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Beowulf

Beowulf is a heroic poem, the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular epic. The work deals with events of the early 6th century, and, while the date of its composition is uncertain, some scholars believe that it was written in the 8th century. Although originally untitled, the poem was later named after the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, whose exploits and character provide its connecting theme. There is no evidence of a historical Beowulf, but some characters, sites, and events in the poem can be historically verified. The poem did not appear in print until 1815. It is preserved in a single manuscript that dates to circa 1000 and is known as the Beowulf manuscript.

Plot

Beowulf falls into two parts. It opens in Denmark, where King Hrothgar has a splendid mead hall known as Heorot, a place of celebration and much merriment. However, the joyous noise angers Grendel, an evil monster living in a nearby swamp. For 12 years the creature terrorizes Heorot with nightly visits in which he carries off Hrothgar’s warriors and devours them.

After learning of the Danes’ trouble, young Beowulf, a prince of the Geats in what is now southern Sweden, arrives with a small band of retainers and offers to rid Heorot of its monster. Hrothgar is astonished at the little-known hero’s daring but welcomes him. After an evening of feasting, much courtesy, and some discourtesy—at one point, one of Hrothgar’s men insults Beowulf—the king retires, leaving Beowulf in charge. During the night, Grendel comes from the moors, rips open the heavy doors, and devours one of the sleeping Geats. He then grapples with Beowulf, who refuses to use a weapon. Beowulf grips one of Grendel’s hands with such force that the monster finally wrenches himself free only when his arm is torn off at the shoulder. Mortally wounded, Grendel returns to his swamp and dies. Beowulf then displays the monster’s arm in Heorot for all to see.

The next day is one of rejoicing in Heorot, and a feast is thrown in Beowulf’s honour. However, as the warriors sleep that night, Grendel’s mother, another swamp monster, comes to avenge her son’s death, and she kills one of Hrothgar’s men. In the morning Beowulf dives into her mere (lake) to search for her, and she attacks him. They struggle in her dry cave at the mere’s bottom, and Beowulf finally kills her with a sword. In the cave, Beowulf discovers Grendel’s corpse, whose head he cuts off and takes back to Heorot. The Danes rejoice once more. Hrothgar makes a farewell speech about the character of the true hero, and Beowulf, enriched with honours and princely gifts, returns home to King Hygelac of the Geats.

The second part passes rapidly over Hygelac’s subsequent death in a battle (of historical record), the death of his son, and Beowulf’s succession to the kingship and his peaceful rule of 50 years. However, the tranquility ends when a fire-breathing dragon becomes enraged after a man steals from its treasure-filled lair. The creature begins ravaging Geatland, and the brave but aging Beowulf decides to engage it, despite knowing that he will likely die. The fight is long and terrible—a painful contrast to the battles of his youth. Painful too is the desertion of all his retainers except for his young kinsman Wiglaf, who comes to his aid. They ultimately kill the venomous dragon, but Beowulf is mortally wounded from a bite in the neck. Before he dies, he names Wiglaf his successor. Beowulf is cremated on a funeral pyre, and his remains are buried in a barrow built by the sea. As his people mourn his death, they also express the fear that, without Beowulf, Geatland will be invaded by nearby tribes.

Decline of Literacy

The decline of literacy after the fall of the Roman Empire was primarily caused by the collapse of the Roman administrative and economic systems, which eliminated the practical need for widespread reading and writing.

Collapse of Roman Institutions

The Roman Empire maintained a vast, complex bureaucracy that required a literate workforce to manage its laws, taxes, and trade. After the empire's fall, this system disintegrated, and there was no longer a need for literacy outside of a very small, specialized class. The urban centers that had been hubs of commerce and education shrank, and Europe's economy reverted to a localized, agrarian system. The economic and social chaos made expensive writing materials, like parchment, scarce. This meant that the production of books and documents became an incredibly rare and costly undertaking.

The Rise of Oral Traditions

The Germanic tribes who established new kingdoms in post-Roman Europe generally had rich oral traditions and did not rely on written language for governance or culture. The new ruling elites were more concerned with warfare and land ownership than with education or scholarship. This shift in social values meant that formal education for the general population was no longer a priority, leading to a long period of decreased literacy among the laity.

The Role of the Church

In the midst of this chaos, the Church became the main, and often only, institution to preserve literacy. Monasteries became centers of learning and repositories of knowledge, with monks painstakingly copying religious and classical texts by hand. However, this literacy was largely confined to the clergy and was used for theological and administrative purposes. Reading and writing became almost exclusively a clerical skill, with Latin, the language of the Church, being the only one widely used in writing.

Gutenberg Bible

The Gutenberg Bible is the first great book printed in Western Europe from movable metal type. It is therefore a monument that marks a turning point in the art of bookmaking and consequently in the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanical printing press made it possible for the accumulated knowledge of the human race to become the common property of every person who knew how to read—an immense forward step in the emancipation of the human mind.

The printing of the Bible was probably completed late in 1455 at Mainz, Germany. Johann Gutenberg, who lived from about 1400 to about 1468, is generally credited for inventing the process of making uniform and interchangeable metal types and for solving the many problems of finding the right materials and methods for printing. This Bible, with its noble Gothic type richly impressed on the page, is recognized as a masterpiece of fine printing and craftsmanship and is all the more remarkable because it was undoubtedly one of the very first books to emerge from the press.

The text of the Gutenberg Bible is the Latin translation known as the “Vulgate,” which was made by St. Jerome in the fourth century. The Bible is printed throughout in double columns, for the most part, with forty-two lines to a page. The capital letters and headings are ornamented by hand in color. The three volumes are in white pigskin bindings, which date from the sixteenth century.

The Library of Congress copy is printed entirely on vellum, a fine parchment made from animal skin, and is one of only three perfect vellum copies known to exist. The others are at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Library. For nearly five centuries the Bible was in the possession of the Benedictine Order in their monasteries of St. Blasius and St. Paul in Austria. Along with other fifteenth-century books, it was purchased from Dr. Otto Vollbehr by an act of Congress in 1930.

Historiated Initials

Historiated initials can be defined as those which have a scene incorporated into their design. The scene often told a story, hence the term historiated. Early manuscript historiated initials usually depicted biblical scenes, as did early printed historiated initials. After 1500, as influenced by the Renaissance, themes of historiated printed initials began to include depictions of everyday activities, children, and battle scenes. Printers not only used historiated initials as merely decorative elements but also as a way to indicate the theme of the text to the reader. A well designed historiated initial could encapsulate the essence of the text which, no doubt, contributed to the reading experience.

Semiotics

Semiotics, the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary field of study emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce’s seminal work in the field was anchored in pragmatism and logic. He defined a sign as “something which stands to somebody for something,” and one of his major contributions to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types: (1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); (2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and (3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.

Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work in linguistics supplied the concepts and methods that semioticians applied to sign-systems other than language. One such basic semiotic concept is Saussure’s distinction between the two inseparable components of a sign: the signifier, which in language is a set of speech sounds or marks on a page, and the signified, which is the concept or idea behind the sign. Saussure also distinguished parole, or actual individual utterances, from langue, the underlying system of conventions that makes such utterances understandable; it is this underlying langue that most interests semioticians.

This interest in the structure behind the use of particular signs linked semiotics with the methods of structuralism, which sought to analyze such relations. Saussure’s theories were thus also considered fundamental to structuralism (especially structural linguistics) and to poststructuralism.

Twentieth-century semioticians applied Peirce and Saussure’s principles to a variety of fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, communications, and semantics. Among the most influential of these thinkers were the French scholars Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva.

Vulgate

Vulgate, (from the Latin editio vulgata, “common version”), Latin Bible used by the Roman Catholic Church, primarily translated by St. Jerome. In 382 Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome, the leading biblical scholar of his day, to produce an acceptable Latin version of the Bible from the various translations then being used. His revised Latin translation of the Gospels appeared about 383. Using the Septuagint Greek version of the Old Testament, he produced new Latin translations of the Psalms (the so-called Gallican Psalter), the Book of Job, and some other books. Later he decided that the Septuagint was unsatisfactory and began translating the entire Old Testament from the original Hebrew versions, a process that he completed about 405.

Jerome’s translation was not immediately accepted, but from the mid-6th century a complete Bible with all the separate books bound in a single cover was commonly used. It usually contained Jerome’s Old Testament translation from the Hebrew, except for the Psalms; his Gallican Psalter; his translation of the books of Tobias (Tobit) and Judith (apocryphal in the Jewish and Protestant canons); and his revision of the Gospels. The remainder of the New Testament was taken from older Latin versions, which may have been slightly revised by Jerome. Certain other books found in the Septuagint—the Apocrypha for Protestants and Jews; the deuterocanonical books for Roman Catholics—were included from older versions.

Various editors and correctors produced revised texts of the Vulgate over the years. The University of Paris produced an important edition in the 13th century. Its primary purpose was to provide an agreed standard for theological teaching and debate. The earliest printed Vulgate Bibles were all based on this Paris edition.

In 1546 the Council of Trent decreed that the Vulgate was the exclusive Latin authority for the Bible, but it required also that it be printed with the fewest possible faults. The so-called Clementine Vulgate, issued by Pope Clement VIII in 1592, became the authoritative biblical text of the Roman Catholic Church. On the basis of that text—together with Richard Challoner’s revision (1749–52) of the Douai-Reims English translation of the Vulgate—Catholic scholars produced the English-language Confraternity Version of the New Testament (1941).

Various critical editions have been produced in modern times. In 1965 a commission was established by the Second Vatican Council to revise the Vulgate, and in 1979 the Nova Vulgata, also known as the Neovulgata, was published. It was promulgated in April of that year by Pope John Paul II as the official Latin text of the Roman Catholic Church. A second edition was released in 1986.

Mos Maiorum

The mos maiorum (literally meaning “the way of the ancestors” in Latin) was the unwritten code of traditional values, customs, and social practices that formed the ethical foundation of ancient Roman society. It was central to Roman identity and shaped their political, religious, familial, and military institutions. The mos maiorum embodied a set of moral principles and behavioral guidelines passed down through generations, guiding Romans in their daily lives and shaping their interactions within society.

Origins and Meaning of Mos Maiorum

The term mos maiorum is derived from mos (meaning “custom” or “manner”) and maiorum (meaning “of the ancestors”), implying that it was a set of inherited customs. Unlike codified laws, which were formally written and legislated, the mos maiorum was rooted in tradition, passed down orally and upheld by collective societal consensus. The Roman people, particularly the ruling elite, believed that these ancestral customs had a divine origin and were key to the stability and prosperity of Rome.

The mos maiorum was conservative by nature, emphasizing the preservation of the traditional values and practices established by previous generations. In Roman society, continuity with the past was highly esteemed, and maintaining this connection to ancestral customs was seen as essential for the welfare of the state. Adherence to the mos maiorum gave Romans a strong sense of identity and belonging, reinforcing social cohesion.

The Role of Mos Maiorum in Roman Society

The mos maiorum served as the foundation for Rome’s social hierarchy and moral code, influencing both public and private life. It was a guide for behavior, helping individuals navigate their roles within the family, the state, and religious institutions. While the mos maiorum provided an ethical framework, it was also flexible enough to allow for adaptation and interpretation as circumstances changed over time.

The values upheld by the mos maiorum emphasized duty, respect for authority, discipline, and a strong sense of civic responsibility. Romans were expected to put the interests of the community and the state above their own personal desires. Upholding these values was seen as a moral obligation, and those who adhered to them were respected and honored.

Orpheus

Orpheus and His Musical Legacy

Orpheus is a figure from ancient Greek mythology, most famous for his virtuoso ability in playing the lyre or kithara. His music could charm the wild animals of the forest, and even streams would pause and trees bend a little closer to hear his sublime singing. He was also a renowned poet, traveled with Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, and even descended into the Underworld of Hades to recover his lost wife Eurydice. Orpheus was seen as the head of a poetic tradition known as Orphism where, according to some scholars, adherents performed certain rituals and composed or read poems, texts, and hymns, which included an alternative view of humanity's origins. Orpheus is widely referenced in all forms of ancient Greek art from pottery to sculpture.

Family Background

Orpheus had an excellent musical pedigree as his mother was the Muse Calliope, and he learned his great skills from his father, the god Apollo, the finest musician of them all. Orpheus' mortal father was generally considered to be King Oeagrus (or Oiagros) of Thrace, where the Greeks believed the lyre also came from. Orpheus' brother was the unfortunate Linos (Linus) of Argos, the inventor of rhythm and melody, and the kithara teacher of Hercules, who was killed by his famous pupil after he over-chastised the hero. Orpheus also passed on his musical skills, notably tutoring King Midas, the mythical king of Phrygia whose touch changed everything into gold. In some myths, Orpheus had a son, Leos, who was regarded as the founder of the Athenian Leontids.

Eurydice in Hades

Orpheus married Eurydice (aka Agriope); however, their happiness was short-lived, for Eurydice was bitten on her ankle by a poisonous snake when attempting to escape an attacker, the demigod Aristaeus. Eurydice died, in some accounts, on her wedding night. Distraught, Orpheus followed his love down to Hades, the Greek Underworld, and with his music charmed Charon, the ferryman, and Cerberus, the fearsome dog which guarded the gates, to allow him into the realm of shades.

Meeting Persephone, the wife of the god Hades, he beseeched the goddess with his song to release Eurydice and allow her to return to the land of the living. Hades, who ruled the Underworld, then appeared and, moved by Orpheus' offer that if Eurydice could not be released, he would stay himself in the Underworld, the god consented to her release. There was, however, a condition. The shadow of Eurydice would follow behind Orpheus as he left Hades, but if he once looked back at her, she would forever remain in the world of the dead.

Delighted, Orpheus agreed to this simple request but as he walked through the shadows of Hades and heard not a single footfall from behind, he began to doubt Eurydice was still there following. Then, almost at the threshold of the world of light and happiness, the doubtful Orpheus looked back. There she was, the shadow of Eurydice, but as soon as their eyes met, the girl vanished. In despair, Orpheus stumbled to the daylight and collapsed, his grief not allowing him to eat or drink. Finally, he gathered his senses and roamed the forests of Thrace, but he shunned human company and never sang or played his lyre again.

Romance Languages

Romance languages, group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, all national languages. Catalan also has taken on a political and cultural significance; among the Romance languages that now have less political or literary significance or both are the Occitan and Rhaetian dialects, Sardinian, and Dalmatian (extinct), among others.

Of all the so-called families of languages, the Romance group is perhaps the simplest to identify and the easiest to account for historically. Not only do Romance languages share a good proportion of basic vocabulary—still recognizably the same in spite of some phonological changes—and a number of similar grammatical forms, but they can be traced back, with but few breaks in continuity, to the language of the Roman Empire.

So close is the similarity of each of the Romance languages to Latin as currently known from a rich literature and continuous religious and scholarly tradition that no one doubts the relationship. For the nonspecialist, the testimony of history is even more convincing than the linguistic evidence: Roman occupation of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul, and the Balkans accounts for the “Roman” character of the major Romance languages. Later European colonial and commercial contacts with parts of the Americas, of Africa, and of Asia readily explain the French, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken in those regions.

Thermae

Thermae are grandiose Roman baths, and all thermae are Roman baths, but not all Roman baths are thermae. The thermae were the luxurious, grand versions with multiple facilities for various activities, while Roman baths could be as simple as local public bathhouses.

The thermae was a complex of rooms designed for public bathing, relaxation, and social activity that was developed to a high degree of sophistication by the ancient Romans. Although public baths are known to have existed in early Egyptian palaces, remains are too fragmentary to permit complete analysis of Egyptian types. Bathing occupied an important place in the life of the Greeks, as indicated by the remains of bathing rooms in the palace of Knossos (begun c. 1700 BC). The standardized architectural type of the thermae, however, was not developed until the Romans designed the great imperial thermae—Baths of Titus (AD 81), Baths of Domitian (95), Trajan’s Baths (c. 100), Baths of Caracalla (217), and the Thermae of Diocletian (c. 302).

The general scheme consisted of a large open garden surrounded by subsidiary club rooms and a block of bath chambers either in the centre of the garden, as in the Baths of Caracalla, or at its rear, as in the Baths of Titus. The main block contained three large bath chambers—the frigidarium, calidarium (caldarium), and tepidarium—smaller bathrooms, and courts. Service was furnished by means of underground passageways, through which slaves could move swiftly without being seen. For lighting and for the roofing of the enormous rooms, the Romans developed an ingenious system of clerestory windows (windows in or near the roof or vault).

Modern discoveries of ancient sculpture in the Roman baths, such as the Laocoon group from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, indicate the richness of the furnishings. Floors were marble or mosaic; walls were apparently sheathed with marble to a considerable height and decorated above with stucco reliefs and mosaic. Gilt bronze was used freely for doors, capitals (the crowning member of a classical column), and window screens. This type of imperial bathing establishment was repeated in its essential form, but on a smaller scale, throughout the Roman Empire.

Although there is disagreement among scholars about the exact order of bathing activities, the Roman technique of bathing is thought to have followed a somewhat standardized pattern. The bather probably first entered the apodyterium, where he undressed. He was then anointed with oil in the elaeothesium, or unctuarium, before entering a room or court, where he indulged in rigourous exercise. After this activity, he proceeded to the calidarium (hot room) and to the sudatorium, or laconicum (steam room), where his body was probably scraped of its accumulation of oil and perspiration with a curved metal implement called a strigil. The bather then moved to the tepidarium (warm room) and afterward to the frigidarium (cold room), where there was frequently a swimming pool. The bathing process was completed after the body was once more anointed with oil.

Roman baths varied in size from those in the larger, private houses to the great public thermae. The essential features present in all types of thermae were an ADequate system of furnishing hot, tepid, and cold water; the heating of the hot portions of the bath, and sometimes also the tepidarium, by the circulation of smoke and heated air from a fire under the floor through the hollow walls (see also hypocaust); and ADequate basins for warm and cold water in the hot bath.

As a rule, men and women bathed separately. Mixed bathing is first recorded in the 1st century AD, by the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. The practice, which seems to have been largely restricted to courtesans, was condemned by respectable citizens and prohibited by the emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius.

Silk Road

The Silk Road was a network of ancient trade routes, formally established during the Han Dynasty of China in 130 BC, which linked the regions of the ancient world in commerce between 130 BC-1453 AD. The Silk Road was not a single route from east to west and so historians favor the name 'Silk Routes', though 'Silk Road' is commonly used.

The European explorer Marco Polo (l.1254-1324 AD) traveled on these routes and described them in depth in his famous work but he is not credited with naming them. Both terms for this network of roads - Silk Road and Silk Routes - were coined by the German geographer and traveler, Ferdinand von Richthofen, in 1877 AD, who designated them 'Seidenstrasse' (silk road) or 'Seidenstrassen' (silk routes). Polo, and later von Richthofen, make mention of the goods which were transported back and forth on the Silk Road.

The network was used regularly from 130 BC, when the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD) officially opened trade with the west, to 1453 AD, when the Ottoman Empire boycotted trade with the west and closed the routes. By this time, Europeans had become used to the goods from the east and, when the Silk Road closed, merchants needed to find new trade routes to meet the demand for these goods.

The closure of the Silk Road initiated the Age of Discovery (also known as the Age of Exploration, 1453-1660 AD) which would be defined by European explorers taking to the sea and charting new water routes to replace over-land trade. The Age of Discovery would impact cultures around the world as European ships claimed some lands in the name of their god and country and influenced others by introducing western culture and religion and, at the same time, these other nations influenced European cultural traditions. The Silk Road - from its opening to its closure - had so great an impact on the development of world civilization that it is difficult to imagine the modern world without it.

Verism

From the Latin word meaning “true,” verism is the name of a style of portraiture that is hyperrealistic and emphasizes individual features.

The Romans created veristic portraits of older men most likely because the style conveyed experience as well as indicating that the individual has met an age requirement to run for political office.

Vigiles

The Vigiles (or cohortes vigilum) were formed during the reign of Augustus to act as ancient Rome's permanent firefighting service. Evolving from earlier slave teams, the vigiles were organised as an urban military unit and eventually recruits came from the Roman citizenry. The body, with a permanent camp of its own and equipment stations dotted around the city, patrolled the streets of Rome each night and also performed certain nocturnal policing duties to ensure public order.

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