The Christian Invention of Time

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
Daily Prayer

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.

Presentation

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Redacción CEIICH
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
History Of

<p class="p1">The third number of <span class="s1"><strong>INTER</strong></span><span class="s2"><strong>disciplina </strong></span>underscores this generic reference of <em>Bodies </em>as an approach to a key issue in the understanding of social reality from a humanistic perspective, and to understand, from the social point of view, the contributions of the research in philosophy of the body, cultural history of the anatomy, as well as the approximations queer, feminist theories and the psychoanalytical, and literary studies.</p>

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Sources Of Authority ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Periods

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

Leadership for the Christian Empire: Emperors and Bishops in theEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 684-717
Author(s):  
Anna Lankina
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Raw Data ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
The Relationship

The fifth-centuryEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius is an unusual example of a surviving minority source. Although scholars have mined his work for raw data on events between 320 and 425c.e., in contrast to other contemporary ecclesiastical historians, Philostorgius has received little attention. His work has suffered derision, being seen as nothing more than “Arian” polemic and thus as more partisan than its pro-Nicene counterparts. This essay analyzes Philostorgius's role as one of many competitive voices participating in the composition of historical works for the elite readership of Constantinople in the fifth century. Philostorgius'sEcclesiastical Historyconstituted an integral part of the historiography of late antiquity and early Christianity. His representation of the relationship between bishops and emperors reveals a distinctive theory of history which informs his entire work.

scholarly journals Feminist Historiography and Uses of the Past

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 260-283
Author(s):  
Blossom Stefaniw
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Feminist Historiography

Two recently-published works involved in the representation of women in the Christian past show two contemporary but divergent historiographic modes. The following essay examines each study within a larger frame of inquiry as to how patriarchy continues to shape both the institutional and embodied orders within which feminist historiography of early Christianity and Late Antiquity takes place. Using Critical Race Theory as the best available perspective from which to engage with systems of oppression, I articulate certain revisions which should be made to current efforts towards equality and consider what it would mean to write feminist historiography as counter-narrative or counter-storytelling without that becoming a decorative or extra-curricular practice in the academy. When feminist historiography is treated simultaneously in institutional, embodied, and epistemic terms it becomes evident that the way we think about women is part of a high-stakes conflict around the use of the past.

Afterlife

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
Poetic Justice ◽  
Way Of Thinking

From classical antiquity onwards, writing about life after death has consistently served as a situation for questions of literary theory. The locations of the afterlife are hypotheticals and counterfactuals; they are the site of theory itself. Questions about authorship, for instance, have been articulated through the myth of Orpheus (in the forms recorded by Virgil and Ovid). The story of Orpheus tells of a poet who must go into the underworld to find the material for a tale of survivorship and loss, raising questions about the sources of creative inspiration, the art of trauma, and the suffering of the authentic artist. Dante’s imagined structures of an afterlife, in which punishments fit crimes with an apt poetic justice, have similarly been enlisted into one of the most important theoretical debates of the 20th century between formalists and historicists. The afterlife as a supplement to life’s time has also been used as a way of thinking about temporality and the implications for narrative as a literary mode that works with and through the philosophy of time. One of the most influential aspects of the literature of the afterlife to resonate in literary theory has been the ghost story. In its greatest manifestations, from Hamlet to The Turn of the Screw to Beloved, the ghost story forces its readers to acknowledge those elements of the past that refuse to be laid to rest, and it has therefore served as a vehicle for psychoanalytic questions about how processes of individual or collective memory are depicted in literary texts. In poststructuralist theory, the notion of the hauntological has also built its concepts in dialogue with earlier literary ghosts and become a way of thinking about language and its uncanny slippage between presence and absence. Subsequent critical work continued to develop hauntology into a way of understanding temporality and cultural history. Finally, the notion of prosopopoeia, or the voicing of the dead through writing, is perhaps the most far-reaching way of understanding the prevalence of dead voices as a literary trope, which reflects something of the processes of reading and writing themselves. The afterlife has therefore been a crucial source of generative metaphors for literary theory, as well as a topic and setting with an important literary history.

Religion and Representation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Rzepa
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Book History ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This review is divided into three sections: 1. Jeffrey T. Zalar, Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770–1914; 2. Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy; 3. ‘Translation and Religion: Crafting Regimes of Identity’, a thematic issue of Religion edited by Hephzibah Israel and Matthias Frenz. Taken together, these works provide an overview of approaches that demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research into religion and representation. Drawing on the disciplines of social, political, and cultural history, literary studies, book history, theology, religious studies, translation studies, and postcolonial studies, they highlight the importance of research that contextualizes the relationship between religion and representation, bringing attention to its historically overlooked aspects.

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