This book in effect consists of two parts. The first part contains seven chapters on Historia Ecclesiastica Carmine and related topics, written by Patricia Springborg over many years. While valuable, they will not be discussed here because these have been previously published. The second part is a critical text and translation, on facing pages, of Historia Ecclesiastica by Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson, accompanied by extensive explanatory and interpretive notes by the same scholars. The work (...) shows prodigious effort and scholarship. This book, a large part of which, it seems, will also be published in the Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes , is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on the works of Hobbes.Hobbes' poem is a selective, static, ill-proportioned, and repetitious history of religious belief, practice, and abuse from the ancient Near East to the Reformation of Martin Luther. Much of the same history appears in the appendix to the Latin Leviathan and in An Historical Narration Concerning History. A problem with Hobbes' views stands out in Historia. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's 'Historia Ecclesiastica' presents his views on religion and aims to divert the attention of the public from charges against his being a heretic to placing heresy in pagan history, claiming that Greek philosophers were responsible for introducing heresy in the Christian Church. His book reveals his interest in religious history and the growth of hermeticism and Cabalism in England in his age.

In den neun Büchern seiner Kirchengeschichte hat Salamanes Hermeias Sozomenos den religiösen Wandel vom Hellenentum zum Christentum dargestellt. Eine moderne deutsche Übersetzung der Kirchengeschichte des Sozomenos hat Günther Christian Hansen (H.) nach der von ihm bearbeiteten Textausgabe unternommen (Sozomenos, Kirchengeschichte. Hrsg. VON J. BIDEZ/G. C. HANSEN. GCS N.F., 4. Berlin 1960, 2. Aufl. 1995). Das vierbändige Werk enthält: Einleitung (S. 9–84) mit einer Inhaltsübersicht (S. 42–51), Textübersetzung der neun Bücher (S. 86–1103), Bibliographie (S. 1104–1128) und Register (S. 1129–1164).

This article offers the first comprehensive study of Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Latin 182, a twelfth-century codex formerly belonging to the Benedictine Abbey of Gladbach in Germany. I begin with a full codicological and palaeographical analysis of the entire manuscript, before moving on to a discussion of its contents. These include the Venerable Bede‘s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and the Continuatio Bedae, as well as two hagiographical works copied at the end of the manuscript. I then propose (...) a new possible context of reception for Bede‘s Historia ecclesiastica during the twelfth century, one that interlinked with the prevalent discourses on secular ecclesiastical lordship and monastic reform at Gladbach, as well as, perhaps, in Germany more widely. In doing so, I essentially argue for the possibility that the Gladbach scribes and their audiences may have used and understood the Historia ecclesiastica not only in the conventional context of history and historiography, but also as an example of the golden age of monasticism which during the later twelfth century was re-framed and re-contextualised as both a spiritual guide and a source of miracle stories. (shrink)

Todo ejercicio legítimo del poder político debe su propia existencia a la Iglesia. A su vez, todo el poder que hay en la Iglesia radica o se contiene en el poder papal. Por ello, el poder del sumo Pontífice, incluso en materia temporal, es un poder pleno, absoluto, sine pondere, numero et mensura, como señala Egidio. Dos poderes, dos espadas, una sola autoridad: la del Papa.

Among the paradoxical aspects of Hobbes's scepticism attention has recently turned to Hobbes's fool of Leviathan , chapter xv, where Hobbes makes a claim about justice that paraphrases Psalm 52:1: "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." It is a charge of which Hobbes himself could be suspected, but in fact we see that it is on this startling claim that his legal positivism rests. Moreover it is embedded in a theory of natural law that Hobbes (...) inherited from the late scholastics and that he shares in common with Grotius as a practical solution to the problem of scepticism. Indeed, the fool is not even honoured with the designation "sceptic." He is simply dumb, stultus , one of the mindless mob, or those led astray by priests. Hobbes's treatment of the fool as stultus is Epicurean, as we see in the Historia Ecclesiastica , where he gives the topos special attention, and Epicureanism helps us solve the puzzle of the fool. (shrink)

Nota del Boletín Informativo del Institute for Vico Studies, fundado en 1974 por Giorgio Tagliacozzo en Nueva York, y editor de New Vico Studies, anuario comenzado a publicarse en 1983. La Nota ofrece información de actividades y publicaciones llevadas a cabo por el Instituto americano.A Note of the Informative Bulletin of the Institute for Vico Studies, founded in 1974 by Giorgio Tagliacozzo in New York, and publisher of New Vico Studies' yearbook . The Note offers information of activities and publications (...) carried out by the American Institute. (shrink)

La lectio divina es un ejercicio ascético y espiritual usado por la comunicad cristiana en las asambleas litúrgicas. Desde los Padres del Desierto su práctica nunca se ha extinguido como ejercicio espiritual. Ahora parece haber vuelto con fuerza como ejercicio de lectura de la Palabra de Dios. La primera parte del artículo recrea los datos históricos fundamentales, la segunda explica su validez para los cristianos y las comunidades de nuestro tiempo.

In his ›Historia ecclesiastica‹, Beda Venerabilis presents the origins of English literary history and the vocation of the first English poet within the context of non-Christian inspiration. The article argues that the irritating fact that Beda omits the original wording of the first Old English poem and gives a Latin paraphrase instead, is part of a strategy to defy the pagan implications of inspiration and to christianize the semantics of vernacular poetry.

The papal monarchy is the subject of Thomas Hobbes's Historical Narration concerning Heresy, much of Behemoth, and his long Latin poem, the Historia Ecclesiastica. Hobbes's was not the only account in his day of the papal monarchy as a history of iniquity, or even as “the ghost of the Roman Empire.” The papal creation of a parallel system of offices in the late Roman and Holy Roman Empires is of immense institutional importance. Hobbes's analysis of the second papal (...) strategy, the co‐optation of Roman Law as canon law, is complicated. Hobbes's account of both the institutional and philosophical consequences of the papal monarchy is surprisingly congruent with some of the most authoritative modern accounts. The fourteenth‐century hierocratic publicists belonged as much to the reception of Averroist Aristotelianism as their contemporary antagonists. None of the parties to the struggle between pope and emperor appears to have been immune to the Aristotelianism of the Arabic commentators. (shrink)

This paper traces the history and meaning of the Greek proverb “Win but do not overwin”, first documented in Maurice′s Strategicon and cited thereafter in various contexts in Byzantine military and historical literature. The earliest manifestation of this proverb is identified as a verse of iambic trimeters preserved in the Γνῶμαι Μενάνδρου or Sententiae Menandri, witnessed in both the manuscript tradition and a fragmentary specimen inscribed on a fifth-/sixth-century ostracon. Older scholarship denied the antiquity of this monostichos on linguistic and (...) metrical grounds, but it is shown that there is no impediment to a possible origin in Attic drama, even if date and authorship remain elusive. Recognition of an additional prose variant in Socrates′ Historia Ecclesiastica points to a wider proverbial currency by the beginning of the fifth century at the latest. The study concludes with the conjecture that St. Paul may have had this proverb in mind when he wrote Epistle to the Romans, adducing arguments based on eccentric vocabulary and evidence for Paul′s limited acquaintance with moralising pagan literature. (shrink)

‘Can you tell me, Philocles, what in the world it is that makes many men so fond of lying that they delight in telling preposterous tales themselves and listen with especial attention to those who spin yarns of that sort?’ In the seventh book of his Historia Ecclesiastica the church historian Sozomen provides us with a detailed account of the social and political climate and subsequent motives which precipitated the outbreak of the Riot of the Statues in Antioch (...) a.d. 387. According to his version ‘on the night before the sedition occurred, a spectre was seen in the form of a woman of prodigious height and terrible aspect, pacing through the streets of the city, lashing the air with an ill-sounding whip, similar to that which is used in goading on the beasts brought forward at the public theatres. It might have been inferred that the sedition was excited by the agency of some evil and malicious demon. There is no doubt but that much bloodshed would have ensued, had not the wrath of the emperor been stayed by his respect for this sacerdotal entreaty.’. (shrink)

This chapter examines the doubtful issues in Bede's account of the pre-Viking history of Britain and Ireland in his Historia Ecclesiastica. It focuses on the section of the HE where Bede attributed the conversion of the Picts to the work of Columba and the Christianisation of the southern Picts to one Nynia episcopo reuerentissimo et sanctissimo uiro de natione Brettonum. The chapter explores the origins of the cult of Saint Martin of Tours and considers what evidence it might (...) offer about the nexus of influences operating upon Bede's account of the conversion. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Christmas's Cultural Context Christmas: What's Yule Got to Do With It? Christmas and Christian Apologetics The Medieval Christmas: Christ and Kissing Games.