Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion PDF full book. Access full book title Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion by André Lardinois. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: André Lardinois
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004214216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429
Get Book Here
Book Description
A prevalent view in the current scholarship on ancient religions holds that state religion was primarily performed and transmitted in oral forms, whereas writing came to be associated with secret, private and marginal cults, especially in the Greek world. In Roman times, religions would have become more and more bookish, starting with the Sibylline books and the Annales Maximi of the Roman priests and culminating in the canonical gospels of the Christians. It is the aim of this volume to modify this view or, at least, to challenge it. Surveying the variety of ways in which different types of texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient Greek and Roman religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were in use for both Greek and Roman state and private religions.
Author: André Lardinois
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004214216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429
Get Book Here
Book Description
A prevalent view in the current scholarship on ancient religions holds that state religion was primarily performed and transmitted in oral forms, whereas writing came to be associated with secret, private and marginal cults, especially in the Greek world. In Roman times, religions would have become more and more bookish, starting with the Sibylline books and the Annales Maximi of the Roman priests and culminating in the canonical gospels of the Christians. It is the aim of this volume to modify this view or, at least, to challenge it. Surveying the variety of ways in which different types of texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient Greek and Roman religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were in use for both Greek and Roman state and private religions.
Author: André Lardinois
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004194126
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 430
Get Book Here
Book Description
Surveying the variety of ways in which written texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were intricately connected in both Greek and Roman state and private religions.
Author: Alessandro Vatri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192515446
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Get Book Here
Book Description
This study discusses the question of whether there is a linguistic difference between classical Attic prose texts intended for public oral delivery and those intended for written circulation and private performance. Identifying such a difference which exclusively reflects these disparities in modes of reception has proven to be a difficult challenge for both literary scholars and cultural historians of the ancient world, with answers not always satisfactory from a methodological and an analytical point of view. The legitimacy of the question is first addressed through a definition of what such slippery notions as 'orality' and 'oral performance' mean in the context of classical Athens, reconstruction of the situations in which the extant prose texts were meant to be received, and an explanation of the grounds on which we may expect linguistic features of the texts to be related to such situations. The idea that texts conceived for public delivery needed to be as clear as possible is substantiated by available cultural-historical and anthropological facts; however, these do not imply that the opposite was required of texts conceived for private reception. In establishing a rigorous methodology for the reconstruction of the native perception of clarity in the original contexts of textual reception this study offers a novel approach to assessing orality in classical Greek prose through examination of linguistic and grammatical features of style. It builds upon the theoretical insights and current experimental findings of modern psycholinguistics, providing scholars with a new key to the minds of ancient writers and audiences.
Author: Justin Arft
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192663607
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Get Book Here
Book Description
Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation explores how the enigmatic Phaeacian queen, Arete, is at the heart of an epic-scale "poetics of interrogation" used throughout the Odyssey to negotiate Odysseus' kleos, or epic renown. Arete's interrogation of Odysseus has been especially problematic in scholarship, but diachronic and synchronic analysis of similar interrogations across Indo-European, Orphic, and Greek epigrammatic corpora show that the "stranger's interrogation" is a formula that demands performance and negotiation of status. Within the Odyssey, this interrogation is part of an intraformular network used to generate kleos, and the queen's question initiates the longest and most complex negotiation of Odysseus' status in epic and memory. Arete's role as interrogator not only explains her strange authority and resonance with both Penelope and comparative afterlife figures, but it also establishes a gendered, agonistic tension between she and her husband, Alkinoos, that influences the structure, genre, and narratology of performances across the Phaeacian episode. This book reinterprets the Odyssey's central episode and challenges several assumptions about Nausikaa and Alkinoos' famed hospitality, even demonstrating how the Apologue is organized as a response to competing inquiries into Odysseus' fundamental status in tradition. The Odyssey ultimately navigates away from Odysseus' public reputation and roots his status in private memories, and Arete's carefully arranged interventions signal the larger process by which the Odyssey immortalizes Odysseus in poetry as a nostos hero. The queen and her question invite new applications of oral poetics that shed light on the structure, composition, and reperformance of the Odyssey.
Author: Jacob A. Latham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107130719
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Get Book Here
Book Description
The pompa circensis was a political pageant and a religious ritual that produced a republican, imperial, and even Christian image of the city. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity.
Author: S. C. Humphreys
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019878824X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1488
Get Book Here
Book Description
The concept of kinship is at the heart of understanding the structure of ancient Athenian society and the lives of its citizens. Drawing on epigraphic, literary, and archaeological sources, 'Kinship in Ancient Athens' explores interactions between kin across a range of social contexts, from family life to legal matters, politics, and more.
Author: Andreas Serafim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317573765
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a society where public speech was integral to the decision-making process, and where all affairs pertaining to the community were the subject of democratic debate, the communication between the speaker and his audience in the public forum, whether the law-court or the Assembly, cannot be separated from the notion of performance. Attic Oratory and Performance seeks to make modern Performance Studies productive for, and so make a significant contribution to, the understanding of Greek oratory. Although quite a lot of ink has been spilt over the performance dimension of oratory, the focus of nearly all of the scholarship in this area has been relatively narrow, understanding performance as only encompassing 'delivery' – the use of gestures and vocal ploys – and the convergences and divergences between oratory and theatre. Serafim seeks to move beyond this relatively narrow focus to offer a holistic perspective on performance and oratory. Using examples from selected forensic speeches, in particular four interconnected speeches by Aeschines (2, 3) and Demosthenes (18, 19), he argues that oratorical performance encompassed subtle communication between the speaker and the audience beyond mere delivery, and that the surviving texts offer numerous glimpses of the performative dimension of these speeches, and their links to contemporary theatre.
Author: Klaas Spronk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004337695
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Get Book Here
Book Description
The proceedings of the sixteenth joint meeting presented in this volume will show the fruits of the ongoing cooperation between the members of the British Society for the Study of the Old Testament and the Dutch Oudtestamentische Werkgezelschap. The theme of the conference was ‘Torah and Tradition’. The volume brings together many different approaches in describing the multifaceted traditions behind the Hebrew Bible in its present form.
Author: Samuel E. Balentine
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3161611039
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Get Book Here
Book Description
The discourse of prayer responds to the abiding lure of transcendence. From Gilgamesh to the primordial human beings in Eden to Odysseus, the quest for ultimate truths has summoned forth all manner of human effort - courageous, desperate, pious, impious, successful, failed, invited, forbidden - and like all such lures, one can never be certain whether the glimmer of transcendence is that of a bright and shining star that illuminates the shadows or only a shiny object that seduces one into an inescapable darkness (a fishing lure, for example). In this study, Samuel E. Balentine demonstrates how prayer's invocation of God transgresses the limits of human beings. The author shows how inviting, let alone commanding God to speak may be the "acme of bardic pretention," but in the ancient world such transgression characterizes the audacity of prayer.
Author: Mark McClay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108991998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Bacchic gold tablets are a remarkable collection of objects from the Ancient Greek world: inscribed with short verse texts and buried in graves of mystery initiates, they express extraordinary hopes for post-mortem salvation. Past approaches to these objects have sought to reconstruct their underlying belief system. This book is the first to examine them primarily within the context of early Greek poetry and performance culture. The patterns of thought and expression in the tablets find instructive poetic antecedents and analogies, including in non-canonical and inscribed genres that are not included in conventional descriptions of the poetic tradition. Applying a range of analytical approaches from the fields of epigraphy, anthropology, and religious studies, this book ultimately uses the tablets to cast more familiar literature in a new light.
