scholarly journals L’arbre de la Raison – La fabrique d’un motif pictural au début du XIXe siècle

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-70
Author(s):  
Zenon Mezinski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Extreme Form ◽  
Modern Landscape ◽  
Drawing Method ◽  
Different Parts ◽  
Object Of Knowledge ◽  
Artistic Talent

The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a specialized body of writing that ascribed a central place to the tree as object of knowledge and that contributed to the development of a pictorial motif that I call the “tree of Reason” (“l’arbre de la Raison”). Appearing in Europe in the early nineteenth century, the first “landscape lessons” aimed at beginner artists and amateurs rested on a new pedagogy that promised the reader and student quick results, regardless of their artistic talent. Their approach was based on an extreme form of rationalisation and simplification, which followed from the theoretical and aesthetic principles of Neoclassicism. Behind the word “landscape” (paysage) found in the titles of these successful manuals lay the motif of the tree, which constituted their main subject. This article begins with an examination of Principes raisonnés du paysage, published in 1804 by Nicolas-Alphonse Michel Mandevare, and analyzes the drawing method that it proposes. Regarded as the result of a construction, of an arrangement of its different parts, this “tree of Reason” highlights the end of a big artistic cycle, which was paradoxically to have little influence on the tenets of modern landscape that took hold in the 1830s. This rationalistic and reasoned practice thus ended in an impasse, in which both tree and landscape became petrified in a set of codified rules and references.

Event and Portent: the Fall of Old Oyo, a Problem in Historical Explanation

Africa ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Main Issue ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Covering Law ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphExplanation, or the identification and assessment of the causes of events and situations, occupies the central place in nearly all historical writing in the present century. It is also the aspect of history which is most keenly debated by philosophers, and is the main issue today in the unending, wearisome, but seemingly inescapable controversy as to whether history belongs, or belongs more, with the sciences or with the humanities. The scientific or positivist school, numbering among its recent exponents Popper and Gardiner, emphasizes the extent to which historical explanation attains a regularity akin to, though not identical with, that found in the physical and other sciences, Hempel adding the contention that such explanation can always, and often should, be reduced to a ‘covering law’, or single universal statement subsuming the whole explanation. The idealists, among whom Croce, Collingwood, and most recently Oakeshott are prominent, stress conversely the uniqueness of history, and Dray has reinforced their position by his attack on the covering law thesis. The debate is one in which historians themselves have taken little part, and African historians none at all, despite its crucial importance for almost every aspect of their profession. Yet it is a debate which needs continuous illustration from the historiographical process, a need which historians are best able to meet. The aim of the present article is to contribute to the debate by examining as a problem in historical explanation the fall of Oyo, the powerful state of the northern Yoruba, in the early nineteenth century.

Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Trade

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin ◽  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Different Parts

A large proportion of the slaves captured at sea by the British Royal Navy during the early nineteenth century were landed at Sierra Leone. Statistical data on the make-up of the Sierra Leonean population at this period is available from several sources, and it provides some interesting clues to the scope and size of the slave trade from different parts of Africa.

Binding with a Perfect Sufi Master: Naqshbandī Defenses of rābiṭa from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-78
Author(s):  
M. Brett Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Turkish Language ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Different Parts

Abstract This article explores debates surrounding the controversial spiritual exercise of rābiṭa – the binding of the disciple with a Sufi master by envisioning the image of the master in different parts of the body. Despite being criticized as a non-Qurʾanic practice and as a form of idolatry, rābiṭa was made a ritual of prominence among the Khālidī-Naqshbandī suborder which took shape in early nineteenth-century Syria and spread throughout the late Ottoman Empire. Tracing defenses of the practice from Arabic sources in the early nineteenth century to Turkish language treatises in the twentieth century, I argue that the Sufi ādāb manual al-Bahja al-saniyya composed by Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Khānī (1798-1862) established a repertoire of arguments that have been adopted and reused in Turkish language treatises until the present with little variation, revealing a remarkable continuity of apologetics over nearly two centuries. Additionally, the article considers the role of this ritual in defining the nature of master-disciple relationships and establishing hierarchies of Sufi devotion and obedience.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

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