Musical Classicisms in Italy Before the Madrigal

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Shephard
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Multiple Copy ◽  
Professional Interest

Abstract Modern evaluations of the relation between music and the fashion for the antique in Italy in the period before the madrigal have tended to proceed from the perspective of intellectual history. This article aims to offer an alternative—although certainly related—perspective, by exploring the circulation of musical classicisms in Italian visual and material culture, roughly from 1450 to 1520. This period saw the rise to prominence in Italy of both commercial text printing and other multiple-copy formats such as the art print, the medal, the bronze plaquette, and a little later historiated maiolica. These technologies offer a particularly compelling lens through which to examine musical encounters with classical antiquity that were not motivated by an expert professional interest in either music or classical texts, but rather characterized by an investment in antiquity as a fashionable source of cultural capital.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

IS THERE AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF EARLY AMERICAN WOMEN?

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
John Adams ◽  
James I ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Susan Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006)Consider Abigail Adams. Known to us mostly through over one thousand letters that she exchanged with her husband, John Adams, she was a woman of redoubtable intelligence and energy. Wife of the second president of the United States, she was mother to its sixth. She traveled to France and England, rubbing elbows with dukes and diplomats; she read deeply in history and literature; she supported the literacy of black children; she was a conduit for the American reception of Catharine Macaulay's republican-friendly History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–8). The letters between John and Abigail fly so fast and furious, are so full of learned banter and palpable yearning, that their marriage appears strikingly modern, a union of equals. Let us not be deceived. Abigail Adams, like other women of her generation even in the social stratosphere, had no formal schooling, and her erudition was dwarfed by the massive learning bestowed upon John. He had a Harvard BA and read law for three years. He took for granted a vast public arena in which to unleash his colossal, if tortured, political ambitions. Abigail never published a word.

Diogenes Laertius and Philosophical Lives

2020 ◽  
pp. 250-266
Author(s):  
Stephen White
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy ◽  
Modern Perspective

This chapter addresses Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, which recounts the doings, sayings, and writings of the leading figures of ancient Greek philosophy from its origins down to its rapid efflorescence and institutionalization in the fourth and third centuries bc, with occasional glimpses of its continuing vitality in the centuries beyond. Diogenes’ Lives is an exceptional work on many counts. For one, it is the single largest collection of Lives to survive from classical Antiquity, handily surpassing Plutarch in number and scope if not in depth or length, and so too Philostratus and Suetonius. It is also a key witness to the early stages of biographical literature in the fourth and third centuries bc. At the same time, it presents the single most comprehensive account of the origins and development of an entire discipline, and a distinctive form of intellectual history from a biographical perspective. It also, accordingly, represents a distinctive form of life-writing, framed by basic biographical data but lean, often very lean on the standard biographical fare—from a modern perspective at least—of incident and narrative, and governed instead by its disciplinary orientation, and its sustained focus on philosophy as a distinctive cultural practice and way to live.

Memorial Museum: Existential Optics of Space

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-2) ◽  
pp. 389-409
Author(s):  
Lev Letyagin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Authenticity ◽  
Key Aspects

The modern museum is not only in the sphere of mass interests, but also serves as a reflection and expression of certain mass trends. While maintaining the status of a classical cultural institution, it was to a large extent precisely the museum that has become an arena of public discord on determining the strategies of cultural reproduction. This issue gains a pronouncedly contentious character due to the rapid development of information formats of traditional leisure now including interactive technologies, arbitrary historical reconstructions, elements of theatricalization. In “Escape from Amnesia” (A. Huyssen) the ‘society of total spectacle’ demands searching for new means, which often contribute to loss and substitution of values. The visitor’s interest towards the history of the quotidian greatly influences the dynamics of changing the creative potential of a museum, predominantly a memorial museum. Long-term practices of modeling the historical space reveal the internal form of the concept of ‘ex-position’. This is the natural cause of an internal conflict, when being ‘arranged in a straight line’ replaces the principles of accurate and documentally verified positioning of memorial objects. ‘Museumness’ should not supplant ‘the quotidian’, ‘the existential’; however, the functional principle of arranging the objects, their ‘pattern’ is often replaced by the composite approach, in which ‘decorative’ or ‘design’ solutions become dominant. This trend actively competes with the key theoretical foundations of museum source studies, and the traditional museum is increasingly transforming into a kind of parallel model of culture. The memorial object, as a fact of intellectual history, is significant within the material culture and spiritual heritage. At the same time, the alleged meanings and false semiotization often substitute the biographical realities, when ‘fit for exposition’ is everything that the mass museum visitor connects in his mind with his arbitrary understanding of the past. These are key aspects of the subject of modern museum criticism. This article discloses our understanding of the memorial exposition as a self-organizing system with a certain aesthetic code. Methodologically significant is the existential turn towards ‘evidence paradigm’ – giving up the impersonal demonstration of old things. This is a turn towards the model ‘things-speak’ (self-awareness, self-disclosure of things) – towards the structure that communicates ideas and life meanings. It is where the memorial object, understood as ‘message’, ‘material communication’, can disclose the fullness of its historical authenticity.

VENUS ON THE SOFA: WOMEN, NEOCLASSICISM, AND THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Early National ◽  
Mercy Otis Warren ◽  
History Of

What did early national Americans mean when they articulated fears of “luxury and effeminacy,” those twin sins of a republic that idolized the classical virtues of manly self-restraint? This essay argues that the fear of luxury and effeminacy circulated not just as airy metaphor but as palpable reality, specifically in the figure of the female recumbent on the sofa. The article traces separately the careers of Enlightenment Venus, who especially in her recumbent form embodied fears of passion in a republic built on reasoned consent, and the sofa, a piece of neoclassical furniture that rose to great popularity at this time and was envisioned as both effeminate and luxurious in fictional and nonfiction writing. The essay then joins the two figures of recumbent Venus and the sofa, showing how they were mutually enabling, and how they entered into early national conversations about labor and race. It concludes by examining how two educated American women, the self-described Roman matrons Mercy Otis Warren and Martha Bayard Smith, incorporated the image of the supine woman and her implied sofa into fictional writings about classical polities in danger. By knitting political ideologies, imaginative worlds, and neoclassical objects, the essay suggests a way for historians to flesh out the intellectual history of early national women, showing how they could participate in a conversation about modern politics and classical antiquity from which we have assumed they were largely disbarred.

Aspects of knowledge

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cross Sections ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Postgraduate Students ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literature History

This edited collection explores how knowledge was preserved and reinvented in the Middle Ages. Unlike previous publications, which are predominantly focused either on a specific historical period or on precise cultural and historical events, this volume, which includes essays spanning from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, is intended to eschew traditional categorisations of periodisation and disciplines and to enable the establishment of connections and cross-sections between different departments of knowledge, including the history of science (computus, prognostication), the history of art, literature, theology (homilies, prayers, hagiography, contemplative texts), music, historiography and geography. As suggested by its title, the collection does not pretend to aim at inclusiveness or comprehensiveness but is intended to highlight suggestive strands of what is a very wide topic. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four sections: I, Anthologies of Knowledge; II Transmission of Christian Traditions; III, Past and Present; and IV, Knowledge and Materiality, which are intended to provide the reader with a further thematic framework for approaching aspects of knowledge. Aspects of knowledge is mainly aimed to an academic readership, including advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and specialists of medieval literature, history of science, history of knowledge, history, geography, theology, music, philosophy, intellectual history, history of the language and material culture.

Eighteenth-Century Antiquity: Extended, Embodied, Enacted

2019 ◽  
pp. 219-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Slaney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Enactive Cognition ◽  
Tableaux Vivants ◽  
Physical Limitations ◽  
The Aesthetic

Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vase collection, assembled at Naples between the 1760s and 1790s, became a turning point in the reception of ancient material culture and hence in perceptions of classical antiquity. This chapter compares three angles of approach to the collection, each corresponding to a strand of distributed cognition. Extended cognition is represented by the catalogue which made the collection available to the reading public; embodied cognition is represented by the dance performances of Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife, who based her tableaux vivants of ancient life around the images represented on the vases; and enactive cognition by the aesthetic theory of the ‘feeling imagination’ developed by philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited the Hamiltons at Naples and commented unfavourably on Emma’s performances. I argue that Herder’s rejection of Emma’s kinetic reception of ancient artwork was predicated in part on his reluctance to place physical limitations on simulated movement.

Afterword

Making Milton ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 216-220
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Sauer
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Book History ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Key Features

The Afterword situates the subject of ‘making Milton’ in the broader context of Milton’s value, that is, of making Milton matter, historically, intellectually, and materially. Sauer explains how the volume’s contributions bring Milton Studies into conversation with scholarship on book history, material culture, and the mechanisms of public dissemination. The volume’s tripartite structure is shown to highlight relationships among printing and book trade practices, authorship, and the generation of afterlives, while the collection at large demonstrates how the historical and material operations of ‘making Milton’ intersect. Marking a material turn in Milton Studies, Making Milton serves as a welcome resource and rewarding contribution to the cultural capital of collective book production and reception. While reviewing the book’s key features and arguments, the Afterword also maps out future directions in this ever expanding field.

EVOLUTION OF PROFESSIONAL INTEREST FOR ANONYMOUS LANGUAGE PHENOMENON

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-93
Author(s):  
Evgeniya A. REPINA ◽  
Dariya N. ROMANOVA
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Vernacular Architecture ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Professional Interest ◽  
Professional Field

The relevance of modern Russian anonymous architecture is studied. The evolution of the concept «anonymous» and the variety of its connotations in different contexts are viewed. A brief overview of researches influenced on new values formation is presented. Philosophical and cultural background of inclusion of anonymous language in professional field are analyzed as well as mutual influence of artistic and architectural practices. The question of research typological boundaries is raised. The examples of anonymous language legitimation in Russian and world professional architectural practice are presented. Potential values of Russian vernacular architecture are revealed and classified for professional practice. Objects created by non-professionals demonstrate respect for the place, cultural continuity, careful attitude to things, to manual labor and love of folk material culture.

Social and monumental space in Neolithic Thessaly, Greece

2001 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stratos Nanoglou
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Late Neolithic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Monumental Space

The article considers the ways in which material culture and especially architecture is used in the negotiation of social relationships in Neolithic settlements in Thessaly, Greece. Thus it reconstructs the possibilities past agents had to form an identity in relation to houses and subsequently the consequences of two different habitation strategies, i.e. rebuilding on the same spot or relocation to another area, in relation to the conceptualization of time and the past. It is suggested that the different entanglement of memories with the material culture played an important role in the negotiation of relationships, by allowing agents to use the past as cultural capital and, even more, in the late Neolithic, to appropriate its reference points spatially and thus lay preferential claims over it.

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