Augustine Beyond the Book

Intermediality, Transmediality and Reception
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-90-04-22213-7
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 58, 362 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 738 g

Reihe: Brill's Series in Church History

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is arguably the most influential thinker and Latin author of the Early Christian period. His widespread legacy has been explored to date only in part, and largely with respect to his textual reception. This interdisciplinary volume attempts to redress this emphasis with a set of analyses of Augustine's impact in the visual arts, drama, devotional practices, music, the science-faith debate and psychotherapy. The included studies trace intricate and occasionally surprising instances of Augustine's ubiquitous presence in intellectual, spiritual and artistic terms. The result is a far more differentiated and dynamic picture of the mechanisms by which the legacy of an historical figure may be perpetuated, including the sometimes supra-rational and imaginative dimensions of transmission.

Zielgruppe

All those interested in intellectual history; the historical reception of Late Antiquity; the fine arts; church history, as well as classicists, theologians, early modern historians, and musicologists.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Pollmann, Karla

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Einzelne Autoren: Monographien & Biographien
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Rezeption, literarische Einflüsse und Beziehungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction (Karla Pollmann, Meredith J. Gill)

Visualizations of Augustine
Karla Pollmann (St Andrews), Art and Authority: Three Paradigmatic Visualizations of Augustine of Hippo
Vladimir Cvetkovic (Århus/Niš), The Reception of Augustine in Orthodox Iconography
Meredith J. Gill (University of Maryland), Reformations: The Painted Interiors of Augustine and Jerome

Dramatizing Augustine on Stage
Dorothea Weber (Salzburg/Vienna), Augustine and Drama
Goran Proot (Leuven), Augustine on Stage in the Southern Low Countries in the Early Modern Period

Augustine in Confessionalized Contexts of Spirituality and Devotion
Carolyn Muessig (Bristol), Images and Themes Related to Augustine in Late Medieval Sermons
Julia Staykova (The Huntington Library), Pseudo-Augustine and Religious Controversy in Early Modern England
Feike Dietz (Utrecht), Under the Cover of Augustine: Augustinian Spirituality and Catholic Emblems in the Seventeenth-century Dutch Republic
John Exalto (VU Amsterdam), Orating from the Pulpit: The Dutch Augustine and the Reformed Godly until 1700

Eyolf Østrem (Copenhagen), The Renaissance Reception of Augustine’s Writings on Music
Sabine Lichtenstein (University of Amsterdam), A Musical Relecture of Augustine’s Conversion: La Conversione di Sant’Agostino by Maria Antonia Walpurgis and Johann Adolf Hasse
Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen), St. Augustine in Twentieth-century Music

Augustine beyond Himself
Pablo de Felipe (Madrid), The Antipodeans and Science-Faith Relations: The Rise, Fall, and Vindication of Augustine
Alexandra Pârvan (Pitesti/St Andrews), Beyond the Books of Augustine into Modern Psychotherapy

Notes on Contributors
Indices

Leseproben

Introduction
Karla Pollmann and Meredith J. Gill

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is one of the most prominent and influential Christian thinkers in the history of the West. Indeed, he is probably the only writer whose impact spans such divergent fields as medieval canon law (in Gratian’s Decretum) and twentieth-century pop music (in Sting’s Saint Augustine in Hell). This reflects not only Augustine’s iconic status but also the versatility of his authority, even as his legacy calls into question that very notion. Three factors help explain the broad and diverse character of his reception. The first is the historical figure of Augustine himself who seems to have combined in one person many different qualities. These resulted in a vast and varied oeuvre, comprising in its extant form around five million words. As canonical Church Father, saint, bishop, exegete, brilliant orator, original thinker, passionate fighter of heresy, and relentless soul-searcher, he produced works that lend support to widely divergent views and causes. A second factor centres on the identity of Augustine’s numerous readers who, through the centuries, have appropriated him selectively and creatively in support of their distinctive agendas. The “Augustine” of Thomas Aquinas, for example, is very different from the respective “Augustines” of Petrarch and Martin Luther, or indeed from the modern “Augustines” created by Hannah Arendt or Jacques Derrida. The third factor, which has so far been much less studied than the other two, is the medium in which the reception takes shape. The manuscripts of medieval canon law, for example, allowed for a presentation of Augustinian content that is radically different from its presentation in the pop song composed by Sting. In each case, the medium shapes the reception and performs a particular function.
This collected volume seeks to explore the significance of the medium for the reception process and, in a necessarily interdisciplinary manner, it brings together classicists, theologians, art historians, musicologists, sermonists, neo-Latinists, historians, and philosophers of religion and culture. Ranging in time from after Augustine’s death to the twentieth century, fourteen papers partly deriving from a ground-breaking international meeting, address the following central questions: How is Augustine interpreted outside the medium of the book? What exactly happens when Augustine’s ideas are translated from their written context to other forms, such as music, the visual arts, sermons, or drama? How does the medium affect the message? What is the significance of the medium for the appropriation of Augustine’s authority and for his thought?
In addressing these questions, this volume both explicitly and implicitly engages the concepts of “intermediality,” which for our purposes refers to the juxtaposition of at least two different media in the reception of ideas, and of “transmediality,” which in our context denotes the transfer of content from one medium to the other. While intermediality focuses on the interaction of various media of reception and is predominantly interested in the result of this interaction, the parameter of transmediality highlights the process of the transition from the original medium to the target medium (Meyer 2006). The contributions presented here do not intend to explore these concepts comprehensively, nor are the sub-sections of this volume derived from these concepts as a theoretical matrix. These notions highlight, rather, the dynamic nature of the transmission and reception of ideas, and they are, therefore, helpful in terms of a nuanced examination of how this affects the interpretation and transformation of these ideas.

State of research
Intermediality was introduced as an investigative paradigm in the early 1980s, as, for instance, in 1983 by the literary theorist Aage Hansen-Löve. Since then, the concept of intermediality has been further developed, especially in Germany, and rela

Über Autor(innen)

Pollmann, Karla
Karla Pollmann, Ph.D. (1990) in Classics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, is Professor of Classics at St Andrews University. She has published extensively in the fields of literature and culture of the Roman Empire, including a commentary on Statius, Thebaid 12 (Schöningh, 2004), and a co-edited volume on Poetry and Exegesis (Brill, 2007).

Karla Pollmann, Ph.D. (1990) in Classics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, is Professor of Classics at St Andrews University. She has published extensively in the fields of literature and culture of the Roman Empire, including a commentary on Statius, Thebaid 12 (Schöningh, 2004), and a co-edited volume on Poetry and Exegesis (Brill, 2007).

Meredith J. Gill, Ph.D. (1992) in Art History, Princeton University, is Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at the University of Maryland. She has published in the areas of cross-cultural patronage and the arts and spirituality, including Augustine in the Italian Renaissance (CUP, 2005).