Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation*

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 1265-1297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.

Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Secular Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oppositional Discourse

The introduction traces the intellectual history of resurrection from the Hellenistic era through the Reformation and up to the advent of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. To make the idea of resurrection more compatible with an emerging secular modernity it is gradually modified in the direction of dualism by positing a detachable soul that lives on after death. But the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh lives on as an oppositional discourse that challenges key institutions of an emerging secular modernity including the models of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency it assumes and privileges. The critical potential of the residual idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh is most evident in the most experimental poetry of the century, which I argue anticipates the avant-garde poetry of the early twentieth century theorized by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. The formally experimental poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson is a tool for bringing to light a deranging experience of being vibrant matter at the heart of the socialized self.

Das Corpus Doctrinae Philippicum und seine Nachwirkung

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Irene Dingel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Intensive Investigation

Abstract Hardly any corpus doctrinae had as intensive a reception and as wide a dissemination as the Corpus Doctrinae Philippicum (1560). Situating it in the history of the concept of a corpus doctrinae and briefly sketching its origin and goal elucidate the function and significance of this collection of Melanchthon’s writings. An intensive investigation reveals however any connection of this work with the development of the Reformation in Siebenbürgen (ung. Erdély, rum. Transilvania) in the later 16th century. The records of the Siebenbürgen synods mention the Corpus Doctrinae Philippicum occasionally, revealing the extent to which it served as a norm for public teaching. Unique and characteristic for Siebenbürgen is that the Formula of Concord (1577) did not replace this Corpus Doctrinae; it remained influential long into the seventeenth century. It was however interpreted within the horizon of a Wittenberg theology that was marked by the pre-confessional harmony and doctrinal agreement between Luther and Melanchthon while seeking to ignore Philippist interpretations and focusing on the common teachings of both reformers.

Introduction

Health ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Peter Adamson
Keyword(s):  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Well Being ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Concept Of Health ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethical Virtue ◽  
The Mind

This introduction to the volume gives an overview of the chapters, setting out a case for integrating the history of philosophy with the history of medicine and sketching some of the key philosophical issues that arise around the concept of health. These include the difficulty of defining “health,” the mind-body relationship, and questions about how philosophy informs medical science and practice. A central idea is that the concept of health operates at two levels, the mental and the physical (or the soul and the body), so that ethical virtue and physical well-being have often been seen as parallel or mutually dependent.

Théophraste Renaudot (1586–1653)

2018 ◽  
pp. 353-370
Author(s):  
Olivier Walusinski
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Medical Research ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Medical Studies ◽  
Clinical Practices ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Gilles de la Tourette had a passion for the history of medicine and ideas, with a particular attachment to the city of Loudun, where his family had its roots. In 1884, he published a biography of another Loudun native, Théophraste Renaudot, a seventeenth-century physician who advocated reform in medical studies, calling into question the rigid scholastic method, limited to Hippocratic and Galenic medicine, in order to develop truly clinical practices as well as medical research. This chapter presents this biography and its genesis, Gilles de la Tourette’s hidden debt to Eugène Hatin, and unpublished letters received by Gilles de la Tourette after the book’s publication. Drawing on archival documents, the process Gilles de la Tourette initiated to erect a Renaudot statue in Paris and Loudun is detailed, as is his induction into the Ordre de la Légion d’honneur.

Philisophy in Italy

Philosophy ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 10 (38) ◽  
pp. 219-222
Author(s):  
Guido De Ruggiero
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Doctrine

In a posthumous book by F. Meli1 there are joined two interesting studies in the history of philosophy. The first discusses the religious and political doctrines of Fausto Socino and their developments in the thought of the seventeenth century, and the second the rationalistic mentality of Spinoza. The two themes are essentially related, for in the religious rationalism of Socino the author recognizes one of the currents of thought that were to meet later in Spinoza’s philosophy. The first essay has the merit of greater novelty, because Socinian studies have been neglected up to the present and only touched on indirectly, in their repercussions rather than in their origins. For Meli the historical importance of Fausto Socino lies in the fact that he draws from the religious experience of the Reformation a new conception of religion, clearly affirming the principle that Holy Scripture does not aim at conveying abstract knowledge, a scientific doctrine, but on the contrary, as Galileo confirmed, it aims at increasing in us justice, charity, and the moral sense.

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