Ethics and Aesthetics of Music in Ramon Llull’s Philosophy
Ricardo da COSTA
Original title: Ética e Estética da Música na filosofia de Ramon Llull (1232-1316)
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Medieval Aesthetic, Medieval Music, Middle Ages, Ramon Llull.
Brief exposition of the importance of Music in Western aesthetic thought. From Plato, and later, in the Middle Ages, San Isidore of Seville, Guido of Arezzo and Ramon Llull, all thinkers who did meditations on the importance of the aesthetics of harmonic sounds for human existence. In relation to Llull, we deal with the subject from the works Doctrina pueril (c. 1274-1276), Fèlix o el Libre de meravelles (c. 1289), Arbre de Ciència (c. 1295-1296), Ars generalis ultima (c. 1305), Ars brevis (1308) and especially, the Libre de contemplació en Déu (c. 1273-1274).
From the sagesse des troubadours to the polite allegory of Ramon Llull
Anna Maria COMPAGNA
Original title: De la sagesse des troubadours al alegorismo cortés de Ramon Llull
Published in
Keywords: Laicism, Middle Ages, Ramon Lull, Troubadours.
If certain comparisons between works rarely go beyond superficial analogies, the concept of a figure allows us to frame in a new light the affinity of some of Llull’s works with troubadour poetry, where the lady as a metaphor for Wisdom and as a folkloric epiphany presages what which will be the courteous allegorism of Ramon Llull. The importance that Llull gives to the metaphor finds part of his matrix in the love story of the troubadours.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179): the Exceptional Way of a Medieval Visionary Woman
Carmen Lícia Palazzo
Original title: Hildegard de Bingen: o excepcional percurso de uma visionária medieval
Published in Expressing the Divine: Language, Art and Mysticism
Keywords: Church, Hildegard of Bingen, Middle Ages, visionary woman.
The goal of this article is to present a few aspects of the extensive body of work by the visionary nun Hildegard of Bingen, relating her acceptance with the 12th century context and suggesting certain research possibilities. The debate among monks of Cister and Cluny and the severe criticism to Abelard’s teachings by Bernard of Clairvaux constitute, in my opinion, an essential elements to be considered in order to explain the direct support by the Church to Hildegard’s texts and Hildegard as a person. However, it was certainly the quality of her work and her prodigious intelligence that consolidated her achievements not only as a visionary but also as composer, counsellor and therapist.
History handbooks and medieval education: Middle Ages historiography, proximities and distances
Luciana Rosar Fornazari KLANOVICZ
Original title: Os manuais de História da Educação e a educação medieval: aproximações e distanciamentos na historiografia sobre Idade Média
Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Historiography, History handbooks, Middle Ages, education.
This article addresses interpretations on medieval education available in Education History handbooks in the light of a historiography reading on the topic. Therefore, Paul Monroe’s História da Educação, Edward Myers’ La educación en la perspectiva de la historia, Mario Manacorda’s História da educação, and Franco Cambi’s História da Pedagogia have been analyzed. Amidst any discourse disputes, knowledge on Middle Ages within Education History has also been losing quality or becoming rather symbolic in physical space or time periods, in order to guarantee the identification of western civilization with secularization, progress, and civilization conceived as the ideal society meant to be constructed for the contemporary age.
Isabel de Villena: Prayer and Franciscan Spirituality
Lesley K TWOMEY
Published in Isabel de Villena (1430-1490)
Keywords: Franciscan prayer techniques, Franciscanism, Middle Ages, Orality, Passion.
This essay examines traces of the oral in the prayers written by Isabel de Villena (1430-1490), abbess of the Santa Trinitat convent in Valencia. The essay compares the prayers of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane in the Vita Christi with St Francis’s Office of the Passion. It finds that whilst there are some similarities between St Francis’s Office and Villena’s Vita Christi, this is because of technique in using phrases from the Psalms rather than direct influence.
Itaque sine musica nulla disciplina potest esse perfecta: musical iconography in hispanic romanic sculpture
Alicia MANSO SAN ISIDRO
Original title: Itaque sine musica nulla disciplina potest esse perfecta: la iconografía musical en la escultura románica hispana
Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance
Keywords: Instruments, King David, Last Judgement, Middle Ages, Minstrels, Music, Romanesque sculpture.
The presence of musical iconography in medieval art, particularly in Romanesque sculpture, is enormous. Thus, in this article we will focus on the chronology from the 11th to the 13th century, analyzing the most important examples on the most representented topics: the Final Judgement, King David, and profane scenes. Musical instruments are represented in both non-religious and religious scenes, included as a reflection of biblical texts with a profound theological content. Analyzing the representation of instruments gives us information about iconographic influences, that begin with the miniatures in the Beatos. Moreover, this analysis is useful regarding organology and musicology, assessing the verisimilitude of these representations with a multidisciplinar methology.
Marginalized women. The case of the Castilian concubines
David WAIMAN
Original title: Mujeres marginadas. El caso de las concubinas castellanas
Published in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Peninsula Cultural History
Keywords: Castile, Concubinage, Concubines, Middle Ages, Sexuality.
Concubinage has been, over the past decade, several investigations. While increasingly know more about concubines and late medieval concubinage. This time we will try to give a new look to the pasts in Castile in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Added to this will be analytical axis as the role of women in concubinage, seeing in them the various forms that are part of that reality.
Medieval images in Argentine textbooks
Laura C. del VALLE, David WAIMAN
Original title: Las imágenes medievales en los manuales escolares argentinos
Published in
Keywords: Federal Law of Education, Images, Middle Ages, Textbooks.
Addressing the Argentine textbooks and their relationship with the iconic aspects, proposes in a well-defined period, which is the implementation of the Federal Law of Education since 1993 until 2006. This research aims to investigate some quantitative and qualitative aspects about images of medieval period textbooks of Social Sciences, deepening the comparative analysis between two of the big publishers nationwide, Santillana and Kapelusz.
Medieval leprosy and the metaphorical medicine of Ramon Llull (1232-1316)
Ricardo da COSTA; Hélio ANGOTTI-NETO
Original title: Medieval leprosy and the metaphorical medicine of Ramon Llull (1232-1316)
Published in
Keywords: History of Medicine, Leprosy, Middle Ages.
A brief study of leprosy in the Middle Ages, its history, medical perception and social attitude toward manifestations of the disease. As a case study about the prevailing medical principles, we present some excerpts from Començaments de Medicina (c.1274-1283), Doctrina pueril (c. 1274-1276), Fèlix o Libre de Maravelles (1288-1289), and Liber prouerbiorum (c. 1296) by the medieval philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1316). It presents the theoretical foundations of his Medicine: a metaphorical art that links the Hippocratic four elements (air, fire, earth and water) and Christian Theology using numeric symbolism.
Musica Dolorosa – Symphony of the Sublime and the Grotesque
Antonio Celso RIBEIRO
Original title: Musica Dolorosa – Sinfonia do Sublime e do Grotesco
Published in Rhythms, expressions and representations of the body
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.
