The Cambridge Ritualists were a recognised group of
classical scholars, mostly in
Cambridge, England, including
Jane Ellen Harrison
Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a British classics, classical scholar and linguistics, linguist. Harrison is one of the founders, with Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, of modern studies in Ancient Greek religio ...
,
F.M. Cornford
Francis Macdonald Cornford (27 February 1874 – 3 January 1943) was an English classical scholar and translator known for work on ancient philosophy, notably Plato, Parmenides, Thucydides, and ancient Greek religion. Frances Cornford, his wif ...
,
Gilbert Murray (actually from the
University of Oxford),
A. B. Cook, and others. They earned this title because of their shared interest in
ritual, specifically their attempts to explain
myth
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...
and early forms of
classical drama
Ancient Greek theatre was a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece from 700 BC. The city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and religious place during this period, was its centre, where the theatre was ...
as
originating in ritual, mainly the ritual seasonal killings of ''eniautos daimon'', or the
Year-King
In many historical societies, the position of kingship carries a sacral meaning; that is, it is identical with that of a high priest and judge. The concept of theocracy is related, although a sacred king need not necessarily rule through his ...
. They are also sometimes referred to as the myth and ritual school, or as the
Classical Anthropologists.
Sacrifice and drama
Inspired by ''
The Golden Bough
''The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion'' (retitled ''The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion'' in its second edition) is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir ...
'', Gilbert Murray in 1913 proclaimed the killing of the year spirit as the "orthodox view of the origins of tragedy. The year Daimon waxes proud and is slain by his enemy, who becomes thereby a murderer, and must in turn perish". A decade later, however, the excessively rigid application of Frazer's thesis to Greek tragedy had already begun to be challenged; and by the Sixties
Robert Fagles could state that "The ritual origins of tragedy are totally in doubt, often hotly debated".
Influences
Through their work in classical
philology, they exerted profound influence not only on the Classics, but on literary critics, such as
Stanley Edgar Hyman or
Northrop Frye. Particularly affected by
Émile Durkheim was
F. M. Cornford
Francis Macdonald Cornford (27 February 1874 – 3 January 1943) was an English classical scholar and translator known for work on ancient philosophy, notably Plato, Parmenides, Thucydides, and ancient Greek religion. Frances Cornford, his wif ...
, who used the French sociologist's notion of collective representations to analyze social forms of religious, artistic, philosophical, and scientific expression in
classical Greece
Classical Greece was a period of around 200 years (the 5th and 4th centuries BC) in Ancient Greece,The "Classical Age" is "the modern designation of the period from about 500 B.C. to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C." ( Thomas R. Marti ...
. Other significant influences on the group, particularly on Harrison, were
Darwin,
James Frazer,
Marx,
Nietzsche and
Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in ...
.
See also
References
Further reading
*''The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered: Proceedings of the First Oldfather Conference, Held on the Campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign April 27–30, 1989'', edited by W. M. Calder III
*''The Myth and Ritual Theory'' (1998), anthology edited by Robert A. Segal.
*C Kluckholn, 'Myths and Rituals' ''Harvard Theological Review'' 35 (1942) 45-79
External links
Bibliography of works by and about the Myth and Ritual School
Culture in Cambridge
Ancient Greek theatre
British literary theorists
Ritual
Classical philology
Mythology
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