TP CARTOGRAPHIE 1

This workshop, to be held in three sessions, will explore the reception and reshaping of patristic themes concerning the Virgin Mary in the Byzantine theological and liturgical tradition between the sixth and tenth centuries. Following official recognition of Mary’s important role as ‘Theotokos’ (‘God-bearer’) at the council of Ephesus (431), liturgical and popular devotion to the Virgin developed rapidly from the late fifth century onward. The first session of the workshop will deal with hymnography between the sixth and ninth centuries, starting with the imaginative contribution and enduring influence of Romanos the Melodist. The second session will examine the homilies associated with the Marian feasts that were being introduced into the liturgical calendar between the sixth and eighth centuries. In the third and final session, our attention will turn to a corpus of largely unstudied hagiographical texts that were composed in honour of the Virgin Mary in the ninth and tenth centuries. The narrative strategies, biblical exegesis, and theological preoccupations of these Lives differ in significant ways from conventional liturgical treatment of the Virgin; however, these texts also reveal influence from earlier apocryphal, patristic, and historical sources to a degree not evident in the liturgical material. The development of doctrine and devotion concerning the Virgin Mary in the Late Antique period has been heavily studied in recent years, sometimes creating the impression that later contributors had little to offer, short of repeating traditional formulas. It is the aim of this workshop to prove that Byzantine writers, working creatively within a variety of literary and liturgical genres, continued from the sixth century onward to develop new theological insights, literary techniques, and spiritual reflection on Mary, the Mother of God. My paper: Mary as «scala caelestis» in Eighth and Ninth Century Italy The ‘crypt’ of the abbot Epiphanius (824-42) in the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno (Isernia, central Italy), in the former Langobardia Minor, displays what is usually recognized as the most important painted cycle in the early medieval southern Italy. The present paper concentrates on an image of the Virgin depicted in the vault of the apse. She sits on a throne, holding a book where is written «beatam me dicent,» a quotation from the Magnificat hymn (Luke 1,46-55) – the words with which Mary, after the Annunciation, addressed her cousin Elizabeth. The throne, the crown, and five archangels paraded in the lower section of the vault as celestial guardians, make her appear as the Queen of Heaven ruling with her Son, who is depicted on a throne above her in the vault. The painted cycle of the crypt has been analysed by generations of art historians, among whom Pietro Toesca (1904) was the first to trace a connection between its contents and the writings of the Gaulish author Ambrosius Autpertus († 784), a monk, briefly abbot, and a renowned theologian active at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the second half of the eighth century. Toesca explained the scene of the Virgin in the vault with a passage of Autpertus’ Sermo de adsumptione sanctae Mariae, where Mary, after her transitus is presented as «super angelos elevatam cum Christo regnare», as «reginam caelorum» with Him as «regem … angelorum». Autpertus quotes the Magnificat in the same context, celebrating the humility of Mary that made her the «scala caelestis,» i.e. the ladder to Heaven from which God descended to Earth – thus adopting a new metaphor for describing her role in the history of Salvation. In the West, before Autpertus, the word scala is to be found indeed in a great number of western Church Fathers. But in Ambrose, in his contemporary Zeno of Verona and in Jerome, ladder appears with reference to the Cross; in Jerome and Zeno with reference to the concordance of the two Testaments; in Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Caesarius of Arles, Isidore and Bede with reference to Jacob’s ladder. As for Bede, in another passage, when recalling the teaching of Benedict of Nursia, he says that the rungs in Jacob’s ladder are made of humility, since humility is the way to spiritual perfection in the monastic mentality. Benedict of Nursia had in fact written in his monastic Rule that the ladder represents our terrestrial life, and only by having a humble heart can the ladder be raised by God to Heaven. It appears then that the early Western monastic interpretation of Jacob’s ladder as a ‘ladder of humility’ that represents the difficult ascent to God, in the doctrinal landscape of Autpertus overlapped with the Byzantine metaphor of Mary as ‘ladder to Heaven,’ a metaphor widespread by the Akathistos and by the early eighth-c. Byzantine homiletic production. But historians of theology has not investigated the origins of Autpertus’ phraseology, notwithstanding the fact his above-mentioned homily is the earliest extant original homily in Latin for the feast of the Dormitio celebrated on the 15th of August. In the array of epithets and metaphors developed by the eastern tradition on Mary, she is called «joy of all generations» in the famous hymn Akathistos (IX, 17), which was known and sung also in the West by Greek-speaking communities. The main iconophile writers of the early eighth century connected the Magnificat to the moment of the transitus in their homilies on the Dormitio. Among them, Andrew of Crete declared the Magnificat as the most suitable praise for Mary. John of Damascus observed that Mary truly predicted that she would be called blessed by all generations, not from the moment of her death but from the moment of the conception of Christ, and that death has not made her blessed, but she has made death glorious, destroying its horror and showing death to be a joy. Germanos of Constantinople asked the Virgin to guide the steps of his mind with her ready hand on the ladder to Heaven, she who rightly said that all generations of men and women would call her blessed. Although the modalities of transmission of early iconophile homilies to the West have not been investigated, it remains the case that Autpertus adopts the same phrasing, metaphors, epithets to describe Mary, her Assumption into Heaven, her role in the history of Salvation. These homilies need to be seen as the missing link between Eastern Mariology and Autpertus, who is generally acknowledged as the first Western medieval Mariologist. This paper is aimed at illustrating how the literary image of Mary taken up to Heaven developed by early iconophile authors in the East has been received a few decades later in the West by Autpertus, and how this literary image was eventually translated in visual imagery in Autpertus’ monastery in the years 824-42, pre-dating the earliest examples of the image of the Dormitio/Koimesis in which Mary is shown on her death bed surrounded by the Apostles. This will be accomplished not through a mechanical comparison of the painted image to earlier theological writings, but by trying to reconstruct the modalities of circulation of theological concepts between East and West in the period of the ‘image struggle’, their influence on the religious mentality, and their ‘translation’ into visual imagery.

Plusieurs textes espagnols des XVIe et XVIIe siècles font allusion à une métamorphose animale supposée du roi Arthur en corbeau et à l'attente messianique dont, sous cette forme provisoire, il est censé faire l'objet de la part des Bretons. Ce motif se retrouve dans les traditions orales de la Cornouaille britannique. L'auteur étudie les relations de cette légende (et de la croyance correspondante) avec le folklore et la mythologie celtiques, ainsi que les circonstances et contextes idéologiques qui ont favorisé son apparition et son développement dans les lettres ibériques. Resumen Varios textos españoles del Siglo de Oro aluden a una presunta metamorfosis del rey Arturo en cuervo y a las esperanzas mesiánicas de los bretones relacionadas con esta creencia. El mismo motivo se encuentra en las tradiciones orales de la Cornualla inglesa. El autor estudia los vínculos de esta leyenda con el folklore y la mitología de los celtas y trata de desentrañar las causas y contextos ideológicos de su difusión en la península ibérica.

This workshop aims at exploring ancient medical and philosophical ideas about synchronicity of the body with the environment and with the circumstances affecting its health and well-being. At the same time, it investigates synchronizing as the attempt to bring about, manage, influence and manipulate that synchronicity. In this connection, we are particularly interested in deciphering ancient views on the body under three aspects: 1) the healthy body, 2) the gendered body and 3) the sick body.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023

We consider the distribution of fruit pigeons of the genera Ptilinopus and Ducula on the island of New Guinea. Of the 21 species, between six and eight coexist inside humid lowland forests. We conducted or analyzed 31 surveys at 16 different sites, resurveying some sites in different years. The species coexisting at any single site in a single year are a highly nonrandom selection of the species to which that site is geographically accessible. Their sizes are both much more widely spread and more uniformly spaced than in random sets of species drawn from the locally available species pool. We also present a detailed case study of a highly mobile species that has been recorded on every ornithologically explored island in the West Papuan island group west of New Guinea. That species’ rareness on just three well-surveyed islands within the group cannot be due to an inability to reach them. Instead, its local status decreases from abundant resident to rare vagrant in parallel with increasing weight proximity of the other resident species.

Stanford University Press & China Publishing Group, 2024

A new picture of China's rise since the Age of Exploration and its historical impact on the modern world. The establishment of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 was a monumental event in world history. A century before Columbus, Beijing sent a series of diplomatic missions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean that paved the way for China's first modern global era. 1368 maps China's ascendance from the embassies of Admiral Zheng He to the arrival of European mariners and the shock of the Opium Wars. In Ali Humayun Akhtar's new picture of world history, China's current rise evokes an earlier epoch, one that sheds light on where Beijing is heading today. Spectacular accounts in Persian and Ottoman Turkish describe palaces of silk and jade in Beijing's Forbidden City. Malay legends recount stories of Chinese princesses arriving in Melaka with gifts of porcelain and gold. During Europe's Age of Exploration, Iberian mariners charted new passages to China, which the Dutch and British East India Companies transformed into lucrative tea routes. But during the British Industrial Revolution, the rise of steam engines and factories allowed the export of the very commodities once imported from China. By the end of the Opium Wars and the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan, Chinese and Japanese reformers called for their own industrial revolutions to propel them into the twentieth century. What has the world learned from China since the Ming, and how did China reemerge in the 1970s as a manufacturing superpower? Akhtar's book provides much-needed context for understanding China's rise today and the future of its connections with both the West and a resurgent Asia.

This is the second part of the paper on sustainability development. Part 1 developed theory that explains how complex adaptive human activity systems can be seen as autonomous and self-organising third order cybernetic systems. In this part 2 of the paper a review of the concepts related to sustainability is undertaken and discussed. The paper falls into three parts. The first part relates to the early concepts of the sustainability due to three pillars or disciplinary dimensions of the human activity. The second elaborates on this through the consideration of additional dimensions, which are then referred to as systems. The third extends this argument and considers the rational for these dimensions, in due course reducing them to as five relevant interactive systems. These together compose an interactive supersystem. Sustainability development refers to this supersystem, not to the individual systems. In part 3 of the paper, these systems are considered to be complex human adaptive systems and each is explored in more detail.

Berria, 2019

Versión original del texto publicado el 8 Febrero 2019 en la p. 14 del diario Vasco Berria con el titulo Bortxaketaren kulturaren oximorona disponible en https://www.berria.eus/paperekoa/1876/014/001/2019-02-08/bortxaketaren_kulturaren_oximorona.htm