The biography of Ignatios the Deacon: a reassessment of the evidence

Abstract

The recently published critical editions of three of Ignatios the Deacon's works, his correspondence and two of his hagiographical texts, may have enhanced our familiarity with an important scholarly figure, but have apparently not established a consensus as regards his educational curriculum and ecclesiastical career. This is not surprising in view of the lack of explicit information on crucial periods of his life and the wide diversity of the literature associated with his name. However, the discussion has become all the more confused as some of Ign.'s autobiographical references have been called into question (to my mind, not reasonably) or not taken into account in their entirety. Setting aside the divergences between the biography sketched by Cyril Mango and that by myself, which mainly concern the tentative period of Ign.'s episcopate and the period he became skevophylax, a very different interpretation of Ign.'s biographical data has been offered by Georgios Makris, the editor of the Life of St. Gregory the Decapolite. And a more recent reconsideration of his biography, presented in the Berliner Prosopographie der mittelalterlichen Zeit and published in full length by Thomas Pratsch in this journal, without radically disputing the basic chronological framework of Ign.'s lifetime as proposed by Mango, has tried to rearrange the scattered pieces of his puzzling career. Several hypotheses regarding Ign.'s ecclesiastical career were also put forward by Michel Kaplan in his inquiry into Ign.'s letters dateable to his period as metropolitan of Nicaea. Finally, in his posthumously published History of Byzantine Literature, Alexander Kazhdan, demonstrating excessive skepticism, distinguished the author of the anonymously preserved correspondence from Ignatios the Deacon, as well as denied him the composition of other works that have been assigned to him. The purpose of the present note is to re-assess the biographical evidence provided in Ign.'s own work.     

中国最早两位翰林学士考——吕向、尹愔传论

中国古代翰林学士,开始设置于唐玄宗开元二十六年(738),正当盛唐之世.自此之后,历宋、元、明、清,翰林学士一直有很高的社会声誉.直至1901年,正当八国联军进占北京之后,清朝廷还于6月5日下诏令,称翰林院为"储才重地"(《光绪朝东华录》).在唐代,翰林学士为文士参预政事的最高层次,很值得研究.据现有史料,唐代翰林学士可考知者约二百余人,其中有不少著名政治家、文学家.本文为最早的两位翰林学士立传,既拟纠正史书中的某些误载,又想从这两位学士经历的考述中提供值得思考的历史文化现象.     

The cultural biography of a Western Australian war memorial

In common with other western countries, there is resurgence in war commemoration in Australia indicating a serious pursuit of identity and a national story on a collective and personal level. A widespread academic and popular interest in war memory and material culture such as war memorials has emerged. War memorials often find their way on to heritage registers. This paper advances cultural biography as an approach to determine the significance of war memorials arguing that this may give a deeper understanding of its community meaning than present methods. Emerging in archaeology cultural biography considers the way that social interactions between people and objects over time create meaning. Using the Katanning war memorial statue in Western Australia as a case study, this paper argues that a cultural biographical approach may uncover a deeper cultural significance resulting from a focus on relationships than from the traditional focus on the memorial as object.     

Gorgobad: reflections on a German-Australian family biography

This article continues the focus on German-Australian militarised modernities through the Second World War to the present day. It draws on the author’s own family history, beginning with the memories evoked by her grandparents’ house in northern Sydney, built between 1950 and 1953. Named ‘Gorgobad’, Persian for ‘place of the wolves’, it resonates with a family history that involves German colonial investments in post-First World War Iran, the global geopolitical upheavals of the Second World War, which drew her family into separate histories of refuge, British imprisonment and deportation and, finally, building a new home in Australia. The essay asks pertinent questions about the entanglement of hegemonic racialised orders in Europe with the very racialised orders of the grounds on which Gorgobad was built.     

A revolutionary's biography: the case of V D Savarkar

This article examines the contributions of V.D. Savarkar, an intellectual founder of Hindu nationalism, to the history of an idea: namely, the revolutionary. It examines the impact of Savarkar's interpretation of the revolutionary on modern political thought in India. It explains that Savarkar established criteria for identifying revolutionaries, but he also argued that studying the life-stories of revolutionaries would inspire Indians to create future revolutions. It will further consider that for Savarkar, the reading of history was ontologically transformative and the contributions of past revolutionaries were meant to create an effective response for readers to become transformed into new revolutionaries. Through a study of the first English-language biography of Savarkar, entitled The Life of Barrister Savarkar (1926), and Savarkar's early writings on revolutionary wars, this paper will show the importance of examining Savarkar's ideas and interpretations for considering the making of revolutionary thought in India in the early decades of the twentieth century.