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Doubting John?
No full textThis essay focuses on the figure of John the Baptist in prison and the question he sent his disciples to ask Christ: was he ‘the one who is to come’ (Matthew 11: 2–3). Having observed how the Fathers strove to distance John from the perils of doubt in their readings of this passage, it traces the way their arguments were picked up by twelfth and thirteenth-century biblical exegetes and then by authors of anti-heretical dispute texts in urban Italy, where the Baptist was a popular patron saint. So as to give force to their own counter-arguments, learned polemicists, clerical and lay, made much of heretics’ hostility to John, powerfully ventriloquizing a doubting, sceptical standpoint. One counter-argument was to assign any doubts to John’s disciples, for whose benefit he therefore sent to ask for confirmation of the means of Christ’s return, neatly moving doubt from questions of faith to epistemology. Such ideas may have seeped beyond the bounds of a university trained elite, as is perhaps visible in a fourteenth-century fresco representing John in prison engaging with anxious disciples. But place, audience and genre determined where doubt was energetically debated and where it was more usually avoided, as in sermons for the laity on the feast of a popular saint
Introduction. Approaches to voluntary reclusion in medieval Europe (13th -16th centuries)
Full text linkA late medieval confession manual - its author and context
Full text linkThis thesis focuses on the Summa Angelica de casibus conscientie written by Angelo da Chivasso (d. 1495), first printed in 1486. Angelo belonged to the Observantine branch of the Franciscan Order and was its vicar general four times. Having documented Angelo’s life and career, the thesis centres on the construction and purpose of his Summa. It assesses its originality within the tradition of confession manuals and the reasons for its popularity. It argues that the structure is very clear because Angelo intended it for the use of simplices confessores, by which he probably meant priests who did not have a university degree. He arranged his material alphabetically and in the longer sections, paragraphs were numbered, making cross-referencing easy. He included a list of authorities and explained the manner of quoting from them. Not all these features were original, but together they helped to make the Summa popular.
There are several noteworthy features of Angelo's Summa. The procedures described had been laid down in earlier manuals, including the need for more rigorous questions - ad status – relating to the profession of each penitent and where this might lead to sin. Angelo however diverged from some earlier authorities by warning about excessive rigour. Circumstances were to be taken into account, and where possible penitents to be given the benefit of the doubt.
The number of copies of Angelo's Summa printed throughout Western Christendom during his lifetime and following his death are a tribute to its importance. The period of fame however, was short. Martin Luther was a particularly virulent critic of the Summa, and the Catholic Church changed the method of hearing confessions, making much of it redundant, though it survived for some centuries more as a work of reference for confessors
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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