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Æthicus Ister
Date unknown
Christian cosmological writer,
noted for his almost unreadably complex Latin style.
(The work claims to have been translated by St. Jerome
from a "Scythic" language.)
Because "Ister" means "Danube", Æthicus
is assumed to have
had ties to Central or Eastern Europe, and Romanian
historians have claimed him as a Daco-Romanian. Western
scholars, on the other hand, usually consider him Irish
on the basis of his style and content, presumably one
of the Irish Orthodox missionaries to the Continent.
Older scholarly sources confidently identify him as
St. Virgil O'Neal,
who worked in Austria and was wrongly accused of
heresy partly on the basis of his unusual geographical
theories, but more recent authors seem less convinced of
this identification.
Norman Hugh Redington
- ABOUT:
-
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
-
From Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography.
With a partial synopsis of the Cosmography.
--- Isidore of Seville
- Heinz Löwe:
Ein literarischer Widersacher des Bonifatius, Virgil
von Salzburg, und die Kosmographie des Aethicus Ister,
(1952).
Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1952.
- Heinz Löwe:
Die "Vacetae insolae" und die Entstehungszeit der Kosmographie des
Aethicus Ister,
(1975).
Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters
(31): 1.
- Ian Wood:
Aethicus Ister -- an exercise in difference, (2000).
in W. Pohl and H. Reimitz, eds.,
Grenze und Differenz im frühen Mittelalter,
[Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences].
- Æthicus Ister's Special Alphabet:
- Heinz Löwe:
Aethicus Ister und das alttürkische Runenalphabet
(1976).
Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters
(32): 1.
- Otto Prinz:
Untersuchungen zur Ueberlieferung und zur Orthographie der
Kosmographie des Aethicus,
(1981).
Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters
(37): 474.
-
D. A. Trifonov:
Aethicus Ister's Alphabet.
--- Bulgarian Alphabets
- WORKS:
- Cosmographia:
-
Die Kosmographie des Aethicus,
Latin text edited by Otto Prinz.
MGH (QGM) 14, 1993.
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