Orosius and the Rhetoric of History

Nuffelen, Peter Van

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199655274.001.0001

Cited by 95 publications

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“…De Civitate Dei itself provided an uneasy parallel for early ninth-century historians because it contained greater tensions than Markus himself acknowledged. 115 The textual transmission of De Civitate Dei suggests that the text could in fact have equally encouraged the use of divine agency. Book V contained many such examples, such as when Radagaisus approached Rome, and 'was overwhelmed by the will of the Highest Majesty'.…”

Section: Making Sense Of Secularitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Peter van Nuffelen has recently done much to rehabilitate Orosius as a careful historical thinker rather than a naive providentialist. 19 Mary Garrison and Mayke de Jong have called attention to ways in which Augustinian uncertainty about secular history prevailed throughout the early Middle Ages. 20 Nikolaus Staubach convincingly showed that Frechulf of Lisieux understood much of Augustine's argument in De Civitate Dei when he wrote his history.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

Evans

2021

Early Medieval Europe

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This article explores a series of Carolingian historians, writing in the early ninth century, who marginalized the role of God's agency, in sharp contrast to the pattern established by the Annales Regni Francorum. Where this has been noted before, largely in relation to Einhard's Vita Karoli, it has been explained either as a clash between lay and monastic ideals or as a by-product of the classical renewal at the Carolingian court. Examining this process across multiple texts suggests, however, that these historians can be understood as self-consciously 'secularizing' in response to contemporary crises. * I should like to thank all the participants at the 'Sacral and the Secular' conference at Churchill College Cambridge in June 2018 for helpful comments and feedback on this paper, and especially Conor O'Brien for many fruitful discussions then and since. This paper draws partly on my doctoral thesis, and I should like to thank Rosamond McKitterick for her generous supervision over many years, and I am further grateful to my examiners Stuart Airlie and Mayke de Jong for prompting many improvements to my original arguments about secularity. All errors remain my own.

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Section: Making Sense Of Secularitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

Evans

2021

Early Medieval Europe

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“…Tal banimento foi detalhado pelo cristão Sozomeno que também destacou a fé de Valentiniano e sua recusa 8. Van Nuffelen, «Orosius andthe Rhetoric», 2012, 19. 9.…”

Section: Valentiniano I Sob a Pena De Orósiounclassified

“…377-401 governante75 . Os imperadores cristãos antes de Teodósio foram discretamente apresentados pelo hispano, nem mesmo Constantino recebeu muita atenção76 . A partir deste momento das Historiae, apesar do autor ainda traçar alguns registros sobre Graciano e Valentiniano II, o protagonismo de Teodósio I era evidente.…”

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A dinastia valentiniana na Historiae adversus paganos de Orósio (VII, 32-35)

Pohlmann

2021

SHHA

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Mais de vinte anos após a morte de Valentiniano II, Orósio elaborou e propagou diferentes imagens para os imperadores da dinastia valentiniana. Através de análises realizadas na obra Historiae adversus paganos, escrita pelo presbítero no século V d.C., podemos conhecer um pouco destes personagens e, especialmente, perceber as mensagens que o autor desejava transmitir ao seu público. Sendo assim, o interesse deste artigo centra-se em saber de que maneira, através da retórica de Orósio, os indivíduos da dinastia valentiniana foram interpretados e que fatos o presbítero julgou serem pertinentes à redação de sua obra.

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“…It is supposed to indicate a group of writers who, like Eusebius, identified the Empire as an essential vehicle for the history of salvation. Yet it has been argued that such an interpretation ill fits Eusebius himself (Johnson 2006: 153–97) as well as Orosius, supposedly one of the high points of late ancient eusebianism (Van Nuffelen 2012). We need a more carefully calibrated account of the ‘political’ thought of late ancient Christian authors.…”

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confidence: 99%

Not Much Happened: 410 and All That

Nuffelen

2015

J. Rom. Stud.

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Even in these unclassical times, the sack of Rome by the Goths in a.d. 410 remains entrenched in Western collective memory as a ‘key date’ in history. For a scholarly audience, its sixteen-hundreth anniversary in 2010 was commemorated by no fewer than three conferences in Rome. The resulting volumes illustrate the ambivalent relationship historical scholarship entertains with commemoration. While the conferences draw their appeal from the construction, in late ancient and modern tradition, of the sack as an event of world historical importance, the three volumes collectively lead one to conclude that nothing much really happened between 24 and 27 August 410. The schizophrenic situation is summed up in the following two statements by Philipp von Rummel, the organizer of the conference held by the German Archaeological Institute. In an interview with the BBC, he is quoted as saying: ‘I don't know if people will still be talking about 9/11 in 2,000 years time, but the events of that August day still influence our contemporary view of history.’ In the introduction to his volume, co-edited with J. Lipps and C. Machado, he approvingly notes that scholars ‘have moved away from the traditional narrative of collapse with which the sack was associated’ (11), and his own contribution opens by stating that, without lapsing into ‘historical instrumentalization and projections’, one cannot say much more than that an army under the leadership of Alaric plundered the city of Rome for three days (17: ‘Diese drei Sätze geben präzise das wieder, was abseits historischer Instrumentalisierungen und Projektionen über das Ereignis gesagt werden kann’). Even if the two statements need not be contradictory, they convey two rather different views of the events: a hyperbolic one highlighting long-term repercussions and a rather terse one that remains strictly within the bounds of the factual. It is a phenomenon that can be observed elsewhere: critical scholarship seeks to undermine traditional historical narrative, while at the same time failing to escape entirely the story it rejects.

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Orosius and the Rhetoric of History

Cited by 95 publications

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A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

A dinastia valentiniana na Historiae adversus paganos de Orósio (VII, 32-35)

Not Much Happened: 410 and All That

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