Experiments with Theosophical Truth

2020 ◽  
pp. 345-374
Author(s):  
Michael Bergunder

This chapter argues that there is strong textual evidence to suggest that M. K. Gandhi’s notion of Hinduism, his specific view of Christianity, and his general belief that all religions refer to the same truth were shaped by the ideas of the Theosophical Society. The chapter presents the respective sources, discusses their plausibility, and puts these findings into perspective. This perspective is provided by a global history approach, which holds that the religious concepts in play since the nineteenth century were already products of globally “entangled histories.” Furthermore, it is argued that the impact of esotericism on global religious history, from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, needs to be investigated with more academic rigor.

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Basini

This essay sets the late sacred works of Giuseppe Verdi in the context of the late-nineteenth-century fascination for the revival, performance, and festive celebration of historical cultural figures and artworks. From the 1870s onward, certain artistic trends became prevalent in post-unification Italy: anxiety to instill a sense of nation into art and everyday life, nostalgia for a vanished golden age of Italian artistic history, and an ever more energetic revival of historical artistic forms and styles. These currents were stimulated by a nationalistic Catholic revivalism that, I argue, was the strongest influence on Verdi's late career. I outline Verdi's reception in and his personal association with the Catholic revivalist movement, developing a view of Verdi's late life and works as articulating shifting trends in the Church and conservatory. As well as revealing the impact of revivalist aesthetics on the style of works such as Verdi's Pater noster, this inquiry suggests that revivalism contributed to a "canonization" of his image that intertwined civic and religious history.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 229-257
Author(s):  
Giovanni Maltese ◽  
Julian Strube

Abstract Understandings of religion have been fundamentally transformed since the nineteenth century. The respective contradictions, ambiguities, continuities, and ruptures can be most comprehensively grasped when viewed against the background of global entanglements. For this purpose, the approach of global religious history proposes a range of theoretical and methodological tools. Its theoretical repertoire is largely informed by a critical engagement with poststructuralist epistemology and postcolonial perspectives embedded in a consistent genealogical approach. At the outset, it aims at bridging divisions, including those between postcolonial and global history, between disciplines such as religious studies and history, as well as between different area studies. This implies a theoretically robust reflexion of the question of what global entanglements mean in global religious history, along with the question of how to distinguish global religious history from approaches usually qualified by the prefix trans as, for example, in “transregional.” In this introduction, we offer an in-depth discussion of the theoretical foundations and methodological implications of global religious history.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 210-223
Author(s):  
Anna Burton

In The Woodlanders (1887), Hardy uses the texture of Hintock woodlands as more than description: it is a terrain of personal association and local history, a text to be negotiated in order to comprehend the narrative trajectory. However, upon closer analysis of these arboreal environs, it is evident that these woodscapes are simultaneously self-contained and multi-layered in space and time. This essay proposes that through this complex topographical construction, Hardy invites the reader to read this text within a physical and notional stratigraphical framework. This framework shares similarities with William Gilpin's picturesque viewpoint and the geological work of Gideon Mantell: two modes of vision that changed the observation of landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This comparative discussion at once reviews the perception of the arboreal prospect in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures, and also questions the impact of these modes of thought on the woodscapes of The Woodlanders.


Author(s):  
George E. Dutton

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.


2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.


Modern Italy ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Omar Mazzotti ◽  
Massimo Fornasari

This article examines the dissemination of agricultural education in primary schools in the Romagna, an important rural area in post-unification Italy. The topic is explored within a wider perspective, analysing the impact of institutional changes – at both the national and local levels – on the transmission of agricultural knowledge in primary education during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Two particular elements of the process are examined: students, as the intended beneficiaries of the educational process; and teachers, who as well as having a key role in reducing the extent of illiteracy were sometimes also involved in disseminating agricultural knowledge. The transfer of that knowledge appears to have been a very challenging task, not least because of the scant interest that Italy's ruling class showed towards this issue. However, increasing importance seems to have been given to agricultural education in primary schools during the economic crisis of the 1880s, when the expansion of this provision was thought to be among the factors that might help to prepare the ground for the hoped-for ‘agricultural revolution’.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
W. Walker Hanlon ◽  
Casper Worm Hansen ◽  
Jake Kantor

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.


1988 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Boyer

The article examines the development of the insurance function of trade unions. It analyzes how such policies worked, and why union benefit packages differed across occupations. It also addresses the impact of insurance policies on union organization. Insurance benefits increased the ability of unions to attract and retain members. They did not, however, significantly increase the power of union leaders relative to employers or union rank and file.


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