Commentary Tradition Research Articles

From Augustus’s Soup to Augustus Gloop: The Persistence of Punishing ‘Bad Eaters’ in Nineteenth-century Children’s Literature and Beyond

While previous accounts of the function of food in children’s literature have mainly focused on fiction, this article examines nineteenth-century poetry and drama where ‘bad eating’ is constructed as a form of anti-social behaviour that children should be warned against and should learn to despise in others as well as themselves. Poetry for children, throughout the century, is designed to be repeated orally, often learned by heart and thus internalised: its emblematic characters, secured in memory by rhyme and metre, therefore have particular staying power in childhood consciousness that makes the trope of the ‘bad eater’ especially durable. Theatrical representations, likewise, serve to set the image of the unruly child eater within comic traditions that offer his or her body as an absurd spectacle at which the audience can confidently scoff. These tropes and images have a literary longevity that both reflects and sustains aspects of blame around ‘anti-social’ eating, which children internalise from a young age.

The unity of matter

ABSTRACT According to the Aristotelian account of substantial change, that is, the corruption of one substance and the generation of another, prime matter must be found at the starting and at the end point of change, as that which persists throughout the change. But knowing that matter remains as the substrate of change tells us little about the nature of this matter, which constitutes both the corrupted substance and the new generated substance. Among the questions we can ask about its nature are whether prime matter is an entity of its own apart from form; whether it is one in all those individual material substances or is somehow divided or partitioned into different parts. Early commentaries on the Physics and Metaphysics were interested in precisely these questions about the unity and divisibility of prime matter and about what kind of unity this may be. This article aims to investigate how authors from the English commentary tradition in the period 1250–1270 answered these questions.

Neither Corpus Nor Edition: Building a Pipeline to Make Data Analysis Possible on Medieval Arabic Commentary Traditions

We have built a suite of tools in Python to proficiently analyze text reuse and intertextuality for a specific kind of set of medieval Arabic texts (commentaries) available in print. We take these printed editions, scan them, pre-process the images, give it to an OCR engine, clean the results, and store it in a data structure that mimics the explicit intertextual relation the texts have, and continue to perform data analysis on it. Digital approaches to medieval Arabic texts have either been at the micro-level in what has become known as a ‘digital edition’, i.e. the digital representation of one text, densely annotated, most commonly in TEI-XML, or it has been done at the macro-level in what is called a ‘digital corpus’, consisting of thousands of loosely encoded and sparsely annotated plain text files, accompanied by an entire infrastructure and high-performing software to perform broadly scoped queries. The micro-level generally is at the level of tens of thousands of words while the macro-level can be at the level of over a billion words. The micro-level is explicitly designed to be human readable first, while the macro-level is built to be machine readable first. At the micro-level, every little detail needs to be correct and in order, while at the macro-level a fairly large margin of error is still negligible as a mere rounding error. Amidst these levels we have been seeking a meso-level of digital analysis: neither edition nor corpus, but rather a group of texts at the level of hundreds of thousands to millions of words, with a small but perceptible margin of error, and a light but noticeable level of annotations, principally geared towards machine readability, but with ample opportunity for visual inspection and manual correction. In this paper we explain the rationale for our approach, the technical achievements it has led us to, and the results we so far obtained.

A Joban Theology of Consolation

AbstractContrary to much of the commentary tradition, the book of Job is not primarily a discourse on how to properly speak (or withhold speech) about God in the midst of innocent suffering, nor is it aimed primarily at offering up the character of Job as an exemplar of how to suffer correctly (or incorrectly). Neither is it a treatise about human submission to (or rebellion from) God’s mysterious sovereign prerogative in permitting evil. It is instead a theological exploration of the dilemmas and demands of consolation that confront us given the inexplicable enormities of human suffering. Its unifying aim is to confront us with multiple voices that pull us into an open-ended—and decidedly pessimistic—reflection on what innocent suffering reveals to us about our creaturely limits and the fragility of our hope in God, features of the human condition that require our capacities for compassion to exceed our capacities for theological sense-making.

Hadis Şerh Geleneğinde Manzûmeler: Buhârî’nin es- Sahîh’ine Dair Türkçe Bin Ehâdîs Şerhi

Hz. Peygamber henüz hayatta iken sınırlı da olsa sözlerinin nazmedilmesine müsaade etmesiyle bazı rivayetler şiirlere konu edilmiştir. Bunun yanı sıra Osmanlı’da şefaate ulaşma arzusuyla hadisleri nazmetme fikri, şairlerin hedeflerinden biri olurken dini sorumluluk ve literal bakış açısının tercümelere yansıtıldığı görülmektedir. Sahih-i Buhârî’den seçilen rivayetlerin şiirle şerh edilmesi maksadıyla yazılan İsmâil Sâdık Kemâl’e ait Bin Ehâdîs Şerhi, bu araştırmanın konusunu oluşturmaktadır. Hadis ilimlerinde usul alanında başlayan ve zamanla kırk hadis edebiyatında yoğunlaşan manzumelerin hadis şerh çalışmaları içerisindeki yerinin tespiti amaçlanmaktadır. Eserin yöntemi ve kaynakları gibi şekilsel incelemenin yanı sıra normatif yönü de bulunan örnek bir rivayet, tahlil edilmek suretiyle hadis şerhçiliğinin manzumedeki durumu nicel analiz yöntemiyle ele alınmaktadır. Bu doğrultuda Bin Ehâdîs Şerhi’ndeki 611 rivayetin Sahîh-i Buhârî hadislerinden, geri kalanlarının da farklı kitaplardan seçildiği tespit edilirken rivayetlerin didaktik bir yöntemle ve literal bir tercümeyle nazmedildiği, mezheplerin görüşlerini de ihtiva edecek şekilde fıkhî hükümlere işaret edilerek telif edildiği bulgularına ulaşılmıştır.

Adalbero of Laon's Poem to King Robert (1023–1025/7): a discourse against Cluniac reform or a commentary on monastic hypocrisy?

The purpose of this paper is to nuance the traditional interpretation of Bishop Adalbero of Laon's satirical Carmen ad Rotbertum regem as a rebuttal of Cluniac reform and its disruptive effect on early eleventh‐century society. Study of the text's literary antecedents reveals that its criticism was rooted in a tradition of commentaries on the conduct and attitudes of a much larger monastic cohort. Furthermore, comparison of its argument with evidence about the context and with a number of polemical statements regarding the relations between bishops and monastic leaders since the 990s indicates that the author's focus was on cautioning against abbots’ hypocrisy rather than against a programmatic reform.

سورة الضحى وتاريخية القرآن في الأدبيات الاستشراقية

Orientalists’ researches on the history of the Qur’an were based on claims that it was written in separate periods, the multiplicity of its authors, and the influence of Jewish and Christian beliefs and legislation on its development. Because the short and naive Meccan suras were completely excluded from the circle of their studies on the history and development of Prophet characteristics, as a crude primary product, sūraẗ al-ḍuḥa became a fertile ground for Orientalists’ interpretations that do not pay attention to traditional commentaries or occasions for revelation (āsbāb al-nuzūl). Although sūraẗ al-ḍuḥa refers to the unidentified person using the pronoun of the addressee, the orientalist translators of the Qur’an - such as Rodwell, Richard Bell, and Arthur Arberry – were compelled to link this pronoun to the Prophet peace be upon Him, based on classical exegesis. inadvertently uniting their peers interested in the development of the Messenger and the message, who ruled out that the pronoun belongs to the Messenger. From this hidden confrontation, contradictions arose about the adoption of the causes of revelation by some orientalists concerned with history, such as David Samuel Margolioth, Montgomery Watt, and other authors of controversial philosophical theories on the historicity of the Qur’an, such as John Edward Wansbrough, the author of the theory of historical crystallisation of the Qur’an. This paper is concerned with explaining the dependence of the reasons for the revelation by some orientalists, after which they considered it a natural entrance to the interpretation of the verses, the difference between the interpreters themselves about the reason for the approved revelation, and the interpretation of Surat Al-Duha between the interpreters of the Qur’an and the orientalists, and the approaches they adopted in interpretation. The approach adopted in this paper is the descriptive and analytical approach by going back to the Orientalist sources and books of interpretation to reach a clear presentation of the Orientalist vision criticize it scientifically and uncover the fallacies and contradictions that surrounded their viewpoints.

EC COMICS — PUBLISHING HOUSE THAT ALMOST CONQUERED AMERICA

Until recently, comics was virtually absent in Russia, but now it is becoming one of The most dynamically developing forms of art. Such processes have taken place in one way or another in all countries with a developed comics industry, and how medium passes through such periods depends on its social status, genre and presumed reader age etc. Therefore, The study of these crisis periods allows us to explain many features of different comic traditions. At The same time, comics, like many mass culture forms, cannot be analyzed in a vacuum. It is first of all a commercial product that exists and develops thanks to The public’s requests, hopes and fears, even where it is not spoken aloud. The subject of The study is American publisher EC Comics in The early 1950s, when it was at The center of The process of renewal and transformation of The local industry. The object of The study is The unique combination of narratives oriented towards social and political criticism of The existing systems with narratives based on rather superficial emotional and shock factors. Only by looking at them as a whole can we fully appreciate The defining role of EC Comics in shaping The American comics system as a whole. Also, EC Comics is virtually unrepresented in contemporary Russian historiography, although in The United States over The past twenty years several important works devoted its history.

Миф о Нарциссе во французской литературе раннего Ренессанса: фрагмент, аллегория, эмблема

This article examines the evolution of medieval interpretations of the myth of Narcissus (Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book III) in French literature of the first half of the 16th century. Jeanne Flore in the “Comptes amoureux” develops the courtesan interpretation of the myth, in which Narcissus, who rejects Cupid’s omnipotence, is combined with the figure of Belle dame sans mercy. In the tradition of moral and allegorical commentary, the young man in love with himself served as a symbol of hubris excessively immersed in worldly goods; in the mid-century, this tradition changed under the influence of humanism: with François Habert and Barthélémy Aneau the story of Narcissus illustrates the maxim “know thyself.” Reception of the Metamorphoses in the Middle Ages implied a fragmentation of the text of the poem: the courtly interpretation referred to its separate subjects, while the allegorical interpretation transformed it into a list of symbolic characters with a stable independent meaning and into a set of didactic maxims of a universal character. During the Renaissance, literati seek to restore the coherence of Ovid’s text. This tendency is embodied not only in new translations (by Clément Marot, F. Habert, B. Aneau) but also, paradoxically, within the genre of the emblem. The “Metamorphose d’Ovide figurée” inherits the medieval florilegiums and transforms the tradition of illuminated manuscripts: on the one hand, it replaces the text of the poem with a series of engravings, while, on the other, its emblems arrangement recreates the unity of the poem. Ovid’s emblematic treatment embodies Horace’s principle of ut pictura poesis.

자유와 自治

What does it mean to read Ham Seok-heon in the 21st century? Furthermore, what does it mean to read the ‘East-Asian Classics’ through him? In this article, I would like to raise a few issues that existing discussions on the relationship between Ham Seok-heon and the East-Asian Classics have not paid attention to, in order to point out the points that we should give more weight to in the hermeneutics of Ham Seok-heon’s ‘Chewing on Old Classics’. First, Ham’s should be read as an independent text in its own right, not as a commentary on the ‘Oriental Classics’. Second, his SSi-al’ Readings of Old Classics should be read in the context of life and place in contemporary Korea, rather than the Laozi and the Zhuangzi relationships it addresses. Third, the meanings and values in SSi-al’ Readings of Old Classics do not lie in its original interpretation of traditional commentaries, but rather in the “common sense” that guided the perceptions and practices of Ssi-al in the democratization process of twentieth-century Korea. To emphasize this aspect, I contrast it with the interpretation of the Zhuangzi in China during the same period. I want to argue that if Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century anticipated their own destiny through the interpretation and discussion of the Zhuangzi, Ham Seok-heon’s reading of the Zhuangzi was expressed as the voice of Ssi-al, which changed the subject of interpretation and at the same time called for the values of modern freedom and equality and preached the ideology of democracy and self-government to realize them. In reading Ham Seok-heon in this way, I believe that we can properly evaluate the historical and philosophical meaning and value of SSi-al’ Readings of Old Classics.

The Context Of Ḥadīth Narration On Prophet Sulaymān Visiting Multiple Wives In A Single Night

The paper aims to shed light on the contextual background of prophetic tradition on “Prophet Sulaymān Visiting Multiple Wives in A Single Night” which has been given as an example of a contradiction between ḥadīth and logic. It tells the story of Prophet Sulaymān sleeping with an enormous number of wives in a single night. Being portrayed as carrying erotic message, the ḥadīth has also been deduced as an example of forgery committed by the ḥadīth scholars themselves. This study aims to clarify the problematic allegations, deduce a number of responses and compare the ideas from significant finding in Jewish and Christian sources. It suggests that such problematic ḥadīth implicitly implying a form of muʿjizāt and karāmah in such tradition. The study is conducted in qualitative manner based on library research technique. Relevant data material were collected from the nine canonical ḥadīth books, traditional commentaries (sharh), Biblical sources and related article and were analysed in a descriptive and analytical, and comparative manner. The finding shows that the ḥadīth fulfils the criteria of a rigorously authenticated ḥadīth given its inclusion in the canonical works of hadith and corroborated in other tradition and highly established in ḥadīth narrations. Hence, the claim of fabrication was categorically dismissed; the number of wives should be understood in general as indicating numerous wives while, ignoring the particular numbers. The study implicitly shows that the paragraph “single night” alluded to the narrative of muʿjizāt.

Modalidades de recepción plautina en los productos dramáticos audiovisuales: recepción directa, mediada y subterránea

This article offers a typology of modalities of reception based on the criteria of activity, (in) mediatedness and awareness, which aims to explain the presence of scenes and motifs with Plautinian parallels in the audiovisual dramatic products of the popular culture of our time: sitcoms, soap operas, quality drama… In some cases, a conscious reception, either direct or mediated, can be recognised. In many others, however, we are faced with possible cases of unconscious mediated reception, in which Plautinian materials, detached from their context and deprived of their authorial pedigree, seem to have become independent ingredients in the melting pot of the Western comic tradition, giving rise, so to speak, to an unconscious and subterranean Plautinian reception.

Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste (eds.). Summistae: The Commentary Tradition on Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae from the 15th to the 17th Centuries (Leuven, 2021)

Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste (eds.). Summistae: The Commentary Tradition on Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae from the 15th to the 17th Centuries (Leuven, 2021)

Summistae: The Commentary Tradition on Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" from the 15th to the 17th Centuries ed. by Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste (review)

Summistae: The Commentary Tradition on Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" from the 15th to the 17th Centuries ed. by Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste (review)

Who is Asking?: Afro-Arthurian Legend-making in N.K. Jemisin's Far Sector

Abstract: Whether an Arthurian knight, a Green Lantern, or a Legendborn, one cannot have a legacy without first becoming a legend. In N.K. Jemisin's graphic novel Far Sector (2020) Sojourner 'Jo' Muellein's story as both community activist and guardian echoes, reinvents, and reimagines Arthurian romances through the lens of Afrofuturism; further, this fantastical remix challenges white supremacist modes of oppressive comic tradition by foregrounding racial and gendered identities. Making a legend is not about whom society has agreed to be the answer. Instead, such ideals lie with whoever asks the question. (DCN)

Theorie und Praxis der Literaturvermittlung. Erläuterungsreihen und Textkommentar bei Heinrich Düntzer, Albert Zipper und Georg Witkowski und ihr Nachklang bis zur Gegenwart

Theorie und Praxis der Literaturvermittlung<b>. Erläuterungsreihen und Textkommentar bei Heinrich Düntzer, Albert Zipper und Georg Witkowski und ihr Nachklang bis zur Gegenwart</b>

Художественное своеобразие романа А. Кампаниле «Так что же такое любовь?»

The article presents an analysis of the first novel by A. Campanile “What is love?” (1927). A. Campanile is a little-known Italian writer-comedian in Russia, whose work has not been sufficiently studied in Italian and foreign literary criticism. The novel “What is love?” is not translated into Russian. In Italy, the novel was a great success, even though the comic tradition at that time was not well developed, critics did not take humorous works seriously. The purpose of this work is to comprehend the role and significance of the author’s heritage in the history of Italian and world literature, consider humorous techniques and analyze the comic technique in A. Campanile’s novel “What is love?” The main methodological basis of the study is a combination of historical-literary, historical-cultural, and comparative methods. The materials presented in the article allow us to conclude that the novel “What is love?” does not have the structure of a traditional novel. The main comic techniques include the disruption of the communication process between the characters, absurd characterizations, the technique of shifting and thickening (Z. Freud). The writer’s passion for mixing styles, montage writing technique testifies to Campanile’s predilection for experimental literature. The text is distinguished by the montage technique of the composition. The writer achieves a comic effect not only through paradox, word play, illogicality, but also through the novel’s unconventional form, structure violation, useless inserts and remarks.

Oral and Written Shī‘ī Qur’ānic Elucidations in Twentieth-Century Indian Subcontinent

Sayyid ‘Alī Naqī Naqvī (Ar. al-Naqawī, d. 1988), popularly known as Sayyid al-‘Ulamā’ and Naqqan Ṣāḥib, is widely regarded as the most prolific, influential, and popular Indian Shī‘ī ‘ālim of the twentieth century. Although the author of a multi-volume tafsīr, Faṣl al-Khiṭāb, which includes a long prolegomenon (muqaddimah), Naqvī’s Qur’ānic elucidations are hardly limited to this text alone; they are to be found throughout his vast corpus. In this article, I attempt an overview of Naqvī’s multi-faceted engagement with the Qur’ān by weaving together these interspersed elucidations. This will be in contrast to the common scholarly approach that focuses on tafsīr as the only Qur’ānic commentary tradition worthy of study in Muslim piety and religious thought. Illustrating how Naqvī engages with the Qur’ān will shed light not only on the relatively invisible and understudied subject of the Qur’ān and its exegesis within contemporary South Asian Shiism but also on the amply deliberated major themes of religious and communal concern in contemporary Shī‘ī South Asia.

Methods of Philosophic Critique Native to the Laozi

Lao-Zhuang thought and the Laozi in particular is frequently interpreted as providing a critique of the dominant social values of its time. In English language literature, this often entails utilizing thinkers from the Western tradition of philosophic critique from Kant onwards, thereby obscuring the critical methods unique to the text itself. Chinese language literature, on the other hand, rarely uses the semantics of philosophic critique which thereby prevents the text from contributing its own unique voice to the discourse of critique. This paper attempts to put the Laozi into discourse with the wider tradition of philosophic critique, broadening the tradition with a unique “Chinese voice”, but allowing it to speak in its own terms according to the text itself, the commentarial tradition, and modern scholarship.

Towards Others: Confucian Shu’s (Due Consideration) Three Types of Gongfu (Practice)

The Confucian philosophy of the Dao of due consideration 恕 (shu) and of “Do not impose upon others what you yourself do not desire ” 己所不欲，勿施於人 undoubtedly involves the question of “others” and addresses the spiritual pursuit of individual equality, mutual agreement, and communality. Confucianism’s theory of practice 工夫 (gongfu), while emphasizing the establishment and success of oneself, also requires the ability to make others established and successful. There are basically three paths for the virtuous subject to reach others: “taking what is near at hand as an analogy ” 能近取譬 (neng jin qu pi), the “measure” 度 (duo) of considering other people’s emotions on the basis of one’s own emotions 將心比心 (jiang xin bi xin), and putting oneself in the place of others 推己及人 (tui ji ji ren). The present study, drawing on the long commentarial tradition, will fully explicate them as gongfu, that is, as concrete processes of moral practice, revealing the three paths of the Dao of due consideration from self to others, and interpreting them in relation to the dimension of the other in Confucian ethical philosophy. All three are unified and highly practical and are effective means of realizing Confucian benevolence 仁 (ren). They do not exist in a sequential ascending relationship. Through diligent moral practice, people can “help others to take their stand” 立人 (liren) and “help others to realize themselves” 達人 (daren) by following any one of the three types of gongfu.