Brepols

The Didascalia apostolorum is one of the ancient church orders, setting out the duties and responsibilities of laypeople, bishops and widows, regulating the keeping of Pascha and engaging in polemic with Judaism. It is a work of extraordinary interest for the history of the church in Syria, as a document of social and liturgical history and as a document bearing witness to relations between Christians and Jews.

Alistair Stewart-Sykes presents the text in a readable English version which takes full account of the various textual witnesses. Of particular importance is the introduction. The Didascalia is conventionally ascribed to a single hand in third-century Syria, but here an entirely new compositional hypothesis is proposed in which the work is shown to be composite and to include sources of much greater antiquity than the period of final redaction. In the light of the compositional hypothesis there are radically new discussions of ministry (including the ministry of widows), relationships with Judaism, and liturgy (including the penitential process). Beyond this the introduction engages with the social context in which these developments emerged.

The work is suitable for a wide audience. The translation will be useful to undergraduate and graduate students whereas the introduction and commentary will be of interest to scholars in ecclesiastical history, historical liturgy, forming Judaism and Jewish-Christian relations as well as Syriac studies.

The author, Alistair Stewart-Sykes, is well-known in the field having produced the first critical text for over a century of the Apostolic church order and the first full-length commentary on the Apostolic tradition.

This book offers an anthology from the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Patristic Studies, “The Discoveries of Manuscripts from Late Antiquity: Their Impact on Patristic Studies and the Contemporary World”, which took place in San Juan, Argentina, in March 2017. The aim of this event was to analyze and assess 20th- and 21st-century discoveries of manuscripts from Late Antiquity. Indeed, complete libraries of manuscripts, as well as individual documents of great importance for our understanding of historical authors and situations, have come to light after having been buried for millennia. Just some examples are the incredible discoveries of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic library, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Origen of Alexandria’s homilies, and Augustine’s sermons, among others. Rather than being passive documents, these manuscripts pose numerous questions to specialists from a diverse array of fields, demanding new evaluations of a past that was already thought to be understood and judged.

The references to Charles the Bold´s work, which are largely drawn from the accounts of the chambres des comptes at Lille and Brussels, amply illustrate the aesthetic preferences of the Burgundian nobility. All the relevant documents, most of which have not been published before, appear in appendix I. The second part of the book reviews the votive portraits of Charles the Bold. The circumstances surrounding the commission of the Liège statuette - Loyet´s sole surviving work - are discussed in detail, and all documents relating to the statuette are included in appendix II. In the second chapter of part II, the focus is on the statuette´s iconography, which is unique for a votive gift. Charles´s motives are further investigated in the final chapter of part II, which discusses the votive portraits that he donated to other shrines. In the third and final part, the attention shifts to votive gifts, and more specifically to the genre of votive portraits.

The Drama of Reform establishes the impact of late medieval and early modern religious reform on dramaturgy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it examines the interactions between theatricality and theology across a range of different plays including the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Jacke Jugeler, John Bale’s Three Laws, and Lewis Wager’s Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene. Tracing the development of arguments concerning the interpretation of the sacraments, the relationship between priests and players, and the use and abuse of imagery and drama in religious worship, The Drama of Reform draws on a rich variety of contextual materials including liturgical texts, heresy trial accounts, dramatic treatises, polemical tracts, and religious laws.

Focussed on the period between Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions in the fifteenth century and Archbishop Cranmer’s second Book of Common Prayer in the sixteenth, The Drama of Reform explores the phenomenological similarities between drama and certain religious rites, notably the eucharist, and proposes that religious reform prompted attempts to reform dramaturgy. In presenting this analysis, the author argues that while drama continued to function as dramatic propaganda, efforts to initiate new modes of playing were only partially successful.

2010 saw the publication of the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Science of Computus in Ireland and Europe, which took place in Galway, 14–16 July, 2006. That first collection, which had the sub-title Computus and its Cultural Context in the Latin West, AD 300–1200, brought together papers by ten of the leading scholars in the field, on subjects ranging from the origins of the Annus Domini to the study of computus in Ireland c. 1100. All those who participated in the Conference were unanimous that a second, follow-up event should be organized, and that duly took place (also in Galway), 18–20 July, 2008. The proceedings of that Conference are published in this current volume. The topics covered in the 2nd Galway Conference ranged from the general – but vitally important – vocabulary of computus (i.e., the technical terminology developed by computists to describe what they were doing) to the origins of the different systems used to calculate the date of Easter in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In addition, there was discussion also of the great debates about Easter, epitomized by the famous Synod of Whitby in AD 664, and the role of well-known individuals in the evolution of computistical knowledge (e.g., Anatolius of Laodicea, the African Augustalis, Sulpicius Severus, Victorius of Aquitaine, Cassiodorus, Dionysius Exiguus, Willibrord, the ninth-century Irish scholar-exile, Dicuil, as well as the late-tenth century Abbo of Fleury). Immo Warntjes is lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Greifswald (Germany). Besides computistics, his main areas of research include the use of languages in Early Medieval Europe, succession to high offices, high and late medieval burial practices, and German, English, and Irish political history and culture. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín lectures in history at NUI, Galway, where he is the Director of The Foundations of Irish Culture project. His research interests are Ireland, Britain and Europe during the Early Middle Ages, computistics, Medieval Latin Palaeography and Irish traditional music and song.

This publication is a collection of essays on the function and significance of emblematic decoration of buildings in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, dealing with general issues involved in architectural emblematics, while a number of the essays are case studies of specific types of building.

The emblematic decoration of buildings, both secular and ecclesiastical, was widespread in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The function and significance of such decoration is, however, frequently overlooked. The two introductory essays seek to come to grips with the general issues involved in architectural emblematics. The remaining essays are case studies of specific types of building while the final two consider the relation of architecture to the book. The essays are revised versions of selected papers presented at an international conference on the subject held at the Canadian centre for Architecture in November 1994.

This volume offers a comparative approach to the crusade movement on the frontiers of Latin Christendom in the high Middle Ages, bringing a regional focus to research on these peripheral phenomena. It features several key questions: Which military campaigns were propagated as crusades on the peripheries of the Christian West? What efforts were made to gain recognition for them as crusades and what effects did these have? What value did the crusade movement have for societies at the fines christianitatis? What role did the cruciatae have in strengthening pan-Western sense of togetherness and solidarity, and what role did they have for creation of a crusader and frontier identity? The eighteen papers, ranging in scope from the southern and eastern Baltic regions to Iberia, Egypt and the Balkans, provide new insights into the ways in which crusade rhetoric was reflected in the culture and literature of countries involved in crusading beyond the Holy Land.

The foundations of European civilization as we know it today were laid in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The Faces of the Other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the Later Roman World traces the roots of the attitudes and argumentation about religious or ethnic otherness in modern western culture. It aims at deepening the historical understanding of attitudes towards otherness as well as cultural and religious conflicts in world history. The Faces of the Other discusses the conceptions, depictions, and attitudes towards the other in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The book focuses on the perception of otherness, whether other peoples or religions, in the Later Roman Empire as understood broadly, from the first until the fifth century CE. These others are ethnic others such as the Persians, Huns, and the Germanic peoples were to Romans, or religious others such as Jews were to Christians or Christians to Jews, Christians to pagans or pagans to Christians, or different cults to the ‘mainstream’ Romans, or different Christian sects to each other.

This book unravels how the agricultural sector and the rural world in Europe became more and more organised within capitalism in the years 1870-1940, and this with the aim of tackling the important challenges of the time. The focus is not so much on the myriad of individual farmers’ actions, but on the collective efforts undertaken through the interplay between the state and the agricultural civil society.

A wide variety of actors, from landowners associations, farmers’ unions, cooperatives, scientific institutions and researchers to farmers themselves (or civil society) played a critical role in the process of drafting a policy agenda, developing agricultural policies and were instrumental in implementing them in close relationship with the state. The result was a metamorphosis from mobilisation and representation of agrarian interests to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level, which would only reach its highest point after the Second World War.

These issues are explored by established rural historians, covering a period of seven decades (1870-1940). The papers provide a wide geographical perspective, from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean.