Download or read book Narrative Imagination and Concepts of Fiction in Late Antique Hagiography written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-13 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores concepts of fiction in late antique hagiographical narrative in different cultural and literary traditions. It includes Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Persian and Arabic material. Whereas scholarship in these texts has traditionally focussed on historical questions, this book approaches imaginative narrative as an inherent element of the genre of hagiography that deserves to be studied in its own right. The chapters explore narrative complexities related to fiction, such as invention, authentication, intertextuality, imagination and fictionality. Together, they represent an innovative exploration of how these concepts relate to hagiographical discourses of truth and the religious notion of belief, while paying due attention to the various factors and contexts that impact readers’ responses.
Download or read book Narrative Imagination and Concepts of Fiction in Late Antique Hagiography written by Julie Van Pelt and published by Mnemosyne, Supplements. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores concepts of fiction, invention, and imagination in late antique hagiographical narrative in diverse cultural and literary traditions. The chapters present innovative explorations of this material by approaching narrative itself as an inherent element of the genre of hagiography that deserves attention in its own right.
Download or read book Celibate Marriages in Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography written by Anne P. Alwis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celibate Marriages in Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography explores the puzzling phenomenon of celibate marriage as depicted in the lives of three couples who achieved sainthood. Marriage without intercourse appears to have no purpose, especially in Christian antiquity, yet these three tales were copied for centuries. What messages were they promoting? What did it mean to be a virgin husband and a virgin wife? Including full translations, this volume sets each life in its historical context, and by examining their individual and shared themes, the book shows that the tension raised by pitting marriage against celibacy is constantly debated. It also highlights the ingenuity of Byzantine hagiographers as they attempted to reconcile this curious paradox. This book addresses a gap in late Antique and Byzantine hagiographic studies where primary sources and interpretative material are very rarely presented in the same volume. By providing a variety of contexts to the material a much more comprehensive, revealing and holistic picture of celibate marriage emerges.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography written by Stephanos Efthymiadis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For an entire millennium, Byzantine hagiography, inspired by the veneration of many saints, exhibited literary dynamism and a capacity to vary its basic forms. The subgenres into which it branched out after its remarkable start in the fourth century underwent alternating phases of development and decline that were intertwined with changes in the political, social and literary spheres. The selection of saintly heroes, an interest in depicting social landscapes, and the modulation of linguistic and stylistic registers captured the voice of homo byzantinus down to the end of the empire in the fifteenth century. The seventeen chapters in this companion form the sequel to those in volume I which dealt with the periods and regions of Byzantine hagiography, and complete the first comprehensive survey ever produced in this field. The book is the work of an international group of experts in the field and is addressed to both a broader public and the scholarly community of Byzantinists, medievalists, historians of religion and theorists of narrative. It highlights the literary dimension and the research potential of a representative number of texts, not only those appreciated by the Byzantines themselves but those which modern readers rank high due to their literary quality or historical relevance.
Download or read book Invoking Angels written by Claire Fanger and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of essays examining medieval and early modern texts aimed at performing magic or receiving illumination via the mediation of angels. Includes discussion of Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Conversion and Narrative written by Ryan Szpiech and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness. In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith. Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.
Download or read book Scale Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture written by Reviel Netz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of ancient literary culture told through the quantitative facts of canon, geography, and scale.
Download or read book Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonnus of Panopolis (5th c. AD), the most important Greek poet of Late Antiquity, is best known for his Dionysiaca, a grand epic that gathers together all myths associated with Dionysus, god of wine and mysteries. The poet also authored the Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel which renders the Fourth Gospel into sophisticated hexameter verse. This volume, edited by Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska, brings together twenty-six essays by eminent scholars that discuss Nonnus’ cultural and literary background, the literary techniques and motifs used by the poet, as well as the composition of the Dionysiaca and the exegetical principles applied in the Paraphrase. As such, the book will significantly deepen our understanding of literary culture and religion in Late Antiquity.
Download or read book Metaphrasis A Byzantine Concept of Rewriting and Its Hagiographical Products written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume represents the first discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles treating hagiographical rewriting from various angles. The contributors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts from late antiquity to late Byzantium.
Download or read book Late Antique Letter Collections written by Cristiana Sogno and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.
Download or read book Specimen Days written by Michael Cunningham and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth. Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or place . . . I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
Download or read book The Letters of Alciphron written by Michèle Biraud and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Letters of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?' (Michèle Biraud and Arnaud Zucker editors) offer a dozen papers on an misknown author of the Second Sophistic, Alciphron, aiming to show the unity of his literary project.
Download or read book Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom 500 1500 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500 shows the historical value of texts celebrating saints—both the most abundant medieval source material and among the most difficult to use. Hagiographical sources present many challenges: they are usually anonymous, often hard to date, full of topoi, and unstable. Moreover, they are generally not what we would consider factually accurate. The volume’s twenty-one contributions draw on a range of disciplines and employ a variety of innovative methods to address these challenges and reach new discoveries about the medieval world that extend well beyond the study of sanctity. They show the rich potential of hagiography to enhance our knowledge of that world, and some of the ways to unlock it. Contributors are Ellen Arnold, Helen Birkett, Edina Bozoky, Emma Campbell, Adrian Cornell du Houx, David Defries, Albrecht Diem, Cynthia Hahn, Samantha Kahn Herrick, J.K. Kitchen, Jamie Kreiner, Klaus Krönert, Mathew Kuefler, Katherine J. Lewis, Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, Charles Mériaux, Paul Oldfield, Sara Ritchey, Catherine Saucier, Laura Ackerman Smoller, and Ineke van ‘t Spijker. See inside the book.
Download or read book Thecla and Medieval Sainthood written by Ghazzal Dabiri and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saint Thecla was one of the most prominent figures of early Christianity who provided a model of virginity and a role-model for women in the early Church. She was the object of cult and of pilgrimage and her tale in the Acts of Paul and Thecla made a tremendous impact on later hagiographies of both female and male saints. This volume explores this impact on medieval hagiographical texts composed in Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Greek, Irish, Latin, Persian, and Syriac. It investigates how they evoked and/or invoked Thecla and her tale in constructing the lives and story worlds of their chosen saints and offers detailed original readings of the lives of various heroines and heroes. The book adds further depth and nuance to our understanding of Thecla's popularity and the spread of her legend and cult.
Download or read book The Christian Invention of Time written by Simon Goldhill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.
Download or read book After Virtue written by Alasdair MacIntyre and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography written by Koen De Temmerman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography is one of the most widespread literary genres worldwide. Biographies and autobiographies of actors, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, and other famous figures have never been more prominent in book shops and publishers' catalogues. This Handbook offers a wide-ranging, multi-authored survey on biography in Antiquity from its earliest representatives to Late Antiquity. It aims to be a broad introduction and a reference tool on the one hand, and to move significantly beyond the state-of-the-art on the other. To this end, it addresses conceptual questions about this sprawling genre, offers both in-depth readings of key texts and diachronic studies, and deals with the reception of ancient biography across multiple eras up to the present day. In addition, it takes a wide approach to the concept of ancient biography by examining biographical depictions in different textual and visual media (epigraphy, sculpture, architecture) and by providing outlines of biographical developments in ancient and late antique cultures other than Graeco-Roman. Highly accessible, this book aims at a broad audience ranging from specialists to newcomers in the field. Chapters provide English translations of ancient (and modern) terminology and citations. In addition, all individual chapters are concluded by a section containing suggestions for further reading on their specific topic.
