The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought: Skepticism, Science and Millenarianism

Author(s):  
Richard Popkin
2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-168
Author(s):  
Kirsten Dickhaut

AbstractThe machine theatre in France achieves its peak in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is the construction of machines that permits the adequate representation of the third dimension on stage. This optical illusion is created by flying characters, as heroes, gods, or demons moving horizontally and vertically. The enumeration indicates that only characters possessing either ethically exemplary character traits or incorporating sin are allowed to fly. Therefore, the third dimension indicates bienséance – or its opposite. According to this, the following thesis is deduced: The machine theatre illustrates via aesthetic concerns characterising its third dimension an ethic foundation. Ethic and aesthetics determine each other in the context of both, decorum and in theatre practice. In order to prove this thesis three steps are taken. First of all, the machine theatre’s relationship to imitation and creation is explored. Second, the stage design, representing the aesthetic benefits of the machines in service of the third dimension, are explained. Finally, the concrete example of Pierre Corneille’s Andromède is analysed by pointing out the role of Pegasus and Perseus.


2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright

This study reconstructs the connected history of socio-economic and intellectual practices related to property in seventeenth-century Bengal. From the perspective of socio-economic practices, this study is concerned with the legal transfer of immovable property between individuals. From the perspective of intellectual practice, this study is concerned with how property was understood as an analytical category that stood in a particular relation to an individual. Their connected history is examined by analysing socio-economic practices exemplified in a number of documents detailing the sale and donation of land and then situating these practices within the scholarly analysis of property undertaken by authors within the discipline of nyāya—the Sanskrit discipline dealing primarily with ontology and epistemology. In the first section of the essay, I undertake a detailed examination of available land documents in order to highlight particular conceptions of property. In the second section of the essay, I draw out theoretical issues examined in nyāya texts that relate directly to the concepts expressed in the land documents. In the third and final section of the essay, I discuss the shared language and shared concepts between the documents and nyāya texts. This last section also addresses how the nyāya analysis of property facilitates a better understanding of claims in the documents and what nyāya authors may have been doing in writing about property.


1948 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Arthur Johnson

The period of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth in England was one of the most momentous epochs in British history. For small groups of people the decade of the 1640's inaugurated a New Age—an age in which the Holy Spirit reigned triumphant. Such believers reached the zenith of Puritan “spiritualism,” or that movement which placed the greatest emphasis upon the Third Person of the Trinity.


Zograf ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Dragan Vojvodic

In the katholikon of the monastery of Praskvica there are remains of two layers of post-Byzantine wall-painting: the earlier, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and later, from the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the conclusion based on stylistic analysis and technical features. The portions of frescoes belonging to one or the other layer can be clearly distinguished from one another and the content of the surviving representations read more thoroughly than before. It seems that the remains of wall-painting on what originally was the west facade of the church also belong to the earlier layer. It is possible that the church was not frescoed in the lifetime of its ktetor, Balsa III Balsic.


PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Jones

Literary style, like human personality, is a compound exceedingly difficult of analysis, for when its more obvious constituents are made clear, there still remains an illusive element, consciousness of which leaves the analyst with the unpleasant sensation of not having reached the bottom of the matter. As the most complex phenomenon in literature, style is the resultant of all the forces, known and unknown, underlying literary development, and the method and extent of the contribution made by each of these forces are a matter of probable inference rather than of positive demonstration. For that reason, any attempt, however ambitious, to account for the style of a literary epoch must be content with pointing out those more obvious influences that are combined and reflected in speech and writing, and with ignoring other factors which may escape detection. Under the protection of this confession I shall attempt to make manifest what seems to me the most important influence instrumental in changing the luxuriant prose of the Commonwealth into that of a diametrically opposite nature in the Restoration.


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