Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond

Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond PDF Author: Sergeĭ Arkadʹevich Ivanov
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199272514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The image of St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square is a familar Russian landmark. Yet few people know what made Basil so famous. He was a saint who wandered about naked, bullied passers-by, brawled in the market-place, and once even smashed a revered icon. Saints such as Basil overturn the conventional concept of sainthood - what, we may ask, is saintly about them? This book aims to solve the mystery by exploring the figure of the holy fool in Byzantium and in later Russianhistory.

Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond

Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond PDF Author: Sergeĭ Arkadʹevich Ivanov
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199272514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The image of St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square is a familar Russian landmark. Yet few people know what made Basil so famous. He was a saint who wandered about naked, bullied passers-by, brawled in the market-place, and once even smashed a revered icon. Saints such as Basil overturn the conventional concept of sainthood - what, we may ask, is saintly about them? This book aims to solve the mystery by exploring the figure of the holy fool in Byzantium and in later Russianhistory.

Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond

Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond PDF Author: Sergey A. Ivanov
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191515140
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
There are saints in Orthodox Christian culture who overturn the conventional concept of sainthood. Their conduct may be unruly and salacious, they may blaspheme and even kill - yet, mysteriously, those around them treat them with even more reverence. Such saints are called 'holy fools'. In this pioneering study Sergey A. Ivanov examines the phenomenon of holy foolery from a cultural standpoint. He identifies its prerequisites and its development in religious thought, and traces the emergence of the first hagiographic texts describing these paradoxical saints. He describes the beginnings of holy foolery in Egyptian monasteries of the fifth century, followed by its high point in the cities of Byzantium, with an eventual decline in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also compares the important Russian tradition of holy fools, which in some form has survived to this day.

Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond

Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond PDF Author: George T. Calofonos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317148150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Although the actual dreaming experience of the Byzantines lies beyond our reach, the remarkable number of dream narratives in the surviving sources of the period attests to the cardinal function of dreams as vehicles of meaning, and thus affords modern scholars access to the wider cultural fabric of symbolic representations of the Byzantine world. Whether recounting real or invented dreams, the narratives serve various purposes, such as political and religious agendas, personal aspirations or simply an author’s display of literary skill. It is only in recent years that Byzantine dreaming has attracted scholarly attention, and important publications have suggested the way in which Byzantines reshaped ancient interpretative models and applied new perceptions to the functions of dreams. This book - the first collection of studies on Byzantine dreams to be published - aims to demonstrate further the importance of closely examining dreams in Byzantium in their wider historical and cultural, as well as narrative, context. Linked by this common thread, the essays offer insights into the function of dreams in hagiography, historiography, rhetoric, epistolography, and romance. They explore gender and erotic aspects of dreams; they examine cross-cultural facets of dreaming, provide new readings, and contextualize specific cases; they also look at the Greco-Roman background and Islamic influences of Byzantine dreams and their Christianization. The volume provides a broad variety of perspectives, including those of psychoanalysis and anthropology.

Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics

Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics PDF Author: M. Grau
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137324554
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Grau reconsiders the relationship between "logos" and "mythos" as a precondition to opening theological hermeneutics to discourse from other cultures and genres, other modes of telling and retelling.

The Trophies of the Martyrs

The Trophies of the Martyrs PDF Author: Galit Noga-Banai
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199217742
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
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 theobjects as portable art, treating the reliquaries as visual historical testimonies. The book is illustrated with nearly 100 finely reproduced drawings and photographs.

Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium

Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium PDF Author: Youval Rotman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674057619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Prologue. Insanity and religion -- Part I. Sanctified insanity: between history and psychology -- The paradox that inhabits ambiguity -- Meanings of insanity -- Part II. Abnormality and social change: early Christianity vs. rabbinic Judaism -- Abnormality and social change -- Socializing nature: the ascetic totem -- Epilogue. Psychology, religion, and social change

Religion in Contemporary European Cinema

Religion in Contemporary European Cinema PDF Author: Costica Bradatan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317860187
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism unfulfilling. The "crisis of religion" is itself a form of religious life. A sense of complex, subterraneous interaction between religious, heterodox, secular and atheistic experiences has thus emerged, which makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating to study, and this is what Religion in Contemporary European Cinema does. The book explores the mutual influences, structural analogies, shared dilemmas, as well as the historical roots of such a "post-secular constellation" as seen through the lens of European cinema. Bringing together scholars from film theory and political science, ethics and philosophy of religion, philosophy of film and theology, this volume casts new light on the relationship between the religious and secular experience after the death of the death of God.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography

The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography PDF Author: Professor Stephanos Efthymiadis
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472404157
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
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 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.

The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy

The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy PDF Author: Paroma Chatterjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107034965
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Explores the development and diffusion of the vita image which emerged in Byzantium in the twelfth century and spread to Italy and beyond.

The Firebird and the Fox

The Firebird and the Fox PDF Author: Jeffrey Brooks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484468
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
A century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.