The poets and prose-writers of Greece and Rome were acutely conscious of their literary heritage. They expressed this consciousness in the regularity with which, in their writings, they imitated and alluded to the great authors who had preceded them. Such imitation was generally not regarded as plagiarism but as essential to the creation of a new literary work: imitating one's predecessors was in no way incompatible with originality or progress. These views were not peculiar to the writers of Greece and (...) Rome but were adopted by many others who have written in the 'classical tradition' right up to modern times. Creative Imitation and Latin Literature is an exploration of this concept of imitation. The contributors analyse selected passages from various authors - Greek, Latin and English - in order to demonstrate how Latin authors created new works of art by imitating earlier passages of literature. (shrink)

The romance ofJoseph and Asenatk(JA), a work almost entirely neglected by classicists, was extremely popular for many centuries and translated into many languages—Slavonic, Syriac, Armenian, Roumanian, Latin (twice), Middle English, Coptic, and Ethiopian. Yet the first complete edition of the Greek text was not published until 1890, and Batiffol'seditio pritnceps(‘Le Livre de la Priére d' Aséneth’,Studia Patristicai-ii (1889–90) does not inspire confidence.Batiffol treated JA as a product of the late fourth or fifth century A.D., though he soon conceded an (...) earlier date, convinced by the arguments of various reviewers that it reflected the missionary outlook characteristic of Judaism of the late Hellenistic and early Imperial period. (shrink)

Paul the Martyr: The Cult of the Apostle in the Latin West. By David L. Eastman. Writings from the Greco-Roman World Supplement Series, vol. 4. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pp. xx + 238, illus. $30.95.

This paper focuses on Gundissalinus’s particularly important contribution to metaphysics which it presents in three steps: firstly, a succinct overview of the history of the relevant metaphysical terminology from the Late Ancient period to the Middle Ages shows how, for the first time, Gundissalinus interpreted metaphysics as the name of a discipline ; in a second step, the paper analyzes the specific epistemological foundation of metaphysics as an autonomous science, namely as ontology, in the chapter on metaphysics in Gundissalinus’s De (...) divisione philosophiae, paying particular attention to his criticism of twelfth-century theology as this was developed in the School of Chartres; thirdly, the paper examines a crucial text from the treatise on the division of the sciences: in it, Gundissalinus included an otherwise unknown translation of a passage from Avicenna’s Book of Demonstration which discusses the thorny issue of the subordination of the philosophical disciplines to metaphysics. This subject is one which would continue to receive plenty of attention in later times, as the examples of Robert Kilwardby and John Duns Scotus demonstrate, both of which authors may be considered to have continued Gundissalinus’s metaphysical project. (shrink)

The Oxford Classical Texts, or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, are renowned for their reliability and presentation. The series consists of a text without commentary but with a brief apparatus criticus at the foot of each page. There are now over 100 volumes, representing the greater part of classical Greek and Latin literature. The Aim of the series remains that of including the works of all the principal classical authors. Although this has been largely accomplished, new volumes are still being (...) published to fill the remaining gaps, and old editions are being revised in the light of recent research or replaced. (shrink)

In the 12th century the "Book of the Soul" by the philosopher Avicenna was translated from Arabic into Latin. It had an immense success among scholastic writers and deeply influenced the structure and content of many psychological works of the Middle Ages. The reception of Avicenna's book is the story of cultural contact at an imipressively high intellectural level. The present volume investigates this successful reception using two approaches. The first is chronological, tracing the stages by which Avicenna's work (...) was accepted and adapted by Latin scholars. The second is doctrinal, analyzing the fortunes of key doctrines. The sense of the original Arabic text of Avicenna is kept in mind throughout and the degree to which his original Latin interpreters succeeded in conveying it is evaluated. (shrink)

The century and a half just before Western Europeans moved out into the wider world during the great age of discovery and expansion which began with Columbus and Vasco da Gama was crucial in the long-term relationship that developed between the Latin West and the Islamic world nearby. And it was in this period that these two great world civilizations formed attitudes towards each other that still govern much of how they interact today. It is in an attempt (...) to clarify the importance of these years that I am addressing you medievalists today. (shrink)

Traces the complex lineages of thinking about private property from ancient to modern times. It challenges a number of deep-seated assumptions we make about the incontestability of private property by building a careful and extended account of where these assumptions came from.

In the earthly city, then, we find two things-its own obvious presence, and its symbolic presentation of the heavenly city. Now citizens are begotten to the earthly city by nature vitiated by sin, but to the Heavenly City by grace freeing nature from sin.

The volume under review presents the state of the art when it comes to tracking the reception of Ibn Rushd, the famed Aristotelian commentator from Andalusia, within medieval Latin philosophy. These are all very high-quality essays, each brimming with subtle insights into the way that themes and philosophical puzzles in Aristotle were framed in Averroes's works through the lens of late antique commentary, and how the Latin scholastics then furthered the agenda through their own creative work as well (...) as further comparisons with other eminent philosophers of the likes of Augustine and Avicenna. A standing theme that emerges is the contested relationship between tradition and... (shrink)

Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), or Averroes, is widely known as the unrivalled commentator on virtually all works by Aristotle. His commentaries and treatises were used as manuals for understanding Aristotelian philosophy until the Age of the Enlightenment. Both Averroes and the movement commonly known as 'Latin Averroism' have attracted considerable attention from historians of philosophy and science. Whereas most studies focus on Averroes' psychology, particularly on his doctrine of the 'unity of the intellect', Averroes' natural philosophy as a whole and (...) its influence still remain largely unexplored. This volume aims to fill the gap by studying various aspects of Averroes' natural philosophical thought, in order to evaluate its impact on the history of philosophy and science between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. (shrink)

In the course of his closing remarks at the Copenhagen Congress, the then President of the Association International des Études Byzantines reminded those who worried about the state of our field of “the rule that science may begin with imagination but … rests on factual documentation rather than conjecture”. As one who was (and is) less troubled about the way things were (and are) going, an art historian may be permitted to point to an example in which a document can (...) be shown to corroborate educated guesswork, and consequently to demonstrate one way in which peace between the two camps can (at least on this occasion) be achieved. The result may not be the absolute certainty demanded by our ancien président, but it comes as close to proof as anything available in a domain notorious for its lack of “factual documentation”. The method in question is triangulation—a third datum brought to bear on two previously known bodies of evidence—and the example that of the Middle Byzantine silks that display images of eagles. At issue is the belief that surviving examples were originally gifts offered to foreigners who in turn presented them to institutions or individuals of the Latin church. (shrink)

This study contains three parts. The first tries to follow the spread of the study of the Prior Analytics in the first two centuries during which it was at all studied in Western Europe, providing in this connection a non-exhaustive list of extant commentaries. Part II points to a certain overlap between commentaries on the Prior Analytics and works from the genre of sophismata . Part III lists the questions discussed in a students' compendium from about the 1240s and in (...) six commentaries per modum quaestionis from the 1270s through the 1290s. (shrink)

Natalia Lozovsky. “The Earth Is Our Book”: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000. (Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts.) x + 182 pp., illus., tables, bibl., index. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. $44.50, £28.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Fromherz has already written a very useful book on the Almohads, and he now attempts to set his work on their remarkable empire within a much wider setting, from the seventh century, when Islam reached the Maghreb, all the way to the fifteenth century, and in the entire western Mediterranean. His thesis is that we should (...) think of western Mediterranean civilization in the Middle Ages as a shared culture and experience, embracing the much-ignored history of what are now Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia alongside the study of Spanish, Italian and other histories, predominantly Christian. Close attention to the Christian shores of the western Mediterranean has, he avers, created a narrative of worlds apart: Christians on the northern flanks who had little in common... (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The beginning of the fifteenth century marks a new stage in the reception of the Platonic dialogues in the Latin West. Throughout the medieval period only four dialogues of Plato--the Timaeus, Phaedo, Meno, and part of the Parmenides--were accessible to Latin readers, and the study of Plato was almost wholly confined to the first of these texts, which is chiefly concerned with natural philosophy. In the first half of the fifteenth century this situation changed dramatically: six new (...) dialogues or parts of dialogues were translated by Leonardo Bruni, the Republic was translated three times, George of Trebizond made versions of the Laws, the Epinomis, and the Parmenides, and a dozen other dialogues were made available in Latin by various other translators. With the work of Marsilio Ficino, who published in 1484 the first translation of the Complete Works, the translation activity of the fifteenth century come to fruition. ;The renewed interest in translating Plato in the early fifteenth century was not however at first a renewal of Platonism. The translation of Plato made part of a cultural program whose premisses were in fact foreign to Platonic thought; Plato was instead put to the task of showing that pagan literature was compatible with Christianity, or read as a wise sage full of melodious maxims in usum scholarum, or so twisted as to endorse with his authority some political belief of the translators. These ulterior motives had their influence on the translations themselves, which were frequently excerpted, bowdlerized, or otherwise expurgated of inappropriate sentiments. Such philosophical understanding of Plato as the early humanists displayed was derived from the Philosophica of Cicero. ;It is only with the Plato-Aristotle controversy of mid-century that some more sophisticated understanding of Platonic philosophy begins to emerge. Despite the central role Plato played in his apocalyptic theology, George of Trebizond does not seem to have had a very firm grasp of Platonic thought, but his opponent in the controversy, Cardinal Bessarion, was able to draw upon the philosophical sagacity of the Byzantine and Western scholastic traditions, and produced a more penetrating, if at times incoherent, interpretation of Plato's thought. It is only with Marsilio Ficino however that philosophical understanding was combined with the philological attainments necessary to produce a respectable translation of Plato, and this may account for the great success Ficino's translations enjoyed in subsequent centuries. (shrink)

Philosophy in the medieval Latin West before 1200 is often thought to have been dominated by Platonism. The articles in this volume question this view, by cataloguing, describing and investigating the tradition of Aristotelian logic during this period, examining its influence on authors usually placed within the Aristotelian tradition (Eriugena, Anselm, Gilbert of Poitiers), and also looking at some of the characteristics of early medieval Platonism. Abelard, the most brilliant logician of the age, is the main subject of (...) three articles, and the book concludes with two more general discussions about how and why medieval philosophy should be studied. (shrink)

There is some temptation to say that the history of Aristotle in medieval Latin philosophy is just the history of medieval Latin philosophy, but this would be to oversimplify matters. The fountainhead of Christian philosophy, Augustine, betrays almost no familiarity with Aristotelian thought, and describes in the Confessions how he was underwhelmed by a reading of the Categories at the age of twenty. Boethius aspired to translate into Latin and comment upon the whole Aristotelian corpus, and reconcile (...) it with Plato as well, but only a fraction of the project was completed. Moreover, even once the influence of Aristotle was felt in its full force—and even more so before then—Platonism remained a strong influence on Latin philosophy. This article discusses the rise of scholastic Aristotelianism and its eventual decline, the history of Aristotelianism in the Latin West, the distinctive character of scholastic Aristotelianism, and disagreements within scholastic Aristotelianism. (shrink)

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in (...) the dance studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’ family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own ‘discursive’ family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today. (shrink)

The so-calledLatin Iliad, the main source for the knowledge of the Greek epic poem in the Latin West during the Middle Ages, is a hexametric poetic summary (epitome) of Homer'sIliadlikely dating from the Age of Nero, which reduces the 15,693 lines of the original to a mere 1,070 lines (6.8%).