Genealogy as a Heuristic Device for Franciscan Order History in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity: Texts and Trees

Abstract The apocalyptic belief systems from early modernity discussed in this series of articles to varying degrees have precursors in the Middle Ages. The drive to map the globe for purposes both geographic and symbolic, finds expression in explicitly apocalyptic manuscripts produced throughout the Middle Ages. An apocalyptic political discourse, especially centered on themes of empire and Islam, developed in the seventh century and reached extraordinary popularity during the Crusades. Speculation about the end of world history among medieval intellectuals led them not to reject the natural world but to study it more closely, in ways that set the stage for the later Age of Discovery. These broad continuities between the medieval and early modern, and indeed into modernity, demonstrate the imperative of viewing apocalypticism not as an esoteric fringe movement but as a constructive force in cultural creation.

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Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages

10.1093/oso/9780192845122.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Rita Copeland

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Late Antiquity ◽

History Of Rhetoric ◽

Early Modernity ◽

Medieval Rhetoric ◽

Social Contracts ◽

History Of ◽

The Impact ◽

Aristotelian Rhetoric ◽

The Middle Ages

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

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Hume and the Legacy of Academic Scepticism

Hume's Scepticism ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451123.003.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 39-76

Author(s):

Peter S. Fosl

Keyword(s):

Human Nature ◽

Middle Ages ◽

David Hume ◽

General Framework ◽

John Locke ◽

Early Modernity ◽

Treatise Of Human Nature ◽

Pierre Bayle ◽

The Middle Ages

Chapter Two of Hume’s Scepticism charts the development of Academic scepticism from Cicero and Augustine, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and into early modernity. The exposition is organized around sceptical ideas that anticipated or may have influenced David Hume, who describes himself an ‘academical’ sceptic. The chapter also sets out Cicero’s influence upon Hume, scepticism at the college in La Flèche where Hume wrote much of A Treatise of Human Nature, and Hume’s self-conception of Academic scepticism. Accounts of sceptical ideas in Marin Mersenne, Simon Foucher, John Locke, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Pierre Bayle set the stage for Hume’s own Academicism. The chapter closes with a five-point General Framework defining Academic Scepticism.

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A socio-cultural history of the machine metaphor

Review of Cognitive Linguistics ◽

10.1075/rcl.11.1.04gle ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 145-162 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Vladimir Glebkin

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

Blow Up ◽

Conceptual Metaphor ◽

Early Modernity ◽

Metaphor Theory ◽

History Of ◽

Historical Phenomenon ◽

The Middle Ages

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up, a scene of affection, after enlarging the negatives, transforms into a scene of an attempted or an actual murder. It seems a good image to characterize the change of the initial view of conceptual metaphor from a more precise perspective. The conceptual metaphor theory emerged with the claim that primary metaphors, such as Categories Are Containers, More Is Up, Affection Is Warmth, and even Time Is Money, were determined by the fundamental constants of our perceptual experience; hence, they could not change or evolve, and had no history. Later, however, plenty of studies have provided strong evidence that such metaphors, being much more complicated structures, essentially rest on the cultural-historical ground. The article can be considered as a step in this direction. It addresses the machine metaphor as a cultural-historical phenomenon examining its development from Antiquity to Early Modernity. The author reveals that conceptual machine metaphor appears in the Middle Ages, long before Newton and the Industrial Revolution, in the wake of the transformation of basic elements of the cultural model from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

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Genealogy as a Heuristic Device for Franciscan Order History in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity: Texts and Trees

10.34055/osf.io/sfb7z ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Marianne Petra Ritsema van Eck

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Visual Representations ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Family Tree ◽

Tree Model ◽

Late Medieval ◽

Late Medieval Period ◽

Franciscan Order ◽

Heuristic Device ◽

Family Trees

This paper explores the significance of spiritual genealogy as a historiographical device in Franciscan representations of the order’s past during the medieval and early modern period. Certain visual exponents of this heuristic – murals, engravings, and manuscript paintings of Franciscan family trees – have been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. I argue that these visual family trees are only one manifestation of a broader tendency to represent and analyse Franciscan order history in genealogical terms. Other manifestations include written historiography, as well as genealogical images other than trees. The versatility of these visual and verbal genealogical representations of the Franciscan past made them into an adaptable means for communicating a variety of messages, apart from emphasizing Franciscan community in a general sense.First, I discuss the main developments in visual representations of the Franciscan family tree during the late medieval period, in tandem with closely related written perspectives on Franciscan order history, so as to point out the perennial conversation between its textual and visual manifestations. By shifting away some of the attention from the visual tree-model in favour of seeing it as part of a larger tendency in textual culture to represent order history in genealogical and/or arboreal terms, it becomes clear that late medieval Franciscan genealogical representations offer a particular, eschatological perspective on order history, associated with Spiritual and Observant Franciscan contexts.Second, my examination of the same phenomena during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when family tree visualisations became much more widespread, suggests that the genealogia emerged as a particular form for organising and presenting written order histories, current among all Franciscan orders. I outline the contours of this diversified sub-set of Franciscan order historiography that employed genealogy as a versatile heuristic, connecting Franciscan communities to a shared familial past, often elaborating links or occasionally even claims to certain local territories.Overall, it shall become clear that textual and visual representations of the order’s past often – but not necessarily – went hand in hand, and that genealogical perspectives on Franciscan order history were a deeply-seated heuristic device that exceeded the visual rhetoric of the tree diagram.

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Fra Salimbene and the Franciscan Ideal

Harvard Theological Review ◽

10.1017/s0017816000009196 ◽

1915 ◽

Vol 8 (4) ◽

pp. 480-503 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ephraim Emerton

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Personal Attitude ◽

Modern Mind ◽

Franciscan Order ◽

Historic Significance ◽

The Middle Ages ◽

Francis Of Assisi

One of the most engaging personalities of that most engaging of Christian centuries, the thirteenth, is Brother Salimbene of Parma. His life, begun in 1221, five years before the death of Francis of Assisi and ended, probably, about 1288, thirteen years after the birth of Dante, connects the mystical, devotional, ascetic piety of the Middle Ages with the rational, individualistic, personal attitude of the modern mind. A devoted member of the Franciscan Order and acutely sensitive to its historic significance, he spends his life in its manifold activities, and toward the close sets himself to the congenial task of putting down in order the most vivid impressions remaining to him of the men and things he has had dealings with.

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