Download or read book Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond written by Sergeĭ Arkadʹevich Ivanov and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-04-06 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square is a familar Russian landmark. Yet few people know what made Basil so famous. He was a saint who wandered about naked, bullied passers-by, brawled in the market-place, and once even smashed a revered icon. Saints such as Basil overturn the conventional concept of sainthood - what, we may ask, is saintly about them? This book aims to solve the mystery by exploring the figure of the holy fool in Byzantium and in later Russianhistory.
Download or read book Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond written by Sergey A. Ivanov and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-04-06 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are saints in Orthodox Christian culture who overturn the conventional concept of sainthood. Their conduct may be unruly and salacious, they may blaspheme and even kill - yet, mysteriously, those around them treat them with even more reverence. Such saints are called 'holy fools'. In this pioneering study Sergey A. Ivanov examines the phenomenon of holy foolery from a cultural standpoint. He identifies its prerequisites and its development in religious thought, and traces the emergence of the first hagiographic texts describing these paradoxical saints. He describes the beginnings of holy foolery in Egyptian monasteries of the fifth century, followed by its high point in the cities of Byzantium, with an eventual decline in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also compares the important Russian tradition of holy fools, which in some form has survived to this day.
Download or read book Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Holy Fools In Byzantium written by Sergey Ivanov and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond written by George T. Calofonos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the actual dreaming experience of the Byzantines lies beyond our reach, the remarkable number of dream narratives in the surviving sources of the period attests to the cardinal function of dreams as vehicles of meaning, and thus affords modern scholars access to the wider cultural fabric of symbolic representations of the Byzantine world. Whether recounting real or invented dreams, the narratives serve various purposes, such as political and religious agendas, personal aspirations or simply an author’s display of literary skill. It is only in recent years that Byzantine dreaming has attracted scholarly attention, and important publications have suggested the way in which Byzantines reshaped ancient interpretative models and applied new perceptions to the functions of dreams. This book - the first collection of studies on Byzantine dreams to be published - aims to demonstrate further the importance of closely examining dreams in Byzantium in their wider historical and cultural, as well as narrative, context. Linked by this common thread, the essays offer insights into the function of dreams in hagiography, historiography, rhetoric, epistolography, and romance. They explore gender and erotic aspects of dreams; they examine cross-cultural facets of dreaming, provide new readings, and contextualize specific cases; they also look at the Greco-Roman background and Islamic influences of Byzantine dreams and their Christianization. The volume provides a broad variety of perspectives, including those of psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Download or read book Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics written by M. Grau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grau reconsiders the relationship between "logos" and "mythos" as a precondition to opening theological hermeneutics to discourse from other cultures and genres, other modes of telling and retelling.
Download or read book Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium written by Youval Rotman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development. Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior—like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr—to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity. A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.
Download or read book The Trophies of the Martyrs written by Galit Noga-Banai and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering study, the first of its kind, Galit Noga-Banai analyses silver reliquaries decorated with Christian figurative themes. She offers a clearer and more detailed picture of the beginnings of the cult of relics, which were an essential asset to the Church in its establishment of pilgrimage centres and local hagiographic heritage sites, first in Italy and later in other places around Europe and North Africa. At the same time, Noga-Banai highlights the identity of the objects as portable art, treating the reliquaries as visual historical testimonies. The book is illustrated with nearly 100 finely reproduced drawings and photographs.
Download or read book Symeon the Holy Fool written by Derek Krueger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-07-19 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Saints and Virtues written by John Stratton Hawley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987-09-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a larger family of saints—those celebrated not just by Christianity but by other religious traditions of the world: Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, African, and Caribbean. The essays show how saints serve as moral exemplars in the communities that venerate them.
Download or read book The Firebird and the Fox written by Jeffrey Brooks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.
Download or read book The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium written by Thomas Arentzen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images and texts tell various stories about the Virgin Mary in Byzantium, reflecting an important cult with strong doctrinal foundations.
Download or read book Caliphs and Merchants written by Fanny Bessard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700-950) offers fresh perspectives on the origins of the economic success of the early Islamic Caliphate, identifying a number of previously unnoticed or underplayed yet crucial developments, such as the changing conditions of labour, attitudes towards professional associations, and the interplay between the state, Islamic religious institutions, and the economy. Moving beyond the well-studied transition between the death of Justinian in 565 and the Arab-Muslim conquests in the seventh century, the volume focuses on the period between 700 and 950 during which the Islamic world asserted its identity and authority. Whilst the extraordinary prosperity of Near Eastern cities and economies during this time was not unprecedented when one considers the early Imperial Roman world, the aftermath of the Arab-Muslim conquests saw a deep transformation of urban retail and craft which marked a distinct break from the past. It explores the mechanisms effecting these changes, from the increasing involvement of caliphs and their governors in the patronage of urban economies, to the empowerment of enriched entrepreneurial tāğir from the ninth century. Combining detailed analysis of a large corpus of literary sources in Arabic with presentation of new physical and epigraphic evidence, and utilizing an innovative approach which is both comparative and global, the discussion lucidly locates the Middle East within the contemporary Eurasian context and draws instructive parallels between the Islamic world and Western Christendom, Byzantium, South-East Asia, and China.
Download or read book Saint Daniel of Sketis written by Britt Dahlman and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Saints and Their Lives on the Periphery written by Haki Antonsson and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the cult of the saints and their associated literature in two peripheral regions of Christendom which were converted to Christianity around the turn of the first millennium, namely, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The fifteen authors focus on how cultures of sanctity were transmitted across the two regions and on the role that neighbouring Christian countries like England, Germany, and Byzantium played in that process. The authors also ask to what extent the division between Latin Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy affected the early development of the cult of saints on the two peripheries. The first part of the book offers for the first time a comprehensive overview of the veneration of local and universal saints in Scandinavia and northern Rus' from c.1000 to c.1200, with a particular emphasis on saints that were venerated in both regions. The second part presents examples of how some early hagiographic works produced on the northern and eastern peripheries borrowed, adapted and transformed--i.e. contextualized--literary traditions from the Latin West and Byzantium.
Download or read book The Corporeal Imagination written by Patricia Cox Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c 500 1492 written by Jonathan Shepard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 1228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantium lasted a thousand years, ruled to the end by self-styled 'emperors of the Romans'. It underwent kaleidoscopic territorial and structural changes, yet recovered repeatedly from disaster: even after the near-impregnable Constantinople fell in 1204, variant forms of the empire reconstituted themselves. The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c.500-1492 tells the story, tracing political and military events, religious controversies and economic change. It offers clear, authoritative chapters on the main events and periods, with more detailed chapters on outlying regions and neighbouring societies and powers of Byzantium. With aids such as maps, a glossary, an alternative place-name table and references to English translations of sources, it will be valuable as an introduction. However, it also offers stimulating new approaches and important findings, making it essential reading for postgraduates and for specialists. The revised paperback edition contains a new preface by the editor and will offer an invaluable companion to survey courses in Byzantine history.
