Anthony O’Mahony (Blackfriars Hall), "Eastern Christian Thought and Scholarship on the Syriac Orient, Jerusalem and the Christian encounter with Islam: Youakim Moubarac (1924-1995) in dialogue with Louis Massignon (1883-1962)". Respondent: Erica Hunter. 

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Fitzroy Morrissey, "Christians, Muslims, and the Nahḍa: Islamic Intellectual History in Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s Encyclopaedia." Respondent: Marilyn Booth. 

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Monsignor Michael Nazir-Ali (St. Edmund Hall), "The Renewal of Arab Christian Thought in the 20th Century." Respondent: Anthony O'Mahony. 

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Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour (University of York), "The Higher Purposes (maqāṣid) of Theology and Law in Modern Islamic Thought." Respondent: Michael Nazir-Ali. 

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Mohammad Kalantari (Royal Holloway University), "Quietism and Activism in Modern Shīʿī Thought: The Politics of the Clergy in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon." Respondent: Amir Bazmjou. 

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Fitzroy Morrissey (All Souls College), "Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾi on Jesus: Modern Shīʿism, the Qurʾān, and Muslim-Christian Relations." Respondent: Shabbir Akhtar. 

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Monsignor Michael Nazir-Ali (St. Edmund Hall), "The Rise of Muslim Modernism and Revivalism: Shāh Waliullāh, al-Afghānī, ʿAbduh, Syed Aḥmad Khān, ʿUbaidullah Sindhi, and Iqbal." Respondent: David Singh. 

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David Burn (University of Leuven)

Discussants: Inga Mai Groote and Christian Leitmeir

When the Passau school-master and composer Leonhard Paminger died in 1567, his sons announced a plan to publish a multi-volume edition of their father’s music. The plan included descriptions of the contents of each of the projected volumes. While most of the types of piece mentioned are self-explanatory, one category, “symbola”, was unfamiliar to me. What was intended? The projected Paminger volume was never produced, but one piece among his surviving music was identified as a “symbolum”, which was sufficient to show that they are settings of emblems or mottoes. Yet, beyond this, the type remains obscure in existing literature: only one collection, Caspar Othmayr’s Symbola of 1547, has received (limited) discussion, and this turns out to raise more questions than it answers. In an attempt to deal with the type more broadly, the present paper thus not only defines what symbola are but also addresses three further basic questions: How many are there? What are their features? And what functions did they fulfil?

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Konstantin Voigt (University of Freiburg)

Discussants: Charles Atkinson and Susan Rankin

Guidonian diastematic notation derived ultimately from a fusion of neumes, stemming from grammatical accents, with the line-diagram of the tone-system found in Boethius. This paper limns the history of neumatic notation as reception of grammar and the history of the line diagram as reception of ars musica, examining the "operative potential" (Sybille Krämer) of both types of visualization. The study shows that the operativity of both diagrams and neumes changed drastically between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. Whereas the Boethian diagram lacked any reference to melodic motion, ninth-century adaptations of it relate it to the melodies of Roman chant, temporalizing it and changing its orientation - a process resulting from the spatial orientation of neumes. Neither medium was intended primarily for "storing" melodic material. Instead, both relied heavily on the melodic knowledge of their users. This recall-based operativity of both ninth-century diagrams and neumes is substantially different from the operativity of Guidonian notation, devised as a means of storage to enable musical practice from the book and resting firmly on the mathematic/aural foundation of the monochord. Indeed, the monochord as the basis for this new operativity meant less a development of notational means than a conceptual restart in the history of notation.

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