Literature and Cultural Capital in Early Modern and Contemporary Pedagogy

The present article discusses one of the contributions of the Royal Shakespeare Company to the World Shakespeare Festival, a celebration of the Bard as the world’s playwright that took place in the UK in 2012 as part of the so-called Cultural Olympiad. Iqbal Khan directed for the RSC an all-Indian production of the comedy Much Ado about Nothing that transposed the actions from early modern Messina to contemporary Delhi and presented its story of love, merry war of wits and patriarchal domination in a colourful setting that recreated a world of tradition and modernity. Received with mixed reviews that in general applauded the vibrant relocation while criticising some directorial choices, this 2012 Much Ado about Nothing in modern-day Delhi raises a number of questions about cultural ownership and Shakespeare’s international performance – issues that are particularly relevant if we see the play in relation to other productions of the World Shakespeare Festival in this Olympic year but also in the context of the increasing internationalization of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in contemporary times.

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With a little help from his friends

Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek ◽

10.1163/22145966-07001007 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 70 (1) ◽

pp. 118-159

Author(s):

Adam Sammut

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Early Modern

Around 1617, Caravaggio’s Rosary Madonna (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) was gifted to the Dominican church in Antwerp by a quadrumvirate of art-lovers – Rubens, Jan Brueghel I, Hendrick van Balen and the merchant Jan Cooymans – who were joined together by the love that is friendship (amor amicitiæ). By enacting the virtues of friendship within Antwerp’s elite circles, the art-lovers could persuade wealthy burghers to sponsor the Rosary Madonna as a civic investment. This process is examined through Rubens’ relationship with Brueghel, the election of Cooymans as ‘prince of the Violieren’ chamber of rhetoric, the artists’ deanships of the Romanists’ guild and their personal acquaintance with Hendrick Goltzius. In the Dominican church, the Rosary Madonna became part of the early modern political economy like few other artworks. As the author demonstrates, the altarpiece indexed the cultural capital of the quadrumvirate, but also their amor amicitiæ, to which it stood as an enduring testament.

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Conclusion

10.1093/oso/9780190694098.003.0012 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Stefania Tutino

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Early Modern ◽

Moral Theology ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Social And Cultural Capital ◽

Historical Significance ◽

Progressive Loss ◽

Crucial Component ◽

History Of

This chapter explores the reasons why the doctrine of probabilism is no longer prominent in our intellectual and scholarly horizon. These reasons include the advent of Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori’s equiprobabilism; the progressive loss of political, social, and cultural capital of the nineteenth-century Roman Curia; and the triumph of Cartesian epistemology in the modern secularized world. This chapter also argues for the necessity to recover the centrality of probabilism, both because probabilism and moral theology were a crucial component of the cultural, political, and religious history of early modern Europe, and because learning how early modern probabilists grappled with uncertainty can be distinctively useful for us today. Even though we are the most informed generation on Earth, we seem to be losing the ability to distinguish facts and truths from opinions. Thus, appreciating the historical significance of probabilism can help us to navigate our current epistemological and moral uncertainties.

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“Lessons meete to be followed”: The European Reception of Boccaccio’s “Questioni d’amore”

Textual Cultures ◽

10.14434/textual.v10i2.1075 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 146-163

Author(s):

Robert Roy Edwards

Keyword(s):

Cultural Capital ◽

Early Modern ◽

Direct Evidence ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Significant Extent ◽

Modern Europe ◽

Political Structures ◽

Social Use

The “Questioni d’amore” from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Filocolo were both works of imagination and forms of cultural capital in medieval and early modern Europe. Translations into French, Spanish, and English resituated the Questioni into new contexts of reading, reception, and social use. Prefaces and paratexts give direct evidence of recontextualizations within political structures, cultural programs, and regimes of self-fashioning. These recontextualizations depend to a significant extent, however, on Boccaccio’s fiction itself. If the Questioni are stabilized into forms of exemplary meaning, their aesthetic tensions remain in both the mimetic narratives and the hermeneutic frames.

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Diplomatic Knowledge on Display

Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198835691.003.0009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 146-159

Author(s):

András Kiséry

Keyword(s):

Public Sphere ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Early Modern ◽

Political Activity ◽

The Political ◽

Political Pressure ◽

Political News ◽

The Public ◽

Body Of Knowledge ◽

Social Prestige

Accounts of the early modern public sphere are characteristically focused on its critical, political functions—imagining it as a sphere of agonistic performativity, of rational-critical debate, or of public opinion being shaped in an effort to generate political pressure, for example. Politics in all these contexts is understood as an engagement with matters of common concern: what is public and what is political are not only inseparable but also close to being synonymous notions. But parallel with the rise of the early modern public sphere(s) and of the political universe implied by it, politics, political activity also began to emerge as a career path: statecraft, an avenue of political mobility through employment and office, which presupposed a body of knowledge, a competence acquired through training, rather than a mere entitlement by birth. This chapter explores the consequences of this development for diplomacy. From the late sixteenth century onwards, information about foreign polities—including both diplomatic writing and political news from abroad—was entering public circulation in manuscript as well as in print. Plays performed on the public stage were also clearly interested in foreign political developments. Such diplomatic knowledge in public circulation is best understood as a form of cultural capital, whose value is partly constituted by its association with activities and competences that were of considerable social prestige, and partly by the restrictions on its circulation.

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