Lorenzo Valla's Critique of Jurisprudence, the Discovery of Heraldry, and the Philology of Images

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 1183-1224
Author(s):  
Jennifer Kathleen Mackenzie
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Social Authority ◽  
History Of

In 1433, Lorenzo Valla attacked contemporary jurisprudence with a treatise attributed to the civilian lawyer Bartolus of Saxoferrato, the “De insigniis et armis.” This was considered Europe's first treatise on heraldry until a team of legal historians questioned its subject matter and authenticity. Meanwhile, visual culture continues to be seen as peripheral to Valla's critical agenda. This article proposes that Valla engaged images as manifestations of social authority and historical change. His epistle against Bartolus participates in an intellectual history of intersections between philology, antiquarianism, and the anthropology of images in which heraldry has been defined.

Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stock
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Geographical Imagination ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Commercial Network ◽  
British Culture ◽  
British People

Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760–1830 seeks to establish what literate British people understood by the word ‘Europe’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It achieves this objective through detailed analysis of nearly 350 geographical reference works, textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias. Largely neglected by historians, these materials were widely read by contemporaries and can reveal the formative ideas about Europe circulating in Britain. The book therefore traces the history of ideas in non-elite contexts; it moves away from an approach to intellectual history concerned predominantly with prominent thinkers. The opening two chapters outline the characteristics and popularity of geography books and explain how they structure geographical knowledge. The remaining chapters explore eight themes which frame how Europe is understood in British culture. A chapter each is devoted to religion; the natural environment; race and other theories of human difference; the state; borders; the identification of the ‘centre’ and ‘edges’ of Europe; commerce and empire; and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change. Each chapter shows how geographical texts use these intricate concepts to communicate and construct widely understood ideas about the European continent. Is Europe unified by shared religious heritage? Where are the edges of Europe? Is Europe primarily a commercial network or are there common political practices too? Is Britain itself a European country? By showing how these and other questions were discussed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, the book provides a thorough and much-needed historical analysis of Britain’s enduringly complex intellectual relationship with Europe.

Making the View from Lookout Mountain: Sectionalism and National Visual Culture

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 269-280
Author(s):  
Matt Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
American Art ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Recent scholarship in the history of American art has uncovered the deep social, political, and economic context within which specific inividuals invented highly charged (and frequently contested) visions of the American landscape. Drawing attention away from the naturalizing tendency of criticism that emphasizes landscape painting as a reflection of national and transcendental ideals, this kind of analysis has brought new richness to the study of landscapes, weaving political and social history into the criticism of American art. Charting paintings as they function within the constellations of patronage, intellectual history, and reception, these new histories help us understand the cultural work of landscape in the 19th-century United States.

Hidden in Plain Sight

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-244
Author(s):  
Rob Linrothe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Art History ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Historical Aspects ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Record

Abstract This is a review article of Janet Gyatso's 2015 award-winning book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. The art-historical aspects of the book—mainly confined to the first chapter, “Reading Paintings, Painting the Medical, Medicalizing the State” and based on a perceptive art-historical reading of a set of medical paintings and its copies—had yet to be reviewed by an academically-trained art historian. This review underscores the fine art-historical insights deserving the attention of art historians working in parallel contexts of the often tense relationship between religious and empirical epistemologies. At the same time, the evaluation of certain readings of the visual record lead to suggested revisions in the support they provide to Gyatso's primary argument. In addition, other precedents of depictions “from life” in Tibetan art history are offered to help contextualize claims of originality or uniqueness. Finally, an analysis is presented of less formal, freehand painting versus more formalized, iconometric execution, calibrated with vernacular subject matter versus iconographically predetermined themes. Both of the painting modes and subject types are combined in the painting set analyzed by Gyatso supporting her assessment of the innovation of the artists selected by the patron, Desi Sangyé Gyatso (1653–1705).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robin Marie Averbeck
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Culture Of Poverty ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Methodological Choices ◽  
The Core ◽  
Howard University ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Black Poverty

The Introduction lays out the subject matter of the book, identifies key assumptions and methodological choices, presents the core arguments, and identifies the intended audience for the book. It opens with the story of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s famous speech on black poverty at Howard University to introduce the subject matter. It then articulates the argument that liberalism is historically entwined with racism, and that American liberalism is much more intertwined with conservativism than is generally recognized, and that the concept of racial capitalism is particularly useful for understanding this. The Introduction makes clear that the book is an intellectual history of postwar liberal thinking on black poverty, particularly the idea of a culture of poverty.

The Nostalgic Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams

This unusual book explores the historical assumptions at work in the style of literary criticism that came to dominate English studies in the twentieth century. Stefan Collini shows how the work of critics renowned for their close attention to ‘the words on the page’ was in practice bound up with claims about the nature and direction of historical change, the interpretation of the national past, and the scholarship of earlier historians. Among the major figures examined in detail are T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and Raymond Williams, while there are also original discussions of such figures as Basil Willey, L. C. Knights, Q. D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart. In the period between Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and Williams’s The Long Revolution, the writings of such critics came to occupy the cultural space left by academic history’s retreat into specialized, archive-bound monographs. Their work challenged the assumptions of the Whig interpretation of English history and entailed a revision of the traditional relations between ‘literary history’ and ‘general history’. Combining close textual analysis with wide-ranging intellectual history, this book both revises the standard story of the history of literary criticism and illuminates a central feature of the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.

Introduction: Emotion, History and the Arts

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Sullivan ◽  
Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Review Section ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
War Correspondents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Johan Huizinga

This introduction surveys the rise of the history of emotions as a field and the role of the arts in such developments. Reflecting on the foundational role of the arts in the early emotion-oriented histories of Johan Huizinga and Jacob Burkhardt, as well as the concerns about methodological impressionism that have sometimes arisen in response to such studies, the introduction considers how intensive engagements with the arts can open up new insights into past emotions while still being historically and theoretically rigorous. Drawing on a wide range of emotionally charged art works from different times and places—including the novels of Carson McCullers and Harriet Beecher-Stowe, the private poetry of neo-Confucian Chinese civil servants, the photojournalism of twentieth-century war correspondents, and music from Igor Stravinsky to the Beatles—the introduction proposes five ways in which art in all its forms contributes to emotional life and consequently to emotional histories: first, by incubating deep emotional experiences that contribute to formations of identity; second, by acting as a place for the expression of private or deviant emotions; third, by functioning as a barometer of wider cultural and attitudinal change; fourth, by serving as an engine of momentous historical change; and fifth, by working as a tool for emotional connection across communities, both within specific time periods but also across them. The introduction finishes by outlining how the special issue's five articles and review section address each of these categories, while also illustrating new methodological possibilities for the field.

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....

ПАТОЛОГИЯ ЛИЧНОСТИ В ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИХ ПОСТРОЕНИЯХ ПРЕДСТАВИТЕЛЕЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ МЕТАФИЗИЧЕСКОЙ ТРАДИЦИИ В ПСИХОЛОГИИ

1970 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 208-215
Author(s):  
Александр Бреусенко-Кузнецов
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Clinical Psychology ◽  
History Of Psychology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
The Given

Статья посвящена проблеме восстановления искусственно прерванной метафизической традиции в отечественной персонологии. Данная проблема принадлежит областям истории психологии и психологии личности, но имеет выходы и в предметные области многих других психологических наук, в частности – клинической психологии. Указана важность соотнесения персонологических концептуализаций учёных-метафизиков с клинической практикой в процессе их опытной верификации. Проведена реконструкция и анализ взглядов на психопатологию и психотерапию представителей метафизической традиции в отечественной психологии личности. Согласно данным взглядам, суть патологии личности – в её уклонении от своего назначения, от подлинного бытия ради неподлинных, онтологически неоправданных форм жизнедеятельности. The article is devoted to the problem of restoration of artificialy interrupted metaphysical tradition in domestic personology. The given problem belongs to the areas of history of psychology and psychology of personality, but provides outcomes in subject matter of many other psychological sciences, in clinical psychology in particular. Importance of correlation between personological conceptualizations of scientists-metaphysicists and clinical practice in the process of their skilled verification is pointed out. The reconstruction and analysis of views at psychopathology and psychotherapy by representatives of metaphysical tradition in domestic psychology of personality have been made. According to the mentioned views, the essence of pathology of personality is in its evasion from the purpose, from original life for the sake of not original, ontologically unjustified forms of ability to live.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

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