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542.More information
This article examines the ara coeli legend, a tale in which the Tiburtine Sibyl showed Emperor Augustus a vision of a virgin holding a child proclaiming the child’s greatness. Based on both texts and art works, mainly from the Holy Roman Empire, it argues that the legend owed its widespread popularity to the way in which it was grafted onto the fifteenth-century Marian cult. While flourishing in coexistence with the humanist reconsideration of the Sibylline heritage, this incorporation into popular belief ultimately led to the legend’s decline during the Reformation, as reformers and later Catholic theologians revised Mary’s role in the unfolding of Christian salvation. In the face of Protestant and post-Tridentine theology, the ara coeli legend thus subsided into religious irrelevance, giving way to political, mythological, and gendered interests in the Sibyls.
Keywords: Sibyl, Reformation, Humanism, Popular Belief, Marian Cult, Holy Roman Empire
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545.More information
This article aims to rehabilitate the approach of a general interpretation of vast, complex and diversified human phenomena. Indeed, postmodern deconstruction – surely a necessary step in the human sciences – has combined with the historical discipline's natural distrust of generalizations, resulting in a gradual fragmentation of knowledge. The text aims to attempt, with all the risks that this implies, a global reading of the monastic phenomenon, at least of the period of its origins. The sacred, a concept much criticized in the religious sciences, is nevertheless mobilized as the interpreting key of this ascetic way of life. Following a selective analysis of the sources, we add the qualifier “total”, well known in the social sciences.
Keywords: monachisme, monasticism, sacred, sacré, asceticism, ascétisme, ancient Christianity, christianisme ancien, théorie de la religion, theory of religion
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