THE ORDER OF BOOKS REVISITED

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROGER CHARTIER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Do So

The Order of Books was published in France in 1992 and translated into English in 1994. I have to confess that I had not reread it since, and perhaps I would have never read it again had I not been invited to do so for this exercise. The central aim of that book was to try to understand something of how in the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth century the written word was classified, organized, and perceived by all the actors involved within the trajectory of the text, from authors to publishers and printers, from the printing shop to the library. I will begin by recounting some of the factors in my own intellectual life that I believe led up to that book, and go on to reflect on the arguments that I posited in 1992, in the hope of giving some account of the ways in which that earlier work might today be supplemented.

scholarly journals Biblioteka klasztoru paulinów w Oporowie w świetle zachowanych katalogów z XVIII wieku

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-145
Author(s):  
Edgar Sukiennik
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Common Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Access To Books ◽  
The University ◽  
Intellectual Formation ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Limited Period ◽  
Do So

From the very beginning of its existence, the Pauline Order paid attention to the need to educate and develop the intellectual life of its members. This resulted from the adoption of St. Augustine’s rule by the community, which in addition to the principles governing the common life also emphasized the intellectual formation of the friars by providing them with access to books. The fulfilment of the obligations resulting from the rule and the subsequent legislation of the convent meant that every Pauline monastery was equipped with a larger or smaller library. It was no different in the case of St. Martin's convent in Oporów, which had existed since 1453 thanks to the foundation of the brothers Piotr and Władysław from the powerful Oporowski family, with the Sulima coat of arms. The monastery library was probably established soon after the foundation of the monastery. It was used primarily by preachers, who prepared Sunday and Christmas sermons, as well as by other monks, if they were authorized to do so. The beginnings of the library are unknown due to the lack of sources from that period. Only the eighteenth-century catalogues of books shed light on the functioning of the library, albeit in a limited period of time 1711-1753. To this day, 13 library inventories have survived, providing welcome information about the intellectual life of the local Pauline monks, titles of books along with the names of the authors and the division of bibliographic material into various thematic categories. The image of the Oporów library is complemented by 47 old prints of Oporów provenience, which are now the property of the University Library in Warsaw. Although their number is insignificant and constitutes only a fraction of the former assets of the library, nevertheless it turns out to be helpful in the analysis of the resources of the Pauline library and the development of intellectual horizons of its users. The analysis of the preserved archival materials is the first attempt to restore the library of the Oporów monastery in the century preceding its irretrievable disappearance in the course of the convent’s annulment.

Bringing Rain and Protection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barend J. ter Haar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Northern China ◽  
Supreme Deity ◽  
Do So

Deities were thought to help and protect people, heal them from illnesses, and sometimes also to punish them. And yet, a worshipper was not free to decide what to ask for, but had to work within a collectively created and transmitted paradigm of expectations of the deity. In Northern China, Lord Guan was often requested to provide rain, and everywhere he was asked to assist in the fight against demons and other types of outsiders (barbarians, rebels, or otherwise), or even appeared of his own accord to do so. From the early seventeenth century onwards, Guan Yu was seen as the incarnation of a dragon executed at the command of the Jade Emperor for bringing rain out of compassion to a local community sentenced to extinction by the supreme deity. Finally, his loyal image inspired his rise as a God of Wealth in the course of the eighteenth century.

Cameralism, Josephinism, and Enlightenment: The Dynamic of Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–92

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
Franz Grillparzer ◽  
Do So

In his great 1848 historical drama,Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:Auf halben Wegen und zu halber TatMit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.[That is the curse of our noble house:Striving hesitatingly on half waysto half action with half means.]True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it cannotbe said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.

Oceanic Intimacies

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165
Author(s):  
Mona Narain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Do So

In this essay, I explore what intimacies might be revealed if we trace oceanic entanglements created by eighteenth-century maritime routes and journeys in historical and contemporary imaginative reconstructions of such histories. I respond to Lisa Lowe’s proposal to use “intimacies as a heuristic,” and to decentre the European notion of “the human” constructed by colonial epistemologies. To do so, I offer two counter-histories, embedded in and through different waters, which challenge imperial two-dimensional epistemologies. “Porous Intimacies” discusses the seafaring part of Sheikh I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet (1765), one of the first travelogues written by an Indian about Europe. “Immersive Intimacies” analyzes David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1995), which imaginatively reconstructs the middle passage of captured Africans on British slave ships bound for the Caribbean. Rethinking former historical accounts within and outside colonial and liberal frameworks, I analyze new intimacies through oceanic connections.

not establish missions, even though they sometimes desired to do so. The first necessity was a body of people with the degree of commitment needed to live on someone else’s terms, together with the mental equipment for coping with the implications. Such commitment was in turn most likely to arise in the wake of powerful religious influences. Times of religious renewal were nec-essary for the recruitment of a sizeable company of such people, and the maintenance of a succession of them. A tradition of mental training, how-ever, was also needed; charismatic inspiration alone would not suffice, and indeed the plodder might succeed better with a new language and a new soci-ety than the inspired preacher. The second need was for a form of organization which could mobilize committed people, maintain and supply them, and forge a link between them and their work and the wider church. Since in the nature of things both their work and the conditions in which they carried it out were exceptional, the necessary structures could not readily emerge in very rigid regimes, whether political or ecclesiastical. They needed tolerance of the exceptional, and flex-ibility. The third factor necessary to overseas missions was sustained access to overseas locations, with the capacity to maintain communication over long periods. This implies what might be called maritime consciousness, with mar-itime capability and logistical support. All three factors were present in the first, Catholic, phase of the missionary movement. The Catholic Reformation released the spiritual forces to produce the committed worker, the religious orders offered possibilities of extension and adaptation which produced the structures for deploying them, and the Portuguese enclaves and trading depots provided the communication net-works and transoceanic bases. When in the course of the eighteenth century the Catholic phase of missions began to stutter, it was partly because the three factors were no longer fully in place. The Protestant movement developed as the Catholic movement weakened. It began, not at the end of the eighteenth century (that is a purely British per-spective) but at the end of the seventeenth; not in England, but in Germany and Central Europe. Its main motors were in Halle and Herrnhut, though, just as German Pietism drew on the English puritan tradition, it had a puri-tan prologue. William Carey’s Enquiry did not initiate it; the object of that

2003 ◽  
pp. 186-187
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Mental Training ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
Do So

“DISMEMBERING THE HUMAN CHARACTER”: ADAM FERGUSON’S CONCEPTION OF CORRUPTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Samuel Fleischacker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Perspective ◽  
Do So

Abstract:This essay lays out three kinds of corruption—personal, structural, and civic—stressing the differences among these phenomena. It then explores civic corruption via the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson. Civic corruption occurs when the citizens of a republic lose interest in defending their shared institutions, and pursue their private wealth alone; avoiding it, according to Ferguson, requires placing limits on these private pursuits and getting citizens to participate in the public realm instead. By way of a comparison with Ferguson’s contemporary and friend Adam Smith—who agreed with Ferguson on many issues, although not on what was corrupting about the acquisition of wealth—the essay argues that Ferguson, for all his emphasis on participatory government, was a liberal, not a collectivist. With that in mind, the essay endorses many of Ferguson’s suggestions from a liberal perspective, and argues that, to preserve liberal republics, it is often necessary to expand what governments do, so as to maintain the commitment of citizens to their public institutions. This prescriptive implication brings out sharply how civic corruption differs from personal corruption, which may best be limited by shrinking the role of government, rather than expanding it.

Allegories of Encounter

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Newman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Great Lakes Region ◽  
Captivity Narratives ◽  
Mary Rowlandson ◽  
Literacy Events ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Williams ◽  
Written Word

This book analyzes representations of reading, writing, and recollecting texts – “literacy events” – in early America’s best-known literary genre. Captivity narratives reveal how colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into the diverse experiences of colonial captivity. Captivity narratives reflect lived allegories, the identification of one’s own unfolding story with the stories of others. Sources include the foundational New England narratives of Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, the French Jesuit accounts of the colonial saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekakwitha, the Anglo-African John Marrant’s account of his sojourn in Cherokee territory, and the narratives of Colonel James Smith and other captives in the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century.

Zwischen Analphabetismus und Büchern, die „verrückt machen“. Ein Werkstattbericht aus dem Projekt „Reading in the Alps. Book Ownership in Tyrol 1750–1800“

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Michael Span
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Research Support ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Support Fund ◽  
The University ◽  
Available Information ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The residents of the historical region of Tirol had long played the role of various projection platforms. However, love for the written word was not a characteristic commonly attributed to them — on the contrary: “It is impossible for the insights of the latter to attract a favorable opinion if one considers that often in large villages hardly anyone can read and write, and those who can do it very poorly; and yet these are exercises enabling people to shape their minds.”That is why the project “Reading in the Alps. Book Ownership in Tyrol 1750–1800” carried out at the University of Innsbruck and the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), and financed by the FWF (Research Support Fund) and the Tiroler Matching Fund, seeks to explore the historical reading customs of people living in the Alps. Drawing on inventories (usually probate inventories), we examine — as has already been done many times with regard to regions under Protestant-Pietist influence — private book collections in the Catholic-dominated Alps. The present article is a report on the main directions of the project as well as its first results.Starting from Joseph Rohrer’s 1796 diagnosis that the rural population of Tyrol in the eighteenth century was largely illiterate, we examine the available information about book resources from that era on the basis of an analysis of over 1500 inventories, inheritance proceedings, purchase and tenancy contracts etc. They suggest that people read quite a lot. However, an important matter is the kind of books preferred by readers at the time. It turns out that they were primarily widely popular religious books. It was mainly the “bestsellers of Catholic edifying literature”, which could be found in households in Bruneck in the South Tyrolean Puster Valley and its surroundings.

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