The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Novel Reading

Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano developed innovative ways to read texts closely, paying attention to historical context, developing methods to determine a text's authenticity, and taking the humanities seriously as a means of bettering human life. Alongside such novel reading practices, technology – the invention of printing with moveable type – fundamentally changed perceptions of truth. Celenza also reveals how luminaries like Descartes, Diderot, and D'Alembert – as well as many lesser-known scholars – challenged traditional ways of thinking. Celenza's authoritative narrative demonstrates above all how the work of the early modern humanist philosophers had a profound impact on the general quest for human wisdom. His magisterial volume will be essential reading for all those who value the humanities and their fascinating history.

The Early Modern Cardinal

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles Pattenden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Church

This chapter sets out the historical context to the cardinal as a subject of portraiture. It engages recent historiography to explain how the cardinal’s function and role in the Roman Curia, including his relationship to the pope, developed from the fifteenth century onwards, and how this was reflected in the range of men who occupied the cardinal’s office. The Sacred College changed substantially over these centuries, with its proud ‘princes of the Church’ giving way to an altogether humbler breed of Counter-Reformation cleric. Naturally, this affected both how cardinals depicted themselves and how they and others used their depictions.

The Growth of Algebraic Thought in Sixteenth-Century Europe

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor J. Katz ◽  
Karen Hunger Parshall
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Third ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Algebraic Thought

This chapter traces the growth of algebraic thought in Europe during the sixteenth century. Equations of the third and fourth degrees sparked quite a few algebraic fireworks in the first half of the century. Their solutions marked the first major European advances beyond the algebra contained in Fibonacci's thirteenth-century Liber abbaci. By the end of the century, algebraic thought—through work on the solutions of the cubics and quartics but, more especially, through work aimed at better contextualizing and at unifying those earlier sixteenth-century advances—had grown significantly beyond the body of knowledge codified in Luca Pacioli's fifteenth-century compendium, the Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni, e proportionalita. Algebra during this period was evolving in interesting ways.

scholarly journals Travniki, Travniki and Travniki: Herbals, Herbalists and Herbaria in Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century Russia

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 58-76
Author(s):  
Rachel Koroloff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Medical Botany ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
Primary Documents

This essay provides a sustained investigation of the term travnik, a capacious word that came to mean herbalist, herbal and herbarium over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though different in physical form, all three were united during this period by the body of knowledge they contained about the botanical world. Taken togetherthey reveal the ways in which knowledge of plants, from folk collecting traditions, to medical botany, to binomial nomenclature, was generated in the productive tension between foreign expertise and local knowledge. The focus here on translation highlights the diverse array of influences that contributed to the early modern Russian conception of the natural world. The travnik as herbal is explored through two centuries of secondary sources, while the travnik as herbalist relies heavily on published primary documents. The third section on the travnik as herbarium focuses on eighteenth century herbaria and the transposition of new scientific methods onto older forms of knowledge making.

Lady Delacour's Library: Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and Fashionable Reading

1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather MacFadyen
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Novel Reading ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Women's Reading ◽  
Public Demonstrations

During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries novel reading was persistently associated with women, and trope of female reading was generated that asserted that women's reading is an act of the body, not the mind. Maria Edgeworth frequently draws on this trope, but in her best-known domestic novel, Belinda (1801), she constructs two tropes: a disruptive trope of fashionable reading that the associates with Lady Delacour and a corrective trope of domestic reading that the associates with Belinda Portman. Both fashionable reading and female reading present women's reading as a breach of domestic femininity. While the typical female reader is marked by her excessive emotional and sexual but essentially private responses to texts, the fashionable reader is marked by her excessive public display of textual knowledge. As a fashionable reader, Lady Delacour indulges in highly public demonstrations of her literary skill in order to ensure the publicity upon which her status within a system of fashionability rests. Her ability to quote and to allude to a wide variety of texts provides her with a series of literary costumes that enable the adoption of nondomestic identities. The transformation of Lady Delacour from a fashionable women into a domestic woman, metonymically expressed in the cure of her apparent breast cancer, is effected by a change in her reading practices. Instrumental in Lady Delacour's cure is Belinda Portman, who gradually draws her away from the literary self-display toward the domestic literary practices.

scholarly journals Wertkörper

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (178) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rüdiger Kunow
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Global Market ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Global Expansion ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Common Logic

Recent advances in the fields of genomics and biotechnology have greatly expanded the discretionary autonomy of human beings over their bodies. Biology has so become a new and alluring terrain for the enlightenment project of self-realization and selffulfilment. These developments have been co-evolving with the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism. This article states that there is a common logic at work in both areas, leading not only to the emergence of a global market in biological materials but also to a re-calibration of the biology of human life into lively capital. For this reason, the new „freedom“ of constructing the body according to one’s own preferences and desires in a dialectical inversion entails new obligations and constraints. In the end, only the technologically enhanced human body is fit for the neoliberal world of social cut-backs and can avoid being consigned to a new, this time biologically defined underclass.

scholarly journals Retooling Medievalism for Early Modern Painting in Annibale Carracci’s Pietà with Saints in Parma

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 609
Author(s):  
Livia Stoenescu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Mary Magdalene ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) drew on the Italian Renaissance tradition of the Man of Sorrows to advance the Christological message within the altarpiece context of his Pietà with Saints (1585). From its location at the high altar of the Capuchin church of St. Mary Magdalene in Parma, the work commemorates the life of Duke Alessandro Farnese (1586–1592), who is interred right in front of Annibale’s painted image. The narrative development of the Pietà with Saints transformed the late medieval Lamentation altarpiece focused on the dead Christ into a riveting manifestation of the beautiful and sleeping Christ worshipped by saints and angels in a nocturnal landscape. Thus eschewing historical context, the pictorial thrust of Annibale’s interpretation of the Man of Sorrows attached to the Pietà with Saints was to heighten Eucharistic meaning while allowing for sixteenth-century theological and poetic thought of Mary’s body as the tomb of Christ to cast discriminating devotional overtones on the resting place of the deceased Farnese Duke.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Putting the Madhyamaka Trick in Context: A Contextualist Reading of Huntington’s Interpretation of Madhyamaka

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-124
Author(s):  
Michael Dorfman
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Correspondence Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
At Command ◽  
Rational Argumentation ◽  
Logical Fallacies ◽  
Key Terms

In a series of works published over a period of twenty five years, C.W. Huntington, Jr. has developed a provocative and radical reading of Madhyamaka (particularly Early Indian Madhyamaka) inspired by ‘the insights of post- Wittgensteinian pragmatism and deconstruction’ (1993, 9). This article examines the body of Huntington’s work through the filter of his seminal 2007 publication, ‘The Nature of the M?dhyamika Trick’, a polemic aimed at a quartet of other recent commentators on Madhyamaka (Robinson, Hayes, Tillemans and Garfield) who attempt ‘to read N?g?rjuna through the lens of modern symbolic logic’ (2007, 103), a project which is the ‘end result of a long and complex scholastic enterprise … [which] can be traced backwards from contemporary academic discourse to fifteenth century Tibet, and from there into India’ (2007, 111) and which Huntington sees as distorting the Madhyamaka project which was not aimed at ‘command[ing] assent to a set of rationally grounded doctrines, tenets, or true conclusions’ (2007, 129). This article begins by explicating some disparate strands found in Huntington’s work, which I connect under a radicalized notion of ‘context’. These strands consist of a contextualist/pragmatic theory of truth (as opposed to a correspondence theory of truth), a contextualist epistemology (as opposed to one relying on foundationalist epistemic warrants), and a contextualist ontology where entities are viewed as necessarily relational (as opposed to possessing a context-independent essence.) I then use these linked theories to find fault with Huntington’s own readings of Candrak?rti and N?g?rjuna, arguing that Huntington misreads the semantic context of certain key terms (tarka, d???i, pak?a and pratijñ?) and fails to follow the implications of N?g?rjuna and Candrak?rti’s reliance on the role of the pram??as in constituting conventional reality. Thus, I find that Huntington’s imputation of a rejection of logic and rational argumentation to N?g?rjuna and Candrak?rti is unwarranted. Finally, I offer alternate readings of the four contemporary commentators selected by Huntington, using the conceptual apparatus developed earlier to dismiss Robinson’s and Hayes’s view of N?g?rjuna as a charlatan relying on logical fallacies, and to find common ground between Huntington’s project and the view of N?g?rjuna developed by Tillemans and Garfield as a thinker committed using reason to reach, through rational analysis, ‘the limits of thought.’

Philosophic Pride

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.

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