Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 106-137
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Shaver

This chapter focuses on the divide between Christian traditions that understand “this is my body” as true in the proper sense (what George Hunsinger calls “real predication”) and those that do not. It traces the development of this divide to the Western eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century. The author argues that both Roman Catholics and Lutherans (on one side) and Swiss Reformers and the Radical Reformation (on the other) shared an assumption that language must be either literal or figurative, with only the former adequate for proper truth claims. The author also analyzes the eucharistic controversy between Luther, who understood “is” as an example of literal predication, and Zwingli, who saw it as a rhetorical trope and thus not properly true. The chapter concludes by arguing that a cognitive understanding of language can transcend this dichotomy since figurative language can indeed be capable of proper truth claims.

Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


Author(s):  
Shannon McSheffrey
Keyword(s):  

Although historians have until now thought that sanctuary in England had become moribund by the early sixteenth century, research in the legal records shows something different: although sanctuary-seeking was indeed infrequent from 1400 to about 1480, it began to increase substantially after that, reaching a peak around 1530 before collapsing, quite suddenly, in the later 1530s. This chapter both introduces the different forms of English sanctuary and explains in broad terms both why resort to sanctuary became more common under the early Tudors, and why it collapsed. This raises a number of themes that weave through the other chapters—mercy and redemption, Christian kingship, jurisdiction, prosecution of felony, and aristocratic honour culture.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.


1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Louis J. Lekai

The sixteenth century was a crucial period in the history of French monasticism. In addition to the causes of a general decline throughout Europe, in France two peculiar developments precipitated a nearly fatal collapse of monastic establishments. One was the commendatory system that spread over the whole country following the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. Royally appointed commendatory abbots, whose only concern was the collection of their share of monastic income, contributed much to the moral and material decline of the institutions supposedly under their care. The other and even more devastating calamity was the series of religious and civil wars during the second half of the century that resulted in the pillage and partial or total destruction of hundreds of monasteries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 253-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Olstein

Abstract World history can be arranged into three major regional divergences: the 'Greatest Divergence' starting at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 15,000 years ago) and isolating the Old and the New Worlds from one another till 1500; the 'Great Divergence' bifurcating the paths of Europe and Afro-Asia since 1500; and the 'American Divergence' which divided the fortunes of New World societies from 1500 onwards. Accordingly, all world regions have confronted two divergences: one disassociating the fates of the Old and New Worlds, and the other within either the Old or the New World. Latin America is in the uneasy position that in both divergences it ended up on the 'losing side.' As a result, a contentious historiography of Latin America evolved from the very moment that it was incorporated into the wider world. Three basic attitudes toward the place of Latin America in global history have since emerged and developed: admiration for the major impact that the emergence on Latin America on the world scene imprinted on global history; hostility and disdain over Latin America since it entered the world scene; direct rejection of and head on confrontation in reaction the former. This paper examines each of these three attitudes in five periods: the 'long sixteenth century' (1492-1650); the 'age of crisis' (1650-1780); 'the long nineteenth century' (1780-1914); 'the short twentieth century' (1914-1991); and 'contemporary globalization' (1991 onwards).


1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.


1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Hunt

According to the thesis of divine ‘middle knowledge’, first propounded by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century, subjunctive conditionals stating how free agents would freely respond under counter-factual conditions (call such expressions ‘counterfactuals of freedom’) may be straightforwardly true, and thus serve as the objects of divine knowledge. This thesis has provoked considerable controversy, and the recent revival of interest in middle knowledge, initiated by Anthony Kenny, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s, has led to two ongoing debates. One is a theoretical debate over the very intelligibility of middle knowledge;1 the other is a practical debate over its philosophical and theological utility.2


2007 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 43-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Gibson

The naming of John Dowland as ‘Author’ on the title page of his publication The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597) suggests a proprietary relationship between the composer and his work. This proprietary relationship is, perhaps, reinforced with the alignment of Dowland’s intellectual activities as ‘author’ with the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘invention’ in the same passage. All three terms could be used by the late sixteenth century to refer to notions of creativity, individual intellectual labour or origination. While many early examples of the use of ‘author’ refer specifically to God or Christ as creator, such as Chaucer’s declaration that ‘The auctour of matrimonye is Christ’, by the sixteenth century it was increasingly used to refer to an individual originator of intellectual or artistic creation closer to the modern sense of the word. Its sixteenth-century usage is, for instance, reflected in the title ‘A tretys, excerpte of diverse labores of auctores’, or as in a reference in 1509 to ‘The noble actor plinius’. Likewise, ‘invent’ or ‘inventor’ could be used to refer to the process of individual intellectual creation, exemplified by its use in 1576 ‘Your brain or your wit, and your pen, the one to invent and devise, the other to write’, while ‘compose’ could mean to make, to compose in words, ‘to write as author’ or, more specifically, to write music.


1981 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Orme

During the last hundred years our knowledge of the educational institutions of medieval England has steadily increased, both of schools and universities. We know a good deal about what they taught, how they were organised and where they were sited. The next stage is to identify their relationship with the society which they existed to serve. Whom did they train, to what standards and for what ends? These questions pose problems. They cannot be answered from the constitutional and curricular records which tell us about the structure of educational institutions. Instead, they require a knowledge of the people—the pupils and scholars—who went to the medieval schools and universities. We need to recover their names, to compile their biographies and thereby to establish their origins, careers and attainments. If this can be done on a large enough scale, the impact of education on society will become clearer. In the case of the universities, the materials for this task are available and well known. Thanks to the late Dr A. B. Emden, most of the surviving names of the alumni of Oxford and Cambridge have been collected and published, together with a great many biographical records about them. For the schools, on the other hand, where most boys had their literary education if they had one at all, such data are not available. Except for Winchester and Eton, we do not possess lists of the pupils of schools until the middle of the sixteenth century, and there is no way to remedy the deficiency.


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