Academic literature on the topic 'Afra (Monastery)'

The Name of the Rose is a 1986 film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, a novel adaptation, and a co-production of German, French, and Italian companies. The Name of the Rose, as it is known, is a 'historical mystery without police' by Umberto Eco, in which the 'political' authority war between the ruling power and the papacy institution, the conflicts between sects, and the pressures of religion on the people in Europe at the beginning of the 14th century, were woven like needlework through a seven-day slice of life and the seven sins associated with seven deaths. It is a tough novel with a detailoriented approach and philosophical weight in which Eco's deep knowledge is reflected in every line. The Name of the Rose is a book that has been translated into many languages, has been selected in the list of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time by the British Crime Writers' Association, and has been criticized for its approach to religion, but has also received much acclaim. Due to these features, it is a long and luscious work that carries serious risks to be adapted into cinema, and every detail has a meaning that cannot be ignored. Yet, in every frame of the film, in all open and closed spaces, the misery of the famine years of the Middle Ages, the bitter face of poverty, and the oppression of religion can be seen and felt. As those who have read the novel will remember, Eco began to describe the structure and the environment from the moment the protagonists started to see the monastery from afar. Once inside the monastery, all structures of the complex were explained in detail in terms of their place, size, form, relations with each other, and decoration. Undoubtedly, it is not possible to reflect this much detail properly in a limited time; however, it must be admitted that Annaud managed to reflect the general historical and architectural atmosphere as best as he could. The scenes in which we watch the eerie depictions of the reliefs, which also observe uneasiness and even fear, make the audience at least as uncomfortable as Adso.Cinema, which expresses its concerns through moving images, is a field of study that reveals its existence in other art branches and has to follow the technology closely. Literature and cinema, which have a common dramatic source, have always progressed art in art, and in The Name of the Rose, the relationship and affiliation of architecture, which is a visual field of study focused on intervention in space and designing the space for cinema has come to life in a much stronger and more violent way.

Gargilius Martialis’ (3rd century A. D.) Medicinae ex holeribus et pomis : a pharmacopoeia for domestic use in Roman Africa – All components of Gargilius Martialis’ short handbook on The Remedies extracted from Vegetables and Fruits show that the aforenamed work has been written by a retired officer who was anxious to offer his Afro-Roman countrymen – on the fringe of the scientific pharmacology – a form of medication resolutely empiric and usual which stands at the level of individual or collective experience. Since by drawing up this collection of therapeutic formulae Quintus Gargilius Martialis was adding to the sensible remedies – stemmed from the compilation of a main source (Pliny’s Natural History) and of two secondary Greek sources (Dioscorides’ Materia Medica as well as Galen’s monumental works) – a whole series of incantations, spells and all manner of treatments conveyed through popular traditions obviously in order to produce a manual of family medicine. Thus it’s certainly not a matter of chance if about 570 A. D. the wealthy senator Cassiodorus – who enjoined the monks of the monastery he had founded at Vivarium (in the South of Italy) to assist the patients in giving them appropriate remedies – left at the library of the religious institution some medical texts of the highest importance : among other books featured precisely Gargilius Martialis’ treatise.