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The period from the Late Roman Republic to the end of antiquity was marked by a wide interest in divination, and more broadly by an intense belief in the possibility of establishing close and personal connections with the gods. Divinatory practices underwent profound changes, accompanied by new trends in religious belief and philosophical reflection. Different religious, ethnic and cultural groups resorted to prophecy to define their respective identities and traditions, to articulate their peaceful or polemical interactions, and more broadly to construct their own worldview, the effects of which are still visible today. This wide-ranging volume creates a holistic picture of divination in antiquity, with perspectives from scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds. They argue that a greater focus on transcendent knowledge of the divine and cosmos influenced theories of divination among pagans, Jews, and Christians during the later part of the period.
Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries forges a new conversation about the diversity of Christianities in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, centered on the history of practice, looking at liturgy, performance, prayer, poetry, and the material culture of worship. It studies prayer and worship in the variety of Christian communities that thrived from late antiquity to the middle ages: Byzantine Orthodoxy, Syrian Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East. Rather than focusing on doctrinal differences and analyzing divergent patterns of thought, the essays address common patterns of worship, individual and collective prayer, hymnography and liturgy, as well as the indi...
As a direct result of an international conference organized in the year 2021, the volume tries to shed light on the way in which the translation activity contributed to the Romanian culture and language, drawing from different traditions and cultures it came in contact with (directly or indirectly), and thus mingling the own Slavonic church tradition with the new and revolutionary ideas of the Western world and using this mix to modernise the society, language and the politics in this region. Furthermore, this eclectic collection of articles highlights the fact that it was neither the exclusive merit of the Transylvanian scholars, nor of the Moldavian or Wallachian ones to have contributed d...
Light of the Nations is a philosophical work written by the Jewish intellectual and eminent biblical commentator Obadiah Sforno (ca. 1475–1550). His treatise, an apology for both Jewish and universal monotheistic beliefs, was published in Hebrew in 1537 under the title Or ‘Ammim and was translated by the author into Latin as Lumen Gentium in 1548. Written in the style of a classical medieval Scholastic summa, the treatise’s multilingual and multicultural dimensions reveal key humanist ideas that prevailed in the cities of northern Italy during the early modern period, while also speaking to its author’s abiding exegetical rationality.
A new, transnational, and interdisciplinary understanding of cosmology in Asian history. Cosmologies were not coherent systems belonging to separate cultures but rather complex bodies of knowledge and practice that regularly coexisted and co-mingled in extraordinarily diverse ways.
Love has been a central concept of philosophical inquiry over the last several millennia. Love: A History chronicle the most significant moments in this concept's long and complex evolutionary life, and collectively tell the story of the ways in which love's horizons shifted from the transcendent to the immanent over the course of its conceptual history.
Platonic Theories of Prayer is a collection of ten essays on the topic of prayer in the later Platonic tradition. The volume originates from a panel on the topic held at the 2013 ISNS meeting in Cardiff, but is supplemented by a number of invited papers. Together they offer a comprehensive view of the various roles and levels of prayer characteristic of this period. The concept of prayer is shown to include not just formal petitionary or encomiastic prayer, but also theurgical practices and various states of meditation and ecstasy practised by such major figures as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Damascius or Dionysius the Areopagite.
Providing a metaphysical grounding for liturgical participation, this book argues that “active participation” in the liturgy must be understood principally as our participation in God’s act, particularly in the act of Christ, and only secondarily as our ritual involvement. Utilizing Neoplatonist philosophy, Kjetil Kringlebotten proposes that this should be understood in terms of theurgy, which is the human participation in divine action, which finds its consummation in the incarnation of Christ. Without the incarnation all acts will remain extrinsic and imposed but acts can become real and intrinsic precisely because the incarnation makes possible true union with the divine, a metaphys...
Weaving together cultural history and critical imperial studies, this book shows how war and colonial expansion shaped seventeenth-century Venetian culture and society. Anastasia Stouraiti tests conventional assumptions about republicanism, commercial peace and cross-cultural exchange and offers a novel approach to the study of the Republic of Venice. Her extensive research brings the history of communication in dialogue with conquest and empire-building in the Mediterranean to provide an original interpretation of the politics of knowledge in wartime Venice. The book argues that the Venetian-Ottoman War of the Morea (1684-1699) was mediated through a diverse range of cultural mechanisms of patrician elite domination that orchestrated the production of popular consent. It sheds new light on the militarisation of the Venetian public sphere and exposes the connections between bellicose foreign policies and domestic power politics in a state celebrated as the most serene republic of merchants.