Lundi, 27 Mars 2017 08:35
Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle
Karla Pollmann, The Baptized Muse. Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority, Oxford, 2017.
Éditeur : Oxford University Press
288 pages
ISBN : 9780198726487
55 £
With the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire increasing numbers of educated people converted to this new belief. As Christianity did not have its own educational institutions the issue of how to harmonize pagan education and Christian convictions became increasingly pressing. Especially classical poetry, the staple diet of pagan education, was considered to be morally corrupting (due to its deceitful mythological content) and damaging for the salvation of the soul (because of the false gods it advocated). But Christianity recoiled from an unqualified anti-intellectual attitude, while at the same time the experiment of creating an idiosyncratic form of genuinely Christian poetry failed (the sole exception being the poet Commodianus). In The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority, Karla Pollmann argues that, instead, Christian poets made creative use of the classical literary tradition, and—in addition to blending it with Judaeo-Christian biblical exegesis—exploited poetry's special ability of enhancing communicative effectiveness and impact through aesthetic means. Pollman explores these strategies through a close analysis of a wide range of Christian, and for comparison partly also pagan, writers mainly from the fourth to sixth centuries. She reveals that early Christianity was not a hermetically sealed uniform body, but displays a rich spectrum of possibilities in dealing with the past and a willingness to engage with and adapt the surrounding culture(s), thereby developing diverse and changing responses to historical challenges. By demonstrating throughout that authority is a key in understanding the long denigrated and misunderstood early Christian poets, this book reaches the ground-breaking conclusion that early Christian poetry is an art form that gains its justification by adding cultural authority to Christianity. Thus, in a wider sense it engages with the recently developed interdisciplinary scholarly interest in aspects of religion as cultural phenomena.
Source : Oxford University Press
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Jeudi, 09 Mars 2017 08:15
Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle
Carolyn Higbie, Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World. Object Lessons, Oxford, 2017.
Éditeur : Oxford University Press
304 pages
ISBN : 9780198759300
65 £
Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World focuses on the fascination which works of art, texts, and antiquarian objects inspired in Greeks and Romans in antiquity and draws parallels with other cultures and eras to offer contexts for understanding that fascination. Statues, bronze weapons, books, and bones might have been prized for various reasons: because they had religious value, were the work of highly regarded artists and writers, had been possessed by famous mythological figures, or were relics of a long disappeared past. However, attitudes towards these objects also changed over time: sculpture which was originally created for a religious purpose became valuable as art and could be removed from its original setting, while historians discovered value in inscriptions and other texts for supporting historical arguments and literary scholars sought early manuscripts to establish what authors really wrote. As early as the Hellenistic era, some Greeks and Romans began to collect objects and might even display them in palaces, villas, or gardens; as these objects acquired value, a demand was created for more of them, and so copyists and forgers created additional pieces - while copyists imitated existing pieces of art, sometimes adapting to their new settings, forgers created new pieces to complete a collection, fill a gap in historical knowledge, make some money, or to indulge in literary play with knowledgeable readers. The study of forged relics is able to reveal not only what artefacts the Greeks and Romans placed value on, but also what they believed they understood about their past and how they interpreted the evidence for it. Drawing on the latest scholarship on forgery and fakes, as well as a range of examples, this book combines stories about frauds with an analysis of their significance, and illuminates and explores the link between collectors, scholars, and forgers in order to offer us a way to better understand the power that objects held over the ancient Greeks and Romans.
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Dimanche, 05 Mars 2017 08:11
Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle
Louise Hogdson, Res Publica and the Roman Republic. "Without Body or Form", Oxford, 2017.
Éditeur : Oxford University Press
336 pages
ISBN : 9780198777380
65 £
Res Publica and the Roman Republic tells the story of an idea - res publica - and shows us what it meant and was made to mean in the particular historical context of the late Roman Republic. Since the term was politically ubiquitous, often used emotively, and as a consequence is hard to define, the temptation to take res publica as a universally understood and relatively uncontroversial given is rarely resisted. A close look at how res publica was perceived and manipulated, however, brings into focus not just the political crises of the late Republic but also the various attempts to clean up these crises through dubiously legal (and often outright illegal) emergency measures. Although this book is at root a philological study of a political concept, it aims to make a historical point about a politically turbulent period by addressing three key questions: What did it mean for Republican politicians to appeal to the res publica? What did the increasing tendency to do so reveal about the dangerous fragmentation of political legitimacy? How did these pressures transform res publica as a concept?
Through a detailed examination of res publica as it appears in the ancient historians, orators, poets, commentaries and letters, inscriptions, and historical episodes of the late Republic and early Principate, this book demonstrates how the rhetoric surrounding res publica mirrored the changes in the Roman political landscape towards the end of the Republic.
Source : Oxford University Press
Mercredi, 01 Mars 2017 08:15
Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle
Donald Lateiner et Dimos Spatharas (éd.), The Ancient Emotion of Disgust, Oxford, 2016.
Éditeur : Oxford University Press
Collection : Emotions of the Past
336 pages
ISBN : 9780190604110
55 £
The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors, but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy.
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Samedi, 25 Février 2017 08:24
Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle
Richard Fletcher et Johanna Hanink (éd.), Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity. Poets, Artists and Biography, Cambridge, 2016.
Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
Collection : Cambridge Classical Studies
380 pages
ISBN : 9781107159082
99,99 $
What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers imagine the lives of ancient creator-figures. Work in the last decades has emphasized the likely fictionality of nearly all of the ancient evidence about the lives of poets, as well as of other artists and intellectuals; this book now sets out to show what we might nevertheless still do with the rich surviving testimony for 'creative lives' - and the evidence that those traditions still shape how we narrate modern lives too.
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Jeudi, 23 Février 2017 08:46
Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle
Hedwig Schmalzgruber, Studien zum Bibelepos des sogenannten Cyprianus Gallus. Mit einem Kommentar zu gen. 1–362, Stuttgart, 2016.
Éditeur : Franz Steiner Verlag
Collection : Palingenesia
601 pages
ISBN : 978-3-515-11596-4
86 €
Die Bedeutung der Bibelepik als einer Leitgattung der christlichen Spätantike ist unumstritten. Zugleich ist die philologische Erschließung des längsten erhaltenen Bibelepos in lateinischer Sprache, der sogenannten Heptateuchdichtung, ein noch weitgehend unbestelltes Feld. Diese Dichtung, deren nicht näher bekannter Autor oft als Cyprianus Gallus bezeichnet wird, ist wohl in die erste Hälfte des 5. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. zu datieren und umfasst in ihrer heute bekannten Form über 5500 Verse, in denen die ersten sieben Bücher des Alten Testaments behandelt werden. Hedwig Schmalzgruber konzentriert sich in dieser Studie auf das Buch Genesis der Heptateuchdichtung. Ihr Ziel ist es zum einen, die biblische Vorlage des Dichters und seinen erzähltechnischen Umgang mit ihr sowie sein Verhältnis zur patristischen Genesisexegese und die Rezeption poetischer Vorgänger zu untersuchen. Damit nimmt Schmalzgruber seine poetische und exegetische Leistung im Rahmen der Gattung Bibelepik in den Blick. Zum anderen erschließt ein musterhafter Kommentar der ersten großen Erzähleinheit (V. 1–362, Gen 1–9) den Text philologisch und im Hinblick auf seine theologischen Kontexte und beleuchtet die Arbeitsweise des Heptateuchdichters im Detail.
Source : Franz Steiner Verlag
Mardi, 21 Février 2017 17:29
Jacques Elfassi
Giuseppe Botturi, I Synonyma di Isidoro di Siviglia e lo stilus isidorianus. Interpretazione letteraria e studio dello stile con riferimento alle meditazioni di Pier Damiani, Giovanni di Fécamp e Anselmo d'Aosta, Berne, 2017.
Éditeur : Peter Lang
Collection : Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters, 51
299 pages
ISBN : 978-3-0343-2126-6
84,44 €
I Synonyma di Isidoro di Siviglia (ca. 562–636), un dialogo in due libri tra Homo e Ratio, godettero di vastissima fortuna dalla loro composizione fino almeno al XVI secolo. Il dialogo è infatti composto nel peculiare stilus isidorianus – una prosa ritmata e rimata – e offre una meditazione sulla sofferenza umana, sul peccato, e sulla buona condotta di vita. L'autore conduce un esame intertestuale e interdiscorsivo dell'opera, ricercando a livello linguistico e a livello tematico possibili testi di riferimento per la sua comprensione. Sono indagate tre tradizioni letterarie: i libri sapienziali della Bibbia, la patristica latina di Agostino, Gregorio Magno, Ambrogio e Girolamo, e lo stoicismo cristiano. Nell'ultima parte sono considerate invece alcune orazioni anonime di epoca carolingia (IX–X sec.) e alcune meditazioni dell'XI secolo (di Giovanni di Fécamp, Pier Damiani, Anselmo d'Aosta) alla ricerca di eredità isidoriane e differenze nella composizione letteraria delle preghiere.
Source : Peter Lang
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