Verses at the Court of the King: Shifts in the Historical Imagination of the Sanskrit Literary Tradition during the Second Millennium

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
DAUD ALI
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Literary Communities ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
Literary Anthologies

Abstract This essay argues that the rise and circulation of large numbers of Sanskrit literary anthologies as well as story traditions about poets in the second millennium together index important changes in the ‘author-function’ within the Sanskrit literary tradition. While modern ‘empirical authorship’ and external referentiality in Sanskrit has long been deemed ‘elusive'by Western scholarship, the new forms of literary production in the second millennium suggest a distinct new interest in authorship among wider literary communities. This new ‘author-function’ indexed a shift in the perceptions of literary production and the literary tradition itself. Focusing on the famous sixteenth-century work known as the Bhojaprabandha as both an anthology as well as a storybook about poets, this essay further argues that the paradigmatic courts of kings like Vikramāditya and Bhoja (but particularly the latter), placed not in historical time but in an archaic temporality, became the mise en scène for the figure of the poet in the second-millennium literary imagination. They were courts where the finest poets of the tradition appeared and where their virtuosity could be savored and reflected upon by generations of readers.

RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND THE TIMING OF BAPTISM IN ENGLAND, 1538–1750

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. KITSON
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Common Prayer

ABSTRACTThe religious reforms of the sixteenth century exerted a profound impact upon the liturgy of baptism in England. While historians' attention has been drawn to the theological debates concerning the making of the sign of the cross, the new baptism liturgy contained within the Book of common prayer also placed an innovative importance on the public performance of the rite in the presence of the whole congregation on Sundays and other holy days. Both religious radicals and conservatives contested this stress on ceremony and publicity throughout the early modern period. Through the collection of large numbers of baptism dates from parish registers, it is possible to measure adherence to these new requirements across both space and time. Before the introduction of the first prayer book in 1549, there was considerable uniformity among communities in terms of the timing of baptism, and the observed patterns are suggestive of conformity to the requirements of the late medieval church. After the mid-sixteenth century, parishes exhibited a range of responses, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by many communities to complete disregard in religiously conservative parts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Additionally, the popularity of saints' festivals as popular days for baptism fell markedly after 1660, suggesting a decline in the observance of these feasts.

The Latin Editions of Galen's Opera omnia (1490–1625) and Their Prefaces

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Fortuna
Keyword(s):  
Medical Education ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Greek Text ◽  
Western World ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Original Language ◽  
Selection For

AbstractBetween 1490 to 1625, twenty-two editions of Galen's opera omnia were published in Latin, while only two in Greek. In the Western world Galen's literary production was mostly known through Latin translations, even in the sixteenth century, when Greek medicine was being rediscovered in its original language. The paper discusses the twenty-two Latin editions of Galen's writings and how they evolved. In these editions the number of works increased, especially from 1490 to 1533, while later, from 1576–1577 to 1586, forged commentaries on Hippocrates were added, when Galenic medicine was declining. Moreover, in 1490 Galen's works were printed in medieval translations from Arabic and Greek, while by 1541–1542 most of them had already received new humanist translations. The humanist translations, which started about 1480, depended on Greek manuscripts until 1525, when the Aldine provided the standard Greek text of Galen. Afterwards, the Greek manuscripts were used to correct the Latin, especially in the editions from 1541–1542 to 1565. Therefore the complete Latin editions included most of the philological work on Galen during the sixteenth century, as well as discussions on the authorship of some works, on the order in which they had to be read or printed, and on their selection for medical education.

‘A Fine Pate Full of Fine Dirt’: Hamlet Among the Atomists

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-190
Author(s):  
Christopher Crosbie
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter situates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a late sixteenth century atomism increasingly shorn of its atheist metaphysics and Epicurean ethics. Making available new ways of thinking about matter as theoretically compatible with theistic ideas, early modern atomism provides a set of ontological assumptions that governs the playworld and shapes the course of Hamlet’s revenge. Paying special attention to two strands of atomist thought – namely, the body as particularized and the functions of perception, memory, and time as material imprints – this chapter reads Hamlet’s understanding of the dissolvable body and his attempt to remold the court's collective memory, the most proximate record of historical time, as of a piece. Hamlet's revenge, consonant with his prior ways of conceptualizing embodied existence, functions as a kind of material accretion to the past. In his brooding and revenge, Hamlet seeks comfort, then, in the prospect of a reassuringly enduring materiality but a comfort that remains theoretical and contingent. The most intense poignancy of his tragic demise emerges from Hamlet’s surprisingly persistent refusal to abandon the tantalizing, if elusive, consolations proffered by the material world itself.

Film Language

2010 ◽  
pp. 35-70
Author(s):  
Tanya Jones
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The Real ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
The World ◽  
Film Language

This chapter talks about mise-en-scène as a French phrase that best translates in English as 'put into the scene', which includes setting, décor, costume, props, body language, and make-up. It explains how mise-en-scène conveys meaning and includes information concerning character emotion, psychological state, mood, atmosphere, historical time, genre, and point in the narrative. It also points out ways in which mise-en-scène dominates some films as they are constructed as cinematic tableau, such as a series of pictures or paintings. The chapter describes Guillermo Del Toro's vision of the world of Pan's Labyrinth, in which there are clear parallels between the real-world characters and sets and the imaginary ones. It explores how Pan's Labyrinth gives centre stage to the power of the imagination and the need to retain imagination in order to counter point the horrors of the real-world.

The Literary Periodization of Eighteenth-Century France

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Cherpack
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Systematic Survey ◽  
The Enlightenment

Critical and historical investigations of eighteenth-century French literature have been hampered by inadequate and often irrelevant schemes of periodization. If, as has been claimed, the secular division itself is arbitrary and does not respect the realities of literary production, other principles of division, such as literary generations, have not seemed more realistic. As for the contested attempt to equate the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, its effect on literary studies has been to stress unduly the literature of ideas, especially as produced by the outstanding philosophes. Attempts to elaborate a rationale for a rococo-style periodization have raised more problems than they have solved, and may lead to unproductive theoretical bickering. Logically, it is only a systematic survey of the literature itself in the light of literary tradition that will yield truly literary periodizations, and it is only when these have been achieved that we can meaningfully investigate literature's relationships with other aspects of what might as well be called, with due reservations, the eighteenth century.

Textual Collaboration and Spiritual Partnership in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Ortensio Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga*

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 694-747 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith K. Ray
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Print Publication ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Alternative Path ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Professional Writers ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe sixteenth-century writer Ortensio Lando (ca. 1512–ca. 1553) wrote many of his works pseudonymously and borrowed liberally from the works of others. Part of a community of professional writers who experimented with collaborative modes of literary production, Lando was also deeply invested in the currents of religious reform that swept through sixteenth-century Italy. In his extensive literary recourse to female personas, Lando privileged contemporary women who shared his own heterodox religious views. This essay examines Lando's female impersonations with particular attention to his use of Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazzuolo (ca. 1521–76), whose complex literary relationship with Lando is illustrated by her presence throughout his literary corpus, and by his role in the book ofLetterepublished under her name. It argues that the relationship between these two figures can be best understood as a literary and spiritual partnership, one that meshed Lando's editorial expertise with Gonzaga's fame as a woman of extraordinary virtue and spiritual authority, a reputation that Lando himself helped to create. In an era when print publication by women was still far from common, such collaboration constituted an alternative path to literary expression.

“All That Glitters”: Contemporary Amazonian Gold Miners' Tales

1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 720-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candace Slater
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
General Population ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
New World ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Gold Miners ◽  
El Dorado

One of the most persistent of all New World dreams, El Dorado has acquired new life over the last two decades throughout much of the Amazon Basin. Many of the same golden visions that led Orellana and his men to plunge ahead down an “ocean-river” in the sixteenth century continue to prompt large numbers of people in Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, above all, Brazil to leave their families and set out for makeshift mining camps to seek their fortunes amidst a sea of mud. This discussion focuses on representations of gold miners or garimpeiros by themselves and others. I argue that although miners unquestionably draw on a much larger oral tradition, their stories stand apart from those told by a more general population in their tendency to portray gold as an active, female agent and in their relative lack of interest in clear-cut morals. In addition, while the vision of nature and natural forces as female and the fixation on violence as a (if not the) key element of life in the garimpo would appear to corroborate precisely those images of miners that reach a national and international public, this surface agreement cloaks important underlying differences that underscore the fundamental multiplicity of metaphor.

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