“Truth is Not Subject to Human Empire”

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-224
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Modern Logic ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Correct Reading

Now a niche figure in intellectual history, Samuel Pufendorf was one of the great lights of the early Enlightenment. A renowned professor of law, Pufendorf is John Locke’s rival in forging the modern logic of religious tolerance. The link between early modern Christianity and violence, which occasions Pufendorf’s book The Bearing of Christian Religion on Civil Life, is broken by his re-elaboration of the Augustinian tradition that this book seeks to retrace. Jesus is a king, according to Pufendorf, but his kingdom is “not of this world”. A correct reading of the Roman trial of Jesus is thus, for him, a sine qua non of a European political culture in which ritual and confessional differences are tolerated.

THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT IN EARLY MODERN SWITZERLAND

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARC H. LERNER
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Good Government ◽  
History Of

What are the debts that the modern world owes to the political culture of the Enlightenment? For historians of political thought this is a widely debated subject. Throughout Europe, the Enlightenment provided the critical lens for a widespread reassessment of the nature of political authority. Much of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century focuses on this reassessment and the debates over the nature of good government, liberty and sovereignty. The discussion of these issues is linked to the history of liberalism, democratic republicanism, popular sovereignty, and the nature of the modern political world itself.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Brabantia: decoding the main characters of Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (Number 187- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 151-182
Author(s):  
Maarten M.K. Vermeir
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political System ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Home Town ◽  
Christian Humanism ◽  
Political Thinker

In this study, we propose a new understanding, according to the principles of ‘humanistic interpretation’, of a fundamental layer of meaning in Utopia. In the work of Thomas More, major references can be found to the particular genesis and a crucial purpose of Utopia. Desiderius Erasmus arranged the acquaintance of Thomas More with Peter Giles, a key figure in the development of Erasmus as political thinker. More and Giles together in Antwerp (Giles’s home town), both jurists and humanists, would lay the foundation of Utopia. With this arranged contact, Erasmus handed over to More the knowledge of a particular political system - the earliest form of ‘parliamentary democracy’ in Early modern Europe - embedded in the political culture of the Duchy of Brabant and its constitution, named the ‘Joyous Entry’. We argue that Erasmus, through the indispensable politicalliterary skills of More in Utopia, intended to promote this political system as a new, political philosophy: applicable to all nations in the Respublica Christiana of Christian humanism. With reference to this genesis of Utopia in the text itself and its prefatory letters, we come to a clear recognition of Desiderius Erasmus in the figure of Raphael Hythlodaeus, the sailor who had discovered the ‘isle of Utopia’ and discoursed, as reported by More, about its ‘exemplary’ institutions.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

Translation in Action: Global Intellectual History and Early Modern Diplomacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-467
Author(s):  
Lisa Hellman ◽  
Birgit Tremml-Werner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History

Augustine and the Humanists. Reading the City of God from Petrarch to Poliziano

10.54179/2102 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Della Schiava
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Western World ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The City

Augustine and the Humanists fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine’s oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, De civitate Dei, has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the City of God at the dawn of the modern age. Augustine and the Humanists focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.

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