Search Results (18)

This study examines two proximate yet theologically and spatially disparate religious spaces in Seoul: the Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine (Korean: 절두산 순교 성지; hereafter “Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine”) and the Yanghwajin Protestant Cemetery (Korean: 양화진 묘원; hereafter “Yanghwajin Cemetery”). We propose the concept of isomorphic heterotopias and discuss the logic of intersecting memories. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and cultural memory theory, the study finds that the Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine, through architectural enclosure, the exhibition of relics, and pilgrimage rituals, foregrounds the vertical redemption of martyrs’ flesh and faith, reinforcing ecclesiastical discourse and collective salvation narratives. In contrast, at Yanghwajin Cemetery, through dispersed tombstone layouts, egalitarian epitaph inscriptions, and public commemorative activities, the study finds that the site presents the dialectic of the martyr spirit within a secular spiritual space and individual testimonies. Despite their spatial heterogeneity, their geographic proximity generates a dialogical memory field: the vertical sacrality of the shrine is refracted through the cemetery’s horizontality, while the cemetery’s public spirit resonates with the shrine’s liturgical framework. This dialogical memory field, shaped by shared physical environments and common public narrative platforms—generates a long-term coexistence without convergence, producing a spatial relationship of “non-integrative entanglement” born of antagonism. At the same time, these sites are not isolated spatial fragments; rather, through urban governance, they are woven into the same memory politics network, forming an “isomorphic heterotopia.” Through politically inflected discursive narratives, both sites facilitate multidirectional flows of memory, preserving their respective “canons” while re-contextualizing each other within the same urban memory network. In doing so, they engage in an ongoing process of mutual rereading and co-construction, producing a re-contextualization of spatial memory and shaping a “composite historical sensibility” that, in turn, contributes to the city’s character. Full article

Curiosity lies at the heart of the sixteenth-century miscellany books, which served as precursors to the essay genre. Among them, a truly exceptional piece stands out: La silva curiosa by Julián de Medrano, published in 1583. This work pushes the boundaries of curiosity to such an extent that it challenges its classification within the genre of miscellany owing to its unconventional and strange nature. Julián de Medrano, the author of this outlandish work, transforms himself into a character and protagonist, defining himself as an “extremely curious” individual. During his extensive travels, he curates a collection of “curious” epitaphs associated with often comical and peculiar deaths, spanning Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Galician, and Italian. In addition to this, La silva curiosa includes an autobiographical narrative, a precursor to the Gothic genre, in which Medrano recounts unsettling encounters with black magic. This work offers a multifaceted exploration of curiosity, taking it to the extreme by narrating the author’s life experiences driven by a relentless pursuit of the curious, which is synonymous with the bizarre, extraordinary, marvelous, and unexpected. La silva curiosa emerges from a time marked by an almost nihilistic void, as the full force of the Baroque era has not yet arrived, and the ideals of humanism are fading away. It stands as a unique document that unveils an unexpected facet of the concept of curiosity within Spanish Renaissance culture. Full article

Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) is among the earliest domesticated staple crops in the world’s agricultural history and facilitated the development of several early agrarian cultures, particularly those originating in northern China. However, the propagation route of broomcorn millet in China from the Middle Ages to the present remains unclear. The aim of this study is to explore the genetic affinity between ancient and modern millet samples, trace the genetic origins and diffusion pathways of broomcorn millet, and provide insights into its domestication and spread. To achieve this, we sequence ancient DNA from broomcorn millet remains excavated from the Chashan Village cemetery (AD 691) in Gansu Province, China. Phylogenetic and population genetic analyses, integrating ancient and modern millet genomes, reveal a close genetic relationship between ancient millet and contemporary millet from Ningxia Province (445 km away from Chashan Village), suggesting a potential origin for the Chashan millet. This finding aligns with the tomb’s epitaph, which documents the reburial of the tomb’s owner, who was originally buried in Ningxia, and provides important archaeological evidence for understanding the interaction between geopolitical dynamics and the natural environment in northwest China during the late seventh century. Furthermore, outgroup-f3 and D statistics evidence suggests substantial genetic interactions between ancient millet and modern varieties from the Loess Plateau, Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, and Northeast Plain, indicating the dispersal route of broomcorn millet, along with human migration routes, from the northwest to northern China and ultimately to the northeast region, starting from the Middle Ages onward. This study enhances our understanding of millet’s genetic history, offers a novel perspective on burial archaeology, and provides valuable insights into the origins, domestication, and diffusion of broomcorn millet. Full article

This article discusses Tzvi Avni’s Second Piano Sonata, Epitaph, a sonic commentary on one of the inner tales in Rabbi Nachman’s “The Seven Beggars”. Written between 1974 and 1979, Epitaph not only marks the composer’s act of translation (from words into music and from a textual tale into a wordless and semantically unmarked piano sonata) but also his very turn to ethnographic sources that defied their negative function in a national territorial culture that vilified otherness while separating art from ethnography. Avni’s turn to Rabbi Nachman was part of a bigger shift that saw composers’ dialectical returns to Jewish histories and cultures that were previously repressed from a national culture which dehistoricized the Diaspora to the point of rendering the times and cultures of diasporic Jews a single temporality—ahistorical, contextless, and outside the teleological time of Zionism. With the (re)introduction of diasporic temporalities, non-redemptive poetics became an affordance in the music of Avni or Andre Hajdu (who is also discussed here) while steadily muting the territorial tropes that constituted Hebrew culture. Full article

On behalf of the Catholic Church, the Council of Trent (1545–1563) confirmed the usefulness of religious images and multisensory worship practices for engaging the bodies and the minds of congregants, and for moving pious devotees to empathize with Christ. In the center panel of the Rockox Epitaph (c. 1613–1615), a funerary triptych commissioned by the Antwerp mayor Nicolaas Rockox (1560–1640) and his wife Adriana Perez (1568–1619) to hang over their tomb, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) paints an awe-inspiring, hopeful image of the Risen Lord that alludes to the promise of humankind’s corporeal resurrection at the Last Judgment. In the wings, Rockox and Perez demonstrate affective worship with prayer aids and welcome onlookers to gaze upon Christ’s renewed body. Rubens’s juxtaposition of the eternal, incorruptible body of Jesus alongside five mortal figures—the two patrons and the three apostles, Peter, Paul, and John—prompted living viewers to meditate on their relationship with God, to compare their bodies with those depicted, and to contemplate their own embodiment and mortality. Ultimately, the idealized body of Christ reminds faithful audiences of both the corporeal renewal and the spiritual salvation made possible through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Full article

For a long time, scholarly research on Buddhism in Luoyang during the Tang Dynasty has mainly focused on eminent monks and Buddhist temples. This focus is evident in the recorded literature of ancient times, such as The Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks and The Biographies of Eminent Monks. Based on stone inscriptions, this paper examines the dissemination and development of Buddhism in the Eastern Capital of Luoyang during the Tang Dynasty. This article presents the following viewpoints and findings: Firstly, the epitaphs and pagoda inscriptions provide historical details that are not widely known, such as the names of temples in the suburb, the identities of prominent monks who propagated Dharma in Luoyang, the Buddhist scriptures chanted and learned by the Luoyang people, and the people’s motivation to adopt Buddhism. Secondly, the epitaphs and pagoda inscriptions supplement important historical materials on Chan Buddhism, confirming the widespread popularity of the Northern Sect of Chan Buddhism in the Luoyang region. Thirdly, the epitaphs and pagoda inscriptions reveal that Luoyang Buddhist practice was popular, characterized by the succession of blood-related monastic companions; that is, many families had two or more relatives who became monks or nuns simultaneously or successively, a phenomenon that has not attracted attention from academic circles. Fourthly, the blood-related monastic companions of Buddhist practice affected the mentoring relationships and organizational management of temples and monasteries, promoting communication and interaction between Buddhism and traditional Chinese culture. Full article

Survival and death are the two most important things in life. The ancient Chinese people attached great importance to death, so the funeral ceremonies were very complete. Since its inception, Taoism has actively participated in funeral activities, so the combination of epitaphs and tomb inscriptions has a historical origin. The establishment of a unified dynasty in the Sui Dynasty provided an opportunity for the integration and development of Taoism in the north and south. The Mao Shanzong (茅山宗) in the southern region began to spread to the north, gradually integrating Lou Guan Dao (樓觀道) and becoming the mainstream of Northern Taoism. The epitaph of Wu Tong in the Sui Dynasty is engraved with rich Taoist symbols, and the epitaph text adopts the language content of “Zhen Gao” (真誥), which is a typical representative of the integration of Northern and Southern Taoism and reflects Taoism’s concern for death. Full article

Epitaph and poetry are two different literary genres in ancient China. However, when they collectively address the theme of “mourning the deceased”, they demonstrate an evident phenomenon of permeation and interaction. Pan Yue, as the pioneer of mourning poetry, his personal expressions as well as the scenes and objects in his mourning poems have become fixed imageries of mourning, which have been applied to the epitaphs written by later literati for their deceased wives, enhancing the mourning attributes of these inscriptions. Some renowned poets such as Wei Yingwu 韦应物 (737–791) from the Tang 唐 Dynasty (618–907), and Li Mengyang 李梦阳 (1473–1530), from the Ming 明 Dynasty (1368–1644) would personally write tomb inscriptions while creating mourning poems for their deceased wives. Reading these two kinds of texts from the same author side by side not only deepens our understanding of both types of text, but also helps to examine the intertextual interactions between these two literary forms. Full article

Arrangements for the afterlife were important matters to the Tang 唐 (618–907) people. The newly unearthed epitaphs of the Tang Dynasty contain a large number of dialogues and words of the deceased before their death, as well as their instructions concerning the arrangements for funerals and the inheritance of family traditions. These instructions not only reflect Tang funeral concepts and the importance of arrangements for the afterlife, but they also allow us to perceive the characters and personalities of the deceased, which are valuable new materials for the study of ancient Chinese biographical literature. Full article

In spite of the fact that taboos change over time, death is still a delicate and sensitive subject in today’s Western societies. Our unwillingness to talk openly about death and dying makes people resort to euphemism as a safe way to talk about human mortality and related matters. Following Steen’s Deliberate Metaphor Theory, this study discusses the role that euphemistic metaphors play on a sample of 174 gravestone inscriptions from the English Cemetery of Malaga, the oldest Protestant cemetery in Spain, and, at the same time, examines the social and cognitive aspects of metaphor in epitaph writing. The analysis carried out reveals that most of the 96 metaphorical items observed in the gravestone inscriptions present positive connotations. Indeed, the source domains of rest, peace, new life and journey offer an optimistic and comforting approach to death and dying, whereas the domains of loss and separation refer to the target domain of death in negative terms. All in all, the metaphors encountered in the epitaphs are deliberately used both to help the bereaved confront the loss of a loved one and pay tribute to the deceased. Full article

Through a comparative study of last testaments documented in epitaphs of the Tang period, this article offers a glimpse into people’s outlooks on life and their concerns in the face of death. The thoughts expressed in last testaments have been neglected in the studies of Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty, with research restricted to compilations of materials. In-depth analyses of such materials are rare. Through a study of the last testaments in the epitaphs, several trends in attitudes towards death and burial can be discerned: a turn from burial to cremation; the simplification of ritual and its procedures; a greater prevalence of separate, rather than joint spousal interment. The last testaments from the Tang period exhibit these different features under the influence of Buddhist ideas prevalent during those times. Full article

I compare the status of a sacred language in two very different religious traditions. In Judaism, the Hebrew language is the language of liturgy, prayer, and the Written Law. The traditional way of reading Torah passages involved translating them into Aramaic, the everyday language of communication in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium CE. Later, other Jewish languages, such as Yiddish, played a role similar to that of Aramaic in the Talmudic period, constituting a system referred to as the “Traditional Jewish Bilingualism”. Hebrew lexemes had denotations related to the realm of Biblical texts, while Aramaic/Yiddish lexemes had everyday references. Therefore, the act of translation connected the two realms or domains. The Lucumí (Santería) Afro-Cuban religion is a syncretic tradition combining Roman Catholicism with the Ifá tradition, which does not have a corpus of written sacred texts, however, it has its sacred language, the Lucumí (Anagó) language related to the Yoruba language of West Africa. While the Spanish-Lucumí bilingualism plays an important role in Santería rituals, the mechanisms of reference are very different from those of the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism in Judaism. In Santería, divinations about the meaning of Lucumí words play a role similar to the translations from Hebrew in Judaism. I further discuss the role of ritual dances in Santería for the transition from the sacred to the secular domain and a function of Hebrew epitaphs to connect the ideal world of Hebrew sacred texts to the everyday life of a Jewish community. Full article

Volubilis was a Roman city located at the southwest extremity of the Roman Empire in modern-day Morocco. Several Jewish gravestone inscriptions in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, likely from the 3rd century CE, have been found there. One of them belongs to “Protopolites Kaikilianos, the head of a Jewish congregation (synagogue)”, and it indicates the presence of a relatively big Jewish community in the city. The Hebrew inscription of “Matrona, daughter of Rabbi Yehuda” is unique occurrence of using the Hebrew language in such a remote region. The Latin inscription belongs to “Antonii Sabbatrai”, likely a Jew. In addition, two lamps decorated with menorahs, one from bronze and one from clay, were found in Volubilis. In nearby Chellah, a Jewish inscription in Greek was also discovered. We revisit these inscriptions including their language, spelling mistakes, and their interpretations. We relate epigraphic sources to archaeological evidence and discuss a possible location of the synagogue in this remote city, which was the first synagogue in Morocco. Full article

A general cemetery was established in 1829–1830 for the town of Perth, Western Australia, and during the rest of the nineteenth century, other cemeteries were added to the complex to cater for various Christian denominations as well as for Chinese and Jewish communities. In all, seven contiguous cemeteries were used over the colonial period in Perth. By 1899, when the cemetery complex was closed, approximately ten thousand people were buried there. The deceased or their bereaved loved ones chose funerals, epitaphs, burial locations, and funerary monuments to express social, ethnic, religious, familial, and gendered identity. These expressions of identity provide more information than just birth and death dates for genealogists and family historians as to what was important to the deceased and their family. In the first half of the nineteenth century, identities were dominantly related to family, whereas later in the century, identities included religion, ethnicity, and achievements within the colony of Western Australia. Some expressions of identity in Perth contrast with those found in other Australian colonies, especially in regard to the use and types of religious crosses in the Christian denominations. Full article

The state of conservation of some tombs in the Jewish Cemetery of Algarrobos in Colonia Mauricio, Buenos Aires, Argentina was evaluated. A lot of material was found, but only two tomb-markers were done on wood. They were in a state of serious deterioration, so these were defined as an object of study. The tomb-markers, which had been established by the Jewish immigrants from Russia at the end 19th century, were made of South American tree known as Aspidosperma Quebracho Blanco and suffered both biological (from fungal decay and insect attack) and mechanical deterioration (cracks and fissures due to weathering, and discoloration due to ultraviolet radiation). Thus, the aim of this paper was the conservation of one of the two remaining wooden tomb-markers found, using impregnant based on non-toxic siloxanes employing sol-gel technology in order to increase the readability of epitaphs and reliefs found at the tomb-marker. The treatment with this modern technology resulted in the excellent performance of wooden tomb-maker conservation. The structural consolidation and cracks sealing were achieved. It avoided the detachment of material and the appearance of natural veins; furthermore, it improved the reading of the epitaphs and reliefs. Full article