A Fish Tale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ava Chamberlain
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Face

Ava Chamberlain treats Jonthan Edwards’ interpretation of the biblical story of Jonah, comparing it with that of Cotton Mather and that of early modern skeptics. In this case study, she shows how exegetes like Edwards and Mather probed the meaning of Hebrew terms and considered how the biblical account accorded with the natural world—all in the face of those who derided the Jonah story as a farce. Her work highlights how early modern questions about the Bible’s historicity informed and affected the exegesis of Protestants like Edwards and Mather. It also demonstrates that although Edwards and Mather engaged the biblical text in many similar ways, Edwards also differed in the degree to which he emphasized the need for divine grace to understand the Bible, a forceful assertion of supernaturalism against the emerging naturalism of his time.

GLOSSING THE GLOSS: READING PETER LOMBARD’SCOLLECTANEAON THE PAULINE EPISTLES AS A HISTORICAL ACT

Traditio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 83-116
Author(s):  
PETER O'HAGAN
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Classroom Activity ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Pauline Epistles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extended Analysis

Peter Lombard's influential commentary on the Pauline Epistles, theCollectanea in omnes divi Pauli epistolas,has received little extended analysis in scholarly literature, despite its recognized importance both in its own right and as key for the development of hisSentences.This article presents a new approach to studying theCollectaneaby analyzing how Lombard's commentary builds on theGlossa “Ordinaria”on the Pauline Epistles. The article argues for treating theCollectaneaas a “historical act,” focusing on how Lombard engages with the biblical text and with authoritative sources within which he encounters the same biblical text embedded. The article further argues for the necessity of turning to the manuscripts of both theCollectaneaand theGlossa,rather than continuing to rely on inadequate early modern printed editions or thePatrologia Latina.The article then uses Lombard's discussion of faith at Romans 1:17 as a case study, demonstrating the way in which Lombard begins from theGlossa,clarifies its ambiguities, and moves his analysis forward through his use of otherauctoritatesand theologicalquaestiones.A comparison with Lombard's treatment of faith in theSentenceshighlights the close links between Lombard's biblical lectures and this later work. The article concludes by arguing that scholastic biblical exegesis and theology should be treated as primarily a classroom activity, with the glossed Bible as the central focus. Discussion of Lombard's work should draw on much recent scholarship that has begun to uncover the layers of orality within the textual history of scholastic works.

scholarly journals Jezik kot posoda Duha pri Luthru in Trubarju ▪︎ Luther and Trubar’s View on Language as the Vessel of the Spirit

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (33) ◽  
pp. 71-81
Author(s):  
Fanika Krajnc-Vrečko
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
National Language ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Basic Tool ◽  
The Bible ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Slovene Language

The discussion sheds light on the conception or understanding of the national language of two prominent personalities of the 16th-century Reformation: the German reformer Martin Luther and the Slovene Protestant and most important reformer Primož Trubar. For both authors, language serves as a basic tool for preaching the gospel in their mother tongues. They accomplish this by translating the Bible, and they each in their own way justify the use of the mother tongue as the means through which the Spirit of God is embodied. Both Luther and Trubar consolidate the biblical text in early modern European languages: Luther in the New High German and Trubar in the Slovene language, which had not appeared in books until the publication of his printed texts. Both authors developed their own language programme that can be compared and from which both Protestants’ view on language can be discerned, which was based on the realization that God used languages when he wanted the gospel to spread among all people.

scholarly journals “Nature’s Bastards”: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Claire Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Reproduction Humaine

This paper examines the shared rhetoric between human and horticultural generation in early modern England, particularly focusing on grafting. Early modern English gardening manuals imagine grafting as a method of controlling generation in the natural world, and early modern English obstetrical treatises imagine the female generative body in horticultural language. Alongside these scientific texts, this article uses Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a literary case study of grafting rhetoric. Ultimately, while grafting treatises imagine man’s power over generation in the natural world and obstetrical treatises imagine controlling human generation using horticultural metaphor, The Winter’s Tale complicates this fantasy by depicting Leontes’s efforts at genealogical control as unnecessary and fruitless: not only do Perdita and Hermione survive and flourish after his attempts to kill them, but Perdita is the legitimate and non-grafted offspring of Hermione and Leontes. Cet article examine la rhétorique que partagent la reproduction humaine et l’horticulture en Angleterre au début de l’époque moderne. Les ouvrages portant sur les jardins, à l’époque, représentent la greffe comme une méthode pour contrôler la reproduction dans le monde naturel, tandis que les ouvrages d’obstétrique de la même époque représentent la capacité reproductrice du corps féminin en termes d’horticulture. A côté de ces textes scientifiques, on se sert dans cet article de la pièce de Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale comme exemple de la rhétorique de la greffe. En dernière analyse, tandis que les ouvrages décrivant la greffe représentent la puissance humaine sur la reproduction dans le monde naturel et que les ouvrages d’obstétrique représentent la reproduction humaine avec des métaphores tirées de l’horticulture, The Winter’s Tale vient compliquer cet imaginaire en présentant comme futiles les tentatives de contrôle généalogique de Leontes : non seulement Perdita et Hermione survivent et fleurissent après les tentatives de meurtre, mais encore Perdita est le fruit légitime non-greffé des amours d’Hermione et Leontes.

scholarly journals De functie van parabels (mesjalim) in de Tanchuma

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-168
Author(s):  
Ronit Nikolsky
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Cultural Role ◽  
Sacrifice Of Isaac

Abstract This article takes the narrative nature of parables seriously and looks at their role from this perspective. After theorizing the cognition- and cultural role of stories, four meshalim from the Tanhuma Midrashim are studied: ‘Grasshoppers in a jar’ (about the Tower of Babel), ‘Abraham’s circumcision’, ‘The baby on the table’ (about the sacrifice of Isaac), and ‘The calf and its mother’ (about Joseph and the Egyptian exile). The conclusion of this case study is that the role of meshalim is not to interpret the biblical text as such, but to change the audience’s attitude toward the biblical story. For this, the points of agreement between the mashal and the biblical story need only be minimal. In order to effectuate this new attitude, the meshalim in the Tanchuma Midrashim, which are usually based on earlier midrash on the said biblical text, adopt these existing midrashim while at the same time transforming them into new stories that are more suitable for the Tanchuma audience. Usually this amounts to a ‘softening’ of the message of the existing, earlier midrash.

Calvinism and Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 94-114
Author(s):  
Mark S. Sweetnam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
John Donne ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe

Calvinists wrote indefatigably, flooding early modern Europe with sermons and commentaries, theological treatises and works of polemic. But for some critics, early modern Calvinism has seemed fundamentally inimical to the production of literature in any form. These views have retreated in the face of recent work, which has highlighted—or, at any rate, acknowledged—the Calvinism of some significant authors. These efforts have been most sustained where the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert is concerned. The critical history of these two poets provides us with an excellent, if not altogether encouraging, case study in the search for a Calvinist poetic.

The Mappe and the Bible: Nation, Empire and the Collective Memory of Jonah

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 476-500
Author(s):  
Simon Staffell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Modern Period

AbstractThis article uses the work of the English cartographer John Speed as a way to explore the role of the collective memory of Jonah in social and political discourses during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The paper engages with debates concerning nationalism during the early modern period. Collective memory theory is also used to consider how Jonah became a reified site of memory. By placing Speed's writing alongside the works of his forebears and examining the function of the Jonah text within three sermons, the evolving collective memory of the biblical text, and its imagined attachment to national identity, is traced. It is suggested that Speed's cartographic selectivity in depicting biblical narratives can be seen in relation to the nascent nationalist and imperialist worldviews and ideologies of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

The Fixation of (Moral) Belief

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Hoover Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Institutional Logics ◽  
Moral Belief ◽  
Moral Conflict ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
Moral Conflicts ◽  
The Face ◽  
Moral Claims

AbstractThis article argues that the transition between early-modern and modern organization of empires—especially the administrative outlooks and institutional logics used to govern them—revolved around how moral conflict was viewed within imperial organizations themselves and by metropolitan audiences. Early modern imperial organizations were deeply patrimonial, and hence relied on a style of embedded moral reasoning that distanced and segmented their affairs from the metropole. By contrast, modern empires order what they govern in hierarchies that are nominally objective and whose criteria seem universal. Using a case study of the British Empire’s crisis and transformation at the turn of the 19thcentury, I argue that modern imperial administration emerged because networks of moral justification, which provided the scaffolding for patrimonial early-modern empire, eroded in the face of “disinterested” metropolitan scrutiny. This scrutiny created an audience for bitter political and moral conflicts among imperial administrators, who then used disembedded moral claims to mobilize support.

Jacob Wrestling with “a Man”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Noll
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
The Bible

Mark A. Noll provides a detailed comparison of Jonthan Edwards’ biblical interpretation with that of other interpreters in his surrounding context by focusing on Genesis 32:22–32, the account of Jacob wrestling with “a man,” as a case study. He offers a careful comparative analysis of Edwards’ exegesis of this passage across his corpus, and then he compares him with six exegetes: Matthew Poole, Matthew Henry, Cotton Mather, August Hermann Francke, Charles Wesley, and Thomas Scott. These interpreters represent eras prior to, during, and after Edwards’ lifetime; some come from his theological tradition, whereas others do not. By tracing continuities and discontinuities in this exercise, Noll makes incisive observations about Edwards’ exegesis and proposes paths forward in the study of Edwards’ engagement with the Bible.

The Stock Ticker in the Garden: Frank Norris, American Literary Naturalism, and Capitalocene Aesthetics

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-511
Author(s):  
Phillip R. Polefrone
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Frank Norris ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The University ◽  
Financial Transactions ◽  
Influential Theory

Abstract This essay argues that American literary naturalism engages with the Anthropocene at the moment it began to be visible, the turn of the twentieth century, and specifically identifies the role of finance in precipitating the crisis. Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903) offer a case study of a naturalist Capitalocene aesthetics, one capable of capturing global capitalism’s destructive planetary agency. As a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Frank Norris was exposed to Joseph LeConte’s influential theory of the Psychozoic era, a proto-Anthropocene theory from 1877 that named a new unit of geologic time in light of humanity’s status as a transformative planetary force. Norris adapted this theory into a critique of a rapidly globalizing capitalism’s effects on the planet and the natural world, particularly the structures of agricultural capitalism in which complex financial transactions led to destructive wheat monocultures. This critique anticipated the Capitalocene, a contemporary offshoot of the Anthropocene theory arguing that capitalism (rather than humanity per se) is responsible for the present planetary crisis. The vehicle of Norris’s critique is his multimedia landscape descriptions, which invoke and subvert Romantic landscape aesthetics through painterly language and visual paradox. At the center of this aesthetics is a contradiction in individual and collective agency that is also central to life and art in the Capitalocene: confronted with an anthropogenic landscape that is both destroyed and made sublime by the structures of capitalism, individual viewers both feel powerless in the face of the force it represents and feel themselves implicated in its creation, despite different levels of responsibility.

Possessing the Iconic Book

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 309-329
Author(s):  
Claudia V. Camp
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Ben Sira ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Woman Wisdom ◽  
Martin Marty

I propose that the notion of possession adds an important ideological nuance to the analyses of iconic books set forth by Martin Marty (1980) and, more recently, by James Watts (2006). Using the early second century BCE book of Sirach as a case study, I tease out some of the symbolic dynamics through which the Bible achieved iconic status in the first place, that is, the conditions in which significance was attached to its material, finite shape. For Ben Sira, this symbolism was deeply tied to his honor-shame ethos in which women posed a threat to the honor of his eternal name, a threat resolved through his possession of Torah figured as the Woman Wisdom. What my analysis suggests is that the conflicted perceptions of gender in Ben Sira’s text is fundamental to his appropriation of, and attempt to produce, authoritative religious literature, and thus essential for understanding his relationship to this emerging canon. Torah, conceived as female, was the core of this canon, but Ben Sira adds his own literary production to this female “body” (or feminized corpus, if you will), becoming the voice of both through the experience of perfect possession.

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