The Stoic philosophy M. Cornelius Fronto advised Marcus Aurelius with these words: “Now imperium is a term that not only connotes power but also speech, since the exercise of imperium consists essentially of ordering and prohibiting. If he did not praise good actions, if he did not blame evil . . . . Continue Reading »
Jay Sexton opens his The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America by noting the “ambiguous and paradoxical” character of President Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress, the document that served as the basis for Monroe’s famous document: “The . . . . Continue Reading »
Watch the gyrovagi, Benedict says in the first chapter of his Rule . You know the type: “wanderers, who travel about all their lives through divers provinces, and stay for two or three days as guests, first in one monastery, then in another; they are always roving, and never settled, giving . . . . Continue Reading »
The title of Jason David BeDuhn’s The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual is, the author admits, surprising: Manichaeanism was a intellectualistic gnostic movement that saw salvation as liberation from the body, right? The subtitle is also a surprise, since many scholars suggest that . . . . Continue Reading »
Hindus often claim yoga as their own ancient practice, and non-Hindus accept the claims. Mark Singleton ( Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice ) sets out to debunk these claims. It’s true that the word “yoga” appears in some ancient texts, and it’s true that . . . . Continue Reading »
Defending the Spanish conquest of the Americas, Sepulveda argued that the Indians had forfeited their rights because they violated natural law by cannibalism and human sacrifice. Las Casas defended the Indians not by denying the charges but by defending human sacrifice on the basis of natural law. . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 1988 study in Past and Present , Charles Zika examines processions and pilgrimages in 15th-century Germany as sites of conflict between the extra-clerical use of relics and the clerically-dependent uses of the host. Devotion to the host was promoted, he argues, in order to bring lay devotion . . . . Continue Reading »
In her The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity , recently republished by Baylor, Debora Shuger examines, among other things, how Renaissance writers attending to biblical texts spread out in all directions: “In the Renaissance, discussions of Christ’s agony in . . . . Continue Reading »
In her Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel , Lee Palmer Wandel shows that images in medieval Christianity were modes of God’s presence. In attacking images, Protestant iconoclasts were acting on an alternative understanding of that . . . . Continue Reading »
In an article in SJT , Paul Rhodes Eddy summarizes the results of recent scholarship on the origins of Manicheanism. Since the publiscation of the Cologne Mani Codex in the 1970s, the standard views of the origins of the movement have “been decisively overturned.” The new evidence, Eddy . . . . Continue Reading »
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