scholarly journals The extraordinary and changing role of women in Dutch language history

Author(s):  
Marijke van der Wal ◽  
Jan Noordegraaf

Since the second half of the sixteenth century, there has been a tradition of publishing grammars, dictionaries, and linguistic treatises, composed by male authors of various professions. Although women do not seem to have played a visible role in language codification and language studies in the Netherlands, at least two extraordinary femmes savantes stand out. The first of these from the seventeenth century was Anna Maria van Schurman, a highly admired scholar and polyglot who maintained an international network of correspondence and was familiar with a wide range of languages. Her eighteenth-century counterpart, Johanna Corleva, was interested in rational grammar, translated the Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1660) into Dutch, and compiled a Dutch dictionary according to particular explicit principles. Attention will also be paid to female activities in education, from elementary schools to academia. Throughout this chapter, the leading question will be why, despite the activities described, Dutch ‘linguistics’ was such a predominantly male enterprise for more than three centuries.

Author(s):  
William E. Nelson

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.


Author(s):  
John Baker

This chapter traces the history of negligence in tort. The role of fault in the action of trespass vi et armis is somewhat speculative, since the relevant facts were hidden from courts by the plea of Not Guilty. But the concept of inevitable accident seems to be predicated on negligence. Negligence is more visible in actions on the case, though the earliest examples were contractual in essence. The first signs of a distinct tort of negligence, where there was no contract or custom imposing liability, appear in the seventeenth century, and in the next century there emerges a general principle that everyone must take reasonable care not to injure his neighbour. The duty of care was gradually enlarged between the eighteenth century and the present, especially with the removal of obstacles connected with the principle volenti non fit injuria and with the old notion that trespass would not lie for words.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilia Rota

The paper reviews knowledge on earthworms from early classical times to the end of the seventeenth century. The Aristotelian view that these “imperfect” animals developed spontaneously from mud and lacked internal organs except the gut was not challenged until the late Renaissance but, by the end of the 1600s, it was overthrown. Aldrovandi and Mouffet presented field observations of sexual reproduction and specific habitat requirements. Willis demonstrated the complex internal anatomy of an earthworm. Finally Redi, based on numberless dissections, showed the existence of variations on that basic anatomical plan, which anyway remained distinct from that of parasitic worms. Through a series of controlled laboratory tests, Redi also proved that earthworms have a physiology of their own and are most sensible to water loss. In those same years, Swammerdam investigated earthworm cocoons nursing them in his room, and Tyson discovered earthworms’ hermaphroditism. Two significant interpretations of earthworm's locomotion, by Fabrici ab Aquapendente and Borelli, also belong to this period, but were both short-lived in their influence. An awareness of the ecological role of earthworms in pedogenesis and soil fertility did not emerge until the late eighteenth century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.


Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.


2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 625-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn

This study argues that English royalist prose romance of the 1650s should he read as a contribution to seventeenth-century debates about the role of the passions in forging political obligation. Taken together, Percy Herbert'sPrincess Cloria(1653-61), Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales’ unfinishedTheophania(1655), chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest — which contemporaries identified with Hobbes — to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Sytniak R.M.

The purpose of the article is to highlight the views of linguists of the second half of the XX – early XXI century on the importance of synchronic and diachronic studies of lexical meaning and identify the tendency of modern linguists to consider synchrony and diachrony as components of one whole. With the help of synchronic-diachronic study of language, studies of lexical semantics are presented in an extremely wide range of works, which receive new opportunities to explain semantic processes and highlight similar dominant features in both structurally related and unrelated languages. The scientific interest of linguists can be directed both to the study of a particular morpheme and to the derivation of universal laws for the development of the lexical meaning of the world’s languages. The vast majority of studies, however, have a more or less clear distribution on the principle of synchrony and diachrony. The article highlights the current perception of diachronic research as one that consists of a number of studies of synchronous sections in the history of lexical meaning, and as a result is considered as one holistic effective study. In accordance with the purpose of the article, a general scientific method is used – an actualist method, which is based on the principle of historicism and allows modern knowledge to trace the development of certain linguistic concepts in the past and predict some trends in future theories. The methodological basis of the actualist method is the principles of historicism, causality, systematics and the principle of general connection of phenomena. As the result of the research it was established that the linguists of our time accept the idea of not confrontation, but of fruitful joint work of synchronic and diachronic research of lexical meaning, unity of synchronic description and historical reconstruction. The author concludes that from the point of view of modern linguistics, the dichotomy of synchrony and diachrony is quite conditional. Synchronous research is not opposed, but, on the contrary, is an important component of diachronic research, because diachronic analysis without synchronic one does not exist. The tacit ban on the use of language history data in synchronic analysis has been overcome.Key words: synchrony, diachrony, dichotomy, non-linguistic concept, interdependence, flexible way of thinking, scientific subjectivism. Метою статті є висвітлення поглядів мовознавців другої половини ХХ – початку ХХІ століття на важливість синхронічних та діахронічних досліджень лексичного значення та виявлення тенденції лінгвістів сучасності розглядати синхронію та діахронію як складники одного цілого. За допомогою синхронно-діахронного вивчення мови дослідження лексичної семантики представлені надзвичайно широким діапазоном праць, що отримують нові можливості пояснення семантичних процесів та виокремлення схожих домінантних рис як у споріднених, так і у неспоріднених мовах світу. Науковий інтерес мовознавців може бути спрямований як на дослідження окремої морфеми, так і на виведення універсальних законів розви-тку лексичного значення мов світу. Більшість досліджень усе ж мають більш-менш чіткий розподіл за принципом синхронії та діахронії. У статті висвітлюється сучасне сприйняття діахронного дослідження як такого, що складається із певної кількості досліджень синхронних зрізів в історії лексичного значення, і як результат – розглядається одним цілісним ефективним дослідженням. Відповідно до мети у статті використано загальнонауковий метод – актуалістичний, який бере за основу принцип історизму і дає змогу за допомогою сучасних знань простежити розвиток певних лінгвістичних концепцій у минуло-му та передбачити деякі тенденції майбутнього розвитку відповідних теорій. Методологічну основу актуалістичного методустановлять принципи історизму, причиновості, системності та принцип загального зв’язку явищ. У результаті дослідження встановлено прийняття лінгвістами сучасності ідеї не протистояння, а плідної сумісної праці синхронного та діахронного дослідження лексичного значення, єдність синхронного опису та історичної реконструкції. Автор доходить висновку, що з погляду сучасного мовознавства дихотомія синхронії та діахронії носить досить умовний характер. Синхронне дослідження не протиставляється, а навпаки, є важливою складовою частиною діахронного дослідження, тому що діахронний аналіз без синхронного не існує. Припинено мовчазну заборону на використання даних історії мови у разі синхронного аналізу. Ключові слова: синхронія, діахронія, дихотомія, нелінгвістична концепція, взаємозумовленість, мінливий образ мислення, науковий суб’єктивізм.


Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.


Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen

This chapter begins with a systematic comparison of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles of embodied language through versions of the same narrative in French and English. Lennox’s work as a cultural broker and translator aims not only to bring narratives rooted in the seventeenth century into her contemporary literary world but also to extend their repertoires of embodied language. In her translations, she integrates instances of inner and outer bodily perception and grounds direct speech in the characters’ bodies. With Lennox’s literary magazine The Lady’s Museum, it will be shown how the novel and its embodied style are embedded in a larger world of book learning. The relations that Lennox establishes between the serialised novel, short forms like the maxim, and educational treatises document an understanding of the role of the novel that differs from the indices and abridgements around Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa.


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