Segismundo's Soliloquy on Liberty in Calderon's La Vida es Sueño

PMLA ◽  
1908 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-253
Author(s):  
Milton A. Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
Lope De Vega ◽  
Greek Philosopher ◽  
Physical Limitations ◽  
Stone Walls ◽  
Spanish Soil ◽  
At Will ◽  
Do So

Spanish poets of the seventeenth century were very fond of the contrast between the physical limitations of men, especially when prisoners,—“ ces eternels envieux des mouches et des oiseaux” (Victor Hugo)—and the freedom of birds that fly at will, or of “ fishes that tipple in the deep.” But nowhere has the comparison been given such artistic form and signal appropriateness as in the mouth of Calderon's hero, Segismundo. This young Titan felt himself fettered by stone walls. They were a real prison to him and he rebelled against his lot. He was not in a mood to admit, had it even occurred to him to do so, the superior advantage of man's mental freedom over the physical freedom of fishes and birds and brutes, or running brooks. But the thought was not original with Calderon, nor, according to Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, was it original with any of Calderon's immediate predecessors, but went back to the Greek philosopher, Philo. Lope de Vega was probably the first to transplant the conceit to Spanish soil,—and it bore abundant fruit. In one of his early plays, El Remedio en la desdicha, written before the close of the sixteenth century, occur the following verses: Rendido estoy á tu nobleza, y veoQue mi ignorancia fué mi propio engaño;Aunque si amor á todos da disculpa,¿ Porqué no la tendrán mi amor y celos ?Si tú, si tus soldados, si los hombresSi las aves, los peces, si las fieras,Si todo sabe amor, si todo temePerder su bien, y con sus celos propiosDefiende casa, nido, mar y cueva,Llora, lamenta, gime, y brama; advierteQue celos y sospechas me obligaronAl desatino que á tus pies me rinde.

Scottish Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
The Many ◽  
Scholastic Philosophy ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
Do So

During the seventeenth century Scots produced many philosophical writings of high quality, writings that were very much part of a wider European philosophical discourse. Yet today seventeenth-century Scottish philosophy is known to hardly anyone. The Scottish philosophy of the sixteenth century is now being investigated by many scholars, and the philosophy of the eighteenth is widely studied. But that of the seventeenth century is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves. This book begins by placing the seventeenth-century Scottish philosophy in its political and religious contexts, and then investigates the writings of the philosophers in the areas of logic, metaphysics, politics, ethics, law, and religion. It is demonstrated that in a variety of ways the Scottish Reformation impacted on the teaching of philosophy in the Scottish universities. It is also demonstrated that until the second half of the century, and the arrival of Descartes on the Scottish philosophy curriculum, the Scots were teaching and developing a form of Reformed orthodox scholastic philosophy, a philosophy that shared many features with the scholastic Catholic philosophy of the medieval period. It also becomes clear that by the early eighteenth-century Scotland was well placed to give rise to the spectacular Enlightenment that then followed, and to do so in large measure on the basis of its own well-established intellectual resources. Among the many thinkers discussed are Reformed orthodox, Episcopalian, and Catholic philosophers including George Robertson, George Middleton, John Boyd, Robert Baron, Mark Duncan, Samuel Rutherford, James Dundas (first Lord Arniston), George Mackenzie, James Dalrymple (Viscount Stair), and William Chalmers.

The Dutch Case: a National or a Regional Culture? The Prothero Lecture

1979 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 155-168
Author(s):  
E. H. Kossmann
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Common Culture ◽  
The North ◽  
Southern Netherlands ◽  
North And South ◽  
Do So

As in relation to many other countries in sixteenth-century Europe, it is difficult to apply modern conceptions of nationhood to the situation in the Low Countries. If the difficulty seems more awkward in this area than elsewhere, it is perhaps merely because the sixteenth-century Netherlands, as we all know, developed into two distinct nations, the northern Netherlands and Belgium. It is clearly impossible to give a convincing answer to the question whether, in politically more propitious circumstances, the northern and the southern Netherlands might have grown into a single nation state with one common culture. All we know is that in the north a new state was created which, in the seventeenth century, undoubtedly possessed a culture idiosyncratic enough to be described as properly Dutch. We may well call this a national culture. On the other hand, if we bear in mind, asmany seventeenth-century commentators did, that the Dutch Republic was no more than a part of what had been the real Netherlands, both north and south, it would not be totally incongruous to define Dutch culture, that is the northern culture, as regional rather than national. However, if we do so, we must conclude that the national culture uniting the southern and the northern Netherlands, and somehow enclosing the regional cultures of Flanders and Brabant, of Holland and Zeeland, never came into existence.

Academic Feud, Bloodfeud, and William Welwood: Legal Education in St Andrews, 1560–1611-Part I

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Joint Meeting ◽  
Academic Education

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Lutherans and the Suffering of Christ

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Heal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Mining Region

Chapter 5 focuses on one particular type of Lutheran devotional image: the crucifix. It examines transformations in Lutheran Passion piety from the early Reformation to the era of Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), using this to illustrate the increasing significance accorded to images. Luther himself had condemned the excesses of late-medieval Passion piety, with its emphasis on compassion for Christ and the Virgin Mary, on physical pain and on tears. From the later sixteenth century onwards, however, Lutheran sermons, devotional literature, prayers and poetry described Christ’s suffering in increasingly graphic terms. Alongside this, late-medieval images of the Passion were restored and new images were produced. Drawing on case studies from the Erzgebirge, a prosperous mining region in southern Saxony, and Upper Lusatia, the chapter investigates the ways in which images of the Passion were used in Lutheran communities during the seventeenth century.

Bringing Rain and Protection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barend J. ter Haar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Northern China ◽  
Supreme Deity ◽  
Do So

Deities were thought to help and protect people, heal them from illnesses, and sometimes also to punish them. And yet, a worshipper was not free to decide what to ask for, but had to work within a collectively created and transmitted paradigm of expectations of the deity. In Northern China, Lord Guan was often requested to provide rain, and everywhere he was asked to assist in the fight against demons and other types of outsiders (barbarians, rebels, or otherwise), or even appeared of his own accord to do so. From the early seventeenth century onwards, Guan Yu was seen as the incarnation of a dragon executed at the command of the Jade Emperor for bringing rain out of compassion to a local community sentenced to extinction by the supreme deity. Finally, his loyal image inspired his rise as a God of Wealth in the course of the eighteenth century.

Commercial Linkages with Central Asia and Iran

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott C. Levi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Family Firms ◽  
Indian Region ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Commercial System ◽  
Northern India

While it may seem counterintuitive, the increase in Mughal India’s maritime trade contributed to a tightening of overland commercial connections with its Asian neighbors. The primary agents in this process were “Multanis,” members of any number of heavily capitalized, caste-based family firms centered in the northwest Indian region of Multan. The Multani firms had earlier developed an integrated commercial system that extended across the Punjab, Sind, and much of northern India. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Multanis first appear in historical sources as having established their own communities in Central Asia and Iran. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at any given point in time, a rotating population of some 35,000 Indian merchants orchestrated a network of communities that extended across dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and villages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran, stretching up the Caucasus and into Russia.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

Presidential Address: Tudor Government: The Points of Contact III. The Court

1976 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Interesting Topic ◽  
History Books

WHEN on the previous two occasions I discussed Parliament and Council as political centres, as institutions capable of assisting or undermining stability in the nation, I had to draw attention to quite a few unanswered questions. However, I also found a large amount of well established knowledge on which to rely. Now, in considering the role of the King's or Queen's Court, I stand more baffled than ever, more deserted. We all know that there was a Court, and we all use the term with frequent ease, but we seem to have taken it so much for granted that we have done almost nothing to investigate it seriously. Lavish descriptions abound of lavish occasions, both in the journalism of the sixteenth century and in the history books, but the sort of study which could really tell us what it was, what part it played in affairs, and even how things went there for this or that person, seems to be confined to a few important articles. At times it has all the appearance of a fully fledged institution; at others it seems to be no more than a convenient conceptual piece of shorthand, covering certain people, certain behaviour, certain attitudes. As so often, the shadows of the seventeenth century stretch back into the sixteenth, to obscure our vision. Analysts of the reigns of the first two Stuarts, endeavouring to explain the political troubles of that age, increasingly concentrate upon an alleged conflict between the Court and the Country; and so we are tempted, once again, to seek the prehistory of the ever interesting topic in the age of Elizabeth or even Henry VIII.

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