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Presentation

Rhythms, expressions, and representations of the body. From the Ancient World to the Baroque

Ricardo da COSTA

Original title: Ritmos, expresiones y representaciones del cuerpo

Special Issue

Ancient Medicine and the body’s perception in Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BC)

Hélio Angotti Neto

Original title: A Medicina Antiga e a percepção do corpo em Hipócrates (c. 460-370 a. C.)

Keywords: Galen, Hippocrates, History of Medicine, Human Body, Nature of Man.

Hippocratic medicine addresses the human body and its phenomena based on principles like the complexity and the balance of its components among themselves and its relations towards the nature. By means of logical formulations based on the composition of the human body by humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and dark bile) and, consequently, principles (heat, cold, dry and humid), the Hippocratic author seeks an explanation of phenomena such as epidemic diseases and nutritional disorders. Although the text is anachronistic, according to the current scientific perspective, there are epistemological principles obtained through contemplative science and empiricism that still have some value in relation to medical epistemology concerning human body comprehension.

The World of Dionysus. Visions of bodies in fun in Classical Greece

Manuel ÁLVAREZ JUNCO

Original title: El mundo de Dioniso. Visiones de los cuerpos en diversión en la Grecia Clásica

Keywords: Dionysus, Festivities, Satyrs, Symposiums, Visual insight.

The figure of the mythical Greek god Dionysus presided over the most playful aspects of classical Hellenic society, whether they were parties, banquets, comedies, or celebrations in general. The visualizations of the scenes of the divinity of wine and orgy, accompanied by his crazy cohort of satyrs and maenads, show the burlesque, critical and comic sense of a culture that laid the foundations of the West. Something as contemporary as today’s graphic humor finds images of its remote origins through the splendid figurative ceramics of the classical Greek period dedicated to this god. This article shows and analyzes some examples of that visual world where the festive, the comic and the conceptually ingenious provide the unveiling of the transgressive universe of Greek society.

Music and continence in St. Augustin’s (354-430) Confessions

Luiz Cláudio Luciano França GONÇALVES

Original title: Música e continência em Confissões, de Santo Agostinho (354-430)

Keywords: Confessions, Continence, Sacred Song, Saint Augustine.

The experience of singing in the church of Bishop Ambrose in Milan prompted Augustine to reflect not only on the beautiful specific musical practice he had witnessed, but also on the moral component associated with it. Later, such impressions were reported in Confessions (Confessiones, 397-401). At the time, Augustine expressed concern for the “pleasures of the ear” (voluptates aurium), which, although they could be employed in the sense of spiritual elevation, occasionally provoked unruly emotions and thus harmful to equilibrium and soul unity. Reflecting on the merit of avoiding the soul dispersion by the tempting musical beauty and expanding his meditation to the domain of bodily pleasures in general, Augustine highlights, in this scenario, the continence (continentia) – essential part of the Christian moral virtue of temperance (temperantia) –, whose intervention can reorder emotions.

The face as the place of the subject that existed: artistic figurations from Antiquity to Baroque

Alexandre Emerick NEVES

Original title: O rosto como lugar do sujeito que houve: figurações artísticas da Antiguidade ao Barroco

Keywords: Antiquity, Baroque, Face, Presence and Absence.

Generally, when we refer to human representation, we immediately remember the human body, the human figure, and when we deal with the subject, the first reference is his face or, more specifically, his portrait. It is interesting to remember, in this regard, that the face itself can be fragmented, divided into significant, if not autonomous, parts. Without intending to go through an exhaustive and linear history of the face, consenting to jumps and returns between Antiquity and the Baroque with some providential escapes, I turn to Giorgio Agamben regarding the asymmetrical relationship between the head and the body, while Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière help us on the affinity of the images of figured bodies with the presence or absence of the subject, especially in the face.

Musica Dolorosa – Symphony of the Sublime and the Grotesque

Antonio Celso RIBEIRO

Original title: Musica Dolorosa – Sinfonia do Sublime e do Grotesco

Keywords: Body, Middle Ages, Music, Self-flagellation, Sin, Soul.

The present work intends to briefly analyze the role of the music in the mortification of the human body as atonement for sins, either voluntary as in the ritual of self-flagellation, and/or imposed for corporal punishment being both perceived as a source of pleasure, pain, desire, and expiation culminanting in the spectacle of scourging. Starting from the concept of the duality of the soul and the body, as suggested by several medieval allegories, the paper aims to make correlations between music, body, desire, religious fanaticism and madness in European Middle Ages, being these relationships the corporeality of musical and religious experience, i.e. through the experience of (self)-imposed flagellation, ascestics would insist the human body would function as a musical instrument where it skin, tendons, throat, torso could be beaten, strechted, plucked, and strummed to produce resonances that were in accord with the pitch and timbre of the crucified Jesus, whose exposed ribs and extended sinews turned him into the harp of the salvation in countless medieval allegories.

The dignity of the body, of woman, of love and pleasure. Brief analysis in the great humanist works of the Crown of Aragon

Júlia BUTINYÀ

Original title: La dignitat del cos, de la dona, de l’amor i del plaer. Breu anàlisi en les grans obres humanistes de la Corona d’Aragó

Keywords: Commedia, Curial e Güelfa, Decameron, Lo somni.

This observation aims to outline quantitative nuances about the notion of the body and senses from the great humanist works of the Crown of Aragon: The dream of Bernat Metge (1399) and the Curial and Güelfa (ca. 1458), for the purpose of approach the evolutionary line of the Humanism since the beginning. It demands to go back to the literary sources and the ascendancy of that ideological renewal, which will lead to Dante. This route is of interest to follow the first humanist achievements, of which we obtain very pure samples in these Italo-Catalan origins, marked by a stamp of mixture, sensual and moral, that characterizes them. Finally, we will conclude by pointing out the fleetingness of the humanistic purity that these two works contain.

Fuente Ovejuna (1619) by Lope de Vega (1562-1635): Moral injury of the body and the breach of rites and social vitality

Victor Sales PINHEIRO; Ayrton Borges MACHADO

Original title: Fuente Ovejuna (1619) de Lope de Vega (1562-1635): a ofensa moral do corpo como quebra dos ritos e vitalidade social

Keywords: Barroque Literature, J. M. Bernstein, Lope de Vega, Moral Injury, Recognition.

This article proposes a study of the conception of moral injury in the baroque thought of Lope de Vega, based on the analysis of his work Fuente Ovejuna, in which one explores the Lope’s reflection on a local tyrant who disrespects and violates the citizens of Fuente Ovejuna, from the verbal insult, disdain for gifts, breach of rites, culminating in the rape of Laurencia. The study proposes to carry out a fusion of horizons, searching how much the Lope’s social thought regarding moral and social offense can contribute to the reflection on the social process of recognition, that is, how in a society its members manage to recognize themselves as peers, who respect and include each other. Therefore, the dialogue carried out takes place between the Lope’s thought extracted from Fuente Ovejuna and the theory of recognition by J. M. Bernstein. In the first topic, comedy is analyzed as a study of customs, emphasizing how much the dramaturgical tradition has been not merely fictional, but an investigation about morals, politics, and psychology, by its writers, so that Lope can appear as a thinker in this article. In the second topic, a narrative of Fuente Ovejuna is made, to form an understanding of the object. In the third topic, an analysis of various parts of Lope’s work is carried out, in which violations, disrespect and the breaking of ties and rites that imply damage to social self-understanding and vitality of themselves are perceived. The fourth topic presents first step of the core of the analysis, that is, how Lope explains the paradigm shifts to delve into the change in the understanding of moral offense, moving from honour to dignity, from morality to the body, and from man to the figure of the offended woman. In the fifth topic, having formed Lope’s social understanding in Fuente Ovejuna, a dialogue is carried out between this and Bernstein’s theory of recognition, to make explicit the contributions of Lope’s thought to the understanding of moral formation and recognition.

Articles

Ptolemais of Cyrene (3rd century BC) and the musical theory in Ancient Greece

Laura CAROLINA DURÁN

Original title: Ptolemaïs de Cirene (siglo III a. C.) y la teoría musical en la antigua Grecia

Keywords: Aristoxenics, Greek Music Theory, Perception vs. Reason, Ptolemaïs of Cyrene, Pythagoreans.

Giles Menage in his History of Women Philosophers mentions Ptolemaïs of Cyrene as a Pythagorean not entirely committed to that school, he thinks that she was probably a contemporary of the Empress Julia Domna, since by her example many women dedicated themselves to studies. Ptolemaïs is the only woman music theorist from Greek Antiquity whose texts are preserved, but we lack biographical data about her. Porphyry’s Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonica contains a series of fragments, of variable lenght, from Ptolemaïs’s Pythagorean Elements of Music. In these texts, the female author presents the epistemological commitmets and methodologies of various schools of ancient musical traditions that she divides into two large groups: the mousikoí or Aristoxenics and the kanonikoí or Pythagoreans. These schools have a different understanding of the use of perception and reason in relation to musical knowledge. Pythagorean music theory was base on mathematical principles, while Aristoxenus favored the use of sensory data. When dealing with these themes, Ptolemaïs dedicates herself to the philosophical problema of the scope of reason and perception, a discussion of the mind-body dilema that has traversed the history of philosophy addressed in a philosophical-musical setting. In this work I present and analyze the perserved texts of the female autor, which will allow us to measure the importance of this female figure in the history of philosophical thought about music, while at the same time rescuing her from oblivion in Western culture.

The Platonism and Neo-Platonism influence on Origen’s exegesis of the Bible

Eirini ARTEMI

Keywords: Christian Platonist, Greek Philosophy, Neo-Platonism, Origen, Plato, Platonism, Plotinus, Proclus.

Origen is a Christian writer who knows very well not only the Bible and the Christian tradition until his day, but he has studied Greek philosophy and probably Greek literature. His knowledge of Greek philosophy and literature gives him an absolute privilege to deepen and enrich the meanings of the biblical language and terminology. Origen doesn’t adopt Greek philosophy without any critical thought. He accepts Platonism and Neo-Platonism ideas only if they were consistent with the church’s rule of faith. For him, the study of philosophy is understood as an exercise involving moral purification as well as intellectual training, as a necessary preparation for the study of Scripture. In this essay, we will show that Origen was a Christian Platonist, who accepts many things of Platonic philosophy and criticizes many others which do not belong to Plato but were expressed by some other philosophers as false Platonism ideas. Plotinus and Proclus showed a disliked view against Origen’s Christian writings, but they accepted his ideas concerning God and “the things”, deeming them raised by Greek philosophy. In Origen’s theological system, Neoplatonic features can be underlined. The knowledge of the Bible is for Origen the only truth, but Platonism and Neoplatonism provide a simpler and more natural explanation of the revelation of God.

The written sources of the Byzantine tradition on the Dormition and the Assumption of the Virgin

Spyros P. PANAGOPOULOS

Original title: Les sources littéraires de la tradition byzantine sur la Dormition et l’Assomption de la Vierge

Keywords: Assomption, Byzance, Dormition, Sources littéraires, Vierge Marie.

Cet article traite de la littérature grécophone à l’époque byzantine, à propos de la Dormition de la Vierge. La littérature sur la Dormition, si elle a fait l’objet d’études par de nombreux chercheurs jusqu’à présent, néanmoins une brève revue de ces textes a été jugée nécessaire, puisqu’ils sont les principales sources d’inspiration pour l’iconographie du spectacle. Pour une meilleure présentation, ces textes sont classés en apocryphes, hagiographiques, homilétiques-patristiques. De plus, au début de l’article, un examen des rapports sur la fin terrestre de Théotokos avant la création du corps de la littérature concernée est suggéré.

Augustine of Hippo’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness in Partida 7.24 De los judios

David NAVARRO

Keywords: Alfonso X, Augustine of Hippo, Fourth Lateran, Jews, Siete Partidas.

This article examines Augustine of Hippo’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness in Alfonso X’s Partida 7.24 De los judios. This Augustinian tenet, derived from traditional theological anti-Judaism, serves as the juridical principle for the first six laws of the Partida. These postulates, the most extensive and detailed of the Partida, enhance the Jews’ hermeneutical features, and denote a lenient posture toward their religious freedom and communal jurisdictional autonomy. In addition, these precepts differ from the Jews’ functional traits and the segregationist tone present in the rest of the laws of the text, drawn from the Church’s Lateran campaign and popular tradition. I posit the Augustinian Witness Doctrine represents the main legal framework in the redaction of this Partida, creating an opening for a new discussion on the monarch’s debated tolerant stance toward his Jewish subjects.

Enyego d’Àvalos (c. 1414-1484), the Prince of Viana and the new translatio of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

Salvador CUENCA ALMENAR

Original title: Enyego d’Àvalos (c. 1414-1484), el príncep de Viana i la nova translatio de l’Ètica nicomaquea d’Aristòtil

Keywords: Aristotle, Charles of Aragon, Enyego D’Àvalos, Leonardo Bruni, Nicomachean Ethics.

We will present the relationship between the manuscript British Library, Harley 3305, owned by Enyego D’Àvalos, and the Spanish translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by Charles from Aragon, Prince of Viana, during his stay at the Neapolitan court of Alfons el Magnànim between 1457 and 1458. The study of the critical loci of Bruni’s nova translatio copied in the Harley manuscript 3305 will lead us to rule out the possibility that it is the Latin model of the version written by the Prince of Viana.

Clarinda and the Discurso en loor de la poesía or Juan Manuel de Mendoza y Luna (1571-1628) and the origins of Spanish Literature in Peru

Jesús Fernando CÁSEDA TERESA

Original title: Clarinda y el Discurso en loor de la poesía o Juan Manuel de Mendoza y Luna (1571-1628) y los orígenes de la literatura castellana en el Perú

Keywords: Antarctic Academy, Discurso en loor de la poesía, Lope de Vega, Marquis of Montesclaros.

Throughout this study, I analyse the authorship of the Discurso en loor de la poesía that introduces the Primera parte del Parnaso antártico de obras amatorias, a collection of poems written in Peru and published in Seville in 1608. It is a composition by Juan Manuel de Mendoza y Luna, viceroy of those lands, friend of those mentioned in this poetic prologue, hidden under a very significant name, “Clarinda”, of clear Lopes que ancestry and revealing of his own name. To support this hypothesis, I provide several biographical and textual reasons.

Figure des Brifilians: allegory and utopia

Luiz Cláudio Moisés RIBEIRO; Bárbara DANTAS

Original title: Figure des Brifilians: alegoria e utopia

Keywords: Allegory, Amerindian, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Michel de Montaigne.

The Americas were proof of a new way of life, that of the Amerindians. Since the 16th century, the French already knew Portuguese America and called its native inhabitants brifilians, that is, Brazilians. These Indians aroused curiosity, they were living proof of the beings that inhabited exotic and rich lands, places that, for Europeans, were ready to be conquered and explored. According to the function of entertaining and instructing linked to artists as political philosophers, this article presents the relationship between image and text through the vision of four European philosophers − John Locke, Michel de Montaigne, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau − about America and its inhabitants, eyes covered by their own conceptions and prejudices, but willing to understand the New World. Whether in philosophy or visual art, the medium used to represent this exotic place − therefore strange − was the allegory.