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This work provides a definitive translation into English of the Targum of Lamentations, based on a critical reading of all the extant versions, with textual annotations and extensive notes. An appendix offers, in addition, a translation and annotation of the Yemenite version.

Accessible Study of Ecclesiology and Eschatology from a Reformed Perspective Reformed Systematic Theology explores key Scripture topics from biblical, doctrinal, experiential, and practical perspectives, helping readers grow in their understanding and application of the truth presented in God's Word. Written by Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, each volume presents a comprehensive yet accessible study of the Reformed Christian faith that ministers to the whole person―head, heart, and hands. The final volume, Church and Last Things, unpacks important topics around ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church) and eschatology (the doctrine of last things), including the biblical significance of church membership, Jesus's model for the church, and 7 practical lessons from Revelation. A set of all 4 Reformed Systematic Theology volumes is also available. - Biblical and Theological: Explains key passages of the Holy Scriptures and draws extensively from historic Reformed and Puritan sources - Easy to Understand: Explores central points of ecclesiology and eschatology from a simple, accessible, comprehensive, and experiential approach - Part of the Reformed Systematic Theology Series: Volumes cover the entire scope of systematic theology based on 8 central themes: revelation, God, man, Christ, the Holy Spirit, salvation, the church, and last things - Also Available as Part of the 4-Volume Reformed Systematic Theology Set

This masterful work by Dr. Laurie Olsen uncovers the behind-the-scenes story of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium VIII based on unpublished records from the Vatican Apostolic Archives, including internal memoranda, private notes, never-before-heard audio recordings of closed-door sessions, and more. This monumental achievement of archival research provides a window into what really happened at Vatican II—the council's inner workings and maneuvers to steer Lumen Gentium VIII in a direction that would profoundly affect marian devotion and the study of mariology from that moment on.

Does the Holy Spirit proceed only from the Father—or also from the Son? Protestants and Roman Catholics might immediately answer the latter and wonder why their Orthodox friends protest. Historically one of the major obstacles to Christian unity across the East-West divide, the Filioque—the part of the Latin translation of the Nicene Creed claiming the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son—still bedevils Trinitarian theologians today. How can the church possibly achieve unity in the face of this dogmatic difference, implacable for over a millennium? Giulio Maspero shows us how the answer can be found in history. In the fourth century, when Pneumatomachians denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Cappadocian Fathers came to a relational understanding of the most elusive person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit was conceived of as the glory and power eternally exchanged between the Father and the Son. In fact, this understanding is still fundamentally shared by Eastern and Western Christians. Examining Syriac traditions as an example, Maspero observes that both Syriac and Latin lack the linguistic precision to describe the nature of the Holy Spirit's procession from the Trinity in the same way as Greek, hence the ambiguous Filioque. Yet what might be seen on the surface as a mere translation error reveals deep questions about the triune nature of God. With rigorous theological argument, Maspero ultimately proposes a way forward for East and West—one based not on centuries of polemics, but on a common tradition established by the Greek Fathers. Essential reading for the ecumenically minded theologian, Rethinking the Filioque with the Greek Fathers takes a crucial step toward Christian unity.

This book discusses hagiographic, historiographical, hymnological, and theological sources that contributed to the formation of the sacred picture of the physical as well as metaphysical Jerusalem in the literature of two Eastern Christian denominations, East and West Syrians.Popa analyses the question of Syrian beliefs about the Holy City, their interaction with holy places, and how they travelled in the Holy Land. He also explores how they imagined and reflected the theology of this itinerary through literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, set alongside a well-defined local tradition that was at times at odds with Jerusalem. Even though the image of Jerusalem as a land of sacred spaces is unanimously accepted in the history of Christianity, there were also various competing positions and attitudes. This often promoted the attempt at mitigating and replacing Jerusalem's sacred centrality to the Christian experience with local sacred heritage, which is also explored in this study. Popa argues that despite this rhetoric of artificial boundaries, the general picture epitomises a fluid and animated intersection of Syriac Christians with the Holy City especially in the medieval era and the subsequent period, through a standardised process of pilgrimage, well-integrated in the custom of advanced Christian life and monastic canon.The Making of Syriac Jerusalem is suitable for students and scholars working on the history, literature, and theology of Syriac Christianity in the late antique and medieval periods.

James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality reads Dubliners and Ulysses through studies of hospitality, particularly that articulated in the Lukan parable of the Good Samaritan. It traces the origins of the novel in part to the physical attacks on Joyce in 1904 Dublin and 1907 Rome, showing how these incidents and the parable were incorporated into his short story ‘Grace'and throughout Ulysses, especially its last four episodes. Richard Rankin Russell discusses the rich theory of hospitality developed by Joyce and demonstrates that he sought to make us more charitable readers through his explorations and depictions of Samaritan hospitality.

This volume includes cutting-edge research on the spread of Syrian Christianity along the Silk Road from the 6th to the 14th century. Recent archaeological discoveries and excavations of ancient and medieval Christian sites in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China shed new light on Christian communities in Central Asia, China and Mongolia. Scholars from such fields as archaeology, manuscript studies, history and theology have contributed, offering new insights into the influence of Syriac Christianity along the Silk Roads. Li Tang is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Christian East (ZECO), University of Salzburg/Austria. Dietmar W. Winkler is Head of the Department of Biblical Studies and Ecclesiastical History, and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the Christian East (ZECO), University of Salzburg/Austria

The tale of a collective evil force known as Gog and Magog has occupied the imagination of Jews, Christians, and Muslims for millennia, finding expression in literary and scholarly works and other cultural artifacts. This book gathers the papers from two conferences at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg by scholars ranging from history, to religious studies, to art history, and is the most thorough work on the subject to date.

This volume includes cutting-edge research on the spread of Syrian Christianity along the Silk Road from the 6th to the 14th century. Recent archaeological discoveries and excavations of ancient and medieval Christian sites in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China shed new light on Christian communities in Central Asia, China and Mongolia. Scholars from such fields as archaeology, manuscript studies, history and theology have contributed, offering new insights into the influence of Syriac Christianity along the Silk Roads.

With modern media and technology, the local campaign has made a comeback. Inside the Local Campaign pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of constituency-level campaigning during a Canadian federal election.

Joyce's methods of composition have only recently begun to be examined in a rigorous fashion. Already the work done on the genesis of Joyce's texts has fostered both new insights and new questions regarding the overall status of his oeuvre. The conference Genitricksling Joyce, held at Antwerp in 1997, testified to the variety and vitality of genetic investigations into Joyce's work. We have tried to recreate this vitality in the present volume with a double purpose, or double trick. First, the essays collected in Genitricksling Joyce are not only indicative of the growing body of genetic scholarship, they also signify methodological and theoretical changes among its practitioners towards a more open form of discussion and understanding. Second, we hope that these essays will clearly demonstrate the relevance of genetic criticism to current critical and cultural concerns in Joyce studies.

Es besteht inzwischen weithin Konsens, dass die syrischsprachigen, christlichen Gemeinschaften in der Spätantike und den ersten Jahrhunderten des Islam mehr waren als nur verstreute Minderheitengemeinschaften, die in geografischen Gebieten, die stark vom iranischen Element geprägt waren, nur geringen Einfluss gehabt hätten. „Iranianate and Syriac Christianity“ schlägt eine Brücke zwischen verschiedenen Fachdisziplinen, vor allem der Iranistik, der Syriazistik und der Geschichte des Christentums, und versammelt eine Reihe maßgeblicher Stimmen zu diesem Thema. Die 14 Beiträge sind in zwei Abschnitte gegliedert: Mission, Bekehrung und Macht sowie Sprachen, Texte und Konzepte. Sie repräsentieren ein breites Spektrum von Ansätzen und spiegeln die Komplexität der religiösen, politischen und kulturellen Geschichte der christlichen Gemeinschaften im eurasischen Raum bis zum Jahr 1000 und darüber hinaus wider.

Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages offers the first overall discussion of the hitherto under-studied literary genre of pseudo-biblical dialogues. The essays presented here analyse texts, which transform dialogues and disputations about contemporary theological, legal or philosophical matters into a biblical scenario as discussions between biblical characters. Such dialogues, involving demonic, human and divine figures, are common and popular in the Oriental (Syriac, Coptic and Arabic) as well as Greek, Latin and medieval vernacular literatures, in prose and poetry alike, from late antiquity to the early modern. The present volume is the first attempt for a systematic and interdisciplinary study of this literature in the form of thematically organized essays by some of the most eminent experts on late antique and medieval dialogic texts in a wide range of traditions. Presenting surveys of pseudo-biblical dialogues in various languages and cultures, the volume will foster a new interdisciplinary approach to these texts previously investigated in isolation within the individual scholarly fields of Oriental, Byzantine, Medieval or Slavonic studies. It also endeavours to create new methodologies for their investigation informed by and also impacting both literary and biblical studies. Analysing the interplay between content and literary form, the contributions present an overview of the development of pseudo-biblical dialogues from Syriac, Coptic and Greek patristics to not only Medieval Latin and Byzantine but also Slavonic, Arabic and English texts, providing us with the first manual about this wide-spread and popular, but unexplored literature.

Early Islam has emerged as a lively site of historical investigation, and scholars have challenged the traditional accounts of Islamic origins by drawing attention to the wealth of non-Islamic sources that describe the rise of Islam. A Prophet Has Appeared brings this approach to the classroom. This collection provides students and scholars with carefully selected, introduced, and annotated materials from non-Islamic sources dating to the early years of Islam. These can be read alone or alongside the Qur'an and later Islamic materials. Applying historical-critical analysis, the volume moves these invaluable sources to more equal footing with later Islamic narratives about Muhammad and the formation of his new religious movement.Included are new English translations of sources by twenty authors, originally written in not only Greek and Latin but also Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, and Arabic and spanning a geographic range from England to Egypt and Iran. Ideal for the classroom and personal library, this sourcebook provides readers with the tools to meaningfully approach a new, burgeoning area of Islamic studies.

This book offers a number of innovative studies on the three main communities of the East Mediterranean lands—Muslims, Jews and Christians—in the aftermath of the seventh-century Arab conquests. It focuses principally on how the Christian majority were affected by and adapted to their loss of political power in such arenas as language use, identity construction, church building, pilgrimage, and the role of women. Attention is also paid to how the Muslim community defined itself, administered justice, and regulated relations with non-Muslims. This book will be important for anyone interested in the ways in which the cultures and traditions of the late antique Mediterranean world were transformed in the course of the seventh to tenth centuries by the establishment of the new Muslim political elite and the gradual emergence of an Islamic Empire.

Tanto San Efrén, quien fue proclamado doctor de la iglesia por el papa Benedicto XV, como Jacobo de Sarug, fueron dos de los primeros y más importantes representantes de la visión teológica de la iglesia siriaca. Gran parte de su trabajo quedó plasmado al modo de himnos y homilías métricas, haciendo de la poesía un medio de expresión de la teología. En Teología siriaca en la tradición maronita, el corobispo Seely Joseph Beggiani se esfuerza por presentar las reflexiones de estos personajes de un modo sistemático, de acuerdo con categorías utilizadas en tratados occidentales, sin por ello socavar la originalidad y cohesión de su pensamiento. Para san Efrén de Siria (m. 373) y Jacobo de Sarug (m. 521), Dios es absolutamente misterioso, si bien está presente en todo lo que ha creado. La kenosis (el auto-vaciamiento) del Verbo de Dios no sólo se encuentra en la naturaleza humana de Cristo, sino también en las palabras finitas de las Sagradas Escrituras. A través de esta acción, el Divino se vuelve accesible para los seres humanos. El triple descenso del Hijo de Dios al seno de María, al Río Jordán en su bautismo, y al sheol al momento de su muerte, fueron acciones dirigidas tanto a la redención como a la divinización. Efrén y Jacobo emplearon un sistema de tipologías y anti-tipologías utilizado en las Sagradas Escrituras para demostrar que los sacramentos son extensiones de la acción de Cristo a través de la historia. El material está organizado a partir de los temas del ocultamiento de Dios, la creación y el pecado, la revelación, la encarnación, la redención, la divinización y el Espíritu Santo, la iglesia, María, los misterios de iniciación, la escatología, y la fe. A su vez, este libro resalta el hecho de que la tradición litúrgica de la iglesia maronita, una de las iglesias siriacas, constituye una expresión consistente y penetrante de la teología de estos dos padres de la iglesia siriacos.

Disputation literature is a type of text in which usually two non-human entities (such as trees, animals, drinks, or seasons) try to establish their superiority over each other by means of a series of speeches written in an elaborate, flowery register. As opposed to other dialogue literature, in disputation texts there is no serious matter at stake only the preeminence of one of the litigants over its rival. These light-hearted texts are known in virtually every culture that flourished in the Middle East from Antiquity to the present day, and they constitute one of the most enduring genres in world literature. The present volume collects over twenty contributions on disputation literature by a diverse group of world-renowned scholars. From ancient Sumer to modern-day Bahrain, from Egyptian to Neo-Aramaic, including Latin, French, Middle English, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese, the chapters of this book study the multiple avatars of this venerable text type.

Ancient manuscripts of John's Gospel containing hermeneiai have long puzzled scholars, provoking debate about their origins, purpose, and use. The fragmentary nature of the early evidence has impeded progress towards a better understanding of these specialized books. The present study shows that these books are'Divining Gospels'—editions of John's Gospel incorporating lot divination materials for use in fortune-telling. The study centers on material presented here for the first time: the text and translation of a unique sixth-century Syriac manuscript, the earliest and most complete example of a hermeneia Gospel. An analysis of the Syriac along with evidence from Greek, Coptic, Latin, and Armenian versions show they all preserve vestiges of the same apparatus, disseminated widely at an early time throughout many different Christian communities. These books must be situated squarely within the development of divinatory practices in early and late antique Christianity. However, they represent a true hermeneutic, a method by which interpreters brought the potency of the Bible to bear on the everyday concerns of people who consulted them for help. Furthermore, the Divining Gospel draws on the special aura that John's Gospel held in the Christian imagination, both as text and as textual object. An analysis of the interplay between the biblical text and sacred codex, the oracles, the ritual practitioner, and the client enrich our appreciation of this distinctive hermeneutic. Contextualizing these materials in popular use illuminates the fraught relationships between the ecclesial establishment, ritual experts operating on the margins of orthodox respectability, and lay clients seeking knowledge and help.

This book is a new edition and translation of the Nag Hammadi tractate, The Concept of Our Great Power, with introduction and commentary.It suggests that the tractate is composite, and that its basis was a non-Christian Gnostic apocalyptic work whose background may have been Samaritan, and which emanated from a breakaway Simonian group who, unlike other Simonians, believed in celibacy. The tractate later received Christian additions. The last of these may refer to the career of Julian the Apostate. This is a fresh approach to the interpretation of this puzzling tractate.

Ephrem, one of the earliest Syriac Christian writers, lived on the eastern outskirts of the Roman Empire during the fourth century. Although he wrote polemical works against Jews and pagans, and identified with post-Nicene Christianity, his writings are also replete with parallels with Jewish traditions and he is the leading figure in an ongoing debate about the Jewish character of Syriac Christianity. This book focuses on early ideas about betrothal, marriage, and sexual relations, including their theological and legal implications, and positions Ephrem at a precise intersection between his Semitic origin and his Christian commitment. Alongside his adoption of customs and legal stances drawn from his Greco-Roman and Christian surroundings, Ephrem sometimes reveals unique legal concepts which are closer to early Palestinian, sectarian positions than to the Roman or Jewish worlds. The book therefore explains naturalistic legal thought in Christian literature and sheds light on the rise of Syriac Christianity.

No detailed description available for'Seeing Islam as Others Saw It'.

“Toward Precision Assessment and Psychotherapy: Understanding Individual Differences through Neurobiology, Genetics, and Epigenetics” provides a transformative approach to the understanding of mental health in the 21st century. It does so by encouraging the replacement of traditional subjective techniques with more precise and objective measures that are designed to discover individual differences in our patients. Just as in personalized medicine, where diagnostic and treatment techniques are becoming more targeted toward the specific conditions of a particular patient, so to in the mental health field we need to develop targeted and focused methods through the use of clinical science concepts and through the adoption of an agnostic, unassuming posture where the presentation of each patient is viewed as unique. For example, treatments may draw from an integrative approach that incorporates genomic and epigenomic analyses of the patient to inform a more targeted medication regimen or psychotherapy approach (some psychiatrists are beginning to use genomic analysis to aid in the choice of a specific antidepressant, for example, that would most likely be effective for a certain patient). Diagnostically, paper and pencil questionnaires leading to current diagnostic labels, long the standard, must be replaced, for the most part, by objective measures of stress that prioritize “reports from the body”. Additionally, research methods of extremely complex psychological disorders can be enhanced by breaking them down into smaller subtypes (or endophenotypes) versus large phenomenologically-based symptom clusters (i.e. DSM diagnoses). Individual differences, a consistent focus throughout the book, may be the product of genetic variants and/or epigenetic mechanisms. The latter mediate gene X environment interaction that is now the primary paradigmatic lens through which we investigate and seek to explain resultant behavioral profiles. A major focus of the book is on the effects of early adversity, particularly trauma, and how they contribute to a “re-programming” of the brain through epigenetic alterations of gene expression. This results in increased vulnerability to possible psychological disorders, such as various anxiety conditions, depression, and character disorders which may manifest later in life. By identifying the epigenetic effects caused by early stressors, that is, how gene expression is altered, we can eventually make significant advances in primary prevention. This book represents an attempt to move us into a transitional domain and beyond, where causes and the treatment of psychological disorders are re-conceptualized through our developing insights from neurobiology, genetics, and epigenetics.

This comprehensive and timely book on the European energy transition has been written by Europe's leading energy experts, and provides guidance for the incoming policy makers at a European level. It reflects on the latest policy developments, such as the Clean Energy for All Europeans package and the outcomes of the UN Climate Conference COP 24. The energy transition is Europe's flagship project. It needs to provide sound answers to the climate and sustainability-, security of supply- and competitiveness imperatives. The energy transition corresponds to a large scale economic and cultural change. It encompasses sector coupling- linking up sectors that have ignored each other previously, like mobility and power. What is the meaning of digitalization, and how to face cybersecurity risks? What is the response to energy poverty, that 50 million Europeans are victims of? While the geographical scope is Europe at large, divide lines from the past continue to exist, and new ones emerge: What are the borders of the new Energy Europe? The book analyses the factors driving change: where are we on climate and sustainability, competitiveness and market, and security of supply? It presents the actors: what genesis of and what contemporary institutions for European energy policy, how is energy addressed by the national and by the European; what about the active customer paradigm and the many startups and business models changing, as well as NGOs? It looks into sectors: power, gas, mobility and the powerful push from digitalization. It proceeds with a reality check, based on facts and figures and reflects on modelling. Edited by Susanne Nies the book is prefaced by Jacques Delors and sees contributions from distinguished authors from policy, research, industry and NGOs across Europe.

This adventurous study focuses on experimental animal writing in the major interwar journal transition (1927–1938), which contains a striking recurrence of metaphors around the most basic forms of life.

Isho'dad of Merw, Bishop of the East Syrian Church in Ḥedatta, wrote his commentaries on the books of the Old and New Testament around 850 A.D. His work constitutes one of the most important and extensive exegetical collections within the East Syrian Church. From 1911 to 1916 Margaret D. Gibson published a text edition and an English translation of the New Testament Part. Developments in the area of manuscript tradition, the discovery of new sources and the many deficiencies in Gibson's work, made a new text edition and translation necessary. The starting point has been taken in Isho'dad's commentary on the Gospel of St. John. This gave the opportunity to trace in Isho'dad's commentary the influences of the work of Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose commentary on the Gospel of St. John has survived in the Syriac language. Volume 671 (Textus) offers a Syriac text edition based on 15 manuscripts. In the Introduction these manuscripts and their mutual relationship are described. Volume 672 (Versio) contains a description of Isho'dad's life, a study of the sources used by him, and a translation. The volumes include a survey of Gibson's errata, an orthographical index and an index of biblical citations and Greek terms quoted.

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the storyIn the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history.What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

How did Christianity make its remarkable voyage from the Roman Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent? By examining the social networks that connected the ancient and late antique Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, central Asia, and Iran, this book contemplates the social relations that made such movement possible. It also analyzes how the narrative tradition regarding the apostle Judas Thomas, which originated in Upper Mesopotamia and accredited him with evangelizing India, traveled among the social networks of an interconnected late antique world. In this way, the book probes how the Thomas narrative shaped Mediterranean Christian beliefs regarding co-religionists in central Asia and India, impacted local Christian cultures, took shape in a variety of languages, and experienced transformation as it traveled from the Mediterranean to India, and back again.

Preaching formed one of the primary, regular avenues of communication between ecclesiastical elites and a wide range of society. Clergy used homilies to spread knowledge of complex theological debates prevalent in late antique Christian discourse. Some sermons even offer glimpses into the locations in which communities gathered to hear orators preach. Although homilies survive in greater number than most other types of literature, most do not specify the setting of their initial delivery, dating, and authorship. Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East addresses how we can best contextualize sermons devoid of such information. The first chapter develops a methodology for approaching homilies that draws on a broader understanding of audience as both the physical audience and the readership of sermons. The remaining chapters offer a case study on the renowned Syriac preacher Jacob of Serugh (c. 451-521) whose metrical homilies form one of the largest sermon collections in any language from late antiquity. His letters connect him to a previously little-known Christological debate over the language of the miracles and sufferings of Christ through his correspondence with a monastery, a Roman military officer, and a Christian community in South Arabia. He uses this language in homilies on the Council of Chalcedon, on Christian doctrine, and on biblical exegesis. An analysis of these sermons demonstrates that he communicated miaphysite Christology to both elite reading communities as well as ordinary audiences. Philip Michael Forness provides a new methodology for working with late antique sermons and discloses the range of society that received complex theological teachings through preaching.

1517 : fondation du Collegium Trilingue, ou College des Trois Langues de Louvain. L'histoire de cet etablissement humaniste en est une non seulement d'une remarquable visee scientifique et pedagogique, mais aussi d'efforts obstines, voire de combats courageux, couronnes d'un succes international sans precedent. Mettant a profit le legs de Jerome de Busleyden, conseiller au Grand Conseil de Malines, decede en aout 1517, Erasme s'attela aussitot a la creation d'un college ou des savants de renommee internationale prodigueraient un enseignement public et gratuit de latin, de grec et d'hebreu. Dans ce college trilingue, etudiants-boursiers et professeurs vivaient ensemble. La fondation du college, pres du Marche aux poissons, au centre de Louvain, a du affronter de nombreuses critiques et attaques de la part d'adversaires traditionalistes. Dans le premier siecle de son existence, le college dut traverser des moments difficiles a une epoque fortement marquee par des troubles politiques et religieux. Toutefois, pendant ce temps, le nouvel institut s'acquit une haute renommee scientifique a travers l'Europe. De l'etranger, des centaines d'etudiants y accouraient pour suivre les cours donnes par des professeurs de reputation internationale. A la fin du XVIIIe siecle, la Revolution francaise mit brusquement fin a trois siecles d'enseignement trilingue. Les contributions dans cet ouvrage fournissent une vue d'ensemble du projet pedagogique et scientifique anime par l'esprit d'Erasme, de l'histoire du College des Trois Langues, et de sa contribution didactique et scientifique a l'etude des langues et des litteratures, dans son contexte europeen.

The art of interpreting Holy Scriptures flourished throughout the culturally heterogeneous pre-modern Orient among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Different ways of interpretation developed within each religion not without considering the others. How were the interactions and how productive were they for the further development of these traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influences in profiling the own tradition against the others? These and other related questions are critically treated in the present volume.

This book is a part of series of Causes of Celebrations written by Moshe Bar Kepha (813-903). These Causes are unique in that they demonstrate a new genre of the Syriac literature initiated by the East Syriac authors at the beginning of the sixth century. Moreover, these Causes reveal the appreciation and dependency of Moshe Bar Kepha on the East Syriac sources despite the ecclesiastical doctrinal separation between the East Syriac and West Syriac churches.

This book breaks with three common scholarly barriers of periodization, discipline and geography in its exploration of the related themes of heresy, magic and witchcraft. It sets aside constructed chronological boundaries, and in doing so aims to achieve a clearer picture of what ‘went before', as well as what ‘came after'. Thus the volume demonstrates continuity as well as change in the concepts and understandings of magic, heresy and witchcraft. In addition, the geographical pattern of similarities and diversities suggests a comparative approach, transcending confessional as well as national borders. Throughout the medieval and early modern period, the orthodoxy of the Christian Church was continuously contested. The challenge of heterodoxy, especially as expressed in various kinds of heresy, magic and witchcraft, was constantly present during the period 1200-1650. Neither contesters nor followers of orthodoxy were homogeneous groups or fractions. They themselves and their ideas changed from one century to the next, from region to region, even from city to city, but within a common framework of interpretation. This collection of essays focuses on this complex.

Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries forges a new conversation about the diversity of Christianities in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, centered on the history of practice, looking at liturgy, performance, prayer, poetry, and the material culture of worship. It studies prayer and worship in the variety of Christian communities that thrived from late antiquity to the middle ages: Byzantine Orthodoxy, Syrian Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East. Rather than focusing on doctrinal differences and analyzing divergent patterns of thought, the essays address common patterns of worship, individual and collective prayer, hymnography and liturgy, as well as the indigenous theories that undergirded Christian practices. The volume intervenes in standard academic discourses about Christian difference with an exploration of common patterns of celebration, commemoration, and self-discipline.Essays by both established and promising, younger scholars interrogate elements of continuity and change over time – before and after the rise of Islam, both under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire and in the lands of successive caliphates. Groups distinct in their allegiances nevertheless shared a common religious heritage and recognized each other – even in their differences – as kinds of Christianity. A series of chapters explore the theory and practice of prayer from Greco-Roman late antiquity to the Syriac middle ages, highlighting the transmission of monastic discourses about prayer, especially among Syrian and Palestinian ascetic teachers. Another set of essays examines localization of prayer within churches through inscriptions, donations, dedications, and incubation. Other chapters treat the composition and transmission of hymns to adorn the liturgy and articulate the emotions of the Christian calendar, structuring liturgical and eschatological time.

The studies collected in Preaching after Easter examine the festal history and homiletics of Mid-Pentecost, Ascension, and Pentecost in the late antique Mediterranean world. Articles on individual sermons or the work of individual preachers such as John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, Peter Chrysologus, Leo the Great, and Severus of Antioch exhibit the richness of late antique festal preaching. Questions of authenticity, heresiology, and theological, exegetical, or liturgical history are addressed with methodological rigor. Complementary contributions that deal with ancient Jewish-Christian dialogue, art-historical reception, and contemporary liturgical theology illustrate the wide ramifications of ancient Christian festal practice. Students and scholars of these feasts and the interpretive traditions devoted to them will find this volume to be an indispensable source of information and analysis.

In Religious Stories in Transformation: Conflict, Revision and Reception, the editors present a collection of essays that reveal both the many similarities and the poignant differences between ancient myths in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern secular culture and how these stories were incorporated and adapted over time. This rich multidisciplinary research demonstrates not only how stories in different religions and cultures are interesting in their own right, but also that the process of transformation in particular deserves scholarly interest. It is through the changes in the stories that the particular identity of each religion comes to the fore most strikingly.

Cyrillona (fl. 396) has been ranked among the foremost early Syriac poets since his work was rediscovered by scholars in the mid-19th century. His Holy Week discourses on the Last Supper, the Washing of the Feet, and the Institution of the Eucharist have become particularly well-known to western readers through quotations by such diverse authors as Hugo Rahner and Photina Rech. This volume presents the first modern critical edition of Cyrillona's Syriac works together with the first complete English translation.

This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative alignment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative alignment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. Thus an entire cycle of alignment change can be traced, something which had previously been considered unlikely. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through which these alignment changes took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as'see'and'hear', which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.

Cyrillona (fl. 396) was a younger contemporary of Ephrem the Syrian whose work has been celebrated as comparable in both beauty and its significance for our understanding of early Syriac Christianity. This study reassesses conventional claims about the author's identity, date, and the constitution of his corpus. It introduces each of Cyrillona's five surviving poems and examines their poetic form and genre, structure and rhetorical features, and critical questions of text, interpretation, and theology.

The Sasanian Empire was home to many religious communities. It was also a place of meeting and transformation. The studies in this volume encompass a diverse array of topics concerning these religious communities inhabiting the Sasanian Empire. Some include the Roman East in their deliberations. Most, however, deal with the interaction of one or other religious community based in the Sasanian Empire with the dominant religion of the empire, Zoroastrianism.

Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia offers a comparative approach to understanding the spread of Islam and Muslim culture in medieval Anatolia. It aims to reassess work in the field since the 1971 classic by Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization which treats the process of transformation from a Byzantinist perspective. Since then, research has offered insights into individual aspects of Christian-Muslim relations, but no overview has appeared. Moreover, very few scholars of Islamic studies have examined the problem, meaning evidence in Arabic, Persian and Turkish has been somewhat neglected at the expense of Christian sources, and too little attention has been given to material culture. The essays in this volume examine the interaction between Christianity and Islam in medieval Anatolia through three distinct angles, opening with a substantial introduction by the editors to explain both the research background and the historical problem, making the work accessible to scholars from other fields. The first group of essays examines the Christian experience of living under Muslim rule, comparing their experiences in several of the major Islamic states of Anatolia between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially the Seljuks and the Ottomans. The second set of essays examines encounters between Christianity and Islam in art and intellectual life. They highlight the ways in which some traditions were shared across confessional divides, suggesting the existence of a common artistic and hence cultural vocabulary. The final section focusses on the process of Islamisation, above all as seen from the Arabic, Persian and Turkish textual evidence with special attention to the role of Sufism.

Presents the insights of St. Ephrem and Jacob of Serugh, two of the earliest representatives of the theological world-view of the Syriac church.

Armenian text of the Prayers attributed to Ephrem the Syrian, with the first-ever translation into a western language. Utilizing a highly developed poetic rhythm, the author manifests a profound spirituality laying his own emptiness before the inexhaustible Mercy of God.

Ephrem the Syrian is known as one of the greatest Christian poets and as a unique author whose mode of thought is usually described as “symbolic.” In this work, Kees den Biesen explores the literary, intellectual, and theological mechanisms at work in Ephrem's writings with the specific aim of identifying the exact nature of his “symbolic thought” and evaluating its contemporary relevance. Den Biesen elaborates a comprehensive approach that integrates a variety of methods into a genuinely theological methodology. He then proposes his own comprehensive understanding of the nature and merits of Ephrem's symbolic thought.

This Encyclopedia is the first to compile pseudonyms from all over the world, from all ages and occupations in a single work: some 500,000 pseudonyms of roughly 270,000 people are deciphered here. Besides pseudonyms in the narrower sense, initials, nick names, order names, birth and married names etc. are included. The volumes 1 to 9 list persons by their real names in alphabetical order. To make the unequivocal identification of a person easier, year and place of birth and death are provided where available, as are profession, nationality, the pseudonym under which the person was known, and finally, the sources used. The names of professions given in the source material have been translated into English especially for this encyclopaedia. In the second part, covering the volumes 10 to 16, the pseudonyms are listed alphabetically and the real names provided. Approx. 500,000 pseudonyms of about 270,000 persons First encyclopedia including pseudonyms from all over the world, all times and all occupations Essential research tool for anyone wishing to identify persons and names for his research within one single work

This Encyclopedia is the first to compile pseudonyms from all over the world, from all ages and occupations in a single work: some 500,000 pseudonyms of roughly 270,000 people are deciphered here. Besides pseudonyms in the narrower sense, initials, nick names, order names, birth and married names etc. are included. The volumes 1 to 9 list persons by their real names in alphabetical order. To make the unequivocal identification of a person easier, year and place of birth and death are provided where available, as are profession, nationality, the pseudonym under which the person was known, and finally, the sources used. The names of professions given in the source material have been translated into English especially for this encyclopaedia. In the second part, covering the volumes 10 to 16, the pseudonyms are listed alphabetically and the real names provided. Approx. 500,000 pseudonyms of about 270,000 persons First encyclopedia including pseudonyms from all over the world, all times and all occupations Essential research tool for anyone wishing to identify persons and names for his research within one single work

The Sasanian Empire was home to many religious communities. It was also a place of meeting and transformation. It was where old religions met more recent arrivals, and where both new and old were transformed as a result of this contact. While some religious communities shared more than others, and this for historical or geographical reasons, some form of contact and exchange with Zoroastrianism, the religion of the ruling dynasty and of many of the inhabitants of the empire was undoubtedly the rule for all. The studies in this volume explore the dynamics between these communities within the broad Sasanian religious and cultural context and encompass a diverse array of topics concerning, in particular, Jews, Christians, and Manichaeans. Some include the Roman East in their deliberations. Most, however, deal with the interaction of one or other Sasanian religious community with Zoroastrianism.

Collected together in eight books, probably in eleventh or twelfth century Armenian Cilicia, these prayers are filled with a very profound spirituality and a highly developed poetic rhythm, nearly every line evoking a phrase, an image or an event from the Bible. The author bares his soul in his deep yearning for union with God, groans and pours out all his sins and weaknesses, laying them at the feet of the Almighty, always begging for but still completely trusting in God's inexhaustible Mercy. Whatever their relation to the fourth-century Syrian poet St. Ephrem, these exquisite Prayers exist only in Armenian. The accompanying English translation makes this work, heretofore the exclusive treasure of the Armenian Church, accessible to the western world for the first time.

Juan de Segovia (d. 1458), theologian, translator of the Qur'ān, and lifelong advocate for the forging of peaceful relations between Christians and Muslims, was one of Europe's leading intellectuals. Today, however, few scholars are familiar with this important fifteenth-century figure. In this well-documented study, Anne Marie Wolf presents a clear, chronological narrative that follows the thought and career of Segovia, who taught at the University of Salamanca, represented the university at the Council of Basel (1431–1449), and spent his final years arguing vigorously that Europe should eschew war with the ascendant Ottoman Turks and instead strive to convert them peacefully to Christianity. What could make a prominent thinker, especially one who moved in circles of power, depart so markedly from the dominant views of his day and advance arguments that he knew would subject him to criticism and even ridicule? Although some historians have suggested that the multifaith heritage of his native Spain accounts for his unconventional belief that peaceful dialogue with Muslims was possible, Wolf argues that other aspects of his life and thought were equally important. For example, his experiences at the Council of Basel, where his defense of conciliarism in the face of opposition contributed to his ability to defend an unpopular position and where his insistence on conversion through peaceful means was bolstered by discussions about the proper way to deal with the Hussites, refined his arguments that peaceful conversion was prefereable to war. Ultimately Wolf demonstrates that Segovia's thought on Islam and the proper Christian stance toward the Muslim world was consistent with his approach to other endeavors and with cultural and intellectual movements at play throughout his career.

For thirty years, Stratford Caldecott has been an inspirational figure in liturgy, fantasy literature, graphic novels, spirituality, education, ecology and social theory. Hundreds of people have learned from his spiritual approaches to the great existential questions. The Beauty of God's House is a Festschrift dedicated to him. The book seeks to cover the whole range of Caldecott's interests, from poetics to politics. Anyone interested in the field of theology and the arts will find much to intrigue them in this delightful multi-authored volume. The common core of Stratford's interests is in the beauty of the cosmos and how it reflects the beauty of God. This book is about the beauty of God's'realm,'and it conceives God's realm as the arts, politics, liturgy, religions, and human life. It touches on the many places where beauty and spirituality overlap. It is an engagement in theological aesthetics that goes well beyond the'aesthetic.'

The Catholicisms of Coutances is a richly detailed account of France from the Hundred Years'War to the French revolution. Coining the word'catholicisms'to denote the complex varieties of religious beliefs and practices within the Church, J. Michael Hayden presents a detailed analysis of the diocese of Coutances - chosen because of the unusually large number of records available - to shed light on the many ways in which religion developed and affected life in early modern France. Opening with a geographical and chronological sketch of the diocese, Hayden describes the catholicisms of mid-fourteenth century Coutances, discussing their evolution and effects over four hundred years. Employing a wide array of primary sources, the book provides a meticulous study that includes qualitative analyses of papal and diocesan documents and synodal statutes, a quantitative analysis of ordination and pastoral visit records, and a combination of both forms of analysis of the cahiers prepared for the Estates General of 1789. The Catholicisms of Coutances is an innovative contribution to contemporary understandings of Catholic beliefs and practices in the early modern period and their profound effect on the people of a diocese.