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.

3. The history of political thought and Marxism

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Friedrich Engels

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.

Straight from the Heart: The Great Vibrato Debate

2020 ◽  
pp. 227-238
Author(s):  
Walter S. Reiter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sound Production ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
History Of

Vibrato, its uses and misuses, has been a topic debated for centuries, with sources from all periods agreeing that it is an ornament to heighten expression that should not be over-used, which apparently it often was! This lesson traces the history of vibrato from the sixteenth century until today, using numerous quotes referring both to the violin and to other instruments. The continuous vibrato taught today as an essential aspect of sound production developed only in the twentieth century and was criticized at the time by prominent musicians. The lesson asks for what purpose and how much it was used in the Baroque period, by what technical means it was produced, and to what extent, if at all, it altered the pitch of a note. Two exercises seek to reproduce vibrato techniques as described at the start of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and another investigates how playing chinless affects vibrato.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-147
Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Academic Dissertations

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

The female contribution to language studies in Portugal

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Sónia Coelho ◽  
Susana Fontes ◽  
Rolf Kemmler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Educational Context ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women's Role

This chapter analyses the contribution of women to the history of linguistics in Portugal from the sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century. To carry out this investigation archivist, bibliographic, and hemerographic sources have been consulted in order to understand this specific context. It has been used in a variety of sources that are representative of the women’s role in the linguistics field but also in the area of education and in the society in general. These sources range from grammars, dictionaries, and translations to texts on feminine conduct and education, literary and official texts. This essay follows a chronological order with a section for each century. In order to understand the role played by women and the difficulties they faced at that time, each section starts with an educational context, followed by the contributions in the production of materials in the field of linguistics by and for women.

Maritime Archaeological Studies in India

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniruddh S. Gaur ◽  
Kamlesh H. Vora
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Indian Coast ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
Detailed Work

India has played a major role in Indian Ocean trade and the development of shipbuilding technology. The study of the maritime history of India commenced in the first decade of the twentieth century and was largely based on literary data. Maritime archaeological investigations have been undertaken at various places along the Indian coast, such as in Dwarka, Pindara, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Maharashtra coast, the Tamil Nadu coast, etc. Despite a long coastline and a rich maritime history, there are no proper coastal records or records of shipwrecks that are preserved, except some literary references, which suggest a large number of shipwrecks dating between the early sixteenth century and the nineteenth century. This article discusses important shipwrecks on which detailed work is in progress.

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.

Gender and the historiography of science

1993 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludmilla Jordanova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Historiography Of Science ◽  
Logical Reason ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
Intellectual Maturity

The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity of a field. It suggests both that the field's broad contours, refined over several generations of scholarship, enjoy the approval of practitioners, and that audiences exist with an interest in or need for overviews. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the history of science, since the existence of big historical pictures precedes that of a well-defined scholarly field by about two centuries. Broadly conceived histories of science and medicine were being written in the eighteenth century, when such an all-encompassing vision was central to the claims about the progress of knowledge upon which Enlightenment ideologues set such store. The Plato to Nato style histories, characteristic of the earlier twentieth century, were written largely by isolated pioneers, and while these were used in teaching as the field was becoming professionalized, recent scholars have preferred to concentrate on a monographic style of research. Despite the existence of the series started by Wiley, and now published by Cambridge University Press, it is only in the last ten years or so that more conscious attempts have been made to generate a big-picture literature informed by new scholarship. It is noteworthy that most of this is addressed to students and general readers, although there is no logical reason why it should not tackle major theoretical issues of concern to scholars. My point about maturity still holds, then, since as a designated discipline the history of science is rather new; it is still feeling out its relationship with cognate disciplines. Big-picture histories have an important role to play in these explorations since they make findings and ideas widely available and thereby offer material through which ambitious interpretations can be debated, modified and transformed.

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