Brepols Online Books Other Monographs Collection 2016 - bob2016moot

This book presents a thorough re-examination of Apuleius’ Platonic philosophy, encompassing both his philosophical and literary works. Its primary concern lies in demonstrating how there is no significant gap between the Platonic philosophy of the Opuscula (De deo Socratis, De Platone et eius dogmate, De mundo) and the literary tastes of his rhetorical and most important output, such as the Apologia, the Florida, and foremost the Metamorphoses. Apuleius’ Middle-Platonism did not limit itself to technical works, but also influenced his literary interests.

Up to now, Apuleius’ Platonism has been very poorly investigated. It had attracted the attention of only a few - although prominent - scholars (Festugière, Dodds, Theiler), before being taken briefly into consideration in the monographs by John Dillon (The Middleplatonists, London 1977) and Stephen Gersh (Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. The Latin Tradition, Notre Dame 1986). Because of his multifaceted interests and brilliant style, which is reflected in his conferences, judicial orations and in the novel, Apuleius was mainly treated as a sophist. In the wake of a recent revival of interest in Greek Middle Platonism and in its predecessors (such as Philo of Alexandria or Plutarch), the rhetor of Madauros is worthy of a new examination. This book aims at considering Apuleius as a Philosophus Platonicus who, at the same time, is a Latin Sophist, showing how the two aspects are closely intertwined.

Examining only one aspect would be easy, but would not do justice to Apuleius’ personality. In particular, it is necessary to insert him into a philosophical line, which runs from the first to the third century AD, thus outlining the specifics of Latin Platonism. On the other hand, it is necessary to take into account the concerns of the Second Sophistic in philosophy, though in a somewhat trivialized and less systematic way.

The title of the book (Apuleius and the Metamorphoses of Platonism) indeed underlines how Apuleius’ chameleonic Platonism ‘transforms’ itself, both in his philosophical and his literary works. While challenging the current scholarly trend that overrates the philosophical presence in the Metamorphoses, this book suggests new outlooks, as well as providing a new perspective on many hypotheses previously considered as a given. In order to do this, it investigates the literary, religious and philosophical, Graeco-Roman / African milieu in which Apuleius lived from a literary, religious and philosophical point of view, while considering his influence on authors from Late Antiquity.

Contemporary historiography holds that it was the practices and technologies underpinning both the Great Voyages and the ‘New Science’, as opposed to traditional book learning, which led to the major epistemic breakthroughs of early modernity. This study, however, returns to the importance of book-learning by exploring how cosmological and cosmographical ‘novelties’ were explained and presented in Renaissance texts, and discloses the ways in which the reports presented by sailors, astronomers, and scientists became not only credible but also deeply disturbing for scholars, preachers, and educated laymen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.

It is argued here that dialectic - the art of argumentation and reasoning - played a crucial role in articulating and popularizing new learning about the cosmos by providing the argumentative toolkit needed to define, discard, and authorize novelties. The debates that shaped them were not confined to learned circles; rather, they reached a wider audience via early modern vernacular genres such as the essay.

Focusing both on major figures such as Montaigne or Descartes, as well as on now-forgotten popularizers such as Belleforest and Binet, this book describes the deployment of dialectic as a means of articulating and disseminating, but also of containing, the disturbance generated by cosmological and cosmographical novelties in Renaissance France, whether for the lay reader in Court or Parliament, for the parishioner at Church, or for the student in the classroom.

Après avoir édité le texte des Questions évangéliques d’Eusèbe de Césarée (env. 265-env. 340) dans la forme abrégée sous laquelle il nous est parvenu, Claudio Zamagni livre ici son commentaire de ce texte. Le texte originel de cet ouvrage d’Eusèbe est perdu. Il comportait deux parties. La première, dédiée à un certain Stéphanos, traitait des problèmes concernant les généalogies de Jésus d’après les évangiles ; la deuxième, faisant intervenir un autre questionneur, Marinos, concernait la résurrection de Jésus ainsi que les visions des anges, les apparitions du Ressuscité aux disciples. En grec, le texte est connu par des fragments provenant principalement de la chaîne de Nicétas d’Héraclée sur Luc et de manuscrits d’autres genres de recueils, et par une « sélection (eklogè) en abrégé », fondée sur l’ensemble de l’ouvrage. La tradition syriaque est elle-mme double : une version faite au tournant du vii e au viii e siècle, qui donne un résumé par rapport aux traditions grecques disponibles, et une autre, plus ancienne, peut-être du v e siècle, connue par l’intermédiaire de Commentaires évangéliques de Georges de Belthan (viii e s.) et de Denys bar Salibi (xii e s.). Le commentaire de Claudio Zamagni s’attache à la comparaison de l’eklogè et des fragments de Nicétas, qui offrent un texte élargi, sans couvrir l’ensemble présent dans la sélection des Questions à Stéphanos, et qui sont le seul témoin pour d’amples parties des Questions à Marinos. Il tient compte aussi des témoins syriaques. Le travail, qui prend appui sur une bibliographie exhaustive, a pour fin de reconstituer le mieux possible la structure de l’ouvrage d’Eusèbe, en assignant sa place à chacun des fragments et en appréciant leur fidélité à l’original, d’approfondir la connaissance de la méthode exégétique d’Eusèbe et de la définir par rapport à ses devanciers, notamment Origène, et à ses successeurs, de préciser aussi comment se situe le texte néotestamentaire des Questions dans les traditions textuelles des évangiles. Ce livre étudie en outre la postérité de l’ouvrage d’Eusèbe en Orient et en Occident, jusqu’au Moyen Âge.

Cette recherche s’inscrit dans une double démarche : restitution d’une cohérence globale à l’oeuvre d’Ibn Qutayba (213/828-276/889) et essai de définition de la notion d’adab (genre littéraire, éthique, paideia ?). Elle s’articule autour de la fonction d’auteur telle qu’elle apparaît dans les ‘Uyūn al-Aḫbār, somme de récits et vers exemplaires, ainsi que de la fonction rhétorique de cet ouvrage qui l’apparente à un recueil d’exempla de l’Occident médiéval. La parenté des‘Uyūn al-Aḫbār avec le genre de l’encyclopédie y est également abordée. Enrichie d’un éclairage comparatiste apporté par la littérature médiévale occidentale, la confrontation critique de ce texte avec les interprétations qui en ont été données est fondée sur l’analyse rhétorique et stylistique du prologue des ‘Uyūn al-Aḫbār, ainsi que sur la lecture transversale des introductions des trois ouvrages fondamentaux d’adab d’Ibn Qutayba, que sont l’Adab al-Kātib, les ‘Uyūn al-Aḫbār et les Ma‛ārif. La traduction annotée des deux dernières citées accompagne cette recherche.

This 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.

La religion romaine était une religion légaliste, et les romains pensaient partout et toujours juridiquement : ce sont les truismes de l'histoire ancienne. Néanmoins, au-delà du sujet du culte public, il n'y a aucune enquête contemporaine sur l'imbrication de la religion et du droit civil. Religion et gouvernement dans l'Empire romain propose d'examiner la sociologie de la religion et la subjectivité politique dans l'empire romain : l'ascétisme comme discipline du citoyen dans l'antiquité tardive ; la tolérance des pratiques religieuses non-romaines par le gouvernement de l'Empire ; l'improvisation dans les rites romains religieux et juridiques ; et l'utilisation de la citoyenneté comme métaphore pour l'affiliation religieuse, du monde classique à l'empire chrétien. Le livre fournit l'étude moderne la plus détaillée des textes légaux et religieux sur son sujet.

People have always immigrated in search of better working and living conditions, to escape persecution, reconnect with family, or simply for the experience. This volume traces the history of Venice’s Greek population during the formative years between 1498 and 1600 when thousands left their homelands for Venice. It describes how Greeks established new communal and social networks, and follows their transition from outsiders to insiders (though not quite Venetians) through an approach that offers a comparative perspective between the ‘native’ and the immigrant. It places Greeks within the context of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual Venice. Personal stories are interwoven throughout for a more intimate account of how people lived, worked, prayed, and formed new social networks. These accounts have been drawn from a variety of sources collected from the Venetian state archives, the archives of the Venetian church, and documentation held by the Hellenic Institute of Venice. Notarial documents, petitions, government and church records, registries of marriages and deaths, and census data form part of the collected material discussed here. Above all, this study aims to reconstruct the lives of the largest ethnic and Christian minority in early modern Venice, and to trace the journey of all immigrants, from foreigner to local.

The Christian practice of the Stations of the Cross has historically largely been the purview of devotional authors. In this academic study, the Reverend Doctor Sarah Lenzi revisits the evidence-based history of the western European development of the Stations as it was laid out at the turn of the twentieth century. She begins with a discussion of how this history is often neglected in favor of a mythic history that places the development in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades and she then reestablishes the western origins. While the early twentieth-century authors who worked on the Stations are invaluable for the history they uncovered, there were gaps in the analyses they offered based on that history. In the chapters that follow, Rev. Dr. Lenzi works to debunk those interpretations and to offer a new understanding of the development of the Stations of the Cross. A close examination of pilgrimage texts as well as medieval meditation manuals puts this particular practice in the broader context of Medieval Christian history and ritual, and works to place it appropriately on the spectrum of pietistic behavior. With a new understanding of the development of the Stations of the Cross, Rev. Dr. Lenzi helps to explore notions of time, place, and space in Medieval Christianity, arguing for an understanding of placelessness in Christian piety that is enabled through intentional ritualized use of imagination, narrative, body, and word.

Questo studio è dedicato all’analisi delle situazioni di inganno e finzione presenti nel corpus tragico di Seneca. Si articola in due parti: nella prima sono prese in esame la terminologia dell’inganno e della finzione e la loro morfologia, attraverso una classificazione del lessico, dei personaggi e dei loci drammatici. Nella seconda parte, invece, il tema viene indagato a partire dalla scenografia drammatica, sfondo comune del teatro senecano, il regnum, da un lato, e l’ambiente naturale, dall’altro, entrambi elementi connotativi, in diretto e attivo rapporto con gli avvenimenti e con i personaggi. Lungi dall’essere riducibili a mero omaggio nei confronti della tradizione o del repertorio mitico, fraus e dolus rappresentano tratti costitutivi ed elementi strutturali del teatro di Seneca, che concorrono profondamente, per così dire, ‘a far tragedia’.