, were examined. The connection of the facade solutions with the Bulgarian historical traditions of the early Middle Ages and Byzantium is explained through examples from Preslav, the capital of the First Bulgarian Kingdom. This way the coloured ceramic tiles of the facades of the Central Mineral Baths are represented as an expression of the Bulgarian medieval tradition in the Secession style in Sofia. The colour facade interpretations of the buildings in Vienna, Paris and Prague of that period are presented for comparison and demonstration of the national differences, decisions and tasks of the Secession style.

Envy: An Insidious Emotion in Medieval Anglo-Norman Tradition of England

There are two main categories of emotion theories: basic emotion and componential theories. While these theories are generally focused on the contemporary world, they may provide new perspectives on medieval literature. Roman de Horn and Boeve de Haumtone are Anglo-Norman romances that tell the stories of noble, handsome, and good-looking heroes who become courageous along their journeys. Although they somehow begin their journey with bad luck, they both triumph in the end. All these seemingly spectacular characteristics of the heroes naturally evoke envy among others. Envy occurs when someone's autonomy or closely identified persons/property is threatened. In both romances, the heroes battle against false accusations made by their enviers. In this respect, the major concern of this article is to explore how the philosophical and emotional significance of envy performs in medieval tradition.

From Spiritual Guide to Church Mother

Abstract This article compares late medieval and early modern patterns of women’s preaching in Strasbourg. Medieval women circumvented gendered restrictions against female preaching through performative acts of embodied devotion. This article compares the embodied sermons of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenburg and the printed sermons of Katharina Schütz Zell to discuss the change and continuity in late medieval and early modern women’s preaching. Using Beverly Kienzle’s definition of the sermon and Roxanne Mountford’s concept of rhetorical space, I identify continuity in both’s women’s conformity to gendered regimes of piety. I also argue that Protestant reform shifted the location of female religious authority from embodied piety to printed sermons, but in a way that reflects a continuity with medieval traditions of female preaching. Overall this article demonstrates how women’s preaching persisted within the theological and cultural changes of the early modern period.

The Education of Children and Youth in the Seventeenth Century Amsterdam’s Western Sephardi Community

This article is a study of how the Amsterdam Sephardi congregation organized its educational system starting in the early 1600s. On 25 May 1616, the two existing congregations at the time, Bet Jacob [House of Jacob] and Neve Salom [Dwellings of Peace], founded the “Hebra Kedosa Talmud Torah” [Holy Confraternity Talmud Torah], an institution that was to fund the education of male children and youth. On that day, the lay congregational leaders elected two interim officers to organize the festivities two days later on Shavuot, the Jewish festival traditionally associated with the initiation of children in the study of the Torah. The newly formed school educated male children as young as five years old and consisted of six grades, starting with the teaching of the Hebrew alphabet, and ending with the Talmud. In 1637, the congregation founded the “Ets Haim” [Tree of Life] confraternity to provide stipends to older, deserving, and talented students, so that they remained in school. A third stage took place in 1639 when the three congregations united into one under the name “Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah,” and the merged school consisted of seven grades. The author argues that this educational system was a blending of attributes from the Jewish medieval tradition and the Iberian Jesuit system which emphasized the character formation of its students that the lay founders of the Sephardi congregation had experienced while they were living as conversos in Spain or Portugal.

Paradox of practical atheism in Raimund Lullus spiritual quests

The intuitions of Raimundus Lullus religious metaphysics are in this article explicated according to the opportunities of the convergence between the medieval and the new time philosophy. Such approach to the creativity of the thinker is possible, because his conception is one sides associated with the mystical symbolic theologism, that is typical for the medieval tradition, over sides develops Lullus the new understanding of the infinity of the world, inherent in the newtime philosophy. This opposition conditions some of the features of Lullus spiritual quest. This quest connected the respect to the past, that causes the homesickness to the lost ideals, together with the progressivity - the presentation of the future. This presentiment is by Lullus expressed as the desire to change the external world. The aim of this change is the approximation of the rational theological base - the model for the real life. Lullus experiences the combination and the unrealized synthesis of this intentions as the tragedy. The acute and intensive conflict of this intentions triggers the practical atheism, when the stimulation of the external distraction of the evil leads causes the appearance and the activation of the new evil. This disaster of life is determined with some aspects of Lullus metaphysics, in that the infinity of God is realized as the infinity of the world. The infinity of the world is by Lullus given as the rational hierarchical order, leading to the creator of the world. The tragedy of life is for Lullus the marker, that emphasizes the crisis of the medieval philosophy, that was based on the revelation. This crisis discovers the land of new philosophy. This philosophy stresses the autonomy of the human personality.

The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut

Abstract This article considers debates in French literature before Guillaume de Machaut, with some references to Occitan and Latin. It demonstrates that debates were a widespread practice of the period, one which was frequently represented in texts and manuscripts. The first part of the article describes the practice of debate in terms of approaches that debaters can take: an intrinsic approach whereby the terms of the debate dictate the debaters’ strategy, and a contextual approach whereby debaters let their own particulars weigh in on the conversation. It shows how, far from imposing rigid modes of participation, these two complementary approaches gave debaters the opportunity to exploit the debate form for argumentative purposes. The second part discusses two manuscripts to show how the material presentation of texts could bring about debates in literary texts and compilations. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308 presents demandes d’amour as debates through illumination. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2609 exemplifies how the juxtaposition of texts creates a debate that runs across them. This article contributes to scholarship on debate literature on two different levels: it proposes that we consider the corpus of debate literature in French in terms of practice rather than genre; and it also makes the case for a thriving literary tradition of debate in the twelfth to early fourteenth century, a period often considered only as a prequel to a more robust late medieval tradition.

An Issue of Intercultural Communication: An Unknown Letter from the “Sultan of Babylon” to Pope Innocent VIII

Abstract In the University of Glasgow Library’s copy of Pius II’s Epistolae familiares (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 16 Sept. 1481), recorded on leaf 1–1v one can find a copy of a letter addressed to Pope Innocent VIII that starts with the heading “Soldanus pontifici Romano pro Restauracione Iunioris filii senioris Turchi”. The letter’s sender, who is referred to in the text as the “Sultan of Babylon”, was the Caliph of Cairo, al-Mutawakkil II (Abdul Aziz ibn Yaʿqub ibn Muhammad). The present text discusses the content of the letter and the issues regarding the question of its authorship. To ensure a comprehensive presentation of the argumentation, the paper not only discusses the content of the letter but also explores the wider context in which it was produced, situating it against the wider history of the Mamluk state and Mamluk diplomacy as well as the late medieval tradition of the exchange of correspondence (both real and fictitious) between the Christian and Muslim worlds. It needs underlining that not only has the content of the letter in question hitherto been substantially unknown to scholars, but the letter is furthermore the first discovered correspondent from an ʿAbbasid Caliph sent to the head of Western Christianity. The paper offers a contribution to research on intercultural communication. The paper comes with three appendices: a transliteration and a translation of the letter and a facsimile of the original record.

The Moral Status of Self-Love in Early Reformed Ethics

Abstract Reformed moral philosophers in the period of early orthodoxy (ca. 1550–ca. 1650) continue a medieval tradition of engaging moral questions in conversation with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and they often address the moral status of self-love in connection with the virtue of friendship. There is broad agreement among these authors that self-love is not only not necessarily sinful, but that some kinds of self-love are morally good and that self-love is the source and rule for love of one’s neighbor. Lambert Daneau’s Ethices Christianae, however, stands in a more complex relationship to this consensus.

The Medieval Tradition in the Ideology of the Karađorđević Dynasty

The Medieval Tradition in the Ideology of the Karađorđević Dynasty

Татарская застежка-ожерелье яка чылбыры: вопросы генезиса и этнокультурных взаимосвязей

The article is devoted to the history of the formation of the ethnospecific jewelry of the Kazan Tatars – a collar clasp-necklace called yaka chylbyry. This piece of jewelry in its classic look had formed by the early-middle 19th century. However, the artistic image of the constituent elements of this multicomponent product, as well as the techniques of its manufacture, go back to medieval traditions. The publication focuses on an earlier constructive analogue of the yaka chylbyry – a clasp for a woman's camisole in the shape of double sheep larvae. The functional reorientation – the use of a clasp for a doublet as a collar clasp-necklace occurred at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. The ram's face is considered by the authors as a result of the historical transformation of the "scarab" image typical for Russian caftan fasteners of the 16th–19th centuries. Echoes of the stylized motif of the ram can be seen on the classic yaka chylbyry up to the early-middle of the 20th century.

An Historical Overview of Jewish Theological Responses to Evolution

ABSTRACT While a systematic comparison of the similarities and differences between Jewish and Muslim approaches to evolution is beyond the scope of this study, it is possible to note some of the most striking observations. Among the key differences highlighted by an historical perspective on Jewish approaches in the late-nineteenth to present day are the phenomenon of panentheistic tendences among Jewish commentators and the practice of defining the position of Judaism against that of Christianity. In response to Malik’s theological approach, which attempted to identify medieval traditions as potential resources for contemporary Muslim evolutionists, it proved to be an interesting counter-factual exercise to generate a comparable list of pre-modern theological resources for Jewish evolutionists.

Journey or Destination? Rethinking Pilgrimage in the Western Tradition

Pilgrimage is undergoing a revival in western Europe, mainly as newly established or revitalised pilgrim routes, such as the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. These trails have helped to foster the widespread idea that pilgrimage is essentially a journey: a spiritual or “meaningful” journey undertaken slowly, and preferably on foot, in the medieval tradition. The purpose of this article is to problematise this journey-oriented understanding of pilgrimage in Christian and post-Christian societies and to suggest that the importance given to the pilgrimage journey by many scholars, and by wider society, is more a product of modern Western values and post-Reformation culture than a reflection of historical and current-day religious practices. Drawing on evidence from a range of contemporary sources, it shows that many medieval pilgrims understood pilgrimage as a destination-based activity as is still the case at numerous Roman Catholic shrines today.

Exalting Christ and God’s Sovereign Grace: Augustinianism and Anti-Arminianism in Samuel Rutherford’s Covenant of Works

ABSTRACT This article examines how Samuel Rutherford, a leading Reformed theologian in seventeenth-century Scotland, discussed Adam’s obedience and merit within the doctrine of the covenant of works and underscored grace as given by God’s free will. Rutherford utilised the late medieval Augustinian Thomas Bradwardine’s voluntarist thought on grace and ethics and highlighted the prevenient nature of grace. The distinctive features of Rutherford’s covenant of works stem from his rejection of the Arminian elevation of human ability and imposition of necessity on God’s ad extra activities by binding these activities with divine goodness and love. Thus, Rutherford’s doctrine of the pre-fall covenant was shaped by anti-Arminian and anti-Pelagian concerns. To pursue this polemic, two late mediaeval traditions of Bradwardinian Augustinianism and God’s covenantal acceptance eventually converged in the development of Rutherford’s covenant of works.

Chiselled in rock, printed on paper: Francesco Quaresmio and the epigraphy of the Holy Land

The substantial two-volume work Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio (1639) by the Franciscan friar Francesco Quaresmio (b. Lodi, Italy, 1583–1656) is known as a veritable encyclopaedia on the Holy Land. It is also an itinerary of pilgrimage through the sacred sites, taking their monumentality and graphic landscape into account. Quaresmio was especially attentive to the Latin inscriptions made by the Crusaders, here copied by him as autoptic testimonies. This is part of a more general phenomenon. From the fifteenth century through to the seventeenth, in Europe this period is sometimes called the “Age of Inscriptions”, during which epigraphy was recognized as a source of ancient history on a par with philology and archaeology. The overall aim of the present article is to show how Quaresmio, while continuing a medieval tradition of Franciscan scholarship, improved upon epigraphical study by deploying a specific technology, namely the visual rendering of uncial inscriptions in printed form. His rigorous observations, however, would have come to naught without the technical mastery of the Flemish printer-typographer Balthasar Moretus (1574–1641). Following previous developments in pilgrimage literature, where inscriptions – especially the Crusader epitaphs at the foot of Calvary – were commonplace, Quaresmio studied inscriptions not only as texts, but also considered their formal and material aspects. Ultimately, the present study argues that these Latin epigraphic texts played a role in the man’s theological argumentation and in the defence of the loca sancta as Latin possession.