Textual Sources (textual + source)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


"Out of the authority of ancient and late writers": Ben Jonson's Use of Textual Sources in The Masque of Queens

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2002
MONIKA SMIALKOWSKA
[source]


The Roman invasion of Britain (AD 43) in imperial perspective: a response to Frere and Fulford

OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 4 2002
Eberhard Sauer
Few subjects have been more passionately discussed recently than the question of whether the invasion force in AD 43 landed in Kent or on the south coast or simultaneously in both areas. Recently Professor Frere and Professor Fulford joined forces to produce a series of arguments, each independently, supporting a landing in Kent. It is argued here that while archaeological or strategic considerations do not exclude either theory, some of the new ,evidence', especially Frere's and Fulford's logistical and linguistic arguments , is demonstrably incorrect. Furthermore, the Kent hypothesis relies on the assumption of an unmentioned far,distance embassy and other non,straightforward interpretations of our main textual source, Cassius Dio. It is, however, not the aim of this paper to replace one one,sided hypothesis by another, but to point out the dangers of dogma. [source]


Lost Works of Art: the problem and a case study

ART HISTORY, Issue 3 2000
Ed Lilley
This article, which is presented in two parts, aims to raise awareness of the position of lost works in art-historical practice. The first section seeks to question the status of the information which can exist regarding work of art that are no longer extant. Without claiming to be comprehensive, it details examples of the different sorts of material that may exist (photographs, engravings, explanatory texts, etc.) and considers these in relation to the original object. The secondary sources are considered individually, as being nearer to, or further from, the original, but they are also seen together as ,traces'. It is explicitly stated that these traces cannot provide access to the meaning of the original but that they may help to elucidate its ,message' (its historical, political or social significance). The second part focuses on two lost paintings by Leclerc which were shown, as pendants, at the 1756 exhibition of the Académie de Saint-Luc in Paris and which are now known only from a single critical text. One of them was a history painting, while the other was a genre scene. The latter, according to the textual source, depicted women in eighteenth-century dress disrobing on the banks of a stream. It is argued that such an immodest scene would not normally have been thought fit for public exhibition in eighteenth-century Paris and reasons are sought for its production and its exposure. The mid-eighteenth century saw doubts cast on frivolous erotic mythology (such as is seen in Leclerc's other painting) as being suitable for artistic depiction. Later events show that the loves of the gods were eclipsed by moral tales from ancient history (the rise of neoclassicism, in a word). It is suggested here, however, that Leclerc perhaps sought to provide an alternative. As his history picture and his genre scene were presently explicitly as pendants, he perhaps aimed to suggest that the way forward might be an acceptance of contemporary sexuality as a suitable subject in art. The paper is exploratory in every sense. It seeks to put the question of lost works on the agenda, to provide the first, rather than the last, word on the subject. In the final analysis, it is even suggested, not entirely frivolously, that Leclerc's paintings may never have existed. But even if they did not, a text describing possible pictures does, and this is of itself an important intervention in the thinking about suitable themes for depiction in eighteenth-century France. [source]


The Death of the Collective Subject in Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 6 2003
David Kenosian
In previous interpretations of Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob, critics have focused primarily on Johnson's relationship to socialism on the complex narrative structure of the novel. In this essay, I explore a topic that has received comparatively little attention: Johnson's notion of subjectivity. I show that Johnson's attempt to challenge Marxist concepts of the collective subject is inseparably linked to his views on representing history. Johnson's first move is to eliminate the omniscient Socialist Realist narrator who is supposed to have a greater understanding of societal forces than do the characters in the fictional world. But in Mutmassungen über Jakob, it is the protagonist (Jakob) who has a greater understanding of politics than the former Socialist Realist narrator (Rohlfs). Their relationship undermines the political hierarchy constituted by workers and party. In addition, history in the novel is not narrated from a privileged epistemological position. Rather, it is reconstructed in a negotiation among various subjects (characters) at the porous border between history and memory. This self-reflexive model of historiography is, as implied by Uwe Johnson, democratic, in contradistinction to Socialist Realism. Finally, I point out that this model of writing history in Mutmassungen über Jakob anticipates the polyphonic representation of the past in Johnson's Jahrestage (1970,83). In Johnson's final work, German history is consequently written in dialogues with Germans, immigrants from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors, and textual sources from various countries. [source]


An isotopic perspective on the transport of Byzantine mining camp laborers into southwestern Jordan

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
Megan A. Perry
Abstract The Byzantine Empire managed a complex administrative network that controlled the mining and processing of natural resources from within its boundaries. Scholars relying upon archeological and textual evidence debate the level of imperial involvement in these ventures, particularly in the provinces. Ancient sources note that many mining camps, for instance, purportedly contained criminal laborers and elite administrators transported from distant locales, indicating significant organization and expenditures by the imperial administration to run the mines. This analysis explores the presence of these nonlocal individuals in a cemetery associated with the third to seventh century A.D. mining camp of Phaeno (Faynan), located in modern Jordan. Strontium isotope analysis of 31 burials indicates that most spent their childhood in a similar geological region as Phaeno, implying that they were locally born. The ,18O results mirror the homogeneous 87Sr/86Sr values, confirming a local origin for most of the sample. Isotopic evidence therefore suggests that the Phaeno mining camp was largely a local operation, contrary to the picture presented in textual sources, although the profits surely padded imperial coffers. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Touch and American Religions

RELIGION COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2009
Candy Gunther Brown
The sense of touch plays an important role in many American religious practices. Yet dismissals of touch as an inferior mode of perception and reliance on textual sources that ignore touch have shaped research agendas. This essay identifies theories articulated by philosophical phenomenologists, students of ritual and performance studies, historians and anthropologists of art and architecture, neuroscientists, and feminist scholars that envision touch as a unique mode of gaining knowledge about the world and oneself and stimulating ethical behavior by working directly on the emotions to motivate empathetic, compassionate concern for others. The essay suggests how touch-oriented theories can aid the development of research areas in American religions where scholars have already begun fruitful explorations of tactility: studies of religious embodiment and ritual and of pain and its alleviation through divine healing or Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). [source]