Download or read book The Power and the Glorification written by Jan L. de Jong and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a turbulent time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, The Power and the Glorification considers how, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the papacy employed the visual arts to help reinforce Catholic power structures. All means of propaganda were deployed to counter the papacy’s eroding authority in the wake of the Great Schism of 1378 and in response to the upheaval surrounding the Protestant Reformation a century later. In the Vatican and elsewhere in Rome, extensive decorative cycles were commissioned to represent the strength of the church and historical justifications for its supreme authority. Replicating the contemporary viewer’s experience is central to De Jong’s approach, and he encourages readers to consider the works through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century eyes. De Jong argues that most visitors would only have had a limited knowledge of the historical events represented in these works, and they would likely have accepted (or been intended to accept) what they saw at face value. With that end in mind, the painters’ advisors did their best to “manipulate” the viewer accordingly, and De Jong discusses their strategies and methods.

Download or read book The Epic Film written by Derek Elley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Charlton Heston put it: ‘There’s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: it’s the easiest kind of picture to make badly.’ This book goes beyond that definition to show how the film epic has taken up one of the most ancient art-forms and propelled it into the modern world, covered in twentieth-century ambitions, anxieties, hopes and fantasies. This survey of historical epic films dealing with periods up to the end of the Dark Ages looks at epic form and discusses the films by historical period, showing how the cinema reworks history for the changing needs of its audience, much as the ancient mythographers did. The form’s main aim has always been to entertain, and Derek Elley reminds us of the glee with which many epic films have worn their label, and of the sheer fun of the genre. He shows the many levels on which these films can work, from the most popular to the specialist, each providing a considerable source of enjoyment. For instance, spectacle, the genre’s most characteristic trademark, is merely the cinema’s own transformation of the literary epic’s taste for the grandiose. Dramatically it can serve many purposes: as a resolution of personal tensions (the chariot race in Ben-Hur), of monotheism vs idolatry (Solomon and Sheba), or of the triumph of a religious code (The Ten Commandments). Although to many people Epic equals Hollywood, throughout the book Elley stresses debt to the Italian epics, which often explored areas of history with which Hollywood could never have found sympathy. Originally published 1984.

Download or read book Transformations of Late Antiquity written by Manolis Papoutsakis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on a simple dynamic: the taking in hand of a heritage, the variety of changes induced within it, and the handing on of that legacy to new generations. Our contributors suggest, from different standpoints, that this dynamic represented the essence of 'late antiquity'. As Roman society, and the societies by which it was immediately bounded, continued to develop, through to the late sixth and early seventh centuries, the interplay between what needed to be treasured and what needed to be explored became increasingly self-conscious, versatile, and enriched. By the time formerly alien peoples had established their 'post-classical' polities, and Islam began to stir in the East, the novelties were more clearly seen, if not always welcomed; and one witnesses a stronger will to maintain the momentum of change, of a forward reach. At the same time, those in a position to play now the role of heirs were well able to appreciate how suited to their needs the 'Roman' past might be, but how, by taking it up in their turn, they were more securely defined and yet more creatively advantaged. 'Transformation' is a notion apposite to essays in honour of Peter Brown. 'The transformation of the classical heritage' is a theme to which he has devoted, and continues to devote, much energy. All the essays here in some way explore this notion of transformation; the late antique ability to turn the past to new uses, and to set its wealth of principle and insight to work in new settings. To begin, there is the very notion of what it meant to be 'Roman', and how that notion changed. Subsequent chapters suggest ways in which fundamental characteristics of Roman society were given new form, not least under the impact of a Christian polity. Augustine, naturally, finds his place; and here the emphasis is on the unfettered stance that he took in the face of more broadly held convictions - on miracles, for example, and the errors of the pagan past. The discussion then moves on to

Download or read book The Life and Legacy of Constantine written by M. Shane Bjornlie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation from the classical period to the medieval has long been associated with the rise of Christianity. This association has deeply influenced the way that modern audiences imagine the separation of the classical world from its medieval and early modern successors. The role played in this transformation by Constantine as the first Christian ruler of the Roman Empire has also profoundly shaped the manner in which we frame Late Antiquity and successive periods as distinctively Christian. The modern demarcation of the post-classical period is often inseparable from the reign of Constantine. The attention given to Constantine as a liminal figure in this historical transformation is understandable. Constantine’s support of Christianity provided the religion with unprecedented public respectability and public expressions of that support opened previously unimagined channels of social, political and economic influence to Christians and non-Christians alike. The exact nature of Constantine’s involvement or intervention has been the subject of continuous and densely argued debate. Interpretations of the motives and sincerity of his conversion to Christianity have characterized, with various results, explanations of everything from the religious culture of the late Roman state to the dynamics of ecclesiastical politics. What receives less-frequent attention is the fact that our modern appreciation of Constantine as a pivotal historical figure is itself a direct result of the manner in which Constantine’s memory was constructed by the human imagination over the course of centuries. This volume offers a series of snapshots of moments in that process from the fourth to the sixteenth century.

Download or read book Naming the Sacred written by Anna Mambelli and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At what point is a place perceived as holy? And when does it become officially so in its definition? Inspired by the UNESCO debate and decisions made concerning holy places, the authors seek answers to these questions. "Naming the Sacred" is a diachronic excursus into the issues of perception and denomination of holy places. The volume examines historical cases in which names and places have been modified or literally eliminated and others where places were subject to policies of protection and tutelage. The work appertains to an ongoing, evolving global debate where the challenge of the reciprocal recognition of holy sites has become increasingly complex.

Download or read book Land of Dreams written by André Lardinois and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays, dedicated to A.H.M. Kessels, provides an overview of modern Dutch scholarship in Greek and Latin studies with special emphasis on dreams in classical literature, classical drama and the reception of Homer.

Download or read book Constantine and the Cities written by Noel Lenski and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the fourth century, Christianity rose from a religion actively persecuted by the authority of the Roman empire to become the religion of state—a feat largely credited to Constantine the Great. Constantine succeeded in propelling this minority religion to imperial status using the traditional tools of governance, yet his proclamation of his new religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. His coins and inscriptions, public monuments, and pronouncements sent unmistakable signals to his non-Christian subjects that he was willing not only to accept their beliefs about the nature of the divine but also to incorporate traditional forms of religious expression into his own self-presentation. In Constantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski attempts to reconcile these apparent contradictions by examining the dialogic nature of Constantine's power and how his rule was built in the space between his ambitions for the empire and his subjects' efforts to further their own understandings of religious truth. Focusing on cities and the texts and images produced by their citizens for and about the emperor, Constantine and the Cities uncovers the interplay of signals between ruler and subject, mapping out the terrain within which Constantine nudged his subjects in the direction of conversion. Reading inscriptions, coins, legal texts, letters, orations, and histories, Lenski demonstrates how Constantine and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire.

Download or read book The Thirty Pieces of Silver written by Lucia Travaini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thirty Pieces of Silver: Coin Relics in Medieval and Modern Europe discusses many interconnected topics relating to the most perfidious monetary transaction in history: the betrayal of Jesus by Judas for thirty pieces of silver. According to medieval legend, these coins had existed since the time of Abraham’s father and had been used in many transactions recorded in the Bible. This book documents fifty specimens of coins which were venerated as holy relics in medieval and modern churches and monasteries of Europe, from Valencia to Uppsala. Most of these relics are ancient Greek silver coins in origin mounted in precious reliquaries or used for the distribution of their wax imprints believed to have healing powers. Drawing from a wide range of historical sources, from hagiography to numismatics, this book will appeal to students and academics researching Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern History, Theology, as well as all those interested in the function of relics throughout Christendom. The Thirty Pieces of Silver is a study that invites meditation on the highly symbolic and powerful role of money through coins which were the price, value, and measure of Christ and which, despite being the most abject objects, managed to become relics.

Download or read book The Mineral and the Visual written by Brigitte Buettner and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths’ workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe’s literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India. Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.

Download or read book The Constantinian Order of Saint George written by Guy Stair Sainty and published by Boletín Oficial del Estado. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to legend the Constantinian Order is the oldest chivalric institution, founded by Emperor Constantine the Great and governed by successive Byzantine Emperors and their descendants. While this chronology was supported by multiple writers even into the twentieth century, it has little historical basis. Nonetheless, the Angeli, Farnese and Bourbon families which held the Grand Mastership could legitimately claim Byzantine imperial descent, albeit in the female line, and the Order’s cross replicates that seen by Constantine in the vision recorded by both Lactantius and Eusebius, writing very soon after Maximian’s defeat at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The Order’s emergence in the middle of the sixteenth century, when Christian Europe was under assault from a militant Ottoman empire, gained Papal support almost immediately and by the end of the seventeenth century the Order had mem-bers across the Italian peninsular, in Spain, Bavaria, Austria and Bohemia, Croatia and Poland. Today the majority of the Order’s members are found in Italy and Spain but there are also members in Portugal, France, Belgium, Great Britain and Luxembourg, with smaller groups in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden as well as an expanding membership in the United States. This work examines the conversion of Constantine and the histories of the Angeli, Farnese and Bourbon Grand Masterships, with extensive reference to hitherto unpub-lished documents in the Vatican archives and in the Farnese and Bourbon archives in Naples. These serve to confirm the close relationship the Order had with the Church and the high regard in which it was held by successive Popes, as well as its autonomy as a subject of canon law independent from any crown or temporal sovereignty. This unique status has enabled its hereditary Grand Masters to maintain this dignity after the absorption of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into a united Italy. The Order’s autonomy, coupled with the Grand Master’s close links to the Spanish Crown, has meant that Spanish and Italian citizens (as well as the citizens of several other states which have accorded the Order recognition) may obtain official permission to wear the Order’s decorations. 2018 is the three hundredth anniversary of the Papal Bull Militantis Ecclesiae which confirmed and approved the previous Papal acts concerning the Order and laid out the rights and privileges of the Order, its Grand Masters and members. In the early 20th century Pope Saint Pius X and Benedict XV conferred further privileges on the Order, ap-proving the statutes, while the then future Pope Pius XII had been admitted to the Order in 1913. Today the Order is engaged in works of charity, in conformity with the Church’s teachings, and includes among its members some thirteen Cardinals as well as some thirty members of reign-ing or former reigning families.

Download or read book ENCICLOPEDIA ECONOMICA ACCOMODATA ALL INTELLIGENZA written by FRANCESCO. PREDARI and published by . This book was released on 1860 with total page 1294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Plenitude of Power written by Robert C. Figueira and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I study power' - so Robert Louis Benson described his work as a scholar of medieval history. This volume unites papers by a number of his students dealing with matters central to Benson's historical interests - ecclesiastical institutions and administration, emperorship and papacy, canon law, political ideology, and historiography. The justification and exercise of political power is considered in two chapters that look at how the hagiography of a late Roman military saint, Maurice, was harnessed in the 11th century to the discussion of the power exercised by both emperor and pope, and how both pious purpose and political pretext animated the Hohenstaufen emperors' suppression of heresy. Three subsequent chapters focus on the Church: a study of the legal commentaries that taught that the 'authority to bind and loose' in a specific ecclesiastical matter could be determined by the opinions of 'the elders of the province'; an argument that Innocent III's administration of the Roman church represented a model for the ordering of all Christian society; and an inquiry into the doctrinal formation of the 'territorial principle' in the exercise of jurisdiction by papal legates. The late Middle Ages provides the focus for two additional studies, namely an exploration of the issues of power and authority in the charitable institutions of Cologne in the 13th-14th centuries, and the argument that the current desire for universal standards of governmental conduct in the area of basic human rights hearkens back to natural law theory as outlined in the 15th century by Nicholas of Cusa. Two historiographical studies round out the volume: an estimation of modern research regarding the political theology of late antiquity, and a reflection on Benson's own contribution to historical scholarship. Together, these papers both epitomize and further develop Benson's distinctive approach to the study of the Middle Ages, while themselves making their own important contribution.

Download or read book Christian Emperors and Roman Elites in Late Antiquity written by Rita Lizzi Testa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a number of case studies to show some of the ways in which, as soon as the Roman Senate gained new political authority under Constantine and his successors, its members crowded the political scene in the West. In these chapters, Rita Lizzi Testa makes much of her work – the fruit of decades of research –available in English for the first time. The focus is on the aristocratics' passion for aruspical science, the political use of exphrastic poems, and even their control of the hagiographic genre in the late sixth century. She demonstrates how Roman senators were chosen as legates to establish proactive relations with Christian emperors, their ministers and military commanders, and Eastern and Western provincial elites. Senators wove a web of relations in the Eastern and Western empires, sewing and stitching the empire's fabric with their diplomatic skills, wealth, and influence, while lively and highly litigious assembly activity still required of them a cultured rhetoric. Through employing astute political strategies, they maintained their privileges, including their own beliefs in ancient cults. Christian Emperors and Roman Elites in Late Antiquity provides a crucial collection for students and scholars of Late Antique history and religion, and of politics in the Late Roman Empire.

Download or read book From Constantine to Charlemagne written by Neil Christie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an overview of the archaeological and structural evidence for one of the most vital periods of Italian history, spanning the late Roman and early medieval periods. The chronological scope covers the adoption of Christianity and the emergence of Rome as the seat of Western Christendom, the break-up of the Roman west in the face of internal decay and the settlement of non-Romans and Germanic groups, the impact of Germanic and Byzantine rule on Italy until the rise of Charlemagne and of a Papal State in the later eighth century. Presenting a detailed review and analysis of recent discoveries by archaeologists, historians, art historians, numismatists and architectural historians, Neil Christie identifies the changes brought about by the Church in town and country, the level of change within Italy under Rome before and after occupation by Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Lombards, and reviews wider changes in urbanism, rural exploitation and defence. The emphasis is on human settlement on its varied levels - town, country, fort, refuge - and the assessment of how these evolved and the changes that impacted on them. Too long neglected as a 'Dark Age', this book helps to further illuminate this fascinating and dynamic period of European history.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine written by Noel Emmanuel Lenski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine offers students a comprehensive one-volume survey of this pivotal emperor and his times. Richly illustrated and designed as a readable survey accessible to all audiences, it also achieves a level of scholarly sophistication and a freshness of interpretation that will be welcomed by the experts. The volume is divided into five sections that examine political history, religion, social and economic history, art, and foreign relations during the reign of Constantine, who steered the Roman Empire on a course parallel with his own personal development.

Download or read book Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome written by Michele Renee Salzman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on the religious and consequently social changes taking place in late antique Rome. The essays in this volume argue that the once-dominant notion of pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts, as well as the social, religious, and political realities of late antique Rome. Together, the essays demonstrate that the fourth-century city was a more fluid, vibrant, and complex place than was previously thought. Competition between diverse groups in Roman society - be it pagans with Christians, Christians with Christians, or pagans with pagans - did create tensions and hostility, but it also allowed for coexistence and reduced the likelihood of overt violent, physical conflict. Competition and coexistence, along with conflict, emerge as still central paradigms for those who seek to understand the transformations of Rome from the age of Constantine through the early fifth century.

Download or read book Greeks and Latins in Renaissance Italy written by John Monfasani and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve essays in this new collection by John Monfasani examine how, in particular cases, Greek émigrés, Italian humanists, and Latin scholastics reacted with each other in surprising and important ways. After an opening assessment of Greek migration to Renaissance Italy, the essays range from the Averroism of John Argyropoulos and the capacity of Nicholas of Cusa to translate Greek, to Marsilio Ficino's position in the Plato-Aristotle controversy and the absence of Ockhamists in Renaissance Italy. Theodore Gaza receives special attention in his roles as translator, teacher, and philosopher, as does Lorenzo Valla for his philosophy, theology, and historical ideas. Finally, the life and writings of a protégé of Cardinal Bessarion, the Dominican friar Giovanni Gatti, come in for their first extensive study.