(1996). Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 25-26.

Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages

Find the secret to improve the quality of life by reading this introduction to the talmud and midrash. This is a kind of book that you need now. Besides, it can be your favorite book to read after having this book. Do you ask why? Well, this is a book that has different characteristic with others. You may not need to know who the author is, how well-known the work is. As wise word, never judge the words from who speaks, but make the words as your good value to your life.

/pdf/introduction-to-the-talmud-and-midrash-4i3ppth0es.pdf

Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash

On Good Friday, 1626, Franciscus Quaresmius delivered a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem calling on King Philip IV of Spain to undertake a crusade to ‘liberate’ the Holy Land. Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade introduces readers to this unique call to arms with the first-ever edition of the work since its publication in 1631. Aside from an annotated English translation of the sermon, this book also includes a series of introductory chapters providing historical context and textual commentary, followed by an anthology of Spanish crusading texts that testify to the persistence of the idea of crusade throughout the 17th century.
Quaresmius’ impassioned and thoroughly reasoned plea is expressed through the voice of Jerusalem herself, personified as a woman in bondage. The friar draws on many of the same rhetorical traditions and theological assumptions that first launched the crusading movement at Clermont in 1095, while also bending those traditions to meet the unique concerns of 17th-century geopolitics in Europe and the Mediterranean. Quaresmius depicts the rescue of the Holy City from Turkish abuse as a just and necessary cause. Perhaps more unexpectedly, he also presents Jerusalem as sovereign Spanish territory, boldly calling on Philip as King of Jerusalem and Patron of the Holy Places to embrace his royal duty and reclaim what is rightly his on behalf of the universal faithful. Quaresmius’ early modern call to crusade ultimately helps us rethink the popular assumption that, like the chivalry imagined by Don Quixote, the crusades somehow died along with the middle ages.

Jerusalem Afflicted : Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade

This thesis is an examination of the cultural and political climate of the medieval Welsh Marches. The investigation is structured around three case studies: Hereford, c. 1180–c. 1210; Ludlow, c. 1310–c. 1350; Cwm Tawe, c. 1380–c. 1410. Using these three case studies, the thesis develops a critique of the core-periphery model that has dominated modern conceptualisations of medieval political and cultural geographies. In its place, I formulate an alternative model based on an engagement with social theories of the network, including Manuel Castells’s ‘network society’ and, in particular, Bruno Latour’s work on ‘actor-network theory’. Reading with networks might, I contend, provide a new, more ethical interpretative model, one capable of restoring cultural and political agency to erstwhile ‘peripheral’ regions. The first chapter traces the multifarious textual networks in which the three case-study locales were active: it thereby identifies the corpus of the following three chapters (i.e. the texts circulated, composed, copied, or translated in each locale), and situates them in their manuscript contexts. The second chapter develops ‘networked’ readings of the texts themselves: I analyse the ways in which the texts position their local environments in relation to the global networks described in their narratives, such that they not only disprove the ‘peripheral’ status ascribed to the Marches, but more searchingly question the validity of the model that produces such ascriptions. Chapters 3 and 4 take a thematic approach, using networks to analyse the political modalities of the texts’ representations of nonhuman agency (Chapter 3) and of issues surrounding language, translation, and multilingualism (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 opens up the corpus to investigate representations of the Welsh Marches in Arthurian literature: I suggest that not only do the Marches emerge as highly connected regions, but that Arthurian literature more fundamentally imagines a networked model of political and cultural geography. The thesis concludes by turning to the Hereford mappa mundi as a succinct image of the investment of the so-called ‘periphery’ in a truly global worldview, and by reasserting the importance of reading with networks in the current political climate. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my Granny Lampitt, my first, best, and most dearly missed friend. Table of

Networking the March : the literature of the Welsh Marches, c.1180-c.1410

This thesis argues that ancient Rome was rehabilitated in English culture during the mid-Victorian period, following a period of effective displacement that began during the late eighteenth century. Devalued through its appropriation by revolutionary polities on both sides of the Atlantic, Rome’s profile in England was eclipsed by the contemporary popularity of Hellenism as a classical model. Yet, as a result of the coalescence of a diverse set of internal and external factors from around 1850 to 1870, Roman antiquity regained credibility and status as a central parallel for Victorian society and empire for the rest of the century.
Although founded upon concepts of reform and progress, as well as defined by its industrial and technological capabilities, mid-to-late-Victorian society became incongruously in thrall to the Roman past for guidance and support at a time of unprecedented commercial development, domestic security and overseas colonial expansion. Presenting a unique episode in the classical framing of the English national experience, this period therefore demands evaluation of the role played by classical Rome in contemporary constructions of domestic and imperial identity.
Taking a culture-wide, integrative approach, this thesis explores the chronological trajectory of the reception of Rome during the Victorian era. Surveying the interplay of domestic and external causes behind the Roman revival, it seeks to achieve three fundamental ends:
- To trace the re-emergence of Rome as a comparative model at this time.
- To identify and analyse the matrix of causes behind Rome’s restoration.
- To evaluate the impact of Rome’s revival on Victorian society and empire.
Accordingly, the thesis shows how the shifting dynamics of Victorian responses to Rome were intimately bound to contemporary trends and events.
The first chapter, ‘Eclipse’, sets Rome’s nineteenth-century reception in a broad historical context, before investigating the recession suffered by its profile as a result
of the events of the revolutionary age. The second and third chapters, ‘Rehabilitation I’ and ‘Rehabilitation II’, examine respectively the set of internal and external factors that motivated Rome’s renewal as a cultural model. The final chapter, ‘Impact’, assesses the influence that this resurgence exercised across the spectrum of mid-to-late Victorian culture. Thus, through a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach, the thesis portrays the diverse ways in which Victorians assumed the purple of ancient Rome.

/pdf/assuming-the-purple-the-rehabilitation-of-ancient-rome-in-2tl6o8nzga.pdf

Assuming the purple:the rehabilitation of ancient Rome in Victorian culture, 1837-1901

This essay considers the growth of historiographical writing in fifteenth-century Iberia within the context of mass conversions of Jews to Christianity. It takes the writing of the convert Pablo de Santa Maria (ca. 1351-1435) as a test case for considering the emergence of historiographical writing directly informed by the events of 1391, in which many thousands of Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity. By reading Pablo’s poem Siete edades del mundo (Seven Ages of the World) in light of his biblical exegesis and anti-Jewish polemic, it is possible to show how issues relevant to Pablo’s conversion, including his exegetical polemic with Judaism, directly affect his historiographical writing and shape his use of standard tropes of fifteenth-century Castilian historiography. This suggests that, while there may be no uniquely “converso voice” in history writing, some fifteenth-century historiography is clearly informed by issues of particular relevance to conversos. At the same time, it implies that some fifteenth-century Christian historiography, like that of Sephardic Jews after the expulsion of 1492, grew from earlier historiographical and polemical traditions that transcend any single catalyzing event such as the trauma of 1391.

/pdf/scrutinizing-history-polemic-and-exegesis-in-pablo-de-santa-3lshjkg4um.pdf

Scrutinizing history: Polemic and exegesis in Pablo de Santa María's Siete edades del mundo

Note on Names, Titles, Citations, and Transliteration Introduction: Conversion and History 1. From Peripety to Prose: Tracing the Pauline and Augustinian Paradigms 2. Alterity and Auctoritas: Reason and the Twelfth-Century Expansion of Authority 3. In the Shadow of the Khazars: Narrating the Conversion to Judaism 4. A War of Words: Translating Authority in Thirteenth-Century Polemic 5. The Jargon of Authenticity: Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid and the Paradox of Testimony 6. The Supersessionist Imperative: Islam and the Historical Drama of Revelation Conclusion: Polemic as Narrative Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

In the well-known third novella in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the young Philomena, one of the ten Florentines gathered in a country villa to tell stories after fleeing the plague, recounts a version of the famous tale of the three rings: When Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, needed money, he devised a plan to trick the Jewish moneylender Melchisedech by asking him to reveal which religion was superior, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Seeing that the Sultan sought to catch him in a snare, the Jew told him a story of a marvelous ring inherited by a king who loved his three sons equally. Not wanting to choose between them, the king had fashioned two identical copies of the ring and gave one to each. After his death, each claimed to have the true ring, and the question of which was original and which was a copy, just like the question of which religion was the most true, has never been resolved (45). Although retold in various forms in French, Latin, Italian, and Hebrew in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, elements of the tale can be found in Arabic as far back as the eighth-century polemical disputation of Timothy, the Nestorian Patriarch of Baghdad, with the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Mahdī (Shagrir 167-68). When asked about the true religion, Timothy states that if a pearl is dropped at night and a group of people set out groveling for it in the dark, one person may find a stone, another a piece of glass, and only one will find the pearl itself. Everyone will think they have the one true pearl until they find out the truth in the light of day. In the Decameron’s frametale version, the basic premise of the tale has not changed from its polemical predecessors, but the implications of its message that “he himself, who had had [the

/pdf/the-original-is-unfaithful-to-the-translation-conversion-and-106w2nvj8t.pdf

The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation: Conversion and Authenticity in Abner of Burgos and Anselm Turmeda

Varios autores cristianos del siglo XII (como el converso Pedro Alfonso de Huesca y el abad de Cluny, Pedro el Venerable) atacaron la tradicion musulmana junto con la judia. Sin embargo, en la segunda mitad del siglo XIII hay un cambio notable en la manera en que los autores cristianos comparan a los judios y a los musulmanes. A partir de la obra antijudia del dominico catalan Ramon Marti, se habla de los musulmanes y de los textos islamicos como “testigos” que afirman la verdad del dogma cristiano a traves de la fe islamica en Jesus como profeta verdadero y la adoracion de Maria en la tradicion musulmana. Este articulo hace un estudio de esta nueva retorica, que se repite en varias obras antijudias del siglo XIV, como el  Mostrador de justicia  del converso Alfonso de Valladolid y la obra polemica en latin del dominico Alfonso Buenhombre. Se conjetura aqui que esta imagen menos negativa del islam solo se encuentra en las polemicas antijudias entre 1250 y los primeros anos del siglo XV, y que el discurso antijudio cambio en el contexto de la critica anticonversa que se produjo a mitad de este siglo. En el nuevo contexto del siglo XV, la imagen islamica de Jesus ya no sirve como herramienta cristiana contra los judios, y el discurso polemico de los cristianos vuelve a criticar el islam tal y como se habia hecho en el siglo XII.

https://revistes.uab.cat/medievalia/article/download/v19-n2-szpiech/pdf_109

«Testes sunt ipsi, testis et erroris ipsius magister»: el musulmán como testigo en la polémica cristiana medieval

The Vita coaetanea (1311) has long been used as a key document in the construction of a chronology of Llull’s life and work. This article proposes to read the Vita as a kind of conversion narrative similar to other narratives or narrative frames (such as those of Abner of Burgos / Alfonso of Valladolid, Petrus Alfonsi, or Samaw’al al-Maghrebi) found within polemical writing between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. By reading the Vita not as a statement of historical fact but as a careful narrative construction of the intellectual and spiritual foundation of Llull’s Art, it is possible to ask what Llull’s polemical motives may have been in dictating this text on the eve of the Council of Vienne, where Llull succeeded in lobbying for the creation of language schools at various European universities. Many details in the Vita reflect Llull’s larger polemical stance against the Dominican order, including the suggestion that Llull’s original visions and turn of heart correspond to the same period as the Disputation of Barcelona, which the Dominicans organized in 1263 to highlight their new antiJewish argumentation based on original Jewish texts. In comparison with the Disputation and with the subsequent writing of Dominican Ramon Marti (d. after 1287) and Alfonso of Valladolid (ca. 1260-ca. 1347), both of whom follow its methodology of citing textual authorities, Llull’s Vita serves to authorize Llull to pursue his unique method of argumentation, one based not on textual authorities but on necessary reasons. In this light, the period of the Disputation of Barcelona can be seen as a turning point in the history of Christian polemical writing, being at once the debut of the new Dominican method, the beginning of Marti’s polemical career, the beginning of Llull’s Art, and the birth of Alfonso of Valladolid. 32 RYAN SZPIECH

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/ryanszpiech/wp-content/uploads/sites/88/2014/12/szpiech.Studia.Luliana.article.finalprint.pdf

Ryan Szpiech

Papers

Scrutinizing history: Polemic and exegesis in Pablo de Santa María's Siete edades del mundo

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation: Conversion and Authenticity in Abner of Burgos and Anselm Turmeda

«Testes sunt ipsi, testis et erroris ipsius magister»: el musulmán como testigo en la polémica cristiana medieval

La disputa de Barcelona como punto de inflexión