Defining Man as Animal Religiosum in English Religious Writing ca. 1650–ca. 1700

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-952 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Rational Animal ◽  
Cambridge Platonism ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Subsequent Incorporation ◽  
The Continuum

This article surveys the emergence and usage of the redefinition of man not as animal rationale (rational animal) but as animal religiosum (religious animal) by numerous English theologians between 1650 and 1700. Across the continuum of English Protestant thought, human nature was being redescribed as unique due to its religious, not primarily its rational, capabilities. This article charts said appearance as a contribution to debates over man's relationship with God; then its subsequent incorporation into the discussion over the theological consequences of arguments in favor of animal rationality, as well as its uses in anti-atheist apologetics; and then the sudden disappearance of the definition of man as animal religiosum at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In doing so, the article hopes to make a useful contribution to our understanding of changing early modern understandings of human nature by reasserting the significance of theological writing in the dispute over the relationship between humans and beasts. As a consequence, it offers a more wide-ranging account of man as animal religiosum than the current focus on “Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism” allows.

Cultures of collecting

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-164
Author(s):  
David Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Material Evidence

Studies of private libraries and their owners invariably talk about ‘book collecting’—is this the right terminology? After summarizing our broadly held understanding of the evolution of bibliophile collecting from the eighteenth century onwards, this chapter considers the extent to which similar behaviours can be detected (or not) in the seventeenth, drawing on the material evidence of bookbindings, wording in wills, and other sources. Do we find subject-based collecting, of the kind we are familiar with today, as a characteristic of early modern book owners? Some distinctions are recognized in ways in which medieval manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) were brought together at this time. The relationship between libraries and museums, and contemporary attitudes to them, is explored. The concluding argument is that ‘collecting’ is a careless word to use in the seventeenth-century context; just as we should talk about users rather than readers, we should use ‘owners’ rather than ‘collectors’ as the default term, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

The nature and role of morality in situational action theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 147737082097709
Author(s):  
Jennifer Barton-Crosby
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Moral Rule ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
Rule Breaking ◽  
Situational Action Theory ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Perception Of Action

For situational action theory (SAT), morality is key to the definition of crime and the explanation for why and how acts of crime happen: acts of crime are acts of moral rule-breaking and personal morality guides individuals’ perception of moral rule-breaking as an option before controls become relevant. However, the nature and role of morality in SAT can be misread. Within this article I respond to misinterpretations of the theory by elaborating and adding further context to the concept of morality in SAT. I contend that the root of misunderstanding is grounded in alternative assumptions regarding human nature: SAT assumes a fundamentally rule-guided human nature, whereas the prevailing view within criminology is that people are primarily self-interested. In this article I delineate SAT’s assumption of a rule-guided human nature and set out how this assumption informs the definition of crime and personal morality in the theory. I further specify the nature and role of morality in the perception of action alternatives, and in so doing distinguish SAT from theories that view constraint as the measure of morality. Finally, I develop and clarify SAT’s position on the relationship between morality and the law.

The Trouble with Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Definition Of

This book argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. But instead of arguing that the Reformation fostered English literature, as scholars have often done, I claim that literature helped undo the Reformation, with implications for both poetry and belief. Ultimately, literature in the Reformation is one vehicle by which religious belief was itself transformed into a human artifact, whether we understand this as a poetic artifact or a mental fiction. This transformation in turn helped produce the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, with its emphasis on our experience of non-cognitive pleasure in the work of art, and the modern formalist definition of literature, according to which—in the words of one critic—“literature solves no problems and saves no souls.” This modern definition of literature, in short, has a history, this history is intertwined with the problem of belief, and by returning to the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, we can come to a new understanding of how the trouble with literature has shaped our discipline. The first chapter contrasts modern and early modern understandings of literature and literariness. The second and third chapters focus on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. The fourth chapter treats the work of Kant, Kierkegaard, and J. M. Coetzee.

scholarly journals POLICING PEDDLERS: THE PROSECUTION OF ILLEGAL STREET TRADE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DUTCH TOWNS

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIELLE VAN DEN HEUVEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Source Materials

AbstractStreet vending was a common feature in many towns in early modern Europe. However, peddlers and hawkers often operated outside the official framework, lacking permission from governments and guilds. The impact of their informal status has hitherto not featured very extensively in historical studies. This article assesses the impact of policing of street vendors by looking at familiar source materials in a new way. Rather than solely focusing on those people who were ultimately punished, this article investigates the full process of policing and prosecution of street traders in eighteenth-century Dutch towns. It exposes that apart from those receiving a formal punishment, many more traders could suffer from policing activities, and that particular groups of street vendors were more vulnerable than others due to the specific dynamics of local power relations. As such, this article provides new insights into policing and social control, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the relationship between the formal and informal economy in pre-industrial Europe.

Persons in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy

Persons ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 154-181
Author(s):  
Antonia LoLordo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Moral Personhood ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Early Modern Britain ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the rise of the problem of personal identity and the relation between moral and metaphysical personhood in early modern Britain. I begin with Thomas Hobbes, who presents the first modern version of the problem of diachronic identity but does not apply it to persons. I then turn to John Locke, who grounds the persistence of persons in a continuity of consciousness that is important because it is necessary for morality, thus subordinating metaphysical personhood to moral personhood. Finally, I examine how the relationship between moral personhood and metaphysical personhood is treated in three of Locke’s critics: Edmund Law, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, and David Hume.

Goddess encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1487 ◽  
Author(s):  
KUMKUM CHATTERJEE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis paper makes a case for exploring the cultural facets of Mughal rule as well as for a stronger engagement with sources in vernacular languages for the writing of Mughal history. Bengal's regional tradition of goddess worship is used to explore the cultural dimensions of Mughal rule in that region as well as the idioms in which Bengali regional perceptions of Mughal rule were articulated. Mangalkavya narratives—a quintessentially Bengali literary genre—are studied to highlight shifting perceptions of the Mughals from the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. During the period of the Mughal conquest of Bengal, the imperial military machine was represented as a monster whom the goddess Chandi, symbolizing Bengal's regional culture, had to vanquish. By the eighteenth century, when their rule had become much more regularized, the Mughals were depicted as recognizing aspects of Bengal's regional culture by capitulating in the end to the goddess and becoming her devotees. This paper also studies the relationship of the Mughal regime with Bengal's popular cultural celebration—the annual Durga puja—and explores its implications for the public performance of religion and for community formation during the early modern period.

Satires on Man and “The Dignity of Human Nature”

PMLA ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 80 (5) ◽  
pp. 535-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertrand A. Goldgar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Species ◽  
General Reaction ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
Definition Of

In his recent critical work on Swift, Mr. Edward Rosenheim, Jr., argues that satire is an attack upon “discernible historic particulars”; a true “satire against mankind,” he adds, necessarily lies beyond this definition and must be considered as a species of philosophic writing. Without questioning his definition of satire, which is intended as a critical tool rather than as historical description, I think it worth recalling that attacks on human nature or the human species as such were thought in Swift's day to be well within the satiric genre. More significantly, such satires on man fell into general disfavor in the first half of the eighteenth century; they appear to have been the first to suffer from the general reaction against satire which Stuart Tave and others have traced. The hostile reception encountered by the greatest example of the genre, Gulliver's Travels, embodied the same charges as had been levelled earlier in the century against lesser works. While other forms of satire were still flourishing and meeting with critical approval, satiric indictments of mankind as a whole were censured as libels on the “dignity of human nature.”

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Adriaan C. Neele
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

Edwards’s debt to Protestant scholasticism, Reformed orthodoxy, and early modern Reformed theology has been largely overlooked in interpretations of his thought. The chapter argues that the model of continuity and discontinuity between the Reformation and post-Reformation era, expressed by the phrase “Calvin vs. the Calvinists,” should be considered and challenged in examining the relationship between Edwards and post-Reformation thought. Therefore, first, a broad sketch of interpretative models will be provided concerning the various appraisals of Reformed orthodoxy. Secondly, a proposal will be offered that the era of Protestant scholasticism and Reformed orthodoxy, as commonly and currently understood, should include early eighteenth-century New England history—thus treating the post-Reformation era as a transatlantic enterprise.

Mapping the early modern city

Urban History ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Hills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This paper analyses in their political context the festival decorations created by Paolo Amato, architect to the Senate of Palermo, in 1686 for the festival of the patron saint of that city. One of these decorations, that of the main altar in the cathedral, is of particular interest in that it represents a map of the city itself. An analysis of this map in relation to other seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps of Palermo reveals its political and social aim and biases, but also shows that it was unusually up to date and accurate as a representation of the city at that date. Such a representation not only marks a striking cul-de-sac in the history of the development of cartography, but sheds light on the relationship between forging politically acceptable identities for a city and their representation in the early modern period. The map in particular, but all the decorations, or apparati, in general are interpreted in the context of the weakened Spanish empire (to which Sicily belonged) and of the internal politics of the island and of Palermo.

Policing the Subject: Confessional Absolutism and Communal Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Austria

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Regina Pörtner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

If proverbial wisdom predicts longevity to the falsely proclaimed dead, then the paradigm of absolutism and its confessional variant must surely be considered a prime example. Having drawn intense fire from scholars of Western Europe over the past two decades, the concept of absolutism has recently been given a fresh lease of life by research, exploring and, to some extent, vindicating its applicability in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe. Given the evolutionary nature of the making of the early modern Austrian-Habsburg monarchy, the complexity of its constitutional, religious, and ethnic makeup, and the waywardness of some of its governing personnel, it seems doubtful if future research will ever be able to satisfactorily clarify the relationship between the political aspirations of individual Austrian rulers, among whom Ferdinand II arguably made the most serious bid for absolute rule, and the practice of negotiated power that characterized the normal state of relations between the Crown and the monarchy's estates.

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