Shakespeare’s suppliants: the ‘rotten custom’ of ancient asylum seeking in Coriolanus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Wald
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Dionysius Of Halicarnassus ◽  
Looking Back

Abstract Looking back to the early modern period from the current immigration crisis, this article reads Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus as a tragedy of displacement and asylum seeking. It argues that just like theatrical productions today, Shakespeare might have harked back to ancient Greek tragedy as a cultural resource for coming to terms with the challenges of immigration. It traces the possible migrations between the ritual of asylum seeking that was reflected in a number of Greek tragedies including Aeschylus’s Hiketides, the earliest surviving play about refugees from the fifth century BC, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. In this respect, this article is part of the current critical re-evaluation of the relations between Shakespeare’s work and ancient Greek tragedy. It places Coriolanus into the intertextual and intermedial hiketeia rhizome, in which one transmission line from Greek tragedy via Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Amyot, and North to Shakespeare can be corroborated by evidence, while other lines are more uncertain. Asking whether hiketeia, the ancient verbal and gestural repertoire of a stranger pleading for protection and integration into the polis, is only present as ‘rotten custom’ in Shakespeare’s tragedy, as a trace of cultural history without any considerable force in the new context, the article explores the paradoxical negotiation of displacement in Coriolanus, where both the exiled and the exiler become suppliants. It proposes that Shakespeare’s transformative reactivation of hiketeia as a theatrically, affectively, and politically potent form created an opportunity to negotiate the immigration crisis in Jacobean England.

Coda: Repositioning Early Modern Prague on the Global Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The City

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

Personalschriften als biographische Quelle. Ein Projekt zum personalen Gelegenheitsschrifttum in den Beständen der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha

Daphnis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466
Author(s):  
Stefan Anders
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Research Library ◽  
Joint Project ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People

This paper presents a joint project of the Institute for Early Modern Cultural History and the Research Library in Gotha, which is digitizing and making accessible about 8000 printed documents from the 16th to the 18th century. These documents were created on the occasion of such personal events as birth, marriage or death. During this process, numerous names of the people mentioned in these occasional documents are being identified and consolidated in a consistent format. The short biographies generated contain essential personal data, originating mostly from these documents but supplemented by information taken from reference books and other biographical resources. The huge potential of these occasional documents for the biographical reconstruction of persons of the early modern period is then demonstrated by a case study, which demonstrates the reliability of the collected data.

"Amore regolato": Papal Nephews and Their Palaces in Eighteenth-Century Rome

2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-91
Author(s):  
Heather Hyde Minor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Modern Period

In the early modern period, families of popes had an extraordinary ability to shape Rome's architectural and urban fabric. The most important architectural project of any papal family in the papal capital was their palace. In 1753, when Cardinal Neri Corsini contentedly surveyed his palace, the satisfaction he felt would have been familiar to papal relatives for more than 250 years. But unlike generations of papal nephews before him, Neri could take added pride in the fact that he had done it all on his own, relying on his wit rather than the papal coffers. The Palazzo Corsini, like the Palazzo Albani and the Palazzo Braschi, was a rarity in eighteenth-century Rome. Through a combination of the traditional practice of careful study of primary sources with cultural history, broadly conceived, this article illuminates the set of political exigencies and social circumstances that led to the extinction of this architectural form, which had shaped the Eternal City for centuries.

Telling Tales with Machines

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-106
Author(s):  
Fiona Macintosh ◽  
Justine McConnell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Modern Period

The connections between epic performances and technological innovation are longstanding, dating from the invention of the mechane in the fifth century BCE. In the early modern period they encompass Inigo Jones’ extraordinary scenic innovations, which he introduced in direct imitation of the Italians for the Court Masques in England from 1604 to 1640. With his complex machinery, Jones was able to effect movement across time and space and, especially, for the gods in his retellings. These scenic innovations, which were to endure for at least the next two-and-a-half centuries, were in many ways dictated by, and heavily dependent upon, epic’s divine machinery, its spectacular encounters and its multiple locations. Yet in 1781 the philosopher and critic James Harris praises Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1737) because they both avoid ‘using Machines, Deities, Prodigies, Spectres or anything else incomprehensible, or incredible’. The ‘merveilleux’ of tragedy, and especially the machines used to usher it into the action, were now deemed deeply problematic in the theatre of bourgeois realism. Throughout the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, the machinery associated with the gods was confined to ballet and opera. In recent years, however, in what is regularly dubbed the contemporary ‘posthuman’ world, where the boundaries between human and machine are increasingly blurred and artificial intelligences are not merely tools but potentially independent agencies, thinking about gods from machines has taken on new resonances.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Economic ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Major Field ◽  
Modern Period

Fewer than three hundred years ago there occurred the most fundamental reordering of human existence since the beginning of agriculture. How was this possible, involving as it did the disappearance of an entire and heavily defended way of life? The Industrial Revolution is a major field for economic and social historians. But explaining it requires us to understand a complex of developments across the early modern period connecting the sub-fields of environmental, economic, social, political, intellectual and cultural history, and to examine the unfolding of world-changing processes and events, including the large-scale migration of peoples....

scholarly journals Nulti stupanj reprezentacije: Umjetnost, tehnika i slikovno pojavljivanje

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Krešimir Purgar
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Actual Reality ◽  
The Status ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship

My starting hypothesis in the theory of pictorial appearing is that Gottfried Boehm’s notion of iconic difference can serve as a sufficiently comprehensive concept for differentiating between image and non-image in all visual artefacts that have been created during the several millennia of visual representation. This era started with the first paleolithic drawings and includes the entire visual production from the period “before art”, as well as all those visual representations that emerged in the early modern period beyond the needs of religious worship, only to be substituted through the technosphere. However, since the technosphere is characterized by increasingly evolved systems of visual immersion, from the all-accessible OLED screen and IMAX cinema theatres to Oculus Rift glasses and further to the experience of total immersion, which recreates synesthetic visual-haptic impressions, ontological differentiation between the visual surface as such and the extra-iconic reality can no longer be established with the idea of difference alone. Namely, the notion of difference can serve as a qualifier for defining the relationship between the separate categories in an object – in our case, the pictorial and non-pictorial ones – only insofar as the reality in which they are situated is identical or equivalent. Thus, nobody questions the clear ontological separation between the two-dimensional represented reality such as established in cinematic fiction and the non-represented, that is actual reality existing outside of that fiction. Many films and artworks count on that implied separation and can therefore afford to question the borderline between the two, primarily within a strictly artistic discourse. Boehm’s theory of iconic difference and Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of the cut have helped establish the semiotic-phenomenological criteria for a theoretical differentiation between various experiences that are innate to man’s picture of the world. In other words, the difference or ontological cut between image and non-image can exist only because even a modestly capable individual can empirically grasp these two categories. However, my hypothesis is that iconic difference reveals itself as an inadequate concept for that ontological cut, not only because the status and the possibilities of human experience are radically altered in the time and space of the technosphere, but also because this new type of experience has not yet been “normalized” within the process that Flint Schier has termed “natural generativity”. The space and time of the technosphere require that one should no longer approach the image merely as the ancient Greek eikon, i.e. mirroring or representation, but rather as an experience, event, and a specific type of phenomenon. The modalities of pictorial appearing in the technosphere can be recognized as symptoms of the most recent visual turn, in any case the first in the 21st century, which no longer occurs in an encounter between image and language, as lucidly described by Mitchell and Boehm, but in an encounter between analogue and digital images, between representation and post-representation, reality and virtuality, semiotics and phenomenology. In order to understand this epochally new reality, one can use concepts such as Bolter’s and Grusin’s remediation, or Žarko Paić’s idea of the technosphere, as well as some other approaches, such as Paul Crowther’s categorization of “transhistorical images” or the phenomenologically based interpretation of art and images that Martin Seel has termed “the aesthetics of appearing”.

scholarly journals Introduction

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-13
Author(s):  
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
North American ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
European History ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Central European ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Works Of Art

This issue of Central European History may at first seem some-what unexpected. All the following papers pertain to the early modern period. All of them moreover originated in connection with an exhibition of works of art, “Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680. A Selection from North American Collections,” its published catalogue, and a symposium, “The Culture of the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680,” held on the occasion of the exhibition's opening. The papers published in this issue are accordingly essays in art, literary, intellectual, and, more generally, cultural history; some words may be needed to explain how they come to appear here now.

Original editions about China and its inhabitants of the rare book section of the Scientific Library of the Petrozavodsk State University

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
Nataliya Vladimirovna Smirnova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
State University ◽  
Rare Book ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Architectural Structures ◽  
Oriental Studies ◽  
Chinese Empire

The article analyzes the features of everyday life of the Chinese and the originality of architectural structures in China in early modern period in the memoirs of travelers of the XVIII-early XX century and lectures of academician I.I. Gornostaev. The article shows the significance of the original publications of oriental studies of the rare book section of the Petrozavodsk State University Scientific Library in the study of the cultural history of the Chinese Empire.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Ashley L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of what the two Indies reveal about the literary and cultural history of British imperialism. A watershed in the history of the Indies pairing was the Seven Years' War (1756–63). Arguably the first global war, its battlefields spanned four hemispheres and five continents. After centuries of straggling behind other European powers in the race to lead the global economy and amass colonial possessions, Britain emerged from this conflict in a nearly uncontested position of geopolitical dominance. Most importantly, victory over France and its allies secured Britain a worldwide empire whose outline traced the shape of the Indies. This was the source of the pairing's renewed “vitality.” In the early modern period, the Indies had been amalgamated by virtue of fantasy. Post-1763, India and the Americas were densely interwoven in the fabric of the global economy, stitched together by the threads of British imperial policy.

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