Unbelief, the Senses and the Body in Nicholas Bownde'sThe vnbeleefe of S. Thomas(1608)

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 266-282
Author(s):  
Patrick S. McGhee
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Logical Possibility ◽  
Important Stage ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Religious Understanding

Doubt and unbelief were central to the ways in which ministers and theologians in post-Reformation England thought and wrote about religion. Far from signalling spiritual failure, grappling with unbelief could be an important stage in developing the faith and religious understanding of the individual believer while establishing a role for physicality and the senses. Nicholas Bownde'sThe vnbeleefe of S. Thomas the Apostle, laid open for the comfort of all that desire to beleeue(1608) suggests that unbelief was relational and that belief required not only an acknowledgement of doubt but also extensive exploration of what doubtful and unbelieving experiences involved and how they were to be overcome. Bownde's work demonstrates that this ongoing spiritual conversation could make use of important scriptural examples such as the ‘Doubting Thomas’ episode in order to elucidate intimate theological problems for contemporary believers. This process suggests that early modern religion can only be properly understood with close reference to the role of doubt, unbelief and spiritual uncertainty in religious discourse because belief itself was predicated on the logical possibility of unbelief.

scholarly journals Worms, worms, everywhere, and not a one to see: The connotative role of worms in Shakespeare’s canon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Christine Reid
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Constructs ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Individual

The study of animals in Shakespeare’s collected works has expanded over the last 30 years. While a number of different animals have been discussed, the importance of the worm in the larger scope of the canon has largely been ignored. By focusing on the perception and presentation of worms in relation to cultural ideas of death, corruption, and consumption, ideas surrounding the body and soul are brought to the forefront. Worms are integral to our understanding of the Early Modern cultural constructs of the body and soul as the presence of worms reveals the state of the individual or the broader environment. Overall, the depiction of worms in Shakespeare’s works serves as a way to understand the metaphysical processes surrounding death and corruption.

scholarly journals Role of Stress on Women’s Health: Causes and Prevention

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Razia Saleem ◽  
Shamsul Siddiqui
Keyword(s):  
General Condition ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
The Body ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Research Attention ◽  
Stress Effects ◽  
After Hours ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Intense Research

In recent years, stress has been the focus of intense research attention. Stress is a misfit between the demands of the environment and the individual’s abilities; the imbalance may be corrected, according to the situation, either by adjusting external demands to fit the individual or by strengthening the individual’s ability to cope or both. Everyone is exposed to stress, and a great number of people have experienced the traces of stress. Women are socialized to be the caretakers of others. More women than men have both a career outside the home and continue to try to juggle traditional responsibilities after hours. It has often been shown that women are the worriers and often do not make time to manage their health and take care of themselves. Stress is on the rise for women as they struggle to find a balance between their homes and careers. The recession has caused a greater need for women to work outside of the home to support their families. Health is a general condition of the body or mind with reference to soundness and vigor; it will be reflected by good or poor health. A poor health affects our mind, as a stressed life affects our health. The struggle that women confront each days trying to achieve the standards of being a daughter, women, wife, mother, house, and/ or career keeper puts us in a vulnerable position of presenting stress effects that may affect our health. And there are some preventive measures to cope with stress such as meditation, yoga, quality time etc.

“Whereunto I made them no answer, but smiled;” Textual and Ironic Authority in Anne Askew’s Examinations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hope
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Knowledge Use ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Hierarchical Position ◽  
Female Authorship

This essay examines the ways in which Anne Askew constructs an authoritative position for herself in her Examinations through the rhetorical placement of her smile. I focus specifically on how her smile acts as a response to her examiner’s questions and reverses the role of power from the male hierarchical position of authority to the subordinate female voice of Early Modern literature. Askew’s smile subverts the expectation of torture and imprisonment being a form of control over the body through her extensive biblical knowledge, use of Socratic irony as a form of response, and ability to manipulate her inferior hierarchical position as a woman and as an individual under interrogation. She carefully shifts the power dynamics throughout the text, using the smile to critique preconceived notions of masculine authority and manipulating the reader’s perception of herself by securing an authoritative position over her examiners. By allowing her readership a privileged understanding of her interrogations through the recordings of her accounts, Askew’s complicated text reveals the value of broadening the sphere of what counts as researchable texts within English departments, allowing a space to study non-traditional literature of Early Modern female authorship.    

scholarly journals Molecular Politics, Wearables, and the Aretaic Shift in Biopolitical Governance

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-96
Author(s):  
Peter Lindner
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

Since the publication of Nikolas Rose’s ‘The Politics of Life Itself’ (2001) there has been vivid discussion about how biopolitical governance has changed over the last decades. This article uses what Rose terms ‘molecular politics’, a new socio-technical grip on the human body, as a contrasting background to ask anew his question ‘What, then, of biopolitics today?’ – albeit focusing not on advances in genetics, microbiology, and pharmaceutics, as he does, but on the rapid proliferation of wearables and other sensor-software gadgets. In both cases, new technologies providing information about the individual body are the common ground for governance and optimization, yet for the latter, the target is habits of moving, eating and drinking, sleeping, working and relaxing. The resulting profound differences are carved out along four lines: ‘somatic identities’ and a modified understanding of the body; the role of ‘expert knowledge’ compared to that of networks of peers and self-experimentation; the ‘types of intervention’ by which new technologies become effective in our everyday life; and the ‘post-discipline character’ of molecular biopolitics. It is argued that, taken together, these differences indicate a remarkable shift which could be termed aretaic: its focus is not ‘life itself’ but ‘life as it is lived’, and its modality are new everyday socio-technical entanglements and their more-than-human rationalities of (self-)governance.

Body and law in late Anglo-Saxon England

1998 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 209-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Manuscript Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article explores some textual dimensions of what I argue is a crucial moment in the history of the Anglo-Saxon subject. For purposes of temporal triangulation, I would locate this moment between roughly 970 and 1035, though these dates function merely as crude, if potent, signposts: the years 970×973 mark the adoption of the Regularis concordia, the ecclesiastical agreement on the practice of a reformed (and markedly continental) monasticism, and 1035 marks the death of Cnut, the Danish king of England, whose laws encode a change in the understanding of the individual before the law. These dates bracket a rich and chaotic time in England: the apex of the project of reform, a flourishing monastic culture, efflorescence of both Latin and vernacular literatures, remarkable manuscript production, but also the renewal of the Viking wars that seemed at times to be signs of the apocalypse and that ultimately would put a Dane on the throne of England. These dates point to two powerful and continuing sets of interests in late Anglo-Saxon England, ecclesiastical and secular, monastic and royal, whose relationships were never simple. This exploration of the subject in Anglo-Saxon England as it is illuminated by the law draws on texts associated with each of these interests and argues their interconnection. Its point of departure will be the body – the way it is configured, regarded, regulated and read in late Anglo-Saxon England. It focuses in particular on the use to which the body is put in juridical discourse: both the increasing role of the body in schemes of inquiry and of punishment and the ways in which the body comes to be used to know and control the subject.

scholarly journals Body, Possibility and Biographical Interpretation

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 64-87
Author(s):  
Anabela Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Individual Interaction ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
World Perspective

The aim of this article is to demonstrate how body-representations offer an opportunity for its visual interpretation from a biographical point of view, enhancing, on the one hand, the image’s own narrative dynamics, and, on the other, the role of the body as a place of incorporation of experiences, as well as, a vehicle mediating the individual interaction with the world. Perspective founded in the works of the artists Helena Almeida and Jorge Molder, who use self-representation as an expression of these incorporated (lived) experiences, constitutes an important discursive construction and structuring of their narrative identity through visual creation, the artists enable the other with moments of sharing knowledge, creativity and subjectivity, contributing also to the construction of the contemporary, cultural and social imagery.

scholarly journals Evolution of Views on the Value of Scientific Knowledge in Western Philosophy

Discourse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
L. A. Pafomova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Self Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
Religious Understanding

Introduction. Evolution of views on the value of scientific knowledge in various directions of Western philosophy, from the ancient period to the 20th century is analyzed in the article. The relevance of the article is due to the fact that the view of scientific knowledge as the value of scientific reality is a fairly new phenomenon.Methodology and sources. The methodological basis of the work is the cultural and philosophical analysis of various points of view in the works of both ancient philosophers, philosophers of the Renaissance and the New times (Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, F. Aquinas, Leonard da Vinci, F. Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza), as well as in the works of O. Comte, Spencer, Mach, Poincare, Pierce, James, Dewey, Jaspers, B. Russell, etc. (i.e. representatives of positivism, existentialism, neo-Thomism).Results and discussion. Today two directions could be distinguished in the relation to science: either its absolutization, that we name scientism, or the cult of an abstract person opposed to science – anthropologism. This is a consequence of the changes in the views on scientific knowledge that have taken place throughout the history of science. Thus, in the ancient period, the value of science was determined, firstly, not in relation to the practical activity of a human being, but only in relation to science to knowledge and cognition, and secondly, as a way of self-development of the individual. In the Middle Ages, science was the “handmaid” of theology. In the Renaissance science faced new challenges: the first was an anti-religious understanding of the essence of a person, the second was the justification of the role of scientific knowledge both for practice and for the worldview as a whole. It was on this understanding of the meaning of scientific knowledge that the concepts of the philosophers of the XVII–XVIII centuries were built, and they dominated until the middle of the XIX century. From this period, a one-sided approach begins to dominate – the ideological role of the value of science was denied and only its pragmatic value is taken. Along with this, there is also a critical attitude towards science, which then develops into anti-scientism. Today, a pessimistic approach (postmodernism, for example) the approach to the consideration of the value of scientific knowledge is characteristic of modern philosophical trends that deny not only the value of scientific knowledge, but also deny knowledge itself.Conclusion. The evaluation of scientific knowledge in Western philosophy has undergone significant changes. If in classical philosophy, with a few exceptions, the recognition of the comprehensive value of science prevailed, i.e. its ideological, humanistic and practical value, then in the future all these three main aspects of the value of scientific knowledge are analyzed. In the extreme forms, this leads to the emergence of antiscientism, for which it is the development of scientific knowledge is perceived as a source of human misery and suffering.

How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Alanna Beroiza
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Sex Reassignment ◽  
Gender Transition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the visual dynamics underlying wrong-body narratives of gender through Lacanian psychoanalytic readings of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair (2015) and Pedro Almodóvar’s film La piel que habito (Spain/France, 2011). Leibovitz’s photographs, seen as the public culmination of Jenner’s gender transition, and Almodóvar’s fictional film, centered on the forced surgical sex reassignment of one of its characters, both comment on the role of technically produced images in constructing visually articulated bodily materiality as central to gender. Staged in Jenner’s domestic space, often before mirrors that reflect the camera alongside its subject, Lei-bovitz’s photos portray Jenner at the center of complex scenarios of mastery over her image. These images demonstrate an awareness of their constructed nature at the same time as they offer themselves as the optical proof of Jenner’s transition; they reveal and, ostensibly, dominate what Lacan refers to as the fundamental misrecognition at the heart of all scopic scenarios of recognition. Almodóvar’s film imagines the reverse scenario in which the body-as-image exerts violent control over the individual, not only erasing the apparent sex of one of its characters, Vicente, but also, and less tolerably, attempting to erase the absence, or misrecognition, of his body in its status as what Lacan calls “objet a,” or object of desire. The distinct ways in which Leibovitz’s images and Almodóvar’s film theorize the relationship between bodies and images with regard to misrecognition and absence point to the continued necessity of considering the influence of scopic relations in formations of gender identity.

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