Buildings as persons: relationality and the life of buildings in a northern periphery of early modern Sweden

Antiquity ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 84 (324) ◽  
pp. 440-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vesa-Pekka Herva
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Family ◽  
Modern Thinking

The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenth-century Tornio (now in modern-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally given spiritual personalities and were treated as members of the family. As more modern thinking took hold, this spirituality was transferred to the more mobile and skittish household sprites.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

The Perraults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Language ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Family Strategies

Through the story of the Perraults, a family of literary and scientific authors active in seventeenth-century Paris, the book argues that kinship networks played a crucial yet unexamined role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of seventeenth-century France, while showing how culture in its turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family. The book examines the world of letters as means of social mobility and revises our understanding of prominent early modern institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as authorship and court capitalism. Put together, this project serves as a catalyst for rethinking early modern cultural and intellectual institutions more broadly. In this view, institutions no longer appear as rigid entities that embody or define intellectual or literary styles, such as “Cartesianism,” “empiricism” or “the purity of the French language.” Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies and practices of writing, thereby reframing their relation to the state.

A Fake Saint and the True Church

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
The Family ◽  
Kingdom Of Naples ◽  
The Relationship

This book uncovers the remarkable story of a fake saint to tell a tale about truth. It begins at the end of the 1650s, when a large quantity of forged documents suddenly appeared throughout the kingdom of Naples. Narrating the life and deeds of a previously unknown medieval saint named Giovanni Calà, the trove generated much excitement around the kingdom. No one was more delighted by the news than Carlo Calà, Giovanni’s wealthy and politically influential seventeenth-century descendant. Attracted by the prospect of adding a saint to the family tree, Carlo presented Giovanni’s case to the Roman Curia. The Catholic authorities immediately realized that the sources were forged and that Giovanni was not real (let alone holy). Yet it took more than two decades before the forgery was exposed: why? Vividly reconstructing the intricate case of the supposed saint, the book reveals the tensions between historical and theological truth. How much could the truth of doctrine depend on the truth of the facts before religion lost its connection with the supernatural? To what extent could theology ignore the truth of history without ending up engulfed in falsity and deceit? This story of a fake saint illuminates early modern tensions. But the struggles to distinguish between facts, opinions, and beliefs remain with us. Examining how our predecessors dealt with the relationship between truth and authenticity guides us too in thinking through what is true and what is not.

scholarly journals Spaces of Privacy in Early Modern Dutch Egodocuments

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-40
Author(s):  
Michaël Green
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Family ◽  
Dutch Language ◽  
Practical Experiences ◽  
Family House

While the word 'privacy' itself only started to appear in the Dutch language in the newspapers of the nineteenth-century, Michaël Green  argues that the idea underlying it was already developing in the early seventeenth century in Dutch contexts. In his article, Green examines, first, transformations that occurred in the seventeenth century in architectural idealizations of the family house, where plans for corridors started to appear alongside locks and separate rooms. Then, based on several examples of egodocuments - among them the diaries of the schoolmaster David Beck and an autobiographical piece by Maria de Neufville - he focuses on how members of the middling and elite classes wrote about their own practical experiences of spatial and emotional privacy.  

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

Orthodox Radicals

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Infant Baptism ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Baptist Identity ◽  
Ongoing Project

Orthodox Radicals explores the origins and identity of Baptists during the English Revolution (1640–1660), arguing that mid-seventeenth century Baptists did not, in fact, understand themselves to be part of a larger, all-encompassing “Baptist” movement. Contrary to both the explicit statements of many historians and the tacit suggestion embedded in the very use of “Baptist” as an overarching historical category, the early modern men and women who rejected infant baptism would not have initially understood that single theological move as being in itself constitutive of a new group identity. Rather, the rejection of infant baptism was but one of a number of doctrinal revisions then taking place among English puritans eager to further their ongoing project of godly reformation. Orthodox Radicals thus complicates our understanding of Baptist identity and addresses broader themes including early modern religious toleration, the mechanisms by which early modern groups defined and defended themselves, and the perennial problem of historical anachronism. By combining a provocative reinterpretation Baptist identity with close readings of key theological and political texts, Orthodox Radicals offers the most original and stimulating analysis of mid-seventeenth century Baptists in decades.

Stuart Succession Literature

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Distinguished Group ◽  
Modern British Literature

Moments of royal succession, which punctuated the Stuart era (1603–1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields.

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