scholarly journals ‘The Miraculous Mathematics of the World’: Proving the Existence of God in Cardinal Péter Pázmány’sKalauz

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 248-259
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó Hannracháin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
Insight Into

This paper offers a brief examination of Cardinal Péter Pázmány’s meditation on the role of the beauty and wonder of the natural world in leading to the true knowledge of God, which is placed at the beginning of his most important work, theGuide to the Divine Truth (Isteni Igazsàgra Vezérlô Kalauz). Pázmány’s treatment of this subject offers an insight into the Catholic intellectual milieu which ultimately rejected the Copernican cosmology championed by Galileo in favour of a geocentric and geostatic universe. In this regard, the confidence with which Pázmány asserts the harmony and compatibility between secular knowledge and apprehension of nature and the conviction of the existence of a creator God is of particular importance. An analysis of this section of his work also points up a surprising contrast with Calvin’s treatment of the same subject in theInstitutes of the Christian Religion.’ Pázmány was raised within the Reformed tradition until his teenage years and as a Catholic polemicist he devoted great attention to Calvin’s writings. Indeed, to some extent it can be suggested that theInstitutesserved as both target and model for his own great work. Yet his handling of the topic of nature as a proof of the existence of God, an area where relatively little difference might have been expected in view of its non-salience as a polemical issue, not only offers a revealing insight into the confident intellectual perspective of seventeenth-century Catholicism, but also suggests some additional ramifications of the greatsola scripturadebate which split European Christianity in the early modern period.

Füchsische Poetologie. Zur Spiegelfiktion im Reynke de Vos (1498)

POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Hannah Rieger
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Ancient Rhetoric ◽  
Wooden Frame ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Specific Material

Abstract The Middle Low German Beast Epic Reynke de Vos (1498) is about two legal proceedings against the fox Reynke, who is charged by the other animals with the tricks he played on them. When he is sentenced to death, Reynke defends himself by delivering speeches that are constructed as described in ancient rhetoric. Part of those speeches is Reynke’s lie about his treasure, which he would give to the lion if he pardoned him. Reynke describes three pieces of jewellery as part of this made-up possession, one of which is a mirror. When Reynke describes it, he also tells Aesopic fables that are carved into its wooden frame. His fictional artefact, especially the interplay of its specific material and the content of the fables told, has a poetological level. In his description, Reynke hybridizes the political discourse of the early modern period, in which the virtue of prudentia becomes more and more important, with the rhetorical competence to deliver speeches and tell fables. In his fiction of the mirror he draws up a poetological draft that combines the role of a rhetor in court with his well-known properties of being clever and cunning. By describing the artefact, Reynke shows how to use rhetorical strategies, especially to tell fables, as an instrument to gain acceptance and to acquire political influence.

‘And all my children?’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Scott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Modern Period

Beginning with an exploration of the role of the child in the cultural imagination, Chapter 1 establishes the formative and revealing ways in which societies identify themselves in relation to how they treat their children. Focusing on Shakespeare and the early modern period, Chapter 1 sets out to determine the emotional, symbolic, and political registers through which children are depicted and discussed. Attending to the different life stages and representations of the child on stage, this chapter sets out the terms of the book’s enquiry: what role do children play in Shakespeare’s plays; how do we recognize them as such—age, status, parental dynamic—and what are the effects of their presence? This chapter focuses on how the early moderns understood the child, as a symbolic figure, a life stage, a form of obligation, a profound bond, and an image of servitude.

scholarly journals Ancient Pneumatics Transformed during the Early Modern Period

Nuncius ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Valleriani
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
Exact Role ◽  
Ancient Technology ◽  
Ancient Science ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The paper aims to show how sixteenth century hydraulic and pneumatic engineers appropriated ancient science and technology – codified in the text of Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics – to enter into scientific discourse, for instance, with natural philosophers. They drew on the logical structure, content and narrative style passed down from antiquity to generate and codify their own theoretical approach and to document their new technological achievements. They did so by using the form of commented and enlarged editions, just as Aristotelian natural philosophers had been doing for centuries. The argument aims to detail the exact role of ancient science and the process of transformation it underwent during the early modern period. In particular, it aims to show how pneumatic engineers first tested the ancient technology codified by Hero while carrying out their own practical activities. Once these tests were successfully concluded, in the spirit of early modern humanism they finally presented these activities as being associated with the work of their discipline’s most authoritative author, Hero of Alexandria, whose technology was tested during the construction of the hydraulic and pneumatic system of the garden of Pratolino.

HISTORY, MEMORY, AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 899-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WALSHAM
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The University

ABSTRACTThis article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 20 Oct. 2011. It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember the English Reformation as a decisive juncture and critical turning point in history. Investigating the interaction between personal recollection and social memory, it traces the manner in which remembrance of the events of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s evolved and splintered between 1530 and 1700. A further theme is the role of religious and intellectual developments in the early modern period in forging prevailing models of historical periodization and teleological paradigms of interpretation.

Music in Global Jesuit Missions, 1540–1773

2018 ◽  
pp. 597-634
Author(s):  
David R. M. Irving
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Global Missions ◽  
High Courts ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Pacific

The Society of Jesus has long been recognized for its global contribution to the study, practice, and dissemination of European music in the early modern period, and especially for its interactions with non-European music cultures. In Europe, Jesuit colleges played a seminal role in music education and the development of music in drama, major sacred works were composed by or for Jesuits, and treatises on music were written by Jesuit theorists. In the Americas and on islands in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, music served as a device for evangelization and conversion of indigenous peoples; in some of the missions, European music was cultivated to a level reported as comparable with standards of cities in Europe. Meanwhile, elite Jesuit scholars who gained access to high courts in Asia engaged in dialogue with local scholars, impressing powerful potentates and distinguishing themselves through their talent in music and their skills in astronomy, mathematics, cartography, languages, and diplomacy. This chapter surveys and critiques the diverse role of music within the global missions of the early modern Society of Jesus, with case studies drawn from Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

scholarly journals Circulation of images and graphic practices in Renaissance natural history: the example of Conrad Gessner

Gesnerus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-72
Author(s):  
Florike Egmond ◽  
Sachiko Kusukawa
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Actual Mechanism ◽  
Multiple Copies ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge

Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium is a compilation of information from a variety of sources: friends, correspondents, books, broadsides, drawings, as well as his own experience. The recent discovery of a cache of drawings at Amsterdam originally belonging to Gessner has added a new dimension for research into the role of images in Gessner’s study of nature. In this paper, we examine the drawings that were the basis of the images in the volume of fishes. We uncovered several cases where there were multiple copies of the same drawing of a fish (rather than multiple drawings of the same fish), which problematizes the notion of unique “original” copies and their copies. While we still know very little about the actual mechanism of, or people involved in, commissioning or generating copies of drawings, their very existence suggests that the images functioned as an important medium in the circulation of knowledge in the early modern period.

Monetary Systems

2016 ◽  
pp. 320-341
Author(s):  
Angela Redish
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Bretton Woods ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
Fiat Money ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Monetary Systems ◽  
Medieval Europe

This chapter presents the evolution of Western monetary systems from the bimetallic standards of medieval Europe through the gold standard and Bretton Woods eras to today’s fiat money regimes. The chapter notes that issues of revenue creation enabled by the monopoly over money issue—through debasement and/or inflation—runs through this history, as does the significance of the credibility of the money issuer. An additional theme in the chapter is the role of changing technology of money issue, from the hammered coins of the medieval period, to the milled coins of the early modern period, through paper money issues to cryptocurrencies.

Conclusion

Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 357-360
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Social Elites

The systemic role of families in the production of much literature and learning in the early modern period needs greater recognition. Countless works were shaped by families’ practice of hunting in packs to maximize their place in society. This production of works was just one of many planks within the broader transgenerational strategies of families, commoner as well as noble. Works were woven into the wider webs of families’ inheritance and legacy practices. They helped families imagine their own futures and steer a course into it, even if that course subsequently swerved, forked, or faded. These families did not, however, represent society as a whole. They belonged overwhelmingly to social elites, whether noble or commoner. However, family literature was often rooted in anxiety, disappointment, and conflict as well as in hope and a sense of vocation, mission, or entitlement to power.

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