The Cambridge Ritualists were a recognised group of classical scholars, mostly in Cambridge, England, including Jane Ellen Harrison, F. M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray (actually from the University of Oxford), A. B. Cook, George Thomson, and others. They earned this title because of their shared interest in ritual, specifically their attempts to explain myth and early forms of classical drama as originating in ritual, mainly the ritual seasonal killings of eniautos daimon, or the Year-King. They are also sometimes referred to as the myth and ritual school, or as the Classical Anthropologists.
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đ Cambridge Ritualists in the context of Myth and ritual
Myth and ritual are two central components of religious practice. Although myth and ritual are commonly united as parts of religion, the exact relationship between them has been a matter of controversy among scholars. One of the approaches to this problem is "the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory," held notably by the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, which holds that "myth does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual." This theory is still disputed; many scholars now believe that myth and ritual share common paradigms, but not that one developed from the other.
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Cambridge Ritualists in the context of Jane Ellen Harrison
Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 â 15 April 1928) was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to Ellen's death in 1903. The depth and influence of Harrisonâs friendship with EugĂ©nie Sellers Strongâended by a dramatic breech in the 1890sâis explored in a monograph by Mary Beard: after their breakup Sellers became an influential authority on the material culture of Imperial Rome, while Harrisonâs work dug deeper and deeper into the primitive ritual origins of Greek drama. Though moving in different directions chronologically, in terms of their focus, the women appear otherwise as doppelgĂ€ngers of one another in their concerns, style and characteristic forms of argument deriving from an approach that became known as classical anthropology. Harrisonâs Prolegomena to Greek Religion had a compelling and inspirational impact on the later artworks of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle and her scholarly legerdemain was formative to the group of classicists known as the Cambridge ritualists.