Theme (narrative)

About: Theme (narrative) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13050 publications have been published within this topic receiving 159511 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theme.

A new model for royal penance? Helgaud of Fleury's Life of Robert the Pious

Abstract: This article studies the theme of penance in writings about early medieval kingship through a case study: in his eleventh-century vita of Robert the Pious, Helgaud of Fleury described how the king did penance for his incestuous marriage in terms taken directly from Ambrose's Apologia David. This article, therefore, examines the influence which Ambrose had both on Helgaud and on earlier writers on kingship.

A Religious History of the American People

Abstract: A Review Article: SYDNEY E. AHLSTROM. A Religious History of the American People, Second edition, with a new Foreword and concluding chapter by David D. Hall. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972, 2004. Pp. Xxiv +1174, bibliographies, index. $30.00 (paper). Peter W. Williams Despite the more than three decades which have expired since its original publication, Sydney Ahlstrom's Religious History-frequently and accurately described as "magisterial"-remains in many ways the benchmark for interpreting the American religious experience as it has unfolded since the time of the first European settlements. Yale University Press now presents a welcome reissue of the original text with a new foreword, summary concluding chapter, and updated bibliography by Harvard's David Hall. Hall is to be congratulated for undertaking what in some ways is the impossible task of "bringing Ahlstrom up to date," a necessary endeavor but, especially under the imposed spatial limits, one that can never be entirely successful. In his foreword. Hall characterizes Ahlstrom's work as centered on two premises: the centrality of religion to an understanding of American history, and the primacy of the Social Gospel among the fruits of Protestantism. The first, if not yet universally accepted among historians, is certainly more widely acknowledged than in Ahlstrom's time, as witnessed, among other ways, in the remarkable influence which his three-dozen some doctoral students have had in the broader profession. (Names such as Holifield, Hutchison, Kane, Marsden, Mullin, Orsi, Rose, Sama, and Stein readily suggest themselves.) Hall's second premise is more problematic. Ahlstrom does aptly contextualize the Social Gospel as part of a lineage of Protestant-inspired campaigns of social reform, including abolitionism and prohibition, and his work was profoundly influenced by latter-day Neo-Orthodox advocates of social themes, such as the Niebuhrs, an influence that may have skewed his conception of religion to exclude many phenomena now focused on by newer generations of scholars. It would probably be more accurate, though, to expand the second theme to include the entire legacy of Puritanism. (Sidney Mead reviewed his namesake's work under the title "By Puritans Possessed.") In his discussion of the Social Gospel, Ahlstrom states unequivocally that the "major element in America's moral and religious heritage was Puritanism, with its powerfully rooted convictions that the shaping and, if need be, the remaking of society was the Church's concern." (787) At the beginning of his concluding chapter, "The Turbulent Sixties," he observes that "[n]ot only did this intense and fiercely lived span of years have a character of its own, but it may even have ended a distinct quadricentennium-a unified four-hundred-year period-in the Anglo-American experience. A Great Puritan Epoch can be seen as beginning in 1558 with the death of Mary Tudor, the last monarch to rule over an officially Roman Catholic England, and as ending in 1960 with the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president of the United States." (1079) It is worth noting that, even for a man with such broadly catholic sympathies and perceptions, Ahlstrom saw fit to frame his thesis in terms of the Catholic/Protestant contrasts and tensions which had only begun to resolve themselves during the many years he labored on this volume-his only major publication during his lifetime. Hall valiantly attempts to cover the third of a century subsequent to this work's first appearance in one chapter and emphasizes, understandably enough, the evangelical turn that has dominated the public religious scene during those decades. He separates Pentecostalism from his broader discussion of Evangelicalism, and is sometimes confusing in his attempt to discern its strains, especially those rooted in race. At the other end, he collapses Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims into one brief section, which may evoke some useful parallels but which hardly does justice to the distinctions among these traditions, even in the rather brief presence of the latter three as players on the American scene. …

Rethinking GIS, three-dimensionality and space perception in archaeology

Abstract: For over 30 years GIS has been a major theme in archaeology, leading scholars to debate the way geo-spatial platforms can contribute to a better understanding of the ancient landscape and a more th...