A REPUBLIC OF CUCKOO CLOCKS: SWITZERLAND AND THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
ISAAC NAKHIMOVSKY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Black Forest ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
The Third ◽  
Forest Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic filmThe Third Man(1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

scholarly journals Bakgrunden till Kellgrens ”Öfver Propertii Buste”

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 90-100
Author(s):  
Eric Cullhed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Third ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Textual History ◽  
History Of

The Background to Kellgren’s ”On a bust of Propertius”. This article examines the Swedish eighteenth-century poet Johan Henric Kellgren’s widely celebrated epigram “On a bust of Propertius” (“Öfver Propertii Buste eller Porträt”), published posthumously. An attractive but fanciful story about the poem as Kellgren’s autobiographical reflection and personal farewell on his deathbed has triggered an unwillingness among scholars to explore what the writer himself declares: that the piece is a translation of the epigram In statuam Propertii by the virtually unknown Italian Renaissance poet Guido Postumo Silvestri of Pesaro. The first section of the article surveys the intertextual field of Postumo’s poem and analyses its fusion of common tropes and motifs in the Greco-Roman and Neo-Latin ekphrastic epigram traditions. The second section traces the subsequent textual history of Postumo’s poem and the changes it underwent in reprints as well as in the eighteenth-century Danish philologist Frederik Plum’s translation into his native language. The third and final section focuses on Kellgren’s interpretation of the Danish text. It was through a process in several steps of reproductions and translations that the Neo-Latin creation was strained of its manierism, mythological references and allusions to late antique poetry, producing this pathos-driven swansong.

The Will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini (ob. 1438)

Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 257-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Textual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
First Time

There are many still unstudied aspects of the cultural history of early Quattrocento Rome, especially if we consider the years before 1443, the date of the more or less permanent re-entry into the civitas aeterna of Pope Eugenius IV. The nexus between the still ephemeral papacy and the emerging intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism is one of these aspects. It is hoped that this study will shed some light on this problem by presenting a document that has hitherto not been completely edited: the original will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini. As we shall see, this important witness to the fifteenth century provides valuable information on many fronts, even on the structure of the old basilica of Saint Peter. The short introduction is in three parts. The first has a discussion of the cardinal's cultural milieu with a focus on the only contemporary treatise specifically about curial culture, Lapo da Castiglionchio's De curiae commodis. The second part addresses the textual history of the will as well as some misconceptions which have surrounded it. The third part contains a discussion of the will itself, along with some preliminary observations about what can be learned from the critical edition of the text here presented for the first time.

Wanted: A Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Third World ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Third World

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.

College Communities Abroad

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In the early modern period, Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions were impelled to establish colleges for the education and formation of students in more hospitable Catholic territories. The Irish, English and Scots Colleges founded in France, Flanders, the Iberian peninsula, Rome and elsewhere are the best known, but the phenomenon extended to Dutch and Scandinavian foundations in southern Flanders and the German lands. Similarly colleges were established in Rome for various national communities, among whom the Maronites are a striking example. The first colleges were founded in the mid-sixteenth century and tens of thousands of students passed through them until their closure in late eighteenth century. Only a handful survived the disruption of the French Revolutionary wars to re-emerge in the nineteenth century. Historians have long argued that these exile colleges played a prominent role in maintaining Catholic structures by supplying educated clergy equipped to deal with the challenges of their domestic churches. This has ensured that the Irish, English and Scots colleges in particular have a rich historiography laid out in the pages of Archivium Hibernicum, the Records of the Scots Colleges or the volumes published under the aegis of the Catholic Record Society in England. Until recently, however, their histories were considered in isolating confessional and national frameworks, with surprisingly little attempt to examine commonalities or connections. Recent research has begun to open up the topic by investigating the social, economic, cultural and material histories of the colleges. Meanwhile renewed interest in the history of early modern migration has encouraged historians to place the colleges within the vibrant migrant communities of Irish, English, Scots and others on the continent. The Introduction begins with a survey of the colleges. It assesses their historiographies, paying particular attention to the research of the last three decades. The introduction argues that an obvious next step is to examine the colleges in transnational and comparative perspectives. Finally, it introduces the volume's essays on Irish, English, Scots, Dutch, German and Maronite colleges, which provide up-to-date research by leading historians in the field and point to the possibilities for future research on this exciting topic.

The Hermeneutical Rehabilitation of Supposition Theory in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Logic

Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 464-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Meier-Oeser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Semantic Function ◽  
The Third ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Supposition Theory

Abstract The paper focuses on some aspects of the early modern aftermath of supposition theory within the framework of the protestant logical tradition. Due to the growing influence of Humanism, supposition theory from the third decade of the sixteenth century was the object of general neglect and contempt. While in the late sixteenth-century a number of standard textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic logic reintegrated this doctrine, although in a bowdlerized version, it remained for a century out of the scope of Protestant logic. The situation changed when the Strasburg Lutheran theologian J.C. Dannhauer, who in 1630 developed and propagated the program of a new discipline which he called ‘general hermeneutics’ (hermeneutica generalis), accentuating the importance of supposition theory as an indispensable device for the purpose of textual interpretation. Due to Dannhauer’s influence on later developments of hermeneutics, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was regarded as a logical discipline, supposition theory is still present in several logical treatises of the eighteenth century. The explication of the underlying views on the notion of supposition and its logico-semantic function may give at least some clues as to how to answer the question of what supposition theory was all about.

Notes on Don Juan of Persia's Account of Georgia

1930 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-186
Author(s):  
W. E. D. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
French Edition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Persian War ◽  
Interesting Account

In one of the recently published volumes of the Broadway Travellers Series (Don Juan of Persia; a Shi'ah Catholic, 1560—1604, translated and edited with an introduction by G. Le Strange) is an interesting account of Georgia and of some of the events of the Turko- Persian War which endured between the years 1578 and 1587. The Persian account throws much light on the state of Georgia at the end of the sixteenth century, and it serves as a valuable supplement to von Hammer Purgstall's history of the war, based mainly on Turkish sources, and published as books 38 and 40 of his Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman (in Vol. viii of the French edition).Neither the historian of Turkey nor the editor of Don Juan appear to have made use of the material from Georgian sources which is available for this period, namely the provincial histories of Kartli, Samtzkhé, Kakheti and Imereti collated by Prince Wakhusht of Kartli during the eighteenth century, and published by Brosset in his Histoire de la Géorgie, 2ième partie, 1iere livraison, Spb. 1856.

The Early History of the Sultanate of Angoche

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Set Up

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals „Nasze śląskie Alpy”, a skały „jak ruiny Palmiry czy Persepolis” — albo różne optyki karkonoskich podróżopisarzy

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 343-355
Author(s):  
Jan Pacholski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Mountain Ranges ◽  
Rock Formations ◽  
Miniature Painting ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Albrecht Von Haller

The present article focuses on eighteenth-century German-language descriptions of the Giant Mountains and Izera Mountains included in selected eighteenth-century accounts of trips to the high est mountains of Silesia and Bohemia by travellers from various German-speaking countries. The analysed fragments refer primarily to sites on the Silesian side of these mountain ranges, although the Bohemian part is mentioned in one case. Differing in terms of their countries of origin, the authors of these works — who included Silesians, a German from Bohemia as well as a man from Berlin and a man from Saxony — liked to refer in their accounts to well-known Swiss models, primarily to the poetic works of Albrecht von Haller and scholarly works of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, comparing the Giant Mountains to the Alps and using in their descriptions of nature metaphors inspired by the famous Swiss authors, whose oeuvres were quite popular across the entire civilised Europe. The present article provides a detailed analysis of the descriptions of the various natural sites and phenomena, in which the authors use the vocabulary of the history of art and culture, comparing, for example, the view of valleys seen from a mountain top to miniature painting, a waterfall to a performance and music, and rock formations to architectural objects and ancient ruins.

Censorship and the Politics of Reception

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Orson Welles ◽  
American Theater ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Events

This article examines censorship and the politics of reception by focusing on Marc Blitzstein’s opera The Cradle Will Rock. It first describes the external events that conspired to enable Blitzstein’s work to circumvent the censors, making it a legend in the history of American theater. It then considers three screenplays that translated the events connected with the premiere of The Cradle Will Rock to the big screen: the first two written separately by Ring Lardner Jr. and Orson Welles in the mid-1980s and the third written by Tim Robbins in the late 1990s. The article explains how each screenplay illustrates the fact that the relevance of censorship is open to various interpretations and can be used to serve a number of agendas.

A misleading source: the fortuna of a sixteenth-century engraving and its impact on the history of Roman baths studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-335
Author(s):  
Giacomo Savani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Wall Painting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Baths ◽  
Uncritical Acceptance ◽  
Roman Wall Painting ◽  
Intellectual Networks ◽  
Cutaway View

AbstractIn this article, I follow the mixed fortunes of a woodcut depicting a cutaway view of a set of ancient baths, so far neglected by modern scholarship. First published in a mid-sixteenth-century treatise on balneology and based on a misinterpretation of Vitruvius (5.10.1), it reappeared as a copy of a Roman wall-painting in several eighteenth-century antiquarian works. The remarkable resonance enjoyed by this image in specialist and popular publications until the early twentieth century makes it one of the most influential and controversial sources in the history of Roman baths studies. In exploring the reasons behind the enduring, uncritical acceptance of this depiction, I raise broader questions concerning the nature and extent of intellectual networks in eighteenth-century Europe.

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