scholarly journals The Hermeneutics of Transmission: Deciphering Discourses on Poetry and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)

2011 ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Déborah Blocker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

This article discusses how the constitution, circulation and institutionalization of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe could best be accounted for from a historical point of view. Pointing to various inconsistencies in the way historians of ideas have traditionally explained the rise of aesthetic discourses, the article examines the usefulness of the tools crafted by historians of the book for the development of such a project. Through an example, the drawbacks of interpretations based solely on serial bibliographies are also addressed, as the author argues for the importance of case studies, grounded in social, cultural and political history, through which various types of aesthetic practices may be made to appear. She also suggests that, to bypass the theoretical and practical deadlocks of traditional Begriffsgeschichte as far as the study of aesthetic practices is concerned, intellectual traditions and the actions that make them possible — that is “actions of transmission” — are to be promoted to the status of primary hermeneutic tools.

Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Edited by Patrick Karl O'Brien, Derek J. Keene, Herman Van der Wee, and Majolein't Hart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 361. $64.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-250
Author(s):  
Anne E. C. McCants
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Science Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Modern Europe

This edited volume is the result of a series of interdisciplinary conferences and seminars sponsored by the Renaissance Trust between 1990 and 1995 to examine “Achievement in Intellectual and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe” (p. 3). Historians of science, culture, the economy, and architecture and urban design were brought together to reflect on the intersections between past achievements in their respective fields within urban centers, as well as on the transfer of those achievements from one urban place to the next over time. These scholars were also called upon to consider the connections between the findings of more traditional “case-study” urban history and the grand narratives of modern development and geopolitical conflict. All of the contributors to this volume agreed to address the same meta question: “Why do recognized and celebrated achievements, across several fields of endeavor, tend to cluster within cities over relatively short periods of time?” (p. 5). In a schema entirely consistent with the Braudelian paradigm of early modern development (Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. New York, 1981–84.), three cities in particular were chosen as representative of these episodic peaks of early modern achievement: Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in roughly the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries respectively. The chapters of the book are thus organized in groups of three, with one chapter devoted to each area of endeavor in each of the three cities, beginning with their material bases in economic growth and ending with high culture as exemplified by the arts, books, and scientific research and discovery.

scholarly journals Humans as Animals and Things in Pre-Buddhist China

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 360
Author(s):  
Michael Nylan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Early China ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
East And West ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

This paper examines the way thinkers in the pre-Buddhist world in China viewed the animal-human divide. It argues that the boundaries between humans and animals were porous. The only unique capacities that human beings are credited with were first (widely) the ability to develop their unique potentials (chengren 成人), and, second (in a very few texts), the capacity to respond with greater sensitivity to the resonant world around them. In both contexts, the extant terms make use of two terms, ling 靈 and jingshen 精神. Part II of the essay then turns to examine the most influential Euro-American theories cited in today’s secondary literature regarding the animal-human divide. None of these seem remotely like the theories articulated in early China. In Part III, the essay examines vitalism, which is an unusual instance in early modern Europe where an important theory seems to approach the views of early China, with the express aim of reminding readers that we need not automatically posit an impassable gulf between East and West, but can, instead, profit from wider reading that yields more comparative insights.

“NOTHING IS THE WAY IT SHOULD BE”: GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TIME REGIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 821-848 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEBASTIAN CONRAD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Technology ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Time Regime ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

When European clocks first arrived in seventeenth-century Japan they generated a commotion. The highly complex but also very precise instruments had been brought to Nagasaki by the Dutch East India Company that monopolized the sparse and highly regulated trade between Japan and Europe for more than two centuries. As an expression of the technological sophistication achieved in early modern Europe, mechanical clocks were hi-tech products of their time. They operated with a spring to store the energy, and their making required highly developed skills in casting and metalwork. The new technology made it possible to emancipate the measurement of time from sunshine and to achieve an evenness of temporal rhythms, not only during the day, but also at night.

OF LIVING LEGENDS AND AUTHENTIC TALES: HOW TO GET REMEMBERED IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Pollmann
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Memory Practices ◽  
New Criteria

ABSTRACTFolklore experts have shown that for a legend to be remembered it is important that it is historicised. Focusing on three case-studies from early modern Germany and the Netherlands, this article explores how the historicisation of mythical narratives operated in early modern Europe, and argues that memory practices played a crucial role in the interplay between myth and history. The application of new criteria for historical evidence did not result in the decline of myths. By declaring such stories mythical, and by using the existence of memory practices as evidence for this, scholars could continue to take them seriously.

Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe*

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Findlen
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

During The Sixteenth And Seventeenth centuries natural history, and to a certain extent science in general, rediscovered its capacity for playfulness in the form of the scientific joke. By scientific joke, I mean thelusus naturae, or joke of nature, and the lusus scientiae, or joke of knowledge, that populated the museums and scientific texts of the period. The relation between the natural paradox of lusus and the scientific demonstrations and experiments that were also lusus points to the way in which the dynamic between art and nature and between collector and audience unfolded in the spectacle of science.

Liberating Judgment

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas John Casson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Absolute Certainty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

Examining the social and political upheavals that characterized the collapse of public judgment in early modern Europe, this book offers a unique account of the achievement of liberal democracy and self-government. The book argues that the work of John Locke instills a civic judgment that avoids the excesses of corrosive skepticism and dogmatic fanaticism, which lead to either political acquiescence or irresolvable conflict. Locke changes the way political power is assessed by replacing deteriorating vocabularies of legitimacy with a new language of justification informed by a conception of probability. For Locke, the coherence and viability of liberal self-government rests not on unassailable principles or institutions, but on the capacity of citizens to embrace probable judgment. The book explores the breakdown of the medieval understanding of knowledge and opinion, and considers how Montaigne's skepticism and Descartes' rationalism—interconnected responses to the crisis—involved a pragmatic submission to absolute rule. Locke endorses this response early on, but moves away from it when he encounters a notion of reasonableness based on probable judgment. In his mature writings, Locke instructs his readers to govern their faculties and intellectual yearnings in accordance with this new standard as well as a vocabulary of justification that might cultivate a self-government of free and equal individuals. The success of Locke's arguments depends upon citizens' willingness to take up the labor of judgment in situations where absolute certainty cannot be achieved.

Montserrat Herrero, Jaume Aurell, and Angela C. Micheli Stout (eds.), Political Theology in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Discourses, Rites, and Representations. Medieval and Early Modern Political Theology, 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017, 397 p.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 456-457
Author(s):  
Evan Kuehn
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
Modern Europe

This volume brings together seventeen papers on the nature of political theology, and theological-political case studies from the medieval and early modern periods (this review will focus only on highlights from the essays relevant to the medieval period). Throughout the volume, political theology is recognized as a historical process of interaction between political and religious concepts, but the introduction defines this more specifically as “the analysis of the tension between the spiritual and the temporal in its very different spheres” (13). Thus political theology is recognized as <?page nr="457"?>not merely a diachronic inquiry, but also a consideration of conceptual structures.

Ireland and the Monarchy in the Early Stuart Multiple Kingdom

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Perceval-Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Foreign Intervention ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

Ireland's position as a kingdom in early modern Europe was, in some respects, unique, and this eccentricity sheds light upon the complexity of governing a multiple kingdom during the seventeenth century. The framework for looking at the way Ireland operated as a kingdom is provided, first by an article by Conrad Russell on ‘The British problem and the English civil war’ and secondly by an article by H. G. Koenigsberger entitled ‘Monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe – dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale’. Russell listed six problems that faced multiple kingdoms: resentment at the king's absence, disposal of offices, sharing of war costs, trade and colonies, foreign intervention and religion. Koenigsberger used Sir John Fortescue's two phrases of the 1470s to distinguish between constitutional, or limited monarchies, and more authoritarian ones during the early modern period. Both these contributions are valuable in looking at the way the monarchy operated in Ireland because the application of the constitution there was deeply influenced by Ireland's position as part of a multiple kingdom and because Englishmen, looking at Ireland, wanted her to be like England, but, at the same time, did not wish her to exercise the type of independence that they claimed for England.

The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe

Notes ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 560
Author(s):  
Irene Heskes ◽  
Craig A. Monson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Europe
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