Author : Michael Roberts
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 29,46 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Christian martyrs in literature
ISBN : 9780472104499
A beautifully detailed literary study of Prudentius's eulogies of the Christian martyrs
Author : Paula Hershkowitz
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 41,61 MB
Release : 2017-01-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1107149606
This book sets Prudentius' martyr poetry within the religious, social, and visual contexts of late antique Spain. This original approach utilises the fields of history, archaeology, classical literature and art history, and the book is important for academics and more advanced students within these disciplines.
Author : Patricia Cox Miller
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 45,37 MB
Release : 2012-02-28
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0812204689
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.
Author : Galit Noga-Banai
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 20,76 MB
Release : 2008-04-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 019152722X
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.
Author : Dennis E. Trout
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,21 MB
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 0198735375
Damasus of Rome makes available in English the epigraphic poetry of Damasus, bishop of Rome from 366 to 384. The translations are accompanied by the Latin text as well as by commentary on the literary, topographic, and archaeological features of Damasus' inscribed epigrams. Antonio Ferrua published the last critical edition of Damasus' poetry in 1942. Since Ferrua's ground-breaking edition, however, much has changed. Recent scholarship has challenged the Damasan authorship of several epigrams, other pieces have been reinstated as Damasan, and archaeology has added fragments that were not known in 1942. Moreover in recent years new ways of appreciating Late Latin poetry have revolutionized thinking about many poets contemporary with Damasus. Damasus of Rome, therefore, not only offers new translations but updates the corpus and criticism of Damasus' poetry. A full introduction situates Damasus in his times by considering his troubled election and the issues that dominated Rome and his papacy. The introduction also sets the poems within the broader sweep of the history of epigraphic poetry at Rome and relates them both to the development of the Christian catacombs and to the emergence of the cults of the Roman saints. Modern scholarship readily acknowledges that the years of Damasus' episcopacy were pivotal ones in the transformation of Rome into a late antique Christian city. His poetry, much of it inscribed at the suburban tombs of the Roman saints and martyrs, played an incalculable but significant role in the redefinition of both Roman and Christian identity in this remarkable age. Damasus of Rome now makes that poetry more readily available to scholars and students alike.
Author : Diane Shane Fruchtman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 26,73 MB
Release : 2023-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1000630919
This book demonstrates that living martyrdom was an important spiritual aspiration in the late antique Latin west and argues that, consequently, attempts to define, study, or locate martyrdom must move away from conceptualizations that require or center on death. After an introduction that traces the persistence of "living martyrs" as real objects of spiritual devotion and emulation across the span of Christian history and discusses why such martyrs have been overlooked, the book focuses on three significant authors from the late ancient Latin west for whom martyrdom did not require death: the Spanish poet Prudentius (c. 348–413), the senator-turned-ascetic Paulinus of Nola (353–431), and the influential North African bishop Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Through historically and literarily contextualized close readings of their work, this book shows that each of these three authors attempted to create a new paradigm of martyrdom focused on living, rather than dying, for God. By focusing on these living martyrs, we are able to see more clearly the aspirations and agendas of those who promoted them as martyrs and how their martyrological discourse illuminates the variety of ways that martyrdom is and can be mobilized (in any era) to construct new, community-creating worldviews. Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond is an important resource for historians of Christianity, scholars of religious studies, and anyone interested in exploring or understanding martyrological discourse. The Introduction of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Author : Jill Ross
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 38,24 MB
Release : 2008-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0802090982
Figuring the Feminine examines the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of the Iberian Peninsula (both Romance and Semitic) as well as in the larger Latinate literary culture. It demonstrates the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning, and the importance of the medieval Iberian textual tradition in this process, a complex multicultural tradition that is often overlooked in medieval literary scholarship. This study adopts an innovative methodology informed by current theories of the body and gender to approach Hispanic literature from a femininst perspective. Jill Ross offers new readings of medieval Hispanic texts (Latin, Castilian, and Hebrew) including Prudentius' Peristephanon, Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Shem Tov of Carrión's Battle Between the Pen and the Scissors, and several others. She highlights ways in which these texts contribute to the understanding of gender in medieval poetics and foreground questions of literary and cultural import. Figuring the Feminine argues that the bodies of women are crucial to the working out of such questions as the unsettling shift from orality to literacy, textual instability, cultural dissonance, and the resistance to cultural and religious hegemony.
Author : Jennifer R. Ballengee
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 34,23 MB
Release : 2009-01-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1438425112
The Wound and the Witness offers a historically grounded approach to an urgent contemporary problem: the persistence of torture in Western culture. Drawing upon ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well as contemporary media events, Jennifer R. Ballengee explores the spectacle of torture as a persuasive device. She suggests that both torture and the witnessing of torture are forms of polemical writing, carried out on the body. The analysis combines close reading and philological study with a materialist cultural approach to ancient Greek theater, early Christian accounts of martyrdom, and recent political controversies over the interrogation tactics in the U.S. government-run Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. By incorporating key classical texts by Sophocles, Achilles Tatius, and Prudentius, the author demonstrates how deeply the ancient literature resonates with contemporary issues of the body, rhetoric, and the spectacle of pain.
Author : Elaine Fantham
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 33,36 MB
Release : 2013-07-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1421409275
This new edition broadens the scope of Fantham’s study of literary production and its reception in Rome. Scholars of ancient literature have often focused on the works and lives of major authors rather than on such questions as how these works were produced and who read them. In Roman Literary Culture, Elaine Fantham fills that void by examining the changing social and historical context of literary production in ancient Rome and its empire. Fantham’s first edition discussed the habits of Roman readers and developments in their means of access to literature, from booksellers and copyists to pirated publications and libraries. She examines the issues of patronage and the utility of literature and shows how the constraints of the physical object itself—the ancient "book"—influenced the practice of both reading and writing. She also explores the ways in which ancient criticism and critical attitudes reflected cultural assumptions of the time. In this second edition, Fantham expands the scope of her study. In the new first chapter, she examines the beginning of Roman literature—more than a century before the critical studies of Cicero and Varro. She discusses broader entertainment culture, which consisted of live performances of comedy and tragedy as well as oral presentations of the epic. A new final chapter looks at Pagan and Christian literature from the third to fifth centuries, showing how this period in Roman literature reflected its foundations in the literary culture of the late republic and Augustan age. This edition also includes a new preface and an updated bibliography.
Author : Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 30,73 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Subject headings, Library of Congress
ISBN :
