By Gabriele Knappe & Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna
What is ‘linguistic medievalism’ and what can it teach us? In our brand new post, Prof. Gabriele Knappe and Prof. Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna of the University of Bamberg jointly present a teaching experiment they carried out on ‘Linguistic Medievalism’. Read on to find out what they did and what they found!By Maria Parani
Dr Maria Parani tells the story of one of the many medieval churches that populate the Cypriot countryside: that of the Church of the Transfiguration at the village of Sotera in southeast Cyprus. Tracing its history of successive building phases and painting campaigns opens up a window into the lives of the people whose needs - social and spiritual - it served.By Daniele Gallindo Gonçalves
Whether it’s the time we get up in the morning or when we eat or go to sleep, our daily routines are a form of ritual. However, can we really call such (individual) habits rituals? What is actually a ritual? As defined by Gerd Althoff, a ritual is “a formally-standardized symbolic sequence of actions that has a specific effectiveness”, since it has the capacity to (re)produce “a social, political, spiritual, etc. change of state” (Althoff; Stollberg-Rilinger 2008: 144).By Marina Toumpouri
Medieval written records are complex things; it is not easy (or often possible) to pin down their provenance, history of ownership, and transmission. In this month’s post, Dr Marina Toumpouri of the University of Cyprus considers the case of surviving Greek manuscripts and the work historians and philologists must do to access their distant but exciting world.By Sarah Böhlau
From the moment the time travel narrative entered human imagination at the end of the 19th century, opening doors to both past and future, the medieval period has held a special point of interest for many storytellers. Examining the foreign period through the lens of temporal tourism provides a unique way to relate to the past – and rituals are important support structures in this journey.By Nils Holger Petersen
In principle, aesthetic evaluation is not essential for judging the successfulness of rituals. The aesthetic value of song, however, was instrumental for the function of medieval liturgical rituals. Elements of these, gradually received into the modern arts, question the distinction between the medieval and medievalism.By Christos Hadjiyiannis
In her latest work, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović stars as Maria Callas. The work opened at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich on 3 September 2020. In his review of the opera, Dr Christos Hadjiyiannis, Scientific Project Manager of NetMAR, suggests that the opera borrows much from late antique and early medieval texts that thematise the suffering of Christian women.By Lars Boje Mortensen
The NetMAR project is seeking to better understand and promote local heritage by bridging the disciplines of art history, literature, musicology, history and more – all under the lense of ritual. NetMAR takes place just as we are seeing a significant surge, and new trends, in the global discourse of heritage.
