Culture and the arts

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Different Parts ◽  
Poetry And Music

The later Middle Ages as a cultural period has been shaped by the Burckhardtian tradition: Burckhardt drew a sharp distinction between the ‘medieval’ outlook he believed had prevailed north of the Alps and the ‘rebirth’ of classical antiquity he saw taking place in the Italian peninsula. Over the past 60 years, however, the validity of such a contrast has been called into question. As a consequence, it is now generally accepted that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were characterized more by diversity than by division. This chapter examines how, in every field of cultural endeavour, from painting and sculpture to poetry and music, there emerged a series of quite different, often heterogeneous trends. Originating in different parts of Europe, these were transmitted across the continent, where they interacted with parallel developments elsewhere. The effect was less that of a concerto than of a rich and discordant symphony of competing voices.

The Poetry and Music of Science

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom McLeish
Keyword(s):  
School Leaver ◽  
Creative People ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Poetry And Music

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.

Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Levi Roach
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This book takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As the book illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime. Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, the book examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, the book indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present — a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects — the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity. As a comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, the book offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.

Nature, Culture, Myth, and the Musician in Early Modern England

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Phyllis Austern
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The One

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, music was often considered an aspect of natural philosophy, the general study of natural and cultural phenomena that had been inherited from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, but was undergoing rapid metamorphosis into more modern fields of science, technology, and the arts. Against this background, many writers began to invoke machine metaphors and the triumph of cultural products over raw nature and Nature's corollaries in the form of women and animals. Older epistemologies of magic and metaphor, which had also incorporated gendered ideas of artifice, perfection, nature, and creation, informed these emerging ideas. The result on the one hand was a practice of secular musical composition that included sounds from the natural world as feminine novelties to be bounded and improved by stylistic artifice. On the other was a documentary allegorization of music that drew from chronicle history, mythology, natural science, religion, and politics to demonstrate the moral and aesthetic superiority of music and musicians that elevated natural elements into enduring musical artifice.

scholarly journals Innovations in a Traditional Landscape of Pilgrimage: The Via Francigena del Sud towards Rome and Other Apulian Pilgrim’s Routes

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1065
Author(s):  
Anna Trono ◽  
Luigi Oliva
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Religious Values ◽  
Coastal Regions ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Intellectual Need ◽  
The Many ◽  
Cultural Routes

Religious routes and itineraries can be seen as promoting not only the sharing of ethical and religious values and sentiments of peace and brotherhood but also the awareness and personal growth of the traveller. Those who walk remote pilgrimage paths today wish to experience the fascination of the past, to feel something of the dread and the passion of ancient travellers, but they also seek to fulfil an emotional and intellectual need for authenticity, spirituality and culture. The Puglia region has numerous religious paths that arose in past centuries and continue to be practised by modern pilgrims, who treat the journey as an emotional, educational, social and participatory experience. Appropriate exploitation of this type of journey would enable the promotion of a “gentle” but no less successful tourism, above all in a period of social distancing and global suffering. The present study starts with a presentation of some of the precursors of the many routes that led from the Orient towards Rome, such as those of the Apostle Peter, St Francis of Assisi and the anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux. It then examines the new values that prompt people to follow the Via Francigena del Sud that runs along the Italian peninsula linking Europe north of the Alps to the ports of Puglia, and it is just an exemplary case aimed at fulfilling the potential of eastern Mediterranean coastal regions by offering cultural routes and itineraries for sustainable and quality tourism.

Track 2.b Introduction: Design & Democracy

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 213
Author(s):  
Virginia TASSINARI ◽  
Ezio MANZINI ◽  
Maurizio TELI ◽  
Liesbeth HUYBRECHTS
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Core Theme ◽  
The Past ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Democratic Discourse ◽  
Different Parts

The issue of design and democracy is an urgent and rather controversial one. Democracy has always been a core theme in design research, but in the past years it has shifted in meaning. The current discourse in design research that has been working in a participatory way on common issues in given local contexts, has developed an enhanced focus on rethinking democracy. This is the topic of some recent design conferences, such PDC2018, Nordes2017 and DRS2018, and of the DESIS Philosophy Talk #6 “Regenerating Democracy?” (www.desis-philosophytalks.org), from which this track originates. To reflect on the role and responsibility of designers in a time where democracy in its various forms is often put at risk seems an urgent matter to us. The concern for the ways in which the democratic discourse is put at risk in many different parts of the word is registered outside the design community (for instance by philosophers such as Noam Chomsky), as well as within (see for instance Manzini’s and Margolin’s call Design Stand Up (http://www.democracy-design.org). Therefore, the need to articulate a discussion on this difficult matter, and to find a common vocabulary we can share to talk about it. One of the difficulties encountered for instance when discussing this issue, is that the word “democracy” is understood in different ways, in relation to the traditions and contexts in which it is framed. Philosophically speaking, there are diverse discourses on democracy that currently inspire design researchers and theorists, such as Arendt, Dewey, Negri and Hardt, Schmitt, Mouffe, Rancière, Agamben, Rawls, Habermas, Latour, Gramsci, whose positions on this topic are very diverse. How can these authors guide us to further articulate this discussion? In which ways can these philosophers support and enrich design’s innovation discourses on design and democracy, and guide our thinking in addressing sensitive and yet timely questions, such as what design can do in what seems to be dark times for democracy, and whether design can possibly contribute to enrich the current democratic ecosystems, making them more strong and resilient?

Les héritages chrétiens: quel avenir?

Moreana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (Number 176) (1) ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Bernard Bourdin
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Politics And Religion

The legacy from Christianity unquestionably lies at the root of Europe, even if not exclusively. It has taken many aspects from the Middle Ages to modern times. If the Christian heritage is diversely understood and accepted within the European Union, the reason is essentially due to its political and religious significance. However, its impact in politics and religion has often been far from negative, if we will consider what secular societies have derived from Christianity: human rights, for example, and a religious affiliation which has been part and parcel of national identity. The Christian legacy has to be acknowledged through a critical analysis which does not deny the truth of the past but should support a European project built around common values.

Phänologische Trends bei den Waldbäumen in der Schweiz | Phenological trends regarding the forest trees in Switzerland

2005 ◽  
Vol 156 (6) ◽  
pp. 207-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Defila
Keyword(s):  
Regional Differences ◽  
Early Growth ◽  
Horse Chestnut ◽  
Forest Trees ◽  
Spring Season ◽  
Arrival Times ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Arrival ◽  
Southern Side ◽  
The Alps

Numerous publications are devoted to plant phenological trends of all trees, shrubs and herbs. In this work we focus on trees of the forest. We take into account the spring season (leaf and needle development) as well as the autumn (colour turning and shedding of leaves) for larch, spruce and beech, and,owing to the lack of further autumn phases, the horse chestnut. The proportion of significant trends is variable, depending on the phenological phase. The strongest trend to early arrival in spring was measured for needles of the larch for the period between 1951 and 2000 with over 20 days. The leaves of the horse chestnut show the earliest trend to turn colour in autumn. Beech leaves have also changed colour somewhat earlier over the past 50 years. The trend for shedding leaves, on the other hand, is slightly later. Regional differences were examined for the growth of needles in the larch where the weakest trends towards early growth are found in Canton Jura and the strongest on the southern side of the Alps. The warming of the climate strongly influences phenological arrival times. Trees in the forest react to this to in a similar way to other plants that have been observed (other trees, shrubs and herbs).

Jiangnan Style

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wickham
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
New Research ◽  
Different Parts

Building on impressive new research into the concept of a ‘global middle ages’, this chapter offers insights into how economic formations developed around the world. Drawing on new research on both Chinese and Mediterranean economies in the ‘medieval’ period, it compares structures of economy and exchange in very different parts of the world. The point of such comparisons is not simply to find instances of global economic flows but to understand the logic of medieval economic activity and its intersections with power and culture; and, in so doing, to remind historians that economic structures, transnational connections, and the imbrications of economy and politics do not arrive only with modernity, nor is the shape of the ‘modern’ global economy the only pattern known to humankind.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document