Art and Holy Powers in the Early Christian House PDF Download

Author: Eunice Dauterman Maguire
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Author: Gary Vikan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040245900
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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In these studies Gary Vikan has opened new perspectives on the daily life and material culture of Late Antiquity - more specifically, on icons and relics, and on objects revealing of the world of pilgrimage, the early cult of saints, and marriage. He contextualizes these familiar categories of object in the patterns of belief and ritual extracted from contemporary texts and the objects themselves, in order to understand their meaning within the everyday lives of those by whom and for whom they were made. The studies give a nuanced delineation of the inherently ambiguous boundary between conventional religion and magic, noting repeatedly those instances wherein the two are invoked in the same breath (and by way of the same art object), toward the same end. From this historically constructed matrix of art, belief, and ritual, the author derives an anthropologically defined paradigm of charisma and pilgrimage (applied in one essay, as an intriguing parallel, to deconstructing the world of a contemporary secular "saint," Elvis Presley).

Author: Robert C. Gregg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190231513
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 690

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Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are considered kindred religions-holding ancestral heritages and monotheistic belief in common-but there are definitive distinctions between these "Abrahamic" peoples. Shared Stories, Rival Tellings explores the early exchanges of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and argues that their interactions were dominated by debates over the meanings of certain stories sacred to all three communities. Robert C. Gregg shows how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpreters--artists as well as authors--developed their unique and particular understandings of narratives present in the two Bibles and the Qur'an. Gregg focuses on five stories: Cain and Abel, Sarah and Hagar, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, Jonah and the Whale, and Mary the Mother of Jesus. As he guides us through the often intentional variations introduced into these shared stories, Gregg exposes major issues under contention and the social-intellectual forces that contributed to spirited, and sometimes combative, exchanges among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Offering deeper insight into these historical moments and their implications for contemporary relations among the three religions, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings will inspire readers to consider--and reconsider--the dynamics of traditional and current social-religious competition.

Author: Chris Entwistle
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1785702742
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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The twenty-five papers in this volume cover diverse aspects of the material culture of the late Roman, Byzantine and Medieval periods, with particular emphasis on the metalwork and enamel of these times. Individual papers include major reinterpretations of objects in the British Museum's Byzantine collections as well as essays devoted to the Museum's recent acquisitions in this field. The volume celebrates the retirement of David Buckton, for over twenty years the curator of the British Museum's Early Christian and Byzantine collections and the National Icon Collection.

Author: Georgia Frank
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520924352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Pilgrims in the deserts of Egypt and the holy land during the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. often reported visiting holy people as part of their tours of holy places. This is the first comprehensive study of pilgrimage to these famous ascetics of late antique Christianity. Through an original analysis of pilgrim writings of this period, Georgia Frank discovers a literary imagination at work, one that both recorded and shaped the experience of pilgrimage to living saints. Taking an important new approach to these texts, Frank finds in them a record of the writers’ and readers’ spiritual expectations and uses these fresh insights to add substantially to our understanding of the purposes and practices of pilgrimage. Frank focuses in particular on two important and well-known early texts—The History of the Monks in Egypt (ca. 400) and Palladius’s The Lausiac History (ca. 420), situating these narratives in their literary, historical, and spiritual contexts. She compares these narratives to exotic travel writing and to tales of otherworldly journeys. Bringing in contemporary theory, she demonstrates the importance of sight as a means of spiritual progress and explores the relation between the function of sight in these narratives and in other expressions of visual piety in late antiquity Christianity, such as the veneration of relics and, eventually, icons. With its unique focus on the sensory dimensions of pilgrimage—especially visuality—this absorbing book widens our understanding of early Christian pilgrims and those who read their accounts. At the same time, it also sheds new light on the relation between religious experience and the senses, on literary representations of visual experience, and on the literature of pious travel.

Author: Sulochana Ruth Asirvatham
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847699698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Between Magic and Religion represents a radical rethinking of traditional distinctions involving the term 'religion' in the ancient Greek world and beyond, through late antiquity to the seventeenth century. The title indicates the fluidity of such concepts as religion and magic, highlighting the wide variety of meanings evoked by these shifting terms from ancient to modern times. The contributors put these meanings to the test, applying a wide range of methods in exploring the many varieties of available historical, archaeological, iconographical, and literary evidence. No reader will ever think of magic and religion the same way after reading through the findings presented in this book. Both terms emerge in a new light, with broader applications and deeper meanings.

Author: David Frankfurter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity. As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different forms of Christianity according to their specific interests, their traditional idioms, and their sense of what the religion could offer. Reintroducing the term “syncretism” for the inevitable and continuous process by which a religion is acculturated, the book addresses the various formations of Egyptian Christianity that developed in the domestic sphere, the worlds of holy men and saints’ shrines, the work of craftsmen and artisans, the culture of monastic scribes, and the reimagination of the landscape itself, through processions, architecture, and the potent remains of the past. Drawing on sermons and magical texts, saints’ lives and figurines, letters and amulets, and comparisons with Christianization elsewhere in the Roman empire and beyond, Christianizing Egypt reconceives religious change—from the “conversion” of hearts and minds to the selective incorporation and application of strategies for protection, authority, and efficacy, and for imagining the environment.

Author: Mary M. Schaefer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199977623
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Mary M. Schaefer examines the ninth-century church Santa Prassede and its foundation myth, as well as an ideal of balanced male-female relationships and women holding pastoral office in the church of Rome.

Author: Andrea Olsen Lam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351185578
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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For those within the fields of art history and Byzantine studies, Professor Henry Maguire needs no introduction. His publications transformed the way art historians approach medieval art through his insightful integration of rhetoric, poetry and non-canonical objects into the study of Byzantine art. His ground-breaking studies of Byzantine art that consider the natural world, magic and imperial imagery, among other themes, have redefined the ways medieval art is interpreted. From notable monuments to small-scale and privately used objects, Maguire’s work has guided a generation of scholars to new conclusions about the place of art and its function in Byzantium. In this volume, 23 of Henry Maguire’s colleagues and friends have contributed papers in his honour, resulting in studies that reflect the broad range of his scholarly interests.

Author: Paul Stephenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190209070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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The Serpent Column, a bronze sculpture that has stood in Delphi and Constantinople, today Istanbul, is a Greek representation of the Near Eastern primordial combat myth: it is Typhon, a dragon defeated by Zeus, and also Python slain by Apollo. The column was created after the Battle of Plataia (479 BC), where the sky was dominated by serpentine constellations and by the spiralling tails of the Milky Way. It was erected as a votive for Apollo and as a monument to the victory of the united Greek poleis over the Persians. It is as a victory monument that the column was transplanted to Constantinople and erected in the hippodrome. The column remained a monument to cosmic victory through centuries, but also took on other meanings. Through the Byzantine centuries these interpretation were fundamentally Christian, drawing upon serpentine imagery in Scripture, patristic and homiletic writings. When Byzantines saw the monument they reflected upon this multivalent serpentine symbolism, but also the fact that it was a bronze column. For these observers, it evoked the Temple's brazen pillars, Moses' brazen serpent, the serpentine tempter of Genesis (Satan), and the beast of Revelation. The column was inserted into Christian sacred history, symbolizing creation and the end times. The most enduring interpretation of the column, which is unrelated to religion, and therefore survived the Ottoman capture of the city, is as a talisman against snakes and snake-bites. It is this tale that was told by travellers to Constantinople throughout the Middle Ages, and it is this story that is told to tourists today who visit Istanbul. In this book, Paul Stephenson twists together multiple strands to relate the cultural biography of a unique monument.