Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
To Come ◽  
Considerable Body

Ushering the reader into both the world of early modern radical religion and the considerable body of scholarly literature devoted to its study, the introduction offers a précis of what is to come and a backward glance to explain how the proposed journey contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations. After orienting readers to the basic methodological boundaries within which the book will operate and briefly situating the book within the wider historiography, the introduction adumbrates the shape of the work as a whole and encapsulates its central argument. The introduction contends that the mid-seventeenth-century men and women often described as “Particular Baptists” would not have readily understood themselves as such. This tension between the self-identity of the early modern actors and the identity imposed upon them by future scholars has significant implications for how we understand both radical religion during the English Revolution and the period more broadly.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-156
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Baptist Identity ◽  
Central Argument

The conclusion considers how the book’s central argument might impinge more broadly upon the widespread historiographical assumption that one can appropriately and coherently describe a distinctive “Baptist” identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum. The labels with which we describe the past inevitably presuppose and project an interpretation of that past. But these embedded interpretations are almost always implicit rather than explicit and often inherited from historiographical predecessors rather than chosen with intention and care. Religious labels often confuse rather than clarify, and it is not at all obvious that the labels affixed to mid-seventeenth-century “Baptists” have helped to clarify the self-identity of the men and women they purport to describe.

Orthodox Radicals

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Infant Baptism ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Baptist Identity ◽  
Ongoing Project

Orthodox Radicals explores the origins and identity of Baptists during the English Revolution (1640–1660), arguing that mid-seventeenth century Baptists did not, in fact, understand themselves to be part of a larger, all-encompassing “Baptist” movement. Contrary to both the explicit statements of many historians and the tacit suggestion embedded in the very use of “Baptist” as an overarching historical category, the early modern men and women who rejected infant baptism would not have initially understood that single theological move as being in itself constitutive of a new group identity. Rather, the rejection of infant baptism was but one of a number of doctrinal revisions then taking place among English puritans eager to further their ongoing project of godly reformation. Orthodox Radicals thus complicates our understanding of Baptist identity and addresses broader themes including early modern religious toleration, the mechanisms by which early modern groups defined and defended themselves, and the perennial problem of historical anachronism. By combining a provocative reinterpretation Baptist identity with close readings of key theological and political texts, Orthodox Radicals offers the most original and stimulating analysis of mid-seventeenth century Baptists in decades.

Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
CYNTHIA TALBOT
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractThe Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

“The Necessary Ornaments of Place”

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Mana Kia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
The World

This article analyzes representations of place in seventeenth-century texts to consider how early modern Persians made sense of the world. The Persian formulation of alterity stands in contrast to Edward Said’s formulation about Orientalism, by which Europe makes itself into the West. In early modern Persianate Asia, common representations of place appear in geographical and travel writing. These shared features, which I call ornaments, adorned both places that shared a learned Persian language, Muslim rule, and those beyond, in other parts of Asia and Africa. The presence or absence of these ornaments made the world intelligible for early modern Persians, creating categories of similarity and alterity that were partial, diffuse, and aporetic, defying the self-other distinctions of Orientalism. This form of knowledge about the self and the world then generated the possibility for encounters different from both modern colonial power and the nation-state.

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

Sensual Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Landscapes

This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms of being in the world.” There exist, after all, multiple manners of sensing and shaping an apparently stubborn reality. The chapter shows how black Mohanes fundamentally fashioned novel ways of sensing the early modern Caribbean world. In the absence of common linguistic and cultural grounds, the chapter shows, black Caribbean ritual practitioners became involved in a new sensorial imbrication of Atlantic threads of all origins. It was through this essential process that Caribbean Mohanes fashioned routes for making perceivable the spiritual and social landscapes of their new land. These paths and ways of sensing were fundamental for the modeling of the experiential revolution of the seventeenth-century Caribbean.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Modern Era

In the early modern world, exceptional bodies are linked to knowledge, not as the production of knowledge of the self through the scrutiny of those who have been ‘othered’, but as a means of inducing self-scrutiny and awareness of the limitations of human understanding. Exceptional beings and phenomena entice us to consider the world beyond that which is familiar to us and raise questions concerning our knowledge systems based on notions of what is natural or, in our modern era, normal. Rather than reacting with horror, disgust or pity, we can learn to respect the variety, mobility and resilience of the natural world in our contemplation of that which we see as exceptional.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Todd Butler
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cognitive Perspective ◽  
Shared Attention ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
To Come

This chapter explains how the political changes of early Stuart England can be usefully examined from a cognitive perspective, with questions of authority and sovereignty being determined not just by what individuals or institutions do but also by how they are understood and expected to think, and in particular how they were expected to come to decisions. In doing so, it links early modern and contemporary understandings of state formation in seventeenth-century England to processes of decision-making and counsel, as well as the management of personal and public opinion, thereby explicating the mental mechanics of early modern governance. More than being simply a form of political thought or doctrine, intellection is presented as a shared attention to cognitive processes amidst historical moments in which we can see particular patterns of thinking—and attention to them as politics—begin to emerge.

Tracing Sexual Difference

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Pamela Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Difference

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when (i) both men and women have identities as subjects, and (ii) the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'

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