Regnal succession in early medieval Ireland

Regnal succession in early medieval Ireland has been the centre of scholarly debate for the past eighty-five years. This paper contributes to the debate with an investigation of the early Irish law texts. It is argued that these law texts, especially the tracts on inheritance, reveal a certain pattern of regnal succession, which can be divided into an early and a later phase. Moreover, they allow us to define necessary criteria for eligibility for Irish kingship. The results of this examination are illustrated in the summary by the historical example of the early Síl nÁedo Sláine.     

Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth‐Century Lima*

In early seventeenth‐century Lima, Peru, female visionaries composed texts of their bodies, and texts composed their bodies. This fact can be explained, in part, by the belief that an individual could gain access to and appropriate the language of God (His spiritus) in distinct ways. Mystical narratives, stigmata, as well as the spoken words of enraptured visionaries communicating with absent souls were considered readable texts because the object to be read could be a book, a painting, or the body itself. Thus the reading of, and listening to, texts was parallel to Lima's visionaries entering a state of spiritual ecstasy (arrobamiento), and “reading” their bodies as living books, which perforce became a readable space.     

佛教汉文文献所见唐朝疆域变迁

文章将唐代佛教汉文文献中所见唐北部、西部疆域变化的有限资料,结合正史记载进行了诠释。认为唐前期北部、西部疆域大幅伸张与收缩,各方政治、军事力量的消长贯穿始终。唐朝是以政治归属来判定版图所至,即以政治控制为依据,政治势力所及地区即为唐版图。今天考察中国古代王朝疆域不能脱离特定的历史背景,应该遵循古代疆域观念予以判定,唯有如此才能对唐朝疆域的形成与变化给出合理的解释。     

Studying Dream Interpretation from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam

Early Christian and early Islamic texts on dreams and dream interpretation have come under increased scrutiny in recent decades. Dream literature from pagan and Jewish antiquity to the early medieval period demonstrates that dreams, especially prophetic dreams, were used to establish spiritual authority, enforce compliance, and justify violence in a religious context. The common cultural roots of Christianity and Islam emerge when we recognise the crucial role played by dreams and prophecy in the two traditions. The various methodologies used in recent scholarship on dreams and their interpretation are surveyed with a view to identifying those most relevant to the analysis of first‐millennium CE literary sources in Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The key texts from the three major religious traditions in this period (Western Christian, Eastern Christian, and Islamic) are then analysed with a view to assessing whether early Christians and Muslims understood and taxonomised dreams differently. Literary genre and audience (lay, clerical, or monastic) are revealed as the key determinants of difference, rather than religious origins.     

Conflict,Order, Harmony: The Modern Meaning of the Confucian Tradition

An examination of how a focus on the reading of traditional Confucian texts as a spiritual exercise can enable us to deal productively with modern understandings of the divergences among different ideals of human excellence.An investigation of such ideals has often focused on virtue discourse,but that discourse generates understandable suspicions in many people.A productive approach to these suspicions is to examine both the idea that new virtues (such as spiritual regret) are needed,and the notion that three distinctive modern emphases must play a central role in any contemporary consideration of the relationships among diverse ideals.After considering two kinds of principled opposition to this approach,we turn to Walter Benjamin's exemplary account of the huge gulf between modern and traditional understandings,and the possible aid some texts may offer in bridging it.Focusing on the distinctive operation of specific forms of presentation in the Confucian tradition,we conclude by investigating the idea that reading Confucian texts can be seen even today as an illuminating kind of spiritual exercise.     

Lying and deception in the Biblical and post‐Biblical Judaic tradition

Abstract

A great variety of cuneiform texts have been found within the precincts of the high priest's building complex in ancient Ugarit. Some of the texts are letters, others are lexical texts and others again are ritual texts. The great epics of aqht and krt are best described as literary texts. Some of the texts, however, do not unambiguously belong to one group only: Some scholars would construe the Baal‐cycle as a ritual text or at least a text somehow connected with the cult performed in the temples; others would describe the Baal‐cycle as pure literature. Similarly the enigmatic text about Shachar and Shalim (abbreviated SS) apparently contains cultic and literary elements. Is this text then a cult‐text or a piece of literature? The aim of the article is to investigate if from the archaeological evidence we can add an argument to the on‐going debate about the Sitz im Leben of the Ugaritic Baal‐cycle: Were the clay tablets in the high priest's building distributed according to their content? The answer seems to be yes. The Baal‐cycle was in fact stored with other literary texts in the high priest's building whereas SS has been kept in the room of the ritual texts. This fact might give us a hint as to how to interpret these two texts.     

清顺治、康熙《延平府志》版本比较研究

通过比对清顺治版与康熙版《延平府志》内容与篇目结构的异同,可以发现二者在编纂内容、版本雕印、原修与增修之间存在承继关系,由此不难看出清顺治版《延平府志》是一部具有重要地域历史文化价值的旧志佳作。     

Histoires de Lectrices en Italie au Début de L’époque Moderne

The connection between the history of reading and gender is made using a range of methodological perspectives, each illustrated by analysing concrete examples from the early modern Italian area. The significance of the circulation and reception of texts as well as the various attempts to control knowledge and behaviour via censorship and availability of reading material will be considered. In fact, since the XVI ^th century, written texts seem to play an increasingly influential role in defining the relationship between men and women. The figure of the early modern woman reader appears in literature sources as both a consciously constructed and easily influenced addressee, who nevertheless may still behave in a way different to that intended by the authors. This double approach facilitates the reading of normative texts from a new perspective that takes into account the possibility of creative adaptation and enables the question of interdependence between the production and reception of the written word to be reconsidered.     

存世《出师颂》墨迹本与刻本关系考

本文将《隋贤书出师颂》墨迹本与传世《出师颂》的八种刻本进行排比梳理,归纳出三个系统:即“萧子云”系统、“索靖”系统、“隋人”系统。通过各本文字校勘比较和文献考证,证明“索靖”系统刻本的母本即史载北宋“宣和本”,“隋人”系统即史载南宋“绍兴本”,而此两本与北宋《兰亭续帖》所刻“萧子云本”,俱出自同一个更古的祖本。进而对辑入《出师颂》文字的《文选》一书的版本进行分析,论证“绍兴本”应是隋和初唐书家的临摹本,即《隋贤书出师颂》墨迹。     

Towards a Language of ‘Europe’: History,Rhetoric, Community

From Herder to Benedict Anderson, language and nation have been at the centre of ideas about (imagined) community. This hypothesis, however, poses a problem for analysing ideas about Europe. How can we understand “Europe” as a concept or form of identity when language and nationality are considered the foundation of imagined communities and loyalties? This article addresses this difficulty. It uses J. G. A. Pocock’s definition of “sub-languages” to suggest that one can investigate the rhetorical strategies, images and vocabularies with which texts articulate ideas about Europe. These sub-languages evoke imagined communities, most obviously when texts name and identify particular groups of people as “Europeans.” But by using images and rhetorics about Europe, these texts also appeal to a readership that comprehends—even if it does not fully accept—certain assumptions about the continent. In this way, texts evoke an imagined community of readers who purportedly share a similar way of understanding Europe, or who can perhaps be persuaded to think about it in similar terms. These processes are historically particular, and so the article concludes with concrete examples. It focuses on how early-nineteenth-century philhellenes evoked a European imagined community to solicit support for the Greek Revolution (1821–32).     

Laughing at a saint? Miracle and irony in the Vita Gangulfi prima

This article examines the Vita Gangulfi prima, a text which was frequently copied and widely circulated in the Middle Ages. It argues that the text can be understood as an ironic discourse on miracle stories in hagiographical texts: the central message of the Vita is that meek and penitential living leads to sanctity, and not the enjoyment of stories about miracles. At the same time, the Vita presents the reader to some extent with a performance of this idea. The reader who sees through to the Vita's ironic intent is encouraged to laugh at the saint and thereby comes to comprehend the very sin for which the various characters in the Vita are punished, while the text simultaneously depicts penitence as the way out of this sinfulness. The Vita's critique of miracle stories made an eccentric contribution to a discourse which was also carried on in a number of other hagiographical texts of the early tenth century.     

Legislation and politics in late Carolingian Italy: the Ravenna constitutions

This article considers some overlooked evidence for royal legislation in the dying days of the Carolingian empire, a series of charters known as the Ravenna constitutions. These documents, which deal with the status of Italian freemen, are often analysed as sources for social history but rarely as texts in their own right. Reconstructing the context in which the charters were issued enables us to cast light on political events and royal self‐representation in early 880s Italy; and by drawing attention to the peculiarities of their form, we can use them to reflect more broadly on the nature of Carolingian capitulary legislation and the meaning of its disappearance at the end of the ninth century.     

«True lovers of religion»: Methodist persecution and white resistance to anti-slavery in Barbados, 1823–1825

This paper argues that white Barbadian responses to the renewed anti-slavery campaign from 1823 to 1825 were characterized by a combination of strident assertions of loyalty with a more hostile rhetoric of difference and distance. Drawing on work that emphasizes the place of the anti-slavery campaign in the formulation of English identity, this paper considers where such accounts leave white West Indians, and argues that opposition to anti-slavery was linked to the production of white identity in Barbados. It seeks to explore the complex nature of white resistance to anti-slavery, and thus the ambiguous nature of West Indian whiteness, by focusing on a series of texts produced in the aftermath of ameliorative instructions sent out by the British government and of a major slave revolt in Demerara. In particular, it considers a series of anonymous texts produced during a period of intense anti-Methodist persecution. Locating this anti-Methodism within the broader context of opposition to the anti-slavery campaign, these texts encapsulate the ambivalence of identity and difference, loyalty and hostility that characterizes West Indian whiteness in the early nineteenth century. In this way, the paper aims to contribute to a more nuanced historical geography of white identity.     

Seventeenth-century legal fictions: the case of John Perry

This essay discusses the role of narrative in the transmission of legal “truth” in the early modern period, taking as its focus the John Perry murder case of 1660. Perry, a servant, confessed to and was convicted of the murder of his missing master, William Harrison, in the village of Campden in Gloucestershire. Two years after Perry’s execution, however, Harrison reappeared, offering in explanation of his absence a lurid and incredible account of his kidnap and transport to the slave markets of Turkey. In the Perry case complex and unstable narratives, with debts to a range of literary genres, served to obscure the central question of a missing body. This narrativisation of circumstance gained further momentum once the affair began to circulate in textual form, when, I will contend, it became not only a legal story but a way of telling stories about the law. In particular, the case raises questions of methodology: where can we, as scholars, locate truth within the ambiguities of law in this period, and is that truth really of value in our consideration of early modern legal and literary texts?     

Reading In,Looking Out: Hermeneutics by Implication in an Early Fifteenth-Century Anthology

This article investigates aspects of mise-en-page in British Library Add. MS. 27261, an anthology of twenty-three texts on mixed subjects produced for Eskandar Soltān (d. 818/1415), grandson of Timur and self-styled ruler of territories in southern Iran during the early fifteenth century. It examines the juxtaposition of literary and scientific texts together with images in Add. MS. 27261, and explores the correlations that these juxtapositions create. It concludes that the London anthology should be seen as a coherent intellectual enterprise, and as an interpretative project designed to feed Eskandar’s experiments with different forms of knowledge.     

关于儒家经典文献的现代整理与诠释

儒家经典文献研究,关乎中国传统文化的传承以及现代人文社会科学研究的多个方面。欲使经典文献更好的为现代服务,必须首先整理出尽可能完善并且具有时代特色的文本。对旧本中可以确定的错字应当加以改正,文本中的古字应当改成今字,不改不足以矫旧弊的通假字也应当改成本字。诠释方面,应当针对文献运用中常见的诸如随意发挥、断章取义、人各一辞等实际现象,本着科学精神,最大限度地揭示经典文献的本义,从根本上杜绝诸种顽弊的出现,并且逐渐向统一的方向发展。