Bride, Court Lady, Oriental Princess, Virgin Mary, Jewess: The Many Faces of Queen Esther in Early Modern Florence

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-376
Author(s):  
Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
The Many

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

‘More, I prithee, more’: Melancholy, Musical Appetite and Medical Discourse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Iselin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.

Healing Touch: Clothed Images of the Virgin in Early Modern Portugal

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-78
Author(s):  
Diana Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Healing Touch ◽  
Devotional Art ◽  
Healing Power ◽  
The Many ◽  
Santa Maria

Over the last decades there was a growing interest in religious materiality, miraculous images, votive practices, and how the faithful engaged with devotional art, as well as a renewed impetus to discuss the long-recognized association between sculpture and touch, after the predominance of the visuality approach. Additionally, the neglected phenomenon of clothing statues has also been increasingly explored. Based on the reading of Santuario Mariano (1707–1723), written by Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), this paper will closely examine those topics. Besides producing a monumental catalogue of Marian shrines and pilgrimage sites, this source offers a unique insight into the religious experience and the reciprocal relationship between image and devotee in Early Modern Portugal, and is a particularly rich source when describing the believers’ pursuit of physical contact with sculptures. This yearning for proximity is partly explained by the belief in the healing power of Marian sculptures, which in turn seemed to be conveniently transferred to a myriad of objects. When contact with the images themselves was not possible, devotees sought out their clothes, crowns, rosary beads, metric relics, and so forth. Items of clothing such as mantles and veils were particularly used and so it seems obvious they were not mere adornments or donations, but also mediums and extensions of the sculptures’ presence and power. By focusing on the thaumaturgic role of the statues’ clothes and jewels, I will argue how the practice of dressing sculptures was due to much more than stylistic desires or processional needs and draw attention to the many ways believers engaged with religious art in Early Modern Portugal.

Textual Transformations

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Book History ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This collection of twelve original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history explores the many ways in which early modern books were subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. The essays discuss the processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation and posthumous publication that resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author’s name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book’s identity or contents. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication (including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy) and of authors and booksellers (including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, Thomas Burnet, Elizabeth Rowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Maundrell, John Nourse; Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Tillotson, Isaac Watts and John Wesley).

scholarly journals Diocesan Licensing and Medical Practitioners in South-West England, 1660–1780

2004 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Medical Expertise ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Decentralized Trade ◽  
South West ◽  
The Many ◽  
South West England

The licensing of provincial surgeons and physicians in the post-Restoration period has proved an awkward subject for medical historians. It has divided writers between those who regard the possession of a local licence as a mark of professionalism or proficiency, those who see the existence of diocesan licences as a mark of an essentially unregulated and decentralized trade, and those who discount the distinction of licensing in assessing medical expertise availability in a given region. Such a diversity of interpretations has meant that the very descriptors by which practitioners were known to their contemporaries (and are referred to by historians) have become fragmented and difficult to use without a specific context. As David Harley has pointed out in his study of licensed physicians in the north-west of England, “historians often define eighteenth-century physicians as men with medical degrees, thus ignoring … the many licensed physicians throughout the country”. One could similarly draw attention to the inadequacy of the word “surgeon” to cover licensed and unlicensed practitioners, barber-surgeons, Company members in towns, self-taught practitioners using surgical manuals, and procedural specialists whose work came under the umbrella of surgery, such as bonesetters, midwives and phlebotomists. Although such fragmentation of meaning reflects a diversity of practices carried on under the same occupational descriptors in early modern England, the result is an imprecise historical literature in which the importance of licensing, and especially local licensing, is either ignored as a delimiter or viewed as an inaccurate gauge of medical proficiency.

Violence Against and Amongst Jews in An Early Modern Town: Tolerance and its Limits in Portsmouth, 1718–1781

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Warner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Considerable Length ◽  
The Many ◽  
Academic Tradition

In 1811, William Robinson, a purser's steward in the royal navy, deserted, having served six long and brutal years at sea. Years later, he wrote his memoirs, under the colorful title of Jack Nastyface. In it he recorded the many indignities inflicted on the sailors of his day. He did so in terms designed to horrify polite men and women, toward which end he dwelled at considerable length on floggings, keel-haulings, and the like. He was, however, perfectly prepared to tolerate the indignities that sailors inflicted on a group even more marginal than themselves: the Jews who made an uncertain living peddling slops and trinkets outside the royal dockyards. In one passage, Robinson fondly remembered how a sailor had avenged himself on one such peddler, known disparagingly as “Moses.” The sailor, assisted by several of the crew, succeeded in appropriating a new suit of clothes; “Moses,” sputtering with rage, was forced to leave the ship “amidst the grins and jeers of the whole crew, who were much diverted and pleased to think that any of their shipmates had tact enough to retaliate so nicely on a Jew.”The incident, at first blush, bears all the marks of anti-Semitism. It suggests that “Moses” was singled out precisely because he was Jewish; as such, it fits nicely with the claims of a new and very pessimistic generation of scholars. These scholars, in true academic tradition, have expressed a great deal of disappointment over the work of their predecessors.

scholarly journals List apostolski Duodecimum saeculum Ojca Świętego św. Jana Pawła II z okazji tysiąc dwusetnej rocznicy Soboru Nicejskiego II. Miejsce ikony w wierze i rozumieniu św. Jana Pawła II

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (4 Zeszyt specjalny) ◽  
pp. 57-71
Author(s):  
Urszula Mazurczak
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Spiritual Expression ◽  
The Church

The letter of the Holy Father John Paul II written in Rome in 1987, in the tenth year of His pontificate, on December 4th, on the day of memorial of Saint John Damascene, the doctor of the Church, on the Twelfth Centenary of finishing the controversy over the icon, is of great importance for the Pope’s program of ecumenism. The Holy Father indicated various directions of the dialogue, however, the one of the utmost importance concerned the agreement with the Orthodox Church, which was confirmed in the letters and in His other documents quoted in this paper. The image used to be essential for religious practice, for illustrating the word of prayer and of the song, in order to preserve the tradition of the Church. The strict prohibition introduced by the iconoclasm depreciated not only the artistic tradition of paintings but also the basic dogmas of Christ’s Incarnation and the one which introduced Virgin Mary as the Theotokos (the God-bearer). The ban constituted a threat not only for the icons but also for the Christian faith. In His Letter, the Pope underlined the important role of the Second Council of Nicaea which reintroduced icons and maintained and deepened the meaning of the cult in the faith of believers. Furthermore, the Holy Father indicated the connection with the Second Vatican Council in understanding the function and form of images in contemporary Church. Contemporary trends are overwhelmed by the impotence of the spiritual expression of sacral art, which is a great concern for the Pope. The Letter is, therefore, a dramatic warning of the threats for religious art in contemporary time, expressed by the Holy Father with these words: ‘The rediscovery of the Christian icon will also help in raising the awareness of the urgency of reacting against the depersonalizing and at times degrading effects of the many images that condition our lives in advertisements and the media.’ (DS, 11).

scholarly journals Handling the Theme of Hands in early Modern Cross-over Contexts

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Anne Sophie Haar Refskou ◽  
Laura Søvsø Thomasen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Human Hand ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
The Many ◽  
Frequent Presence

The human hand is a complex phenomenon within the contexts of early modern visual and textual culture. Its frequent presence in early modern texts and illustrations - as well as the many different types of described and depicted hands - raises a number of questions as to its functions and significances. In this article, we examine the role of the hand and two of its familiar functions –pointing and touching – against diverse and diverging understandings of human perception and cognition in the period focussing particularly on relations between bodies and minds. Through comparative analyses of cross-over examples from both medicine, manuals and drama – primarily John Bulwer’sChirologia and Chironomia, William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – we explore the questions implied by hands and their contributions to the knowledge probed and proposed by these texts and illustrations.

JEAN BARBEYRAC, SUPEREROGATION, AND THE SEARCH FOR A SAFE RELIGION

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
GREG CONTI
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Theological Controversy ◽  
The Many ◽  
Psychological Concern ◽  
Modern Thinking

Jean Barbeyrac was dismayed by the intrusion of theological controversy into the study of modern natural law theory. Yet the longest of the many annotations that he included in his own edition of Grotius was concerned with a theological matter. In this footnote, Barbeyrac attacked Grotius's understanding of Christian ethics as supererogatory; that is, as containing a distinction between the dictates of duty and the counsels of a higher holiness or perfection. The heart of his objection to this view was that it had pernicious psychological effects, that it fostered bigotry and immorality. He reiterated this psychological concern in his later work on the Christian Fathers. This objection to the real-world damages caused by the theory of supererogation was closely linked to his fear of skepticism and his quarrel with Bayle. Barbeyrac's rejection of supererogation also places him within an important strand of early modern thinking about the moral psychology of religion and about the ways in which religious belief could become an obstacle to moral behavior.

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