Brepols

This book examines how the Venerable Bede constructs a racial order in his most famous historical writing, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a remarkable eighth-century work known for how it combines myth and history into a compelling, charming narrative of the English conversion to Christianity. Yet Bede’s History also disturbingly deploys Scripture’s tropes and types, many of them anti-Jewish, to render unflattering sketches of some of Britain’s “races” (gentes)-especially the Britons.

To uncover the History’s characterizations of what it identifies as the British, Irish, English, and Latin races, Foley examines three of its episodes that narrate attempted conversions of the first three races- respectively-either to Christianity or to a better, more orthodox, catholic, Latin version of it. This close analysis exposes the theological dimensions of each episode’s racial constructions. Foley argues that, unlike modern conceptions of race, which are grounded in imagined biological difference, Bede’s is rooted in his perception of a particular race’s affective disposition, its habits of the heart. More than that, Bede closely ties a race’s disposition to its relative proximity to theological orthodoxy and catholicity. This book’s close reading also highlights surprising similarities between Bede’s medieval Christian discourse and modern, secular and white discourses on race.

Archaeological periodization schemes of material culture development in Northern Mesopotamia from 7th to 5th centuries bce traditionally refer to the sequence of dynasties. In particular, they highlight historical events related to distinguished members of the royal houses of the Sargonids, Urartians, Medes, Teispids, and Achaemenids. However, whereas the repercussions these Iron Age empires had on the history of the Near East are undeniable, the impact they had on the material culture and its development is not always equally tangible in the archaeological findings. The latter are not infrequently characterized by continuity rather than by incisive changes, as recent studies and re-evaluations of key sites in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia show. This publication uses case studies to address problems that arises when the archaeological (relative concept) and historical (absolute concept) methodology use different intrinsic values of time to reconstruct history and to understand cultural material development.

Vaste question que celle des sources relatives à la colonisation belge en Afrique ! Alors que chercheurs et société civile réclament un (meilleur) accès aux « archives coloniales », il n’existait jusqu’ici aucun outil permettant d’identifier et de localiser toutes les sources disponibles en Belgique. Pourtant, ce sont près de 20 kilomètres linéaires d’archives relatives à la colonisation qui reposent dans plus de 80 institutions de conservation en Belgique. La rédaction du « Guide des sources de l’histoire de la colonisation (belge) » constitue donc une avancée cruciale dans l’identification et la description des archives relatives à l’État indépendant du Congo (1885-1908), au Congo belge (1908-1960) et au Ruanda-Urundi ([1916] 1923-1962) : archives produites par les souverains et les différents gouvernements, par les hommes et femmes politiques, par l’administration coloniale, par les entreprises, les missions religieuses, les universités, les fondations, le monde associatif et culturel et tous les autres acteurs de cette histoire dont les Africains bien évidemment.

Sorte de GPS des archives coloniales, ce guide permet pour la première fois au citoyen et au chercheur, peu importe le continent sur lequel il vit, de savoir précisément qui conserve quoi sur le territoire belge. Il répond à une triple nécessité : scientifique, sociétale et mémorielle.

Riche de plus de 1500 notices pour près de 2300 pages, cette publication propose une description sommaire et une remise en contexte de tous les fonds et collections d’archives coloniales conservés en Belgique, leur intérêt pour la recherche, leurs liens avec d’autres fonds et collections, etc. Une large et indispensable introduction replace les archives relatives à la colonisation belge dans le débat international et pose les questions très sensibles du partage de patrimoine, du retour des archives en Afrique et de la construction de la mémoire. Le guide est également accompagné d’un bilan historiographique fouillé, de pistes permettant de repérer les sources relatives à la colonisation belge conservées à l’étranger ou encore d’un cahier de plusieurs centaines d’illustrations qui souligne l’intérêt et la nécessité d’élargir les champs de la recherche aux sources iconographiques.

On August 1, 1917 - three years after the outbreak of World War 1 - pope Benedict XV signed his famous peace note, urging the governments of the belligerent Powers to seek a diplomatic solution to their disputes and stop the "useless slaughter". In order to commemorate the event and to define the place of this "forgotten pope" in twentieth-century history, on November 3-5, 2016, the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII (Fscire) hosted an international conference, entitled "Benedict XV in the world of the useless slaughter", in which more than a hundred historians from all over the world participated. The aim of the initiative, supported by the Historical and Scientific Committee for Italy’s National Anniversaries, is to shed light on the key issues of this pontificate, from Giacomo Della Chiesa’s education in the theological seminary in Genua to his heritage and memory all along the twentieth century. The volume resulting from this conference provides a comprehensive and systematic reference work about a key figure in Church history that has all too often been neglected.

The American art historian Bernard Berenson, born in 1865, is famous for his pioneering studies of the Italian Renaissance, but his work on Byzantine art remains less well-known and less studied. Yet his passion for studies of Byzantium - dubbed the ‘Byzantine infection’ - played a major role throughout Berenson’s life, and in the 1920s, he began work on a magnum opus on this topic that was sadly never completed. This volume aims to illuminate and revisit Berenson’s approach to Byzantium and the art of the Christian East through an exploration and analysis of the correspondence, travel notes, and photo archive that Berenson built up over his lifetime, and that taken together, clearly points to an explicit recognition by Berenson of the importance of Byzantine art in the Latin Middle Ages. Drawing together Berenson’s correspondence with art historians, collectors, and scholars from across Europe, the US, and the Near East, together with an overview of his numerous photography campaigns, the book is able to open a new window into Byzantine art historiography from the 1920s to the 1950s. In doing so, it sheds light onto a period in which important discoveries and extensive restoration campaigns were carried out, such as those of the mosaics of Hagia Sophia and Kariye Camii in Istanbul, as well as of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice and its decoration.

La tendance dominante du christianisme durant des siècles n'a pas été l'affirmation d'une puissance travaillant à la transformation du monde et de l'histoire, mais plutôt la disposition à s'en écarter et à prendre ses distances, selon la doctrine du "mépris du monde" (contemptus mundi). C'était en tout cas l'orientation de la pensée monastique qui a traversé tout le Moyen Âge.

Vers la fin de la première moitié du XIIe siècle, un moine bénédictin de Cluny, que l'on a appelé Bernard de Morlaix ou de Morlas ou Bernard le Clunisien, et qui résidait au prieuré Saint-Denis de Nogent-le-Rotrou, a écrit lui aussi un De contemptu mundi. Cet immense poème en vers métriques, est, malgré son titre, beaucoup plus que l'expression habituelle du thème monastique de la vanité du monde. Il contient une représentation lumineuse du Ciel, Jérusalem céleste, Cité resplendissante où Dieu est tout en tous, et une vision des enfers, où les références à Virgile semblent annoncer la grande épopée dramatique et mystique de la Divine Comédie de Dante ; et c'est aussi une longue complainte et une impitoyable satire contre les désordres et les injustices de l'époque, satire n'épargnant ni les prêtres, ni les évêques, ni le pouvoir de Rome.

Bessarion (d. 18 November 1472) first made a name for himself as one of the Greek spokesmen at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438-39. After becoming a cardinal, he several times entered conclaves as a serious candidate for the papacy. The library he bequeathed to the Republic of Venice, destined to become the historic core of the modern Biblioteca Marciana, is justly famous for its extraordinary collection of Greek manuscripts. Celebrated in his own time for his patronage of humanists, he was also Italy’s leading Platonist before the emergence of Marsilio Ficino. He always held in reverence his teacher in Greece, the Neoplatonist philosopher George Gemistus Pletho, and his In Calumniatorem Platonis, printed in Rome in 1469, was a pivotal text in the Plato-Aristotle controversy of the Renaissance. Nonetheless, Bessarion was a great admirer of medieval scholasticism and especially of Thomas Aquinas.

'Bessarion Scholasticus' examines Bessarion’s relationship with Latin culture as evidenced by his library, personal relations, and writings. It examines his humanist collection, his scholastic collection, his Thomism, and the circle of scholars associated with his household, called Bessarionea Academia by contemporaries. Half of Bessarion Scholasticus is a catalogue raisonné of scholastic texts and manuscripts in Bessarion’s library. The volume offers the first edition of Bessarion’s autograph listing of the differences between Scotists and Thomists as well as first editions of prefaces by various authors addressed to Bessarion. In addition, the appendices include statistical tables of Bessarion’s holdings of Latin classical authors and of texts in civil and canonical law and a register of the members of his cardinalitial famiglia before he became cardinal legate in Bologna in 1450.

John Monfasani is Professor at the Department of History, University at Albany - State University of New York. His field of interest is European intellectual history, with a special interest in Renaissance intellectual and religious history. He has published mainly on Greek and Latin humanists in fifteenth-century Italy.

The site of Lori Berd, located in northern Armenia, is home to an extraordinary necropolis that once housed the dead of the local elite during a period that spanned from 2200 to 400 BC. Influenced both by Urartian conquests from the south and by invasions from the Eurasian nomadic tribes from the north, the people of this region buried their dead with prestigious artefacts, complex customs, and a particular reverence shown during the later stages of the Early and Middle Iron Ages (1000–550 BC). This volume offers a detailed account of the archaeological significance of the site, providing detailed accounts of thirty-one tombs, the majority of which have never before been comprehensively published, and seeking to set Lori Berd in its broader historical and material context. Through this approach, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of the Iron Age in the South Caucasus, unravelling the interconnected themes of wealth, power, and cultural expressions.

This thematic volume consists of a selection of papers from the XXth International Congress of History of Science, which was held in Liège in 1997. Two separated symposia were concerned with the study of historical connections between such different scientific fields as chemistry, botany, pharmacy, medicine and their technical aspects. Natural products from plants and animals, and their artificial equivalents, which were especially studied and used for dyeing and for medicinal purposes, were discussed in both meetings. The various contributions of the present volume deal with many of these products in several countries (in Europe, Asia, Africa and America) from the medieval period to the XIXth century. The first part treats of some historical aspects of chemical and pharmaceutical questions related to selected dyestuffs. The second part deals with pharmaceutical products for medicinal and biological purposes. These studies should contribute to foster new interdisciplinary research in this field, which is bound to develop at the international level.