Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2014 - bob2014mime

L'étude des manuscrits hébreux est à juste titre considérée comme le fondement de la recherche en histoire intellectuelle des juifs. C'est sous la plume de Colette Sirat, dont les travaux ont profondement marqué aussi bien les études sur la pensée juive et que sur l'histoire de l'écriture, que la paléographie hébraïque a acquis une méthodologie rigoureuse, un ancrage institutionnel et une série d'ouvrages de référence.

Manuscrits hébreux et arabes est un recueil de mélanges dédiés à Colette Sirat par ses collègues, amis et disciples. Les articles portant sur des manuscrits provenant de lieux et périodes différents montrent l'envergure des travaux en paléographie et codicologie hébraïque aujourd'hui.

This book brings to life an impressively broad array of performances in the Eastern Mediterranean. It covers many traditional types of performance, including singers, dancers, storytellers, street performers, clowns, preachers, shadow-puppeteers, fireworks displays, and semi-theatrical performances in folk and other celebrations. It explores performance of the secular as well as of the sacred in its many forms, including Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, and Alevi Muslims; Sephardic Jews and those in the Holy Land; and Armenian, Greek, and European Catholic Christians. The book focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, including the Early Ottoman. Some papers reach backward into Late Antiquity, while others demonstrate continuity with the modern Eastern Mediterranean world.

The articles discuss evidence for performers and performance coming from archival sources, architectural and manuscript images, musical notation, historical and ethnographic accounts, literary works, and oral tradition. Across the broad range of issues, chronology, and geography, certain fundamental topics are central: concepts of drama and theatricality; varied definitions of ‘performance’ and related terms; the sacred and the profane, and their frequent intersection; and complex relations between oral and written traditions.

Cet ouvrage présente les résultats d’une enquête, menée par des archéologues et des historiens, sur l’organisation spatiale du monachisme au Moyen Âge. Il propose tout à la fois des synthèses inédites sur plusieurs complexes ou cités monastiques et une réflexion sur les processus d’articulation et de hiérarchisation des lieux de vie, de culte et de production constitutifs des monastères occidentaux. Il s’intéresse entre autres aux différentes formes de circulation - déplacements pragmatiques, déambulations liturgiques, parcours mentaux - qui ont favorisé la structuration et la monumentalisation de ces ensembles religieux.

La mise en place et le développement des monastères sont ici appréhendés au travers des usages de l’espace, par l’étude des monuments, des textes et des images qui en portent la trace. Les auteurs de ce volume mettent ainsi en évidence la genèse et la transformation d’un système de lieux singulier qui fut, dans l’Occident médiéval, l’un des principaux laboratoires des représentations et des pratiques de l’espace social.

Nicole Oresme est sans doute un des philosophes médiévaux les mieux connus. L’intérêt qu’il a suscité depuis longtemps dépasse le cercle étroit des spécialistes du fait de l’exceptionnelle variété de son œuvre, aujourd’hui presque complètement éditée. Cet intérêt a largement contribué à modifier l’image du Moyen Âge conçu traditionnellement comme une période obscure, mais a aussi, malheureusement, conduit à la production d’un nombre considérable de contre-sens, voire de fables.

C’est à l’occasion de la parution de son dernier texte important encore inédit, ses Questions sur la Physique, qu’à l’initiative de Christophe Grellard, nous avons organisé à la Sorbonne les 16 et 17 novembre 2012 deux journées d’études sur son activité philosophique, qui ont pu bénéficier des dernières avancées de la critique.

Ce livre est issu des communications produites à cette occasion, mais, à la lumière des discussions qui ont suivi elles ont été modifiées, puis révisées pour assurer la cohérence de l’ensemble. L’objectif était de réaliser un ouvrage qui ferait le point sur nos connaissances de l’œuvre d’Oresme en philosophie de la nature et en philosophie de la connaissance, et sur les débats dans lesquels elle s’inscrivait.

Partners in Spirit focuses on relations between chaste men and women within religious life in Germany (c. 1100-1500), concentrating on the complex set of negotiations that governed contact between a male priest and his female charge. Although religious women were undeniably reliant on priests for pastoral care (the cura monialium) throughout the medieval period, it does not follow that men saw such care as burdensome or that women were spiritually subordinate in their relations with priests. Within the context of the cura, ordained men and professed women met regularly, often developing intimate friendships and providing each other with crucial spiritual support, despite prevailing fears that contact between the sexes must result in sexual temptation and sin.

Examining the various interactions of priests with religious women, Partners in Spirit traces the ways in which both viewed the cura, highlighting the fluidity of gender and authority within the medieval religious life. In doing so, the volume suggests new ways of considering the intersection of gender, religion, and spiritual power within the medieval world.

During the last decades, representations of medieval and early modern urban space have witnessed an increasing popularity as objects of study within the historical disciplines. Scholars with different backgrounds investigate urban landscapes in various forms and using a wide range of media. In general, such ‘portraits of the city’ cover different types of visual and written documents. The twelve essays gathered in this book all cover specific types of such portraits, ranging from historiographical texts and archival record, over drawings, prints and paintings to maps and real urban architectural settings. Moreover, the interdisciplinary scope results in an ample compilation of various innovative methodologies, currently applied in the fields of study and disciplines addressed in the book. ‘Portraits of the City’ provides a representative overview of the current state of knowledge and is in this way a relevant contribution to the international debate on representations of the city.

Authors of the ‘Second Scholasticism’ (as discussed in this volume, at least, mainly Iberian philosophers and theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) not only commented on the works and updated the teachings of medieval Scholastic masters, but also introduced many new ideas in all areas of philosophy, namely logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, moral philosophy, political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In particular, issues arising from the “discovery” of the New World presented new challenges to these thinkers, provoking various reactions among them and causing them to develop new interpretations and theories, especially in practical philosophy and theology. In this volume, scholars from Europe, North America and South America identify and describe some of the main topics and central lines of thought in this still quite unknown chapter in the history of philosophical ideas. The contributors focus on the reception and development of Aristotelian-Thomistic and (to a lesser extent) Scotistic political theory, natural law, positive law and the law of nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; some authors, moreover, address issues in the development of metaphysics during the same period. For the most part, the studies presented here concern the writings and thought of masters from the Universities of Salamanca, Alcalá, Évora and Coimbra, who responded to new questions and conceived new theories in political philosophy, law and moral philosophy closely related to the issues pertaining to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World.

Built on a highly traditional educational system, the language of Byzantine literature was for the most part written in an idiom deeply influenced by ancient Greek texts and grammatical handbooks. The resulting overall archaizing impression of Byzantine Greek is largely why the language of learned literature - as compared with the relatively well researched vernacular literature - has seldom been taken seriously as an object of linguistic study. This volume combines the expertise of linguists and scholars of Byzantine literature to challenge the assumption that learned mediaeval Greek is merely the weary continuation of ancient Greek or, worse still, a poor imitation of it, while proposing that it needs to be treated as a literary idiom in its own right.

The contribution that texts of this kind can offer to sub-fields of Greek historical linguistics is explored using specific examples. Sociolinguistic theory provides a particularly useful framework for a more accurate analysis of the relationship between the vernacular and classicizing varieties of Greek literary language. In addition, the impact of the educational system on the production of texts is examined. In another chapter it is shown that a number of far-reaching assumptions, which originated in the 15th century, about accentuation and the middle voice still tend to colour our understanding of Byzantine, as well as ancient, Greek. Other chapters focusing on particles, the dative and the synthetic perfect reveal that Byzantine authors, while of course influenced by the living spoken language, used their classical linguistic heritage in a creative and innovative way.

Throughout the medieval period, the popular classes were always reckoned as a potential force in society even though it was usually dangerous for them to articulate divergent social, political and religious opinions. Sources on medieval political and social life seem to show us a world of order, acquiescence and consent. Otherwise, they reveal a picture of bloodshed and violent strife. During times of intense conflict, however, the human tongue was always the most frequently used weapon, much more so than the sword or the dagger. The vox populi, though often difficultly retrievable in the sources, was a ubiquitous one within the realm of later medieval politics. The essays collected in this volume deal with such speech acts of political rebels, with political languages of the ‘popular classes’ in medieval society but also with the subversive twists to speech situations such as preaching, mockery and insults.

Jan Dumolyn is a senior lecturer in medieval history at Ghent University. He publishes on the socio-economic, political and cultural history of the urban world of the medieval Low Countries.

Jelle Haemers lectures medieval history at the University of Leuven. He has published widely on the social history of medieval politics and the urban history of the Low Countries.

Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer is professor of Medieval History in the University of Sevilla. He has published both on medieval peasantry and popular political culture, including the making of popular ideologies and forms of popular protest.

Vincent Challet is a senior lecturer at the University of Montpellier-III, and works on the political conscience of communities. He is also the scientific coordinator of the ANR “Thalamus” project which aims to produce a scientific edition of the chronicle and urban statutes of Montpellier in the Middle Ages.