Mirabilia 6

Revista Eletrônica de História Antiga e Medieval
Journal of Ancient and Medieval History
December 2006

ISSN 1676-5818

COSTA, Ricardo da (coord.). A educação e a cultura laica na Idade Média
La educación y la cultura laica en la Edad Media – The educacion and secular culture in the Middle Ages

Spanish version Portuguese version

Ricardo da Costa (Ufes)

Middle Ages are known to be a time of religiosity, a Christian time, after all, faithful time. Normally little emphasis is given to laic world and its manifestations (both in written as in iconographic documents). However many, nowadays those are many studies dealing with medieval education. Therefore, to this new number of Mirabilia Journal we decided to melt two themes in one, and offer to Portuguese language readers a set of works which deal with distinct aspects of laic culture and education.

Our purpose is to offer to the Portuguese language readers another perspective of medieval times: a world only partially Christianized, with a superficial Christianity which little times could reach the deepest subtracts of man’s thought at the time. Thus, we present our collaborators and their texts.

Ronaldo Amaral analyses the Knowledge and Education in Late Antiquity by the relationship between the monastic priests with Greco-roman culture, especially Athanasius of Alexandry, Saint Jeronimus and Isidore of Seville.

Ofelia Manzi and Patricia Grau-Dieckmann (Universidad de Buenos Aires) presents “Los textos apócrifos en la iconografía cristiana”, and analyses the new iconografical forms of the IV century based in the Apocrifal Gospels.

Carlile Lanzieri Júnior presents one of the first works in Portuguese about Guibert of Nogent. His paper “Formation, obedience and humanism: considerations about infantile education in Monodies from Guibert of Nogent abbey (13th century)”, deals with many interesting ways of monastic education in the period soon before the bloom of universities.

Hilda Gomes Dutra Magalhães (UFT), Eliane Cristina Testa (UFT) e Izabel Cristina dos Santos Teixeira's (UFT) paper entitled “The Christian Imaginary in Chivalry novels and love canticles” deals with the influence of Christian education in laic medieval imaginary since The Quest of Holy Grail and the love canticles produced since 12th century.

Terezinha Oliveira (DFE/PPE/UEM) ransoms the Medieval University Memory by the view of three authors: Savigny, Steenberghen and Jacques Verger, and gives her own look and remembrance of our millenary institution, remembrance which is a mark, as professor Oliveira states, of our present.

My work in Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (Ufes) had as one of ours pillars the disposal of the research work to students. In other words, I open the doors to student’s desirable of initiation in a true study of the past: the work with the sources. A result of this human investment was the work of the student and CNPq scholarship holder Nayhara Sepulcri, entitled “‘The damsel who don’t could listen to fuck’ and ‘The woman who pull the balls’: two fabliaux and the questions of the body and the female condition in the Middle Ages (13-14th centuries)”. In this paper we analyzed the fabliaux, profane literary gender, to perceive the feminine medieval condition during the 13th and 14th centuries. The result was very different of litany “suffered-oppressed-woman” many times presented about this period.

Álvaro Alfredo Bragança Júnior (UFRJ) brought us another interesting contribution: a study about medieval proverbs in the theme of this volume of Mirabilia and analyses the laic culture appropriation by religious discourse. Professor Bragança Jr. has been working with medieval paremiologia, always with instigates and daring interpretations, approximating the literary texts to historical reality. We are honored with this present of him for Mirabilia 6.

Gerard Marí i Brull (Universitat de Barcelona), as great Catalan specialist in the theme, recovers and renews the heraldic tradition in his work “Medieval heraldic: a cultural creation to a laic society”, where he shows his historical origins, the specific language of heraldic description and the transmission of this important knowledge another’s to the cultural religious manifestations.

Moisés Romanazzi Tôrres (UFSJ) offers us other analysis or a theme in which he is a notable specialist: the thought of Dante Alighieri. In Convivio and in the work De Monarchia, Romanazzi tells us that Dante traced his ethics, with an aristocratically and elitist aspect. Dante proposed the image of ruler-philosopher, to charge with to guide the human multitudes to happiness and terrestrial perfection.

These are the texts that we are now presenting to the public. We thank the authors who make notable our effort in spread the Ancient and Medieval History, and we expect that you, dear reader, appreciate this one more initiative of Mirabilia Journal.

Ricardo da Costa (Ufes)

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