Enlightenment Historians of Ireland and their Critics

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-198
Author(s):  
Nicholas Canny

Elite Catholics, who accepted Hanoverian rulers as legitimate, believed that Enlightenment historiography would show the Penal Laws to be unreasonable, and would necessitate a re-definition of the Irish political nation. When Hume, whom these elite members esteemed, endorsed Temple’s interpretation of the 1641 rebellion, they commissioned a philosophical history for Ireland to be written by Thomas Leland, a Protestant divine. Leland failed to meet the expectations of his sponsors by concluding, after a close study of early modern events, that a single Irish political nation would exist only when Catholics renounced allegiance to the Pope. Failure to reach political consensus was largely irrelevant because popular histories showed that concessions to elite Catholics would not have assuaged popular discontent. Moreover, urban radicals, notably Mathew Carey, contended that Enlightenment thinking suggested that a multi-denominational Irish nation could be imagined only in the context of an independent Irish Republic.

Author(s):  
Namrata Chaturvedi ◽  

This paper is a close study of early modern women’s poetry on childbirth and the imminent circumstances of maternal and foetal/infantile mortality in seventeenth century England. In tracing the development of women’s post-partum mental health from the medieval to the early modern period, this paper argues for a serious investment in literature composed as memoirs, poetry, diaries and funeral sermons as a means of understanding the trajectories and lacunae in women’s mental health in the early modern period. This study also argues for including the religious experience into any consideration of women’s post-partum health and therapeutic interventions. Lastly, it shows how affect studies have proved the recuperative potential in literature of consolation and mourning so that women’s writing begins to get recognized for its interventionist potential rather than a fossilized historical treatment as it has often received.


Terminus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3 (56)) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Maja Skowron

Women’s Rules of the Game: A Dispute over Women in the Dialogue Il merito delle donne by Moderata Fonte This paper concerns Moderata Fonte (Modesta dal Pozzo), a female Venetian writer who lived in the 16th century, and a dialogue she wrote, Il merito delle donne (On the Value of Women), in which seven women gathered in a garden have a lively discussion about men and their flaws. The author of the study presents the book and Fonte’s biography in the context of the early-modern dispute over women (querelle des femmes). She then analyses Il merito delle donne in terms of the functionality of both the genre in which it was written and the convention of play (game) that is relevant to the work, in order to answer the question of the importance of these devices for the topic Fonte raises. Skowron writes about what makes Il merito delle donne different from other dialogues published at the time by women, as well as from Balthazar Castiglione’s famous Book of the Courtier (Il libro del Cortegiano), and in discussing the motif of the play she uses the definition of the ludic element of Johan Huizinga of Homo ludens. She points to the presence of particular determinants of play in Il merito delle donne, wondering how the voluntary basis of the game, limited time and space, imposed rules or a situation different from ordinary life affect the female characters’ freedom to express their opinions in discussion, as well as the reception of the work itself. Il merito delle donne owes its unique character to its form because it allows not only different views in a dispute over women to be presented, but above all it involves the reader in a discussion which does not end with the last page of the dialogue.


Author(s):  
Cátia Antunes

This chapter provides a case study of the entrepreneurship of Portuguese Jewish merchants in the Dutch Republic in the Early Modern period. Though similar case studies exist, none have focused specifically on Jewish entrepreneurs. The core aim is to determine which business strategies and values the Jewish entrepreneurs shared with their Dutch counterparts. It provides a history of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam, followed by a definition of the early modern entrepreneur. It then examines the trade routes, products, range of trading capital, and social networks of the Portuguese Jewish entrepreneurs, and concludes that Portuguese Jewish and Dutch merchants operated their businesses in similar ways, but Portuguese Jewish merchants were willing to step out of their religious and social boundaries in pursuit of a stronger economic position and were able to do so through financial support gained by dealing in diverse, high quality trade.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Thomas H. McCall ◽  
Keith D. Stanglin

Chapter 1 discusses the purpose of the book as an introduction to the historical development of Arminian theology. It then offers a preliminary description and definition of Arminianism. The late medieval and early modern background of Arminianism is summarized. This background includes a brief overview of the most well-known aspects of Arminius’s thought. The chapter concludes with an outline of the contents of the subsequent chapters.


2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-952 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Mills

This article surveys the emergence and usage of the redefinition of man not as animal rationale (rational animal) but as animal religiosum (religious animal) by numerous English theologians between 1650 and 1700. Across the continuum of English Protestant thought, human nature was being redescribed as unique due to its religious, not primarily its rational, capabilities. This article charts said appearance as a contribution to debates over man's relationship with God; then its subsequent incorporation into the discussion over the theological consequences of arguments in favor of animal rationality, as well as its uses in anti-atheist apologetics; and then the sudden disappearance of the definition of man as animal religiosum at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In doing so, the article hopes to make a useful contribution to our understanding of changing early modern understandings of human nature by reasserting the significance of theological writing in the dispute over the relationship between humans and beasts. As a consequence, it offers a more wide-ranging account of man as animal religiosum than the current focus on “Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism” allows.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
Remco Raben

Issues of segregation and difference in early-modern Dutch Batavia prove harder to define once we move beyond the picture presented by colonial authorities and move away geographically from the centre of colonial knowledge production. Ethnic quarters were established in the colonial cities, but religious identities blurred strict racial boundary making. Three case studies demonstrate how new lines of identification and distinction emerged, which cut across formal ethnic classifiers. Colonial societies were extremely complex places, where race, occupation, religion, class, and legal status constantly interplayed and directed the definition of social boundaries. Instead of thinking in terms of ethnic segregation as presented in the colonial records, this contribution proposes to think in terms of ‘moral communities’. By so doing, we might be able to balance better between ‘Closeness and Proximity’ in colonial societies. We can thus try to visualise colonial society not primarily as a hierarchical order with fairly strict or at least distinctive internal boundaries as defined by the colonial authorities, but as a society of different and overlapping socio-cultural spheres and as circles of trust rather than of bounded ethnic communities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-525
Author(s):  
Robert A. Maryks

The strong resistance of Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556), first superior general of the Society of Jesus (1541–56), to the promotion of his confrères to ecclesiastical offices of (arch)bishops and cardinals because such posts were contrary to the spirit of religious life, requires a brief explanation. Ignatius’s opposition was codified in the Jesuit Constitutions with a requirement that each professed Jesuit promise not to accept such dignities. Nonetheless, Loyola and his successors were occasionally pressured to acquiesce to possible papal appointments of different Jesuits to such offices. This issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies focuses on six of approximately forty-nine cardinals (the definition of Jesuit cardinal can be sometimes tricky for the early modern period). These six represent different historical periods from the late sixteenth until the early twenty-first centuries and different geographical areas, both of origin and of operation (they did not always coincide): Péter Pázmány (1570–1637), Johann Nidhard (1607–81), Giovanni Battista Tolomei (1653–1726), Johann Baptist Franzelin (1816–86), Pietro Boetto (1871–1946), and Adam Kozłowiecki (1911–2007).


Author(s):  
Michael Chazan

Levallois refers to a way of making stone tools that is a significant component of the technological adaptations of both Neanderthals and early modern humans. Although distinctive Levallois artifacts were identified already in the 19th century, a consensus on the definition of the Levallois and clear criteria for distinguishing Levallois from non-Levallois artifacts remain elusive. At a general level, Levallois is one variant on prepared core technology. In a prepared core approach to stone tool manufacture, the worked material (the core) is configured and maintained to allow for the production of detached pieces (flakes) whose morphology is constrained by the production process. The difficulty for archaeologists is that Levallois refers to a particular process of manufacture rather than a discrete finality. The study of Levallois exposes limitations of typological approaches to artifact analysis and forces a consideration of the challenges in creating a solid empirical basis for characterizing technological processes.


2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (S19) ◽  
pp. 107-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Caracausi

SummaryThis article aims to understand norms and values pertaining to the definition of just wages in early modern Italy. The starting point is the treatise by the jurist Lanfranco Zacchia, De Salario seu Operariorum Mercede, which appeared in the mid-seventeenth century and represented the first attempt to collate a set of rules on wages based on the traditions of Roman and canon law. After a brief presentation of the treatise, I shall analyse the meanings and concepts of wages, and then consider the elements that determined the just wage. To understand how prescriptions were seen by individuals, I shall also compare them with information about court cases and rulings compiled by Zacchia in another book, the Centuria decisionum ad materiam Tractatus de Salario, and with the rest of the existing literature. Evidence from my comparison will allow us to understand the interaction and reciprocal influences between juridical thought and daily work practice, and underline the fact that wages were based on a complex system of norms and values where individuals, their social positions, skills, and experience determined the recognition of the just wage with reference to the local context.


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