Motifs and symbolisms in the Hymn of the Pearl

Ephrem's Theological Journal, 2021

An introduction to Ephrem's Symbolic Theology

Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 2006

S56{57. This situation awakened me and reminded me of the covenants.

The Chaucer Review, 2000

In her 1968 British Academy lecture, Elizabeth Salter announced that the Middle English Pearl invites a criticism which applies "the typological or figural method," one that works toward discovering in the text a historiography of "promise and fulfilment, most completely described and illustrated by the Scriptures, but discernible as a constant rhythm in every part of Christian experience, past, present, and to come." 1 But Salter's lecture was not the occasion for launching a large scale typological analysis, but rather a call for others to start thinking of Pearl differently, in line with the aesthetic demands of figuralism. Salter was thereby showing a way out of the notorious "elegy versus allegory" debates which had dominated critical reflection on Pearl for the first half of our century. The new critical orientation Salter proposed steered a course between, on the one hand, the historicism and autobiographicalism of the elegy hypothesis and, on the other hand, the reductive abstractions of allegory, while partaking of the insights of both approaches to the text's meaning: figuralism should direct us accordingly toward an apprehension of spiritual and eternal truths incarnate in concrete, historical facts. For many earlier commentators, however, Pearl in the defining instance had either a concrete historical referent (namely, the poet's own or perhaps his patron's dead daughter, whom the poem supposedly commemorates) or certain symbolic or metaphysical referents (for example, the pearlmaiden stands for virginity or the transformed soul). 2 Early twentiethcentury criticism was thus broadly polarized between an excavative criticism, centered on recovering the original historical conditions of the text's composition, and an exegetical criticism that was directed solely toward expounding Christian doctrine. Out of the context of this critical stalemate, Salter attempted a kind of harmonization of the elegy-allegory theories, what amounts to an ideal rapprochement of the two determinations of genre by way of Erich Auerbach's distinguished discussion of typology. But the question needs to be asked, is a typological reading of Pearl finally defensible? ticularly the way in which Pearl reflexively engages in resisting typology or figura, inasmuch as the figural aesthetic within which typology operates presupposes and preserves a stable continuity between eternity and the human historical continuum that the poem contests. As Boethius writes, adroitly abbreviating a sound medieval distinction between the celestial and the terrestrial, "God indeed is eternal, but the world is perpetual." 7 Just so, much of what the beatified maiden has to say from her eternal, synoptic perspective cannot be limited by reference to temporality, and, hence, is not amenable to a typological reduction. In the rational, figural view of reality described by Auerbach, both promise and fulfillment (or imago and veritas, type and antitype) are "within time, within the stream of historical life." 8 The second term fulfills and encompasses the first as along a temporal continuum, implying a steady advance toward closed or finite meaning. Yet the maiden in Pearl emphasizes that anagogic reality-the main inscrutable subject of her discourse and of the poem itself-is precisely not immersed in the stream of historical life. Nor is the anagogic realm exhausted by typological forecasting. If the text uses the resources of figuralism to make the point, then it finally dispenses with those very means by highlighting the ultimate inadequacy of the typological hermeneutic. As I will proceed to argue, Pearl is better understood, due to its anagogic scope, as parabolic instead of figural in its presentation.

Ancient Magic: Then and Now, J. E. Sanzo, A. Mastrocinque, M. Scapini (eds.), Nordhausen, Verlag Traugott Bautz., 2020

The idea of a charm as a poem has been a widespread common belief; a lot of ancient societies shared the thought that poetry had special properties beyond its artistic features, so it is not surprising that Greco-Egyptian magicians found in poetry a great way to reinforce their spells. These metrical sections from magical texts composed in Roman Imperial period were named “magical hymns” by K.Preisendanz but since he proposed this controversial name, it has been widely discussed: obviously, not all are hymnal and not all came from a magical background. Because of this, the aim of this paper is to delve into the problems that arise from the analysis of these compositions as a group, first regarding the demarcation of the study subject (which texts have been considered “magical hymns”? Should we include or exclude any text nowadays?), and second concerning their characterization (what are “magical hymns ” like? Is it possible to give a general definition?). As a result of this exam, my intention is to examine the current validity of Preisendanz’s denomination in the light of the historical evolution of our understanding of ancient Greek hymnal gender and ancient Greek magic.

Gnomon, 2018

2020

East Syriac poetry embedded in the manuscript decoration was not studied despite its large popularity in this tradition. Such verse pieces, mostly quatrains, are known at least since the 16th century. The poems being discussed in the present paper represent a further development of this particular text group. It seems to have first appeared in the Gospel lectionaries. Later on, the other types of liturgical manuscripts also obtained different kinds of “decorative” scribal poetry. This process went on alongside the growth of the poetry’s popularity in the East Syriac tradition during several centuries of the Ottoman period.

2007

seventh century, the Holy Mandylion was the only image miraculously created by Christ himself, as a kind of selfportrait “not made by human hands”1. The Letter to Abgar of Edessa was the only text written by Christ himself as a kind of a divine autograph2. This unique status determined the outstanding role played by the Holy Face and the Holy Script in the Christian culture. The stories of these two major relics were closely interwoven. Both have appeared in the same circumstances and were venerated for centuries in the city of Edessa. Both were transferred from Edessa to Constantinople and situated in the Pharos chapel – the imperial church-reliquary of the Great Palace in Constantinople. Both were perceived as apotropeia and magic objects, which sometimes were fused in a single whole. This specific phenomenon of a magic fusion of relics will be discussed in the present paper. I will argue that it influenced considerably Byzantine church iconography as well as the practice of icon-...

2010

The Book of the Rose The poem On the laying waste of Jerusalem is part of an East-Syriac collection of hymns, traditionally entitled Kthava d-warda «The Book of the Rose», that is usually attributed in the manuscripts to a certain Giwargis «George», surnamed Warda «the Rose». It is not clear whether the alleged author or compiler of the collection was surnamed Warda after the title of the famous and most appreciated Book attributed to him or if the Book took over the surname of its author. In both cases, the metaphor of the rose would refer to the beauty of the verses, as suggested by the compiler(s) of an anthology of Classical Syriac literature, published in 1898 at the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission in Urmia: This Giwargis was called Rose because of the beauty of his compositions, since like the rose adorns gardens and parks so he adorned the Church with his hymns» (Kthāvonā d-fartuthē 266) 1 .

The first, theoretical part of this study pursues the question of how meaning was generated and how an ambivalent-or polyvalent-object, for example, an allegory, was or can be understood. The interweaving of acts of interpretations involving things, ideas, nature, and-in the specific case of a work of art-the artist, that is to say, the material history of matter and artistic traditions, can be described as allegoresis. As this study demonstrates, the scholar who most vigorously shed light on the medieval exegesis of nature through allegoresis was Friedrich Ohly. The second part of the essay is a case study of an object executed in émail en ronde bosse, combined with an extremely fine relief carved in mother-of-pearl, that unfolds the various layers of the object's meaning through an analysis of the ambivalence of its iconographic motifs, its cultural origin (the courtly practices of gift-giving in French families), and its artistic origin in Paris about 1400, in the workshop of a goldsmith with an extraordinary expertise in only recently developed artistic techniques (rouge cler, émail blanc, painted enamel, and pointillé). The aim of this article is not to provide one interpretation of this object but, rather, to elucidate its ability to oscillate between multiple possible meanings and to reveal how insisting on just one of them would deprive the object of its ability to function in di erent contexts-secular and sacred. FIGURE 1. Reliquary, gold, mother-of-pearl, and enamel, 10.5 × 8 × 7 cm, Paris, ca. 1400, front view, stolen from Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (photo: © Ramon Manent). FIGURE 2. Reliquary, gold, mother-of-pearl, and enamel, 10.5 × 8 × 7 cm, Paris, ca. 1400, back view, stolen from Museu d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (photo: © Ramon Manent).