Experientia contra experientiam. Religiöse ‘innere’ und ‘äußere’ Erfahrung im Spätmittelalter und im Übergang zur Neuzeit.

In the late Middle Ages there are two different conceptions of experience: a non-religious, exterior experience, derived from physical perceptions: the Aristotelian conception, and a religious, interior experience: the conception of monastic theology, represented by Bernhard of Clairvaux. In the transition from Middle Ages to modern times the distinction between exterior and interior experience is transferred into the religious experience.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

En tiempos del condestable Dávalos: Enrique de Aragón,poeta quejoso en Crónica. Año de 1420, de Jerónimo de la Escosura

Infants of Aragon are very important figures in the history and literature of the nineteenth century, but it is rare that one of them, Don Enrique, is the protagonist. This work analyzes the romantic story Cronica. Año de 1420, published by Jerónimo de la Escosura in 1839. In it, Enrique de Aragón is a cunning courtier and a poet in love, and he manages to change history because he changes the story with his verses.     

‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world.The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.     

Jaume Cabré's Viatge d’hivern and the Short Story Cycle

Critics have been uncertain as to the genre of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré's 2000 book, Viatge d’hivern. The confusion, I argue, is due to the fact that the volume is a short story cycle, a literary form situated midway between the novel and the short story collection. Forrest Ingram differentiates among composed, arranged, and completed cycles, and Cabré's comments in his Epilogue to Viatge d’hivern indicate that the book is an example of the third category. While he composed its fourteen narratives over a period of years, when he revised them for inclusion in a single volume he discovered that various threads, some secret and others more obvious, connected the stories. In this essay I examine ways in which theme, structure, and motifs, as well as recurrent imagery and wording, form a web of associations among the individual units of Viatge d’hivern.     

Razi on Reason and Political Authority: A Study in Medieval Persian Political Thought

The Philosopher of Rey, Mohammad-e Zakariya-ye Razi and his Ismaili adversaries, Abu Hatam-e Razi and Naser-e Khosrow, share a political understanding of religion according to which religion is a theologico-political system of domination. However, they are at odds over the political philosophy appraisal of religion qua a system of authority. The paper explicates the latter disagreement in part based on Razi's and his opponents' conflicting ideas about the nature of the faculty of Reason and its distribution among men. Consequently, the paper underlines a democratic implication of Razi's thesis on the makeup of the human intellect.     

The Jacob Story: Between Oral and Written Modes

In this article I examine the relations between Jacob’s putative oral story and the pre-Priestly narrative. I argue that Hosea’s prophecy presents the version of Jacob's oral story related in his time and antedated by many years the composition of the story-cycle in its written form. Comparison of Hosea’s prophecy and Jacob’s narrative indicates the thorough way in which the exilic author worked the oral story he received in order to fit it to his ideological messages and religious concepts. To further examine the relations between the oral and written modes, I discuss the episode of the treaty between Laban and Jacob (Gen 31,45–54) in light of a Mari letter (A.3592). Comparison of the two episodes indicates that part of the biblical narrative rests on the oral story and other part was written by the late author. Evidently, the long process of oral transmission, the growth of the narratives in its course, and the creative reworking of the author make it impossible to either isolate the early oral layer within the present story-cycle or to date the stages of its growth in the oral process of transmission.     

我国最早向西方“佛朗机”学习的人──汪鋐传略考

本文简要介绍了汪 的生平传略,并认为他是中国最早率军抗击西方葡萄牙殖民者“佛朗机”入侵的要臣,也是引进西方先进武器：“佛朗机铳”并进行大规模推广使用的第一人。