Reinterpreting Nature in Early Modern Europe: Natural Philosophy, Biblical Exegesis and the Contemplative Life

2007 ◽  
pp. 25-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Contemplative Life

“You Say I am a King”

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Human History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Poetic Composition

In modern parlance, it is only the guilty who confess. Yet we read in one of the New Testament letters, I Timothy, that Jesus “testified to the good confession in the time of Pontius Pilate”. What is an innocent man—or, in Christian belief, the most innocent man in human history—doing making a confession to a brutal official like Pontius Pilate? It is of immense historical interest that one of the preeminent legal theorists of early modern Europe, Hugo Grotius, commented on this verse in I Timothy in his fabulously learned twelve-volume commentary, Annotations on the Old and New Testament. This chapter shows how Grotius’ biblical exegesis, and his poetic composition Christ Suffering, illuminate the Christian idea of Pilate’s innocence.

Nero and the Last Stalk of Silphion: Collecting Extinct Nature in Early Modern Europe

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 424-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Keller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Modern Europe

Many studies of early modern natural history focus upon observational, empirical techniques. Early moderns also contended with entities which could no longer be observed because they no longer existed. Although it is often assumed that extinction only emerged as a concept in the eighteenth century, the concept of natural loss appeared, often unproblematically, in areas outside natural philosophy. A survey of discussions of the extinct plant silphion across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that the possibility of natural loss was well aired. Paper technologies for collecting extinct nature ran parallel to investigations of newly found nature, and thus can place the latter in a new light. Although ideas of natural mutability often drew on ideas of historical or political change rather than philosophical concepts of natural constancy, techniques developed for extinct nature, such as the list of lost things, remained influential for the research agendas of naturalists.


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