Brepols

The ancient Mediterranean basin was once thought to be populated by large, monolithic, cultural-political entities. In this conception, ‘the Greeks’, ‘the Romans’, and other stable and homogenous cultures interacted and vied for supremacy like early modern states or empires. Today, however, thanks largely to an ever-increasing archaeological record, critical and sensitive approaches to the literary evidence, and the impact and application of new theoretical approaches, the ancient Mediterranean region is instead argued to be full of dynamic microcultures organized in a fl uid set of overlapping networks. While this atomization of culture has resulted in more interesting and accurate micro-histories, it has also challenged how we understand cultural interaction and change.

This volume draws on this new understanding of cultural identity and contact to address the themes of adoption, adaption, and innovation in Pre-Roman Italy from the 9th-3rd centuries BCE. The contributors to this volume build upon recent paradigm shifts in research that challenge traditional Hellenocentric models and work to establish a new set of frameworks for approaching the tangled question of how ‘indigenous’ and ’foreign’ features relate to one another in the material record. Using focused case-studies, ranging from the role played by mobile populations in transferring ideas and technologies to the different ways in which ‘foreign’ artistic elements were used by Italian peoples, the volume explores what the - now commonly accepted - connectedness of a wider Mediterranean world meant for the people of Italy in practical terms, and offers new models for how concepts and ideas were transmitted, reinterpreted, repurposed, and re-appropriated in early Italy to fit within their local context.

Né dans le dernier quart du XIe siècle, Adélard de Bath est de ces lettrés anglais formés aux arts libéraux en France. Dans ses premiers textes de philosophie naturelle et de cosmologie, il remet en cause le legs de ses maîtres, puis décide de poursuivre sa formation en Italie du Sud. Grâce aux réseaux des rois normands d’Angleterre, il part soudainement pour la Syrie peu après la première croisade et s’initie plusieurs années sur place à la langue arabe. À son retour, il traduit des sources venues du monde musulman d’une grande complexité, à la fois en astronomie et en mathématique, il en domine les enjeux scientifiques, et va jusqu’à se passionner pour l’astrologie et la magie. Il devient ainsi l’un des initiateurs du grand mouvement de traduction des textes scientifiques depuis l’arabe vers le latin, se faisant le défenseur d’une méthode de critique comparée entre univers culturels, tandis que d’autres choisissent l’affrontement armé.

This book focuses on Aelius Aristides’ prose hymns (or. XXXVII-XLVI). These texts constitute the richest corpus of rhetorical eulogies of gods which we possess. The special status that these discourses had in the orator’s life and career are being analyzed for the very first time, along with the poetics they put to work, the ways in which they are deeply anchored in Greco-Roman society and the religiosity they display. Presented with a translation, each text is preceded by a note that relates the circumstances of its composition and pronunciation, comments on its structure, general spirit and main features. These notes also help clarify the historical, institutional and civic context of the oratory performance. Based on the 1898 Keil’s Berlin edition, the Greek text has been revised and freed from irrelevant conjectures.

Johann Goeken, specialist of Greek language and literature, is associate professor at the University of Strasbourg.

New Literacy Studies, close reading, and historical sociolinguistics inform Amsler's analyses of late medieval writing and textual cultures. Amsler argues that medieval reading and writing make sense not as individual expressions with discrete texts but as multilingual, sociocultural, and intertextual practices that 'make people up' and that sustain or challenge dominant ideologies and reading formations. Rather than a single Literacy, we find socially situated literacies within manuscript matrices. Bringing new historical dimensions to literacy studies, Amsler explores the intertextualities, affective relations, and social contests in these multilingual formations. Individual chapters examine literacies as cultural practice in schooling and in elite and popular texts by Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Dante, Margery Kempe, devotional writers, Erasmus, and the Jewish convert Hermann von Sheda, along with grammatical writing, mythography, charms, drama, and educational texts. This volume illustrates the diversity of late medieval multilingual writings,textual performances, and embodied readings.

The 2000th anniversary of Ovid’s death, in 2017-2018, led to an upsurge in conferences and publications dedicated to the author’s work and afterlife. One of these is the present volume, resulting from the conference Dopo Ovidio. Aspetti della ricezione ovidiana fra letteratura e iconografia, which was held on 7-8 May 2019 at the Department of Human Sciences (DSU) of the University of L’Aquila, and which looked at various aspects of Ovid’s fortune, from a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions cover a period of about fourteen centuries, from late antiquity until the end of the eighteenth century, and range from late Latin to medieval literature, from humanistic production to modern English and Italian literature, and from linguistics to the figurative arts. All these studies contribute to a collective appraisal of the multifarious impact of Ovid’s works, and especially of the Metamorphoses, the latter’s treatment of myth having been a starting point for integrations, developments, (re)interpretations and representations, in isolation or included in an iconographic program.

What did women deacons do in the early church? This study is a contribution to resolving this topical question through evaluating the tasks of female deacons in the Apostolic Constitutions. This fourth-century document is the largest among the so-called ancient church orders. Pylvänäinen divides the tasks of female deacons into three categories: liturgical, charitable and communicative. She analyses the individual concepts and verses within their contexts, paying special attention to the context of the document as a whole within the sphere of Jewish Christian interaction and from the viewpoint of the sources the compiler has used in remoulding the document.

L’evidenza scritta e materiale sulle donne dell’alto medioevo presenta una importante caratteristica di fondo: la descrizione delle azioni femminili non è normalmente il prodotto della percezione delle donne, né appare organizzata e prodotta per fornire una rappresentazione diretta dell’operato, delle capacità e delle caratteristiche femminili in termini reali. Piuttosto, sia sotto il profilo materiale, sia sotto il profilo scritto, le donne sono utilizzate - dal loro gruppo parentale, dagli avversari oppure dai sostenitori dei loro congiunti - come paradigmi simbolicamente efficaci per far apprezzare le possibilità economiche e di prestigio dei gruppi famigliari, i meriti e gli errori dei loro uomini, il clima politico di un regno. Si rafforza quindi, nella società altomedievale, il tema retorico dell’ “influenza femminile” per spiegare, in modo diretto e persuasivo, la consonanza o la dissonanza con il clima politico complessivo. Come tali, dunque, i modelli di rappresentazione femminile, di volta in volta utilizzati, non sono semplici ripetizioni. Essi variano nel corso del tempo, precisamente in rapporto con la trasformazione dei valori condivisi dalle società altomedievali, e con le reali possibilità femminili che sono progressivamente accettate oppure disapprovate, misconosciute oppure valorizzate. Le immagini della regina buona che converte il proprio marito al cristianesimo e della regina perfida che lo tradisce, così come i ricchi corredi funerari e le iscrizioni femminili rappresentano lo specchio attraverso cui la società altomedievale valutava sé stessa, le proprie tensioni e le proprie certezze.

Ruralia X includes 27 papers dealing with agrarian technologies in the medieval landscape as seen in different European countries. The subject areas include cultivation, livestock husbandry, gardening, viticulture and woodland management – interpreting the concept of agrarian production in a broad sense – studied mainly on the basis of archaeology, but also using iconography, documentary evidence and archaeo-environmental approaches.

Ruralia X, marks an important step on the way towards interpreting innovation, as well as understanding the varieties of agrarian activity from a Europe-wide perspective.

Authors from 14 countries provide a broad overview of the current issues, complemented by extensive bibliographies. Ruralia X represents one of the current fields of European archaeological research and offers a solid foundation for further comparative studies.