欧洲文化入门名词解释

The Introduction of European Culture- English Terms
Greek Culture and Roman Culture
1) It is one of the two great ancient Greek epics by Homer. 2) It deals with the alliance of the states of the southern mainland of Greece, led by Agamemnon in their war against the city of Troy probably in the period 1200-1100 B. C. 3) The heroes are Hector on the Trojan side and Achilles and Odysseus on the Greek. 4) In the final battle, Hector was killed by Achilles and Troy was sacked and burned by the Greeks.
2．Herodotus（希罗多德）: 1) He is one of great ancient Greek historians. 2) He is often called “ Father of History. 3) He wrote about the wars between Greeks and Persians. 4) His history, full of anecdotes and digressions and lively dialogue, is wonderfully readable.5) His object in writing was “ that the great and wonderful deeds done by Greeks and Persians should not lack renown.”
31) He was the philosopher of ancient Greece in the 5th and 4th century. 2) He was considered one of the three greatest names in European philosophy. 3) He hold that philosophy took the aim to reach the conclusion of oneself and virtue was knowledge. 4) His thoughts were recorded in Dialogues by Plato. 5) He devised the dialectical method.
4. Dialectical method（辩证法）: 1) It was devised by ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. 2) It is
a method of argument, by questions and answers.
1) He was the greatest philosopher of ancient Greece, pupil of Socrates. 2) His Dialogues are important not only as philosophical writing but also as imaginative literature. Of the Dialogues he wrote, 27 have survived, including: the Apology, Symposium and the Republic. 3) Plato built up a comprehensive system of philosophy. 4) His philosophy is called idealism.
6. Diogenes（狄奥艮尼）（北京市2002年自考真题名词解释）: He was one of the Cynic’s leaders in ancient Greece, who decided to live like a dog. 2) The word “cynic” means “dog” in Greek. 3) He rejected all conventions, advocated self-sufficiency and extreme simplicity in life.
7．Stoics（斯多咯派）: 1) It was one of four ancient Greek schools of philosophers in the 4th century B. C. 2) To them , the most important thing in life was “duty”. 3) It developed into the
8 1) It is one of three ancient Greek architecture styles. 2) It is also called the masculine style. 3) It is sturdy, powerful, severe-looking and showing a good sense of proportions and numbers. 4) The Doric style is monotonous and unadorned.
9．Pax Romana（罗马和平）（北京市2001年自考真题名词解释）:1）In the year 27 B.C. Octavius took supreme power as emperor with the tile of Augustus. 2) Two centuries later, the Roman empire reached its greatest extent in the North and East. 3) The emperors mainly relied on a strong army-the famous Roman Legions and an influential bureaucracy to exert their rules. 4) Thus the Roman enjoyed a long period of peace lasting 200 years. This remarkable phenomenon in the history is know as Pax Romana.
10. Virgil（维吉尔）: 1) He was the greatest of Latin poets. 2) He wrote the great epic, the Aeneid.
3) The poem opened out to the future, for Aeneas stood at the head of a rce of people who were to found the first the Roman republic and then the Roman Empire.
Division Two The Bible and Christianity
1) The Bible is a collection of religious writings comprising two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. 2) The former is about God and the laws of God; the latter, the doctrine of Jesus Christ.
2. The Old Testament:1)The Bible was divided into two sections: the Old Testament and the New Testament. 2) The Old Testament is about God and the Laws of God. 3)The word “Testament” means “agreement”, the agreement between God and Man.
3. The New Testament: 1) The Bible was divided into two sections: the Old Testament and the New Testament. 2) The New Testament is about the doctrine (教义) of Jesus Christ. 3)The word
1) In the Old Testament, the oldest and most important are the first five books, called Pentateuch.2) Pentateuch contains five books: Genesis (创世记), Exodus (出埃及记), Leviticus(利未记), Numbers (民数记), Deuteronomy (申命记).
5．Genesis：1）Genesis is the first one of the five books in Pentateuch in Old Testament. 2) It tells about a religious account of the origin of the Hebrews people, including the origin of the world and of man, the career of Issac and the life of Jacob and his son Joseph.
6. Exodus: 1) Exodus is the second one of the five books in Pentateuch in the Old Testament. 2) It tells about a religious history of the Hebrews during their flight from Egypt Led by Moses. 3)
1) For many hundred years after Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, the family of man multiplied and spread over the earth, but they became more and more corrupt 2) Thus God decided to destroy all life on earth in a great flood. 3) Because Noah always kept his faith in God, God spoke to him about His intention and told him to build an ark to protect him and his kin from the waters. 4) .Noah followed God’s instructions. 5) For 40 days it rained, the whole earth was covered with water, those sheltered in the ark being the only survivals.
8. The Prophets (先知)：1）For more than a thousand years in the Middle East there had been a class of people known as “Prophets” or the spokesmen of God.2）Earlier prophets lived in groups as temple officials. Later on there appeared in dependent prophet. 3）The Prophets can be grouped into the Major Prophets and Minor Prophets.（分为大小先知）
9．The Book of Daniel（《但以理书》）：1）The Book of Daniel belongs to The Old Testament of the Bible. 2)The book appeared in the early days of Jews’revolt against the Syrian King Antiochus IV. 3) It is a story mixed with vision, describing how Daniel and his friends were taken prisoner to Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem and how they refused to compromise their
101) Roman emperor Constantine believed that God had helped him in winning the battle for the throne, so he issued the Edict of Milan in 313. 2) It granted religious freedom to all, made Christianity legal.
11．The four accounts in the New Testament（四福音书）: 1) The four accounts are the first four books in the New Testament. 2) They were believed to have been written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, four of Jesus’early followers. 3) They tell of the birth, teaching, death and
12 1）As the most important and influential of English Bible, it is also called the “Authorized”version. 2) It was produced by 54 biblical scholars at the command of King James, and was published in 1611. 3) With its simple, majestic Anglo-Saxon tongue, it is know as the greatest book in the English language.
Division Three The Middle Ages
1．the Middle ages（中世纪）（北京市2002年自考真题名词解释）: 1) In European history, the thousand-year period from the 5th century to 15th century following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is called the Middle Ages.2)The middle ages is so called because it came between ancient times and modern times. 3) During the Medieval times there was no central government to keep the order. The only organization that seemed to unite Europe was the Christian church.4) Christianity took the lead in politics, law, art, and learning for hundreds of
“Age of Faith”.
21）Feudalism in Europe was mainly a system of land holding — a system of holding land in exchange for military service. 2）The word “feudalism” was derived from the Latin “feudum”, a grant of land.
3．Fiefs（封地，采邑）：1）In Feudalism, the ruler of the government redivided the large lands into small pieces to be given to chancellors or soldiers as a reward for their service. 2）The subdivisions were called fiefs.
4. vassals（诸侯）: 1)In Feudalism, the ruler of the government redivided the large lands into small pieces to be given to chancellors or soldiers as a reward for their service. 2)The subdivisions were
1) In the Middle Ages of western Europe, as a knight, he were pledged to protect the weak, to fight for the church, to be loyal to his lord and to respect women of noble birth. 2) These rules were known as code of chivalry, from which the western idea of good manners developed.
6. dubbing (骑士头衔加冕仪式) :After a knight was successful in his trails and tournaments, there was always a special ceremony to award him with a title, knight. This special ceremony is called dubbing.
7. The Manor (庄园)：1）The centre of medieval life under feudalism was the manor. 2）Manors were founded on the fiefs of the lords. 3）By the twelfth century manor houses were made of stone
81) In the medieval “age of faith”, almost all Europeans belonged to the Catholic Church. 2) The word “catholic”meant “universal”3) The Catholic Church was highly centralized and disciplined international organization and the Pope was the head of the Church. He not only ruled Rome and parts of Italy as a king, he was also the head of all Christian churches in western Europe. Those who opposed the Pope lost their membership and their political right. 4) The Church even set up a church court-the Inquisition to stamp out so-called heresy. 5) Latin was the accepted official language in the Roman Catholic Church. 6)
’s daily life and the western thinking.
91）Heeding the spiritual message of Christianity, between 300 and 500 A.D., many men withdrew from worldly contacts to deserts and lonely places. 2) This movement developed into the establishment of monasteries（修道院）and convents (女修道院) for monks and nuns. 3）Some of the hermits were great scholars known as “Father of the Church”, whose work is generally considered orthodox.. 4) Three representatives were St. Jerome,
1) It was founded by St. Benedict, a great monk in 529
A. D. 2) The monks who followed Benedict’s rule promised to give up all their possession before entering the monastery. 3) wore simple clothes and ate only certain simple foods. 4) They could not marry and had to obey without question the orders of the abbot. 5) They had to attend service
seven times during the day and once at midnight.6) In addition, they were expected to work five hours a day in the fields surrounding the monastery.
11. holy communion（圣餐）: 1) It is one of most important sacraments. 2) It helps to remind people that Christ has died to redeem man.
12．The Crusades（十字军东征）（北京市2001年自考真题名词解释）: 1) In 1071 Palestine fell to the armies of the Turkish Moslems who attacked the Christian pilgrims, killing many of them and sold many others as slaves. 2) News of this kink roused great indignation among Christians in western Europe. 3) The result was a series of holy wars called the Crusades which went on about 200 years. 4) All the soldiers going to Palestine wore a red cross on the tunics as a symbol of obedience to God. 5) There were altogether eight chief Crusades from 1096 to 1291. 6) Aothough the Crusades did not achieve their goal to regain the Holy land, they had an important effect on the future of both the East and the West. They brought the East into closer contact with
1）In early medieval period, the Emperor of the Romans, Charlemagne, encouraged learning by setting up monastery schools, giving support to scholars and setting scribes to work copying various ancient books. Because the scribes performed their tasks well, few of the ancient works that had survived until that time were ever lost. 3) The result of Charlemagne’s efforts is usually called the “Carolingian Renaissance”. 4)The term is derived from Charlemagne’s name in Latin, Carolus. 5) The most interesting side of this rather minor renaissance is the spectacle of Frankish or Germanic state reaching out to assimilate the riches of the Roman Classical and the Christianized Hebraic culture.
14. Alfred the Great（阿尔弗雷德大王）（北京市2003年自考真题名词解释）: 1) As the ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, he contributed greatly to the medieval European culture.
2) He worried about the disappearance of learning and made Wessex the Anglo-Saxon cultural centre by introducing teachers and scholars, founding new monasteries, and promoting translations into the vernacular from Latin works. 3)He also inspired the compilation of the Anglo
151）The epic was the product of the Heroic Age. It was an important and mostly used form in ancient literature.2）“National epic” refers to the epic written in vernacular languages—that is, the languages of various national states that came into being in the Middle Ages. 3）Literary works were no longer all written in Latin.4）It was the starting point of a gradual transition of European literature from Latin culture to a culture that was the combination
161) It is an Anglo-Saxon epic in 8th century. 2) It originates from the collective efforts of oral literature. 3) The story is set in Denmark or Sweden and tells how the hero, V eowulf, defeats the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother, a sea monster, but eventually receives his own death in fighting with a fire dragon. 4) It marks the beginning of English literature.
17. Song of Roland （《罗兰之歌》）：1）It is the most well-known of a group of French epics known as La Chanson de Gestes. 2) It tells how Roland, one of Charlemagne’s warriors, fights in
1）It was written by the greatest poet of Italy, Dante. 2) It is one of the landmarks of world literature. 3) The poem itself is the greatest Christian poem with a profound vision of the medieval Christian world, and expresses humanistic ideas which
foreshadowed the spirit of Renaissance. 4) It was written in Italian rather than in Latin, which influenced decisively the evolution of European literature away from it origins in Latin culture to
1) The Canterbury Tales was written by English poet Chaucer. 2) The book contains twenty-four tales bold by a group of pilgrims on their journey to Canterbury. 3) Most of the tales are written in verse which reflects Chaucer’s innovation by introducing French and Italy writing into the English native alliterative verse(头韵).
4)The Canterbury Tales is the best representative of the middle English, paving the way to Modern English.
20. Gothic（哥特式建筑）(北京市2001自考真题名词解释)：1）The Gothic style started in France and quickly spread through all parts of western Europe. 2) It flourished and lasted from the mid-12th to the end of 15th century and, in some areas, into the 16th. 3) More churches were built in this manner tan in any other style in history. 4) The Gothic was an outgrowth of the Romanesque, but it reflected a much more ordered feudal society with full confidence. 5) Gothic cathedrals soared high, their windows, arches and towers reaching heavenward, flinging their passion against the sky. The were decorated with beautiful stained glass windows and sculptures.
Renaissance and Reformation
11）As a period in western civilization, generally speaking, Renaissance refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th century. 2 Renaissance started in Florence and Venice with the flowering of paintings, sculpture and architecture.3) The word “Renaissance” means revival, specifically in this period of history, revival of interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture. 4)Renaissance, in essence, was a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of conservatism in feudalist Europe and introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, to lift the restrictions in all areas placed by the Roman church authorities.5. During the period of Renaissance, old sciences revived and new sciences emerge, national languages and national cultures free from the absolute control of the Papal authority in Rome took shape and art and
2．1）Humanism is the essence of Renaissance. 2) Humanists in Renaissance believed that human beings had rights to pursue wealth and pleasure and they admired the beauty of human body. 3) This belief ran counter to the medieval ascetical idea of poverty and stoics,, and shifted man’s interest from Christianity to humanity, from religion to philosophy, fro heaven to earth, from the beauty of God to the beauty of human in all its joys, senses and feelings. 4) Theologically, the humanists were religious. But they began to look at the problems of God and Providence with a view to understanding man’s work and man’s earthly happiness. 5) The philosophy of humanism is reflected in the art and literature in Italy and the rest of Europe, to pass down as the beginning of the history of modern man, who, instead of brooding about death and the other world, lives and works for the present and future progress of mankind.
3. Leonard da Vinci（北京市2004年自考真题名词解释）: 1) He was a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a musician, an engineer and a scientist, who was born in Florence in Italy. 2) He was a Renaissance man in the true sense of the word. 3) He had profound understanding of art, which exerted great influence among the painters of his own generation, and generations to follow.4）
Mona Lisa.
1) Michelangelo was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and
poet. 2) he was a towering figure of the Renaissance. 3) By art, he expressed his vision of man, man’s beauty, man’s nobility, his own anguish and his own energy, a means by which he made
David , Moses and Sistine Chapel.
1) Raphael was one of major painters during the Renaissance. 2) In his work, there is the exquisite harmony and balance of the High Renaissance. 3) Raphael was best know for his Madonna(Virgin Mary). He painted his Madonnas in different postures. 4) Because of his Madonnas with sweet expressions, he came to be known as the elegant Raphael.
6．High Renaissance（文艺复兴全盛时期）: 1) The Renaissance in Italy reached its height in the 16th century with its center moving to Milan, then to Rome, and created High Renaissance(1490-1530). 2) meantime by the beginning of the 16th century, Venetian art had come into being in full glory. 3) the representatives in this period were da Vinci, Michelangelo. Raphael and Titian.
7．Reformation（宗教改革）（北京市２００１年自考真题名词解释）：１）The Reformation was a 16th century religious movement as well as a socio-political movement. ２）It was led by Martin Luther and wept over the whole Europe. 3) This movement was aimed at opposing the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic Church and replacing it with the absolute authority of the Bible. 3) The Reformists believed in direct communication between the individual and God, engaged themselves in translating the Bible into their mother tongues, urged the Church to have institutional reforms and were interested in liberation national economy and politics from the interference of the Roman Catholic Church and carrying out wars in the interests of peasants and revolution of the bourgeoisie. 4) The Reformation dealt the feudal theocracy a fatal blow and
1）He was the German leader of the Protestant Reformation.
2) His doctrine marked the first break in the unity of the Catholic Church. 3) His doctrines were: men are redeemed by faith and not by the purchase of indulgence; Bible was the supreme authority and man was only bound to the law of the word of God, not the word of the clergy; all believers were priests, and all occupations were holy.
9. John Calvin（约翰•加尔文）: 1) He was a French theologian who put his theological thoughts in his Institues of the Christian Religion, which was called as Calvinism. 2) He rejected the papal authorities and devoted himself to the work of reformation in Geneva, where he set himself the task of constructing a government based on the subordination of the state to the church, a type of government which later came to be know as the Presbyterian government. 3) Calvin’s influence was widespread, particularly in England and Scotland, and the Netherlands.
10. Calvinism（加尔文主义）（北京市２００３年自考真题名词解释）:1)Calvinism was established by Calvin in the period of Renaissance. 2)Calvinism held that the absolute authority of the God’s will, holding that only those specially elected by God are saved, and that any form of sinfulness was a likely sigh of damnation whereas hard work and thrifty way of life could be a sign of salvation. 3) This belief serves so well to help the rising bourgeoisie on its path that many historians have suggested that Calvinism was one of the main courses the capitalist spirit.
11. Counter-Reformation（反宗教改革）: 1)By late 1520 the Roman Catholic Church had lost its control over the church in Germany and the movement against the Roman Catholic Church had swept over the whole of Europe, shaking the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church. 2) The Roman Catholic Church did not stay idle. They gathered their forces to examine the Church institutions and introduce reforms and improvements, to bring back its life. 3) In time, the roman
Catholic Church did re-establish itself as a dynamic force in European affairs. 4) This recovery of power is often called by historians the Counter-Reformation.
12. Jesuits/The Society of Jesus（耶酥会）: 1) In the Counter-Reformation, a Spaniard Ignatius and his followers called themselves the Jesuits, members of the Society of Jesus. 2) The Jesuits went through strict spiritual training and organized their own colleges to train selected youth who would be centre of their influence in the next generation.3) The Jesuits made it their life long work
13. 1) Don Quixote is the greatest work by Spanish novelist Cervanes..2) The novel depicts the various adventures of Don Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza and offers a picture of Spain in the 17th century with various characters and landscapes. 3) it was a parody satirizing a very popular type of literature at the time, the romance of chivalry. 4)
1) Shakespeare is the greatest poet and dramatist in English literature. 2) He was a man of the late Renaissance who gave the fullest expression to humanist ideals. 3) He produced a lot of works, including Hamlet, O thello, King Lear and Macbeth, which exerted great impact on the world literature and was regarded as one of the two reservoirs of modern English language.
15. Columbus（哥伦布）:1) He was a Italian navigator. 2) Under the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, He sailed west to reach the orient. 3) He left Palos in 3 August, 1492 with three ships and reached the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, which was claimed to be the New World. 16. Copernicus（哥白尼）: 1) He was a Polish astronomer who put forward revolutionary ideas in astronomy in 17th century. 2) He believed that the earth and other planets orbit about the sun and that earth is not at the centre of the universe. 3) He set forth his beliefs in the book The Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs and came to be known as father of modern astronomy. 4) He was also the forerunner of modern science.
Division Five The Seventeenth Century
1. Kepler’s Laws（开普勒定律）: 1) The first important astronomer after Copernicus to adopt the heliocentric theory was the German scientist Kepler. 2)Kepler is best known for his discovery of the three laws of planetary motion, the three laws being called Kepler’s Laws. 3) They may be stated as follows each planet moves in an ellipse, with sun at one focus; each planet moves more rapidly when near the sun than farther from it; the distance of each planet from the sun bears a definite relation to the time period of its revolution around the sun. 4. :They formed the basis of all
.
1）The law of the universal gravitation is considered to be one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. 2) It was discovered by English scientist, Isaac Newton. 3) It states that the sun, the moon, the earth, the planets, and all the other bodies in the universe move in accordance with the same basic force, which is called gravitation.4) From his law of universal gravitation Newton was able to deduce the orbits of comets, the tides, and even the minute departures from elliptical orbits on the part of the planets.
3. the Great Instauration（伟大的复兴）: 1) To expect any great advancement in science, English philosopher Francis Bacon held, we must begin anew. 2) The fresh start required the mind to overcome all the preconceptions, all the prejudices, all the assumptions, sweep away all the fallacies and false beliefs. In a word it is to break with the past, and to restore man to his lost mastery of the natural world. This was what Bacon called the Great Instauration.
4．Inductive method（归纳法）：1）Inductive method was established by English philosopher Francis Bacon in 17th century. 2) Induction means reasoning from particular facts or individual cases to a general conclusion.3). Induction was put over against deductive method.
5. Thomas Hobbes’s political thought（霍布斯的政治思想）（北京市2004年真题名词解释）: 1) Thomas Hobbes held that men are enemies and at war with each other. 2) In odrder to get men out of the miserable condition of war, there should be a common power or government backed by force and able to punish. 3) He preferred monarchy.
6. Lock’s Social Contract（洛克的社会契约论）：1）He believed that political society and government rest on a rational foundation. 2) He emphasized that the social contract must be understood as involving the individual’s consent to submit to the will of the majority and that the will of the majority must prevail. 3) Absolute monarchy is contrary to the original social contract and dangerous to liberty. 4) The ruler of government is one partner of the social contract. 5) The people shall be judge when circumstances render rebellion legitimate.
7. The English Revolution:1) The English Revolution took place in the middle of the 17th century. 2) Among the causes of this revolution were the growth of capitalism,, the break-up of serfdom and the Puritan Movement. 3) 1in 1642, the Civil War broke out between the king and the Parliament. Led by Cromwell, the English bourgeoisie won the victory, and Charles I was
1) During the restoration in England, many revolutionary leaders and those who had supported the Revolution were persecuted and Charles II was planning to turn England into a Catholic country. 3) In 1688, the representatives of the Parliament went to Holland to negotiate with the Dutch king William and his wife Mary, who was a member of the English royal family and a Protestant. Thus the English throne was offered to William and Mary, and the short-lived restoration ended. 4) There was no bloodshed in this event of 1688, so it was called the Glorious Revolution.
9. The Bill of Rights（权利法案）: 1) In 1889, the Bill of Rights was enacted by the English Parliament. 2) It established the supremacy of the Parliament and put an end to divine monarchy in England. 3) The bill of Rights limited the Sovereign’s power in certain important directions: ①the power of suspending the laws by royal authority was declared to be illegal; Parliament was responsible for all the law making.②The king should levy no money except by grant of Parliament. ③The king should not keep a standing army in time of peace without consent of Parliament; ④.No Roman Catholic, nor anyone marrying a Roman Catholic should succeed to the throne. 4) The Bill is the foundation on which the conditional monarchy of England rests.
10. Descartes’Theory of Knowledge（笛卡儿的认知论）: 1) Descartes employed methodic doubt with a view to discovering whether there was any indubitable truth. 2) His motto is “I doubt, therefore I think: I think, therefore I am”. 3) Doubting is thinking, thinking is the essence of the mind. 4) Descartes concluded that all tings that we conceive very clearly and distinctly are true, and that knowledge of things must be by the mind.
11. French Classicism（北京市2003年自考真题名词解释）: Classicism implies the revival of the forms and traditions of the ancient world, a return to works of old Greek literature from Homer to Plato and Aristotle. 2). It intended to produce a literature, French to the core, which was worthy of Greek and classical ideals. 3)This neoclassicism reached its climax in France in the 17th century. 4) Three characteristics were: ①In The French Classical literature, man was viewed as a social being consciously and willingly subject to discipline;。