scholarly journals Fantasies of Immediacy, or, the Boundaries of the Book in Eighteenth Century Travel Narratives

Author(s):  
Matthias Buschmeier

This article explores a structural shift in techniques of representation in eighteenth-century travel literature as a reaction to the changing needs of cameralist governance, one in which space is no longer grasped as enyclopedic and all-encompassing. Instead of being understood as static territory, space is increasingly represented as a dynamic and continually updatable dataset. As a consequence, travel literature itself goes in search of new representational modes appropriate to this new understanding of space. And as I show, the medium of the book becomes increasingly problematic in this regard. As early modern travel literature (ars Apodemica) largely splits in the eighteenth century into statistics and geography on the one hand and literary travel experiences on the other, each of these categories requires new forms of mediation for their successful presentation. Common to both, however, remains a desire to communicate an immediacy of perception through representation. Taking Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 as my primary example, I show how the medium of the book arrives at its own media boundary, one whose transgression necessarily results in failure because it can no longer account for an epistemological divide that has already transpired. This difference has far-reaching implications for the place of the book within the humanistic sciences today.

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Gabriella Gilányi

Abstract This study surveys the musical notation appearing in the liturgical manuscripts of the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit from the fourteenth until the eighteenth century. As a Hungarian foundation, the Pauline Order adopted one of the most elaborate and proportionate Gregorian chant notations of the medieval Catholic Church, the mature calligraphic Hungarian/Esztergom style, and used it faithfully, but in a special eremitical way in its liturgical manuscripts over an exceptionally long period, far beyond the Middle Ages. The research sought to study all the Pauline liturgical codices and codex fragments in which this Esztergom-Pauline notation emerges, then record the single neume shapes and supplementary signs of each source in a database. Systematic comparison has produced many results. On the one hand, it revealed the chronological developments of the Pauline notation over about four centuries. On the other hand, it has been possible to differentiate notation variants, to separate a rounded-flexible and a later more angular, standardized Pauline writing form based on the sources, thereby grasping the transition to Gothic penmanship at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A further result of the study is the discovery of some retrospective Pauline notation types connected to the Early Modern and Baroque period, after the Tridentine Council. The characteristics of the notations of the choir books in the Croatian and the Hungarian Pauline provinces have been well defined and some individual subtypes distinguished – e.g. a writing variant of the centre of the Croatian Pauline province, Lepoglava.


1991 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 53-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury

The literature on merchants and trade in the early modern Middle East is still rudimentary. Although the period witnessed basic changes in trade patterns of the region, there have been very few regional studies addressing the nature of trade and the various groups engaged in it, either from an internal or local perspective or from an international one (Masters, 1988; Raymond, 1984; Abdel-Nour, 1982). For much of the Arab world there is a gap in the literature between Goitein's and Ashtor's works on the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the eighteenth century on the other when northern European companies acquired a strong foothold in the area (Goitein, 1966, 1967; Ashtor, 1978). For Iraq there exist almost no general works on the early Ottoman period and the Iraqi archives remain inaccessible. Thus, any conclusions on trade and merchants in Iraq during this period are by necessity tentative and general. There are a number of issues that can be raised with respect to early modern Iraq, however, which are relevant to the history of early modern trade in general.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 185-209
Author(s):  
Michael A. Mullett

Since its publication in 1904–5, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has provided a paradigm for assessments of the attitudes to the profitable use of time among different branches of Christianity, emphasising the sanctification of work and thrifty care for time allegedly found in pronouncedly Protestant religious groups. This paper tests further assumptions made by Weber and his school by considering attitudes espoused within the two religious groups in early modern England which are often taken to epitomize the stereotypical extremes of Weberian hypotheses: on the one hand the Catholics, on the other the Quakers.


2015 ◽  
pp. 83-93
Author(s):  
Wojciech Sajkowski

Neighbourhood of the City and the Provinces in Dalmatia in the Light of Chosen Examples of Early Modern French Travel LiteratureIn early modern period Dalmatia was a region which was culturally diversified. Such cities as Zadar or Split were the centres of Italian culture, while province was a part of the Slavic world. Their location on the route to Turkey made of them a frequent stop for such French travellers as Jacob Spon (1675) or Louis-François Cassas (1782), which testimonies became a basis for printed publications. In their testimonies readers could find the information about Dalmatian cities and province and differences between then. The latter issue is important, yet often neglected addition to the discussion on the shaping of the image of the Balkans.In this study we concentrate on this French approach to this problem, because it can be considered as representative for the other Western European perspectives. The French look at the issue of neighbourhood of the city and the province was characterized by a distance, which is rarely found in Venetian sources. This wide chronologic scope will allow to show changes which occurred in the French image of Dalmatia during the age of Enlightenment.The paper tries to analyse the travel literature in the perspective of the issue of image of neighbourhood of the city and province in Dalmatia and proves that this image had two perspectives. The first related to the neighbourhood of the sophisticated Italian culture (synonymous with the city) and the province, equated mostly with little known in the West Slavic world. The second perspective, which appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century dealt with these relationships in the wider context of the neighbourhood civilization and backwardness. Sąsiedztwo miasta i prowincji w Dalmacji w świetle wybranych przykładów francuskiej literatury podróżniczej z czasów nowożytnychDalmacja stanowiła w epoce nowożytnej niezwykle zróżnicowany kulturowo obszar, w którym miasta takie, jak Zadar czy Split, stanowiły przede wszystkim ośrodki kultury włoskiej, podczas gdy prowincja przynależała do świata słowiańskiego. Położenie na szlaku do Turcji sprawiało, że do miast trafiali podróżnicy tacy, jak Jacob Spon (1675), czy Louis-François Cassas (1782), którzy opisywali ich zabytki (w tym te z czasów Cesarstwa Rzymskiego), a także obyczaje ich mieszkańców. Bardzo często zwracali uwagę na kulturowy i etniczny kontrast miasta z prowincją, większy niż w przypadku zachodnioeuropejskich centrów i ich okolic – bo dotyczący również kwestii etnicznych. Francuskie spojrzenie na kwestię sąsiedztwa miasta i prowincji na obszarze Dalmacji jest o tyle istotne, że charakteryzuje się dystansem, który rzadziej spotykamy w źródłach weneckich. W owych opisach już na wstępnym etapie badań można wydzielić  dwie  perspektywy – pierwsza dotyczy spotkania wyrafinowanej kultury włoskiej (utożsamianej z miastem) i prowincji, utożsamianej najczęściej z mało znanym na Zachodzie światem słowiańskim. Druga perspektywa, która pojawiła się w drugiej połowie XVIII wieku, rozpatrywała te relacje w szerszym kontekście sąsiedztwa cywilizacji i zacofania, które łączyło wspominaną refleksję dotyczącą stosunków włosko-słowiańskich  z historyczną refleksją nad sąsiedztwem rzymskiej cywilizacji (której wiele świadectw zachowało się miastach dalmatyńskich) z barbarzyństwem – które doprowadziło do jej kresu. Szersza perspektywa chronologiczna umożliwi uchwycenie zmiany, jaka zaszła w we francuskim spojrzeniu na Dalmację, a której katalizatorem były nie tylko coraz większe zainteresowanie tym regionem (mające swoje apogeum w krótkim okresie napoleońskich rządów w Dalmacji w okresie istnienia Prowincji Iliryjskich), lecz również oświeceniowa refleksja dotycząca cywilizacji i prymitywizmu.


Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.


Kant-Studien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura Follesa

Abstract Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum, the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.


PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-400
Author(s):  
Jolanta Mędelska

The author analysed the language of the first Polish translation of the eighteenth-century poem “Metai” [The Seasons] by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a Lithuanian Lutheran pastor. The translation was made in 1933 by a socialist activist and close associate of Józef Piłsudski, Kazimierz Pietkiewicz. The analysis showed that the language of the translation is peculiar. On the one hand, this peculiarity consists in refraining from archaizing the translation and the use of elements that are close to the translator’s style of social-political journalism (e.g., dorobkiewicz [vulgarian], feministka [feminist]), on the other hand, the presence at all levels of language of peculiarities characteristic for Kresy Polish language in both its territorial variations. These are generally old features of common Polish, the retention of which in the eastern areas of the Polish Rzeczpospolita was supported by the influence of substrate languages, later also Russian, or by borrowing. This layer was natural in the language of the translator, born in Ukraine, who spent part of his life in Vilnius, some in exile in Russia. This is the colourful linguistic heritage of the former Republic of Poland.


PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.


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