scholarly journals Curiosity, youth, and knowledge in the visual and textual culture of the Dutch Republic

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-236
Author(s):  
Els Stronks

ArgumentThe imitation of adults was the dominant educational early modern model, as it had been from the classical era. Yet, from 1500 onward, this traditional model clashed with new pedagogical ideals that explored if and how the youthful mind differed from the adult. To investigate this clash, I examine individual and aggregate cases – taken from the Dutch (illustrated) textual culture – representing conceptualizations of what has been labelled “the curiosity family” (concepts such as curiosity, inquisitiveness, invention). As previously established, during the seventeenth century, curiosity turned from a vice to a virtue among adults. Textual evidence suggests that for the early modern Dutch youth, docility, long valued, remained the guiding ideal. Shortly after 1700, however, two changes can be detected: for youth, travel literature and travel as a metaphor became a means to explore the world without adults; and for adults, the experimental learning style of the young became a new learning model.

Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

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.


Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez

This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms of being in the world.” There exist, after all, multiple manners of sensing and shaping an apparently stubborn reality. The chapter shows how black Mohanes fundamentally fashioned novel ways of sensing the early modern Caribbean world. In the absence of common linguistic and cultural grounds, the chapter shows, black Caribbean ritual practitioners became involved in a new sensorial imbrication of Atlantic threads of all origins. It was through this essential process that Caribbean Mohanes fashioned routes for making perceivable the spiritual and social landscapes of their new land. These paths and ways of sensing were fundamental for the modeling of the experiential revolution of the seventeenth-century Caribbean.


Author(s):  
Chloë Houston

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.  


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham

Ushering the reader into both the world of early modern radical religion and the considerable body of scholarly literature devoted to its study, the introduction offers a précis of what is to come and a backward glance to explain how the proposed journey contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations. After orienting readers to the basic methodological boundaries within which the book will operate and briefly situating the book within the wider historiography, the introduction adumbrates the shape of the work as a whole and encapsulates its central argument. The introduction contends that the mid-seventeenth-century men and women often described as “Particular Baptists” would not have readily understood themselves as such. This tension between the self-identity of the early modern actors and the identity imposed upon them by future scholars has significant implications for how we understand both radical religion during the English Revolution and the period more broadly.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoko Frances Hioki

This article works to identify an intersection of the Catholic and Buddhist pictorial traditions with regard to the symbolism of the journey to the spiritual world. In both Christian and Buddhist traditions, the river/ ocean is a popular symbol that designates the border between this world and the other world. A work of western-inspired Japanese folding screens known as Yōjin Sōgakuzu (Europeans Playing Music) is an outstanding example that makes use of the symbolism of the river to allude to one’s pilgrimage to the other world in the guise of a secular waterfront scene. The folding screens were painted in the seventeenth century by Japanese artists who were affiliated with the art studio founded by the Jesuits. An investigation of European sources of the painting will show how the painters modified the famous Catholic iconography of “The Ship of the Church” to match the taste of the Japanese patrons of the time. Further, comparisons with other Japanese paintings that similarly deal with the theme of the river will show that such secular scenes of waterfront leisure could demonstrate to the Japanese audience the life in the world beyond, as well as a journey to that world they anticipated.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-108
Author(s):  
FEBBY NANCY PATTY

Leonard  Andaya adalah guru besar Sejarah Asia Tenggara di Universitas of Hawaii at Manoa. Ia menyelesaikan pendidikan sarjana di Yale University (1965) dan menyelesaikan pendidikan S2 dan S3 di Cornell University pada bidang sejarah Asia Tenggara. Beberapa karya buku yang dihasilkan di antaranya The Kingdom of Johor (1975); The Heritage of Arung Palakka : History of South Sulawesi (Celebes) in the Seventeenth Century (1981); History of Malaysia (1982); The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in Early Modern Period (1993); Leave of the Same Tree: Trade and Etnicity in the Straits of Melaka (2008); History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400-1830 (2015).


Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 41-72
Author(s):  
Matthew T. Gaetano

AbstractCatholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Neville

Between 1525 and 1640, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in the world of print: England saw the production of more than two dozen editions identified by their imprints or by contemporaries as 'herbals'. Sarah Neville explains how this genre grew from a series of tiny anonymous octavos to authoritative folio tomes with thousands of woodcuts, and how these curious works quickly became valuable commodities within a competitive print marketplace. Designed to serve readers across the social spectrum, these rich material artifacts represented both a profitable investment for publishers and an opportunity for authors to establish their credibility as botanists. Highlighting the shifting contingencies and regulations surrounding herbals and English printing during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the book argues that the construction of scientific authority in Renaissance England was inextricably tied up with the circumstances governing print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at doi.org/10.1017/9781009031615.


Author(s):  
Karin Vélez

Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), a Descalced Augustinian friar from Portugal, spent the last three decades of his life taking inventory of sites dedicated to Mary. Jesuits such as Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Francisco de Florencia, and António Cordeiro also produced encyclopedic compilations of Marian sanctuaries across the world. Their projects suggest that mission names counted in the early modern period because they were actually counted. This chapter begins with counters including the Santa Maria, Gumppenberg, de Florencia, and Cordeiro. This assortment of atlas makers, inventory compilers, and biographers shows the diversity and quantity of individuals engaged in the counting project of the seventeenth century. It was these counters who fixed and publicized the notion that the spread of Loreto was collective and intentional. The chapter then turns to some of the namers featured by the above writers. Finally, it examines Jesuit records that point to the Inka of Cuzco and the Monquí of California, whose processions in honor of Loreto brought the name currency and freshness.


Quaerendo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 15-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pettegree ◽  
Arthur der Weduwen

Abstract In 2018, we published an article that provided a first attempt to survey the whole output of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Our estimate was a minimum of 357,500 editions. This calculation did not yet include the world of ephemeral forms, handbills and posters. The survival of such commercial or private notices is microscopically small, compared to what must have been produced. It is nevertheless vital for our understanding of the print trade that we attempt to capture the complexities of this lost world: this was work that sustained printshops. It was also the form which most acutely influenced commerce, government and social life. Here we wish to offer an introduction to this most elusive genre of the early modern print world, document the myriad ways in which print infiltrated the daily life of people, and offer some hypotheses on the likely total output of certain forms of ephemeral print.


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