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• Characters and magic signs in the Picatrix and other Medieval magic texts

  69–77

  Benedek Láng

  Views:

  311

  The word „characters” covers a number of different phenomena in the Middle Ages. It might refer to a list of incomprehensible signs and astrological symbols inscribed in a talismanic sigil, to a series of Latin letters used for magical purposes, and also to a written form of verbal incantation, a written charm. Characters were often used in the field of talismanic or celestial magic in order to name spiritual beings. The paper reviews the use of characters in various medieval sources: textual amulets, necromantic manuals, texts on talismanic magic and the most famous medieval magical summary, the Picatrix.

• The charaktêres in Ancient and Medieval Jewish magic

  25–44

  Gideon Bohak

  Views:

  216

  This paper examines the different magical signs found in Jewish magical texts and artifacts in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. These include especially the Graeco-Egyptian “charaktêres” (ring-letters, Brillenbuchstaben), the Arabic “string letters” (or Siegel), and the Latin sigilla or figurae, to which one may add a few other types of magical signs. This paper surveys their appearance in Jewish magical texts of different times and places, and analyzes their function within the magical texts where they are found.

• Farmacopea de la peonia, la planta de la Luna

  143–166.

  Sabino Perea Yébenes

  Views:

  124

  For the Greeks, the peony plant had exceptional properties. It was used for many medicinal remedies. The most frequent were gynecological, nervous and mental diseases (insanity), as well as other minor, varied uses. This plant becomes visible at night when the moonlight falls on it. For this reason, it soon became associated with astrological and magical superstitions. These beliefs passed into the Latin world. It appears in herbaria and in medical treatises. In the Middle Ages it was still a plant frequently used in rural areas.

• Review of Scholarship on the Admonitions of King Saint Stephen of Hungary

  151–158

  Előd Nemerkényi

  Views:

  84

  The purpose of the following discussion is to demonstrate that the philological study of the fortuna of the Admonitions of King Saint Stephen of Hungary provides important contributions to the characteristic stages of the development of Latinist scholarship from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until today. The Admonitions, a mirror of princes composed in the eleventh century and attributed to the first Christian king of Hungary, has attracted pious and scholarly attention for a millennium – including the hagiographic tradition of medieval Hungary and the legal tradition of the Corpus iuris Hungarici. Based on its late manuscript tradition, hypercritical scholars suggested that the Admonitions was a humanist forgery or at least an interpolated and stylistically polished text. From the Renaissance on, philologists and editors have addressed various issues of textual criticism such as the problem of dating and authorship, grammatical features (orthography, morphology, and syntax), stylistic devices (vocabulary, prose rhyme and rhythm), and textual parallels (Biblical, Classical, and Carolingian Latin). The way scholars have studied the Latinity of the Admonitions against the standards of Classical, Medieval, and Humanistic Latin for centuries reveals a great deal about their own approaches to their Latinist trade in particular – and therefore about Neo-Latin studies in general.

• Biblical speech and phrases in the Vita sancti Heinrici regis et confessoris by Adalbert of Bamberg

  187–203

  Gábor Bradács

  Views:

  45

  The vita of the emperor Henry II. of the Holy Roman Empire (ruled between A. D. 1002-1024) compiled by a dean of Bamberg, Adalbert about 1146 or 1170, had became one of the most influential work in the medieval German hagiography. The following paper deals with the problems of the authorship and the narrative and biblical sources of the vita. The study has two parts: in the first will be treated about the authorship, the sources and the reception of the vita as well the author’s method in the use of the biblical phrases. We are examining those chapters of the Vita Heinrici regis, in which the author used the biblical phrasing. In the second division of our study we are setting the details of the vita with their parallels from the Bible, investigating the author’s deep knowledge of the Holy Scripture and his virtuosity in the creative use of the biblical phrases.

• Gemstones from Roman Britain: Recorded in the Portable Antiquities Scheme

  25–41

  Martin Henig

  Views:

  183

  Roman gems have continued to be discovered in Roman Britain and published in archaeological reports and notes since the author completed his Corpus of Gems from British Sites in 1978. A new source of glyptic material can be found in the on-line publication of Portable Antiquities (Portable Antiquities Scheme) which includes intaglios, most of them found without stratigraphical context, by users of metal detectors, though many are set in rings, which provide significant aids in dating. Others were clearly re-used as they are set in seal matrices or medieval rings and were frequently freshly imported at that period from southern Europe. In the High Middle Ages, as in Roman times, intaglios reflect the interests, and patterns of thought of those who wore and valued these beautiful objects.