Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Tazzara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Choice ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Rent Seeking ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Economic Liberty ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

The conclusion draws on the book’s key themes to revisit models of the policy process in early modern Europe, particularly that of rent-seeking as understood by public choice economists. It shows that the fight against monopoly was co-constituted with the origins of a science of commerce during the Enlightenment. If the mercantilist state of the Ancien Régime was an outgrowth of a rent-seeking society, it was because the rent-seekers themselves enjoyed a monopoly on economic expertise until the eighteenth century. The new science of economics did not expel local merchants from regime counsels as much as reformers might have desired, however. It gave merchants a powerful rhetorical arsenal concerning economic liberty that helped secure localities from unwanted interference by the central government.

The First Scottish Enlightenment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Scottish History

Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not yet fully realized precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a ‘First’ Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of Early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland’s two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.

scholarly journals Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Europe

In recent political and constitutional history, scholars seldom specify how and why they use the concept of territory. In research on state formation processes and nation building, for instance, the term mostly designates an enclosed geographical area ruled by a central government. Inspired by ideas from political geographers, this book explores the layered and constantly changing meanings of territory in late medieval and early modern Europe before cartography and state formation turned boundaries and territories into more fixed (but still changeable) geographical entities. Its central thesis is that analysing the notion of territory in a premodern setting involves analysing territorial practices: practices that relate people and power to space(s). The book not only examines the construction and spatial structure of premodern territories but also explores their perception and representation through the use of a broad range of sources: from administrative texts to maps, from stained glass windows to chronicles.

Sex and Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-119
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Classical Philology ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Independent Field ◽  
Moral Perspective ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Europe

This chapter looks at examples of scholars who, in the early eighteenth century, worked on texts that were highly controversial from a moral perspective. The focus is on Pieter Burman’s edition of Petronius (1709) and Bentley’s work on Horace. Looking at this material from a perspective of textual criticism allowed Burman and Bentley to avoid delving too deeply into passages of a sexually loaded nature. Nevertheless, political and scholarly opponents of both men tried to blacken their reputation by connecting their research interests with their private lives. It is demonstrated that the association of textual critics with immorality was a commonplace in early modern Europe and that the tensions between in particular Burman and his opponents reveals a struggle to make classical philology a more independent field of enquiry versus other disciplines, such as theology.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....

The Loving Community

Caritas ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cultural Norm ◽  
Family Household ◽  
The Family ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
A Site

Caritas was an idea with resonance across early modern Europe, but given shape and form within particular national or religious contexts. This chapter introduces how the Scottish Kirk envisioned caritas as an embodied ethic—an experience of love that was manifested in deportment, thought, feeling, and behaviour—as well as its widespread take-up as a cultural norm. It particularly highlights that the family—the holy household—was imagined as the basis of a social order founded on caritas and introduces how the idea of caritas shaped the practice of the family-household relationships in eighteenth-century Scotland. It explores how the family was located not just as a site of patriarchal discipline, but also of peace and comfort, where fighting and quarrelling (excesses of passion) should be minimized. The family-household was not formed in private, however: its loving behaviours were interpreted and given meaning by a watching community.

scholarly journals Jewish and Hebrew Books in Marsh’s Library: Materiality and Intercultural Engagement in Early Modern Ireland

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Anderson ◽  
Jason McElligott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Extensive Collection ◽  
Intercultural Engagement ◽  
Personal Collection

Marsh’s Library in Dublin, Ireland, is an immaculately preserved library from the early eighteenth century. Founded by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, the library has an extensive collection of Jewish and Hebrew books which includes Hebrew Bibles, Talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and Yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. This study explores a cross section of the Jewish and Hebrew books in Marsh’s collection, with particular focus on issues of materiality—that is, how these books as material artefacts can inform our understanding of early modern history, religion, and intercultural engagement. We suggest that these books, a majority of which come from Marsh’s personal collection, are a valuable resource for reflection on (1) Christian engagement with Jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (2) the production, use, and travel of Jewish books in early modern Europe, and (3) snapshots of Jewish life in early modern Ireland and beyond.

Peasants and Debt in Eighteenth-Century Champagne

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
High Risk ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rural Households ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Modern Europe

Recent scholarship about debt in early-modern Europe has replaced an old model of misery and exploitation with a new paradigm that emphasizes the entrepreneurial rationale for going into debt. Reassessment of these arguments on the basis of detailed information about 5,000 rural households in France finds that debt posed a high risk of ruin to nearly half of the region's debtors and that viticulture played a unique role in stimulating a borrowing frenzy in the countryside.

‘Freethinking’ and ‘Freedom of Thought’ in eighteenth-century Britain

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
The Social ◽  
Freedom Of Thought

ABSTRACTIn early modern Europe, religious heterodoxy and intellectual inquiry posed serious challenges to the authority of centralizing forces both secular and ecclesiastical. At the same time, however, these dangerous developments had been driven by those individuals whom eighteenth-century writers had adopted as ‘culture heroes’ for an age increasingly self-conscious of its own enlightened status. In Britain, the newly established order defended itself against the scepticism and moral determinism of ‘freethinkers’ by upholding a religious and moral order based on liberty. But ‘freethinkers’ such as Anthony Collins were themselves the inheritors of, and propagandists for, the seventeenth-century revolution in science which underpinned the ideology being wielded against them. Their challenge elicited from Edmund Law an argument which co-opted their epistemology to ground the familiar metaphysics of liberty associated with the Newtonian position of Samuel Clarke. Where ‘freethinking’ had been perceived as a dangerous solvent of the social order, ‘freedom of thought’, within limits that were themselves a leading subject of debate in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, could be upheld as consistent with the demands of political society.

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