DOI: 10.7256/2409-868X.2017.5.20836

Abstract: The subject of this research is the body of miniatures of the NLI MS Giraldus 700manuscript. The object is the rhetorical tools and ways of amplification of the visual text of images of the authorial manuscript in the third version of “Topography…” into the semantic layer of stylistic of the presented treatise of the late XII century. Special attention is given to the classification and typology of miniatures in the Russian and foreign historiography. The researcher specifies the typology of the studied manuscript and its place within the tradition of the English bestiary of the High Middle Ages. The scientific novelty of this work consists in exclusion from the selection of lists of the non-contemporary to the author source – “Topography of Ireland”. In other words, based on such depicted rhetorical tools, the stylistic and rhetorical method of the medieval scribe – the logic in-phase is vividly restored. An important practical result of the conduced analysis of the miniatures will be consciousness within the framework of comparativist approach of the archetype nature of synchrony of the visual and written text as such over the period of III – XII centuries.

DOI: 10.7256/2454-0609.2016.2.17551

Abstract: The subject of this article is the Ancient periphrastic geography tradition, starting from Homer and others to Giraldus Cambrensis, who viewed Ireland's Celtic archaism and mythology inseparably from its physical boundaries through the lens of local histories and legends. The author of this study attempted to track the changes in Ancient descriptive geography as perceived in that genre by Strabo and other classics of the genre. The focus of this study is the reception mechanisms of the Ancient scientific geography paradigm by a cleric of Cambridge-Norman origin at the end of the 12th century. The study's main research methodology is source criticism. This includes the use of the textological tools from the approach of Microhistory and History of Ideas. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the Welsh monk's "living world" during the High Middle Ages in order to identify how and for what purpose he used the legacy of the Ancient world both phenomenologically and epistemologically. The main conclusions of the conducted study are the author's following two deductions: 1) the genre of periphrastic geography had not been preserved in its pure form towards the end of the 12th century; 2) the objective of the author of the “Topographia Hiberniae" was exclusively utilitarian and self-interested (the treatise represents a transitional form of historical sources between political pamphlet, bestiary, geographic treatise and chronicle, annals): in order to legalise the presence of the Anglo-Norman army in the Northern part of Ireland. The author's main scientific contribution is his successful application of the methods from the approach of History of Ideas on the material from Medieval Ireland and South-Eastern Wales. The work's novelty lies in the little-used treatise's introduction into the scientific use of the Russian historiographical community.