Brepols Online Books Other Monographs Collection 2016 - bob2016moot
Collection Contents
4 results
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Poems
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Poems show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: PoemsTheodore Metochites (c. 1270-1332), an important writer of Late Byzantium, composed twenty long Poems in dactylic verse, which constitute an unicum in Byzantine Literature. Some of them are clearly autobiographic, offering important details about their author’s career, while others are devoted to some saints of the Byzantine church (St Athanasius of Alexandria and the three prelates Basil of Caesarea, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom). Some of them are addressed to close friends of Metochites (like the polymath Nikephoros Gregoras, or the church historian Nikephoros Xanthopoulos), asking for their advice or complaining about his own difficulties. Three of them are funerary Poems, extolling the virtues and mourning the death of persons close to the emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, who was the protector and benefactor of Metochites. The last seven Poems are written in a more reflective mood, discussing the precariousness of human happiness and the inevitability of man’s fall due to the adverse circumstances of his life. All those Poems are preserved in MS. Parisinus graecus 1776, which was written in all probability under Metochites’ supervision. The translation is accompanied by notes clarifying the sense of difficult passages and giving references to the texts that inspired Metochites directly or to parallel passages in the works of Metochites himself, or other Greek and Byzantine authors.
The source text of this volume appeared in Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca as Theodorus Metochita, Carmina (CC SG 83). References to the corresponding pages of the Corpus Christianorum edition are provided in the margins of this translation.
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Peace and Peril
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Peace and Peril show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Peace and PerilEmperor Wu is generally recognized as the greatest ruler of the Han Dynasty, and his wars against the steppe warrior Xiongnu as one of his greatest undertakings. To the chief narrator of these events, ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian, the turning point in Han Dynasty history was the way Emperor Wu had abandoned the policy of peaceful relations with the Xiongnu, and launched China on a series of campaigns that would last for decades. This has been almost universally accepted as “truth” in modern scholarship, but these claims cannot be taken at face value.
Firstly, this book identifies ways in which the Shiji account is riddled with inconsistencies and deliberately misleading information, and provides explanations for this. He hid signs of rising disquiet with the peace policy of earlier rulers, and concealed indications that for at least two decades China’s leadership had been searching for alternatives.
Secondly, the work reconstructs a more accurate narrative of events for one hundred years of Han - Xiongnu relations than can be gained by a straight-forwarding reading of individual chapters of the Shiji. A narrative emerges of an historian with an agenda, and of a century of Han - Xiongnu relations that is markedly different from any previously produced.
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Pilgrimage to Heaven: Eschatology and Monastic Spirituality in Early Medieval Ireland
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Pilgrimage to Heaven: Eschatology and Monastic Spirituality in Early Medieval Ireland show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Pilgrimage to Heaven: Eschatology and Monastic Spirituality in Early Medieval IrelandThis book focuses on the expectation of the Judgment and the afterlife in early medieval Irish monastic spirituality. It has been claimed that in the Early Middle Ages, Christianity became for the first time a truly otherworldly religion and in monastic spirituality this otherworldly perspective gained an especially prominent role. In this book, Dr Ritari explores the role of this eschatological expectation in various sources, including hagiography produced by the monastic familia of St Columba, the sermons of St Columbanus, the Navigatio sancti Brendani portraying St Brendan’s sea voyages, and the vision attributed to St Adomnán about Heaven and Hell. One recurrent image used by the Irish authors to portray the Christian path to Heaven is the image of peregrinatio, a life-long pilgrimage. Viewing human life in this perspective inevitably influenced the human relationship with the world making the monastic into a pilgrim who is not supposed to get attached to anything encountered on the way but to keep constantly in mind the end of the journey.
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Poétique de la prière dans les œuvres d'Ovide
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Poétique de la prière dans les œuvres d'Ovide show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Poétique de la prière dans les œuvres d'OvideFrom his early works to the poems of exile, Ovid constructed a personal poetic language, mixing religious stylemes belonging to the liturgical language of the Augustan age with purely poetic stylemes, some taken from literary tradition, others quite original: he thus plays on the border-line separating the religious carmen from the poetic carmen, giving birth to a new song endowing poetry with a sacred status, making it the properly poietic music of creation whose breath gives the world its meaning, its form and its beauty.
When Ovid speaks to us of love, he also speaks to us of poetry, but not just a narcissistic poetry taken as its object and own end. What is reflected in the mirror of Ovidian verse as it takes shape in the utterance of prayer is a perspective – a transcendental perspective through which the poet attempts to contemplate the sacred Music which organizes the universe.
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