Article
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Giotto and the Purgatory: the difficult mission to save a usurer´s soul
Fátima Regina FERNANDES and Michelle MASCHIO
Original title: Giotto e o Purgatório: a difícil missão de salvar a alma de um usurário
Published in Paradise, Purgatory and Hell: the Religiosity in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Avarice, Giotto, Injustice, Purgatory, Usury.
The institution of the Purgatory provides a third way for the destination of the souls after death. It was driven by the appearance of the new social stratum, associated with trade, and translated the need of change, because each time more, the ideas and explanations of simplistic character were refused and the society turned against the antagonistic models. In 1303, Giotto is invited to paint a fresco cycle for Enrico Scrovegni, paduan usurer and son of the recently deceased Reginaldo Scrovegni; mentioned by Dante due to his extreme avarice. Enrico, after the death of his father, maybe had thought something to hurry Reginaldo’s arrival in Paradise. From the Scrovegni Chapel, with its extensive and varied iconographic cycle, we want to focus our attention on the fresco, whose theme is Injustice.
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A “floral garment” for the Paradise Garden: the Mudejar plaster-works
Mª Ángeles JORDANO BARBUDO
Original title: Un “vestido floral” para el Jardín del Paraíso: las yeserías mudéjares
Published in Paradise, Purgatory and Hell: the Religiosity in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Mosque Cathedral, Mudejar, Paradise Garden, Plaster-works, Royal Chapel, Sufism.
The Paradise Garden is a constant feature in the Islamic world. As a result of its survival under Christian domain is its representation through the Mudejar plaster-works, especially in the court spaces nourished as a "qubba", where the tree of Paradise and an endless number of leaves and fruits invade the paraments, showing bright colours -golden, red, blue and black.
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The Dante’s Inferno and the seventh circle symbology
Solange Ramos de ANDRADE and Daniel Lula COSTA
Original title: O Inferno de Dante e a simbologia do sétimo círculo
Published in Paradise, Purgatory and Hell: the Religiosity in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Dante, Demons, Hell, Middle Ages, Violence.
The period between XI to XIII century was remarkable for the expansion of Christian hell. The belief in evil increased the fear of unknown and enabled the structure of a punitive hell. The poet, Dante Alighieri, made a geography for Christian hell, paradise and purgatory by means of collective representations of medieval man. We’ll use the concept of representation to discuss the symbolism of Dante’s inferno, focusing in the structure of its seventh circle, where the violent souls are punished.
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The Sense and the Reason of Being of Dante Alighieri’s Paradise
Moisés Romanazzi TÔRRES
Original title: O Sentido e a Razão de Ser do Paraíso de Dante Alighieri
Published in Paradise, Purgatory and Hell: the Religiosity in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Christian Reform, Dante Alighieri, Paradise, Process of the Mystic Union., Theological Blessedness and Human Deification.
Dante, along Commedia, establishes the great process of his Mystical Union. Once freed from sin, our poet can re-enter into possession of his free will and win the Earthly Paradise (the philosophical blessedness). His “long walk” through Hell and Purgatory thus marks the first phase of his union with God and gives the first of two sanctities, the sanctity of nature (the philosophical blessedness). Paradiso of Dante develops exactly the other two stages. In its ascent through the various heavens, Dante gradually breaks away from all connection with the earth, until, enlightened by truth, can gain access to Celestial Paradise (the theological blessedness). This was the second step, which gave him a new sanctity, the sanctity of grace. But it was only a wonder that Dante double blessed can complete the process of Mystical Union. Just then he felt his free will finally merge with the divine will, and has to obey only love that this is the soul of the world and that moves the sun and other stars. Only then Dante can to realize the highest human and Christian perfection, the deification of man. Then he became worthy and capable of performing his providential mission: to cooperate on earth the triumph of truth and Christian order, and finally , join the action of the godsend that one day will complete the reform of the Church and the world.
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Measure and classify the usual time: the dogged work of medieval jurists
Paola MICELI
Original title: Medir y clasificar el tiempo de la costumbre: la obstinada tarea de los juristas medievales
Published in The Time and the Eternity in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Christian time, Classification, Costume, Legal discourse, Medieval jurists.
The custom has been linked in the juridical classic tradition and in the medieval one to the problem of the time. Nevertheless the conception of the temporality that was operating in each of these traditions was clearly different. The target of this work will be to show the transformation that took place in the medieval right with regard to the time of the custom, change directly related to a new Christian conception that did of the time a key for the salvation. Although the references to the time of the custom were already present in Corpus Iuris never the Roman legal experts alluded to period that were allowing the introduction of the same one. The time in the roman jurisprudence only was qualifying to the custom. The medieval jurists crossed by a conception of the time where the term was an important element for the attainment of an end (the salvation in the eschatological time) got obsessed for measuring and classifying the time of the consuetudo.
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In perfect future. The End of Time in Augustine, the apocalyptic and Gnostic
Luis Felipe JIMÉNEZ JIMÉNEZ
Original title: En futuro perfecto. El fin del tiempo en Agustín, los apocalípticos y los gnósticos
Published in The Time and the Eternity in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Apocalypse, Christianity, Culture, Gnosticism, Philosophy of History, Time.
Augustine's reflection on time, from the level of individual salvation and the transcendence of the heavenly city located from the beginning on Earth, able to characterize or shape of medieval culture, but it is also clear that the expectations generated apocalyptic positions – better known as millenarian sects – and the Gnostics did not fail to weigh heavily in the collective imagination that went through the end of the Roman Empire and the so-called Middle Ages. So the contrast between conceived notions about the future in these three directions, it allows you to understand the full extent the meaning and significance of the choice of linear and finite time, hidden under mythical notions as Revelation, Last Judgment, Kingdom of God, eternal salvation, is at the bottom of the beliefs that have been – and somehow still blowing – life to Western culture.
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The free will and the evil in Saint Augustine
Ricardo J. BELLEI and Délcio Marques BUZINARO
Original title: O livre-arbítrio e o mal em Santo Agostinho
Published in The Time and the Eternity in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Free will, Moral evil, Sin, Supreme Good.
Saint Augustine (354-340). One of the greatest exponents of the Christian philosophy is inserted in a reality where the Christianity has just become his official doctrine of the Roman Empire and still hasn’t got solid basis of his doctrines. A time of arising heresies. In some cases, the own saint himself had important role in the combat such as the Manichaeism and the pelagianismo. Against the Manichaeism which confirmed that the good (spirit) and the evil (something solid) were enemy eternal forces, that were in struggle – Augustine develops his system to solve the evil problem, fully unlinking Good, (the supreme God and creator of everything) from such reality and nothing that the blame of the evil presence in the world, thus, the moral evil or the sin. The physical evil would be, however, an unfolding of the sin.
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“In the Syrian Taste”: Crusader churches in the Latin East as architectural expressions of orthodoxy
Susan BALDERSTONE
Original title: “Ao sabor sírio”: as igrejas dos cruzados no Oriente latino como expressões da arquitetura ortodoxa
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
Keywords: Crusader churches, Latin East, Orthodoxy.
This paper explores how the architectural expression of orthodoxy in the Eastern churches was transferred to Europe before the Crusades and then reinforced through the Crusaders’ adoption of the triple-apsed east end “in the Syrian Taste”2 in the Holy Land. Previously, I have shown how it can be deduced from the archaeological remains of churches from the 4th-6th C that early church architecture was influenced by the theological ideas of the period3. It is proposed that the Eastern orthodox approach to church architecture as adopted by the Crusaders paralleled the evolution of medieval theology in Europe and can be seen as its legitimate expression.
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Love of God or Hatred of Your Enemy? The Emotional Voices of the Crusades
Sophia MENACHE
Original title: O amor de Deus ou o ódio ao seu inimigo? As vozes emocionais das Cruzadas
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
Keywords: Crusades, Emotions, Moslems, Papacy.
The present paper attempts to investigate three cornerstones of the history of the early crusades from a wider range of emotions while focusing on [1] the call to the crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem, [2] the fall of Edessa and, subsequently, the Second Crusade and its outcomes, and [3] the Christian defeat at the Horns of Hattin. Less than a century before the crusades, different groups in Christian society had been the target of the same pejorative emotions that were later used to denounce and reproach the Moslems. These terms should therefore be seen and analyzed, not to produce a superficial moral reading of the vilification of the Moslems, but as an essential part of the thesaurus in which Christian society analyzed itself. In fact, the use of the same Augustinian emotional index transforms negative attitudes toward the Moslems into an act of inverted inclusion of the Moslems within the Christian sphere; in other words, using illusionary inclusion in order to exclude. This inverted inclusion means that within its inner discourse, Christian society defeated the Moslems symbolically, independently of the real outcome on the battlefield. The transformation of the crusaders from esterners into Easterners in Fulcher’s eschatology (note 45) is a conscious practice of erasing the “other” by expropriating its identity. This was not, however, an act of including the Easterner into the crusaders’ weltanschauung, but a symbolic denial that further served to exclude the Easterners altogether.
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Origin of the main houses of the manor of Fuentecubierta (Cordoba, Spain)
Fernando MORENO CUADRO
Original title: Origen de las casas principales del señorío de Fuentecubierta (Córdoba, España)
Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Estate, Fuencubierta, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Manor, Ruy Fernández de Córdoba.
One of the most important historic mansions in the city of Cordoba (Spain) is the one known as the Viana Palace, named after the marquises who were the last owners. The mansion’s origins go back to the 14th and 15th centuries, a time when the Lord of Fuencubierta bought a group of old 14th century houses from Teresa Carrillo which had formerly belonged to Leonor López, widow of the Lord Treasurer of Andalusia, Miguel Ruiz, and which he converted into his main residence. The aim of this work is to make a record of the houses during the late Middle Ages in connection with the Fuencubierta Manor and Estate, before it was rebuilt in Renaissance times to become the Estate of the Lords of Villaseca.
