Geoffrey Hill’s Etymological Crux

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-206
Author(s):  
David-Antoine Williams
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Critical Attention

This chapter is an investigation into Geoffrey Hill’s philosophy of language, which is at its heart philological and etymological, and which engages questions of theology, metaphysics, ontology, ethics, and poetics. It is a philosophy that is perpetually led back to states of self-opposition and contradiction, latterly described as ‘agon’, and ‘gnostic poiesis’. Etymologically this is manifested in the terms which receive extensive poetic and critical attention in Hill—terms which lie on an ‘active–passive divide’—as well as in the method of interrogation, which is self-oppositionally both a ‘tearing up by the roots’ and a ‘rediscovering’ and careful ‘nurturing’ of them. Hill’s various paradigms for language and for poetry are examined, centring on Hebrew language, the fable of the Fall of Man, Original Sin and its early modern metaphysical extensions, and gnosticism, as well as his sources in Milton and Coleridge.

Skepticism and the Philosophy of Language in Early Modern Thought

1998 ◽  
pp. 109-115
Author(s):  
Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Knowledge Argument ◽  
Modern Thought

This paper discusses the importance of skeptical arguments for the philosophy of language in early modern thought. It contrasts the rationalist conception of language and knowledge with that of philosophers who adopt some sort of skeptical position, maintaining that these philosophers end up by giving language a greater importance than rationalists. The criticism of the rationalists' appeal to natural light is examined, as well as skeptical arguments limiting knowledge such as the so-called 'maker's knowledge' argument. This argument is then seen as capital for favoring a positive interpretation of the importance of language for knowledge.

scholarly journals A ‘Chief Error’ of Protestant Soteriology: Sin in the Justified and Early Modern Catholic Theology

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 41-72
Author(s):  
Matthew T. Gaetano
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The World ◽  
The Catholic Church

AbstractCatholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy.

scholarly journals The Swift and Secret Messenger: John Wilkins’s Mercury and the Paradoxes of Language

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Klaudia Łączyńska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
The Right

AbstractJohn Wilkins’s Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger: Showing How a Man May with Privacy and Speed Communicate His Thoughts to a Friend at Any Distance was first published in 1641. As a book on cryptography presenting a variety of secret means of communication at a distance it seems to have appeared at just the right time, when the biblical curse of the confusion of tongues was doubled by the curse of political confusion on the brink of the English civil war. However, the book seems to be more than just a detailed account of methods of secret writing; its topic gives the author a chance to present his views on language which he would later develop in his life’s work An Essay towards Real Character and a Philosophical Language published in 1668. The Essay had received much greater critical attention than the early pamphlet, which is usually referred to as merely a prelude to an account of his universal language project. Indeed, in the little book on cryptography, Wilkins already demonstrated his awareness of the conventional character of language and its role within the system of human interactions, as well as advertised a project of philosophical language that would enhance communication between all nations and remedy the curse of Babel. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the value of the pamphlet lies also in the insight that it gives into the seventeenth-century debates on the nature of language and into arguments which were often provided, in equal measure, by theology, Hermetic lore, mythology, literature and early modern science. Wilkins’s meticulous recording of the contradictory views and propositions on language produces a sense of methodological inconsistency that leads to ambiguities and paradoxes. However, in the medley of concepts and the collection of linguistic “curiosities” that Mercury presents, a careful reader will discern the growing mistrust of language as a means of representing reality and as a foundation of knowledge, which was one of the symptoms of the general crisis of representation leading to an epistemological shift that started in the seventeenth century.

Teaching Romans 7 after Trent: Michael Baius and his Lecture Hall on Concupiscence and Original Sin in Early Modern Louvain (1552–1589)

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-221
Author(s):  
Jarrik Van Der Biest
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Lecture Hall ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
The Core ◽  
Educational Application ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Sacred Scripture ◽  
The University

Abstract This article introduces a new corpus of sources relevant to the sixteenth-century Baianist controversy at the University of Louvain: student notes made during Michael Baius’ lectures on the Bible during the 1560s. The commentary on Romans 7 taught by the Royal Professor of Sacred Scripture contains a discussion on the sinfulness of concupiscence, the effect of the Fall driving humankind to sin. A contested concept between Catholics and Protestants, the nature of concupiscentia also lies at the core of debates on the orthodoxy of Baius’ justification theology, both early modern and more recent. The professor’s lecture on Romans 7 is analysed against his published treatises, the censures (1565–1567) and papal bull (1567) condemning certain propositions as heretical, and the Tridentine Decree on Original Sin (1546). While Baius’ Augustinian revaluation of humanity’s wounded nature (natura viciata) moved away from the Thomistic conception of concupiscence as innate, but disordered, he did respect the boundaries set by the Council of Trent. Indeed, Baius taught his positive theology in the interstices between the educational application of the Tridentine Decrees and the gradual assertion of dominance by a renewed Thomism in Catholic orthodoxy. I argue that such a historical reading of Baius’ ideas is the key to avoid the earlier dogmatic assessments of his theology.

Premodern Scotland

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Morte Darthur ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Public Governance ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Troy Book

This book brings together original essays by a group of international scholars to offer ground-breaking research into the ‘Advice to Princes’ tradition and related themes of good self- and public governance in Older Scots literature, and in Latin literature composed in Scotland in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. The essays honour Professor Sally Mapstone and bring to the fore texts both from and about the royal court in a variety of genres, and for a range of audiences. The writers and texts studied include Bower’s Scotichronicon, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados. Lesser known authors and texts also receive much-needed critical attention, including Richard Holland’s The Buke of the Howlat, chronicles by Andrew of Wyntoun, Hector Boece, and John Bellenden, and poetry by sixteenth-century writers such as Robert Sempill, John Rolland of Dalkeith, and William Lauder. Non-literary texts, such as the Parliamentary ‘Aberdeen Articles’, further deepen discussion of the volume’s theme. Writings from south of the border, which provoked creative responses in Scots authors, and which were themselves inflected by the idea of Scotland and its literature, are also considered here as well as the Troy Book by John Lydgate, and Malory’s Morte Darthur. With a focus on historical and material context, contributors explore the ways in which these texts engage with notions of the self and with advisory subjects both specific to particular Stewart monarchs and of more general political applicability in Scotland in the late medieval and early modern periods.

The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice*

1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Cox
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Marriage Market ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Italian Women Writers ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Italian Women ◽  
Early Modern Venice

The Year 1600 Witnessed A significant though little-noted event in Italian cultural history: the publication of the first substantial full-length works by Italian women writers arguing the case for women's moral and intellectual equality with men. The writers in question were two Venetians, Lucrezia Marinella and Modesta Pozzo (Moderata Fonte); their works, respectively, a polemical treatise, La nobilta et I'eccellenza delle donne, and a dialogue, Il merito delle donne. These texts, long neglected, have recently begun to attract a certain amount of critical attention: particularly Fonte's Merito, far the more accessible of the two and a work, as is now being recognized, of considerable literary merit.

So Many Tall Tales: Constantijn L’Empereur’s Polemical Reading of Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-81
Author(s):  
Marci Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Language Study ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract The twelfth-century Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela and his Book of Travels has attracted widespread attention since the Middle Ages. The narrative, however, has largely been read and studied in the context of what it can tell scholars about the medieval world. This article shifts the approach away from the Book of Travels’ content to its reception. Under discussion is Constantijn L’Empereur’s 1633 Latin edition. This article reveals how L’Empereur elevated the Book of Travels from a travelogue into a work of rabbinic literature to undermine the text’s authority. It argues that by attacking the veracity of the account, L’Empereur employed the narrative in anti-Jewish polemics against the cunning, and theologically blind Jews to illustrate the errors of their beliefs. By illuminating L’Empereur’s engagement with the text, the article also situates L’Empereur’s use of rabbinic literature in the wider early modern debate about the utility of Hebrew language study and rabbinic literature for Christian scholars.

The Name of Grim: Tracing the Character of Grim the Collier in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Theatre

Early Theatre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Seymour
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Superficial Similarity ◽  
The Devil

Grim the Collier is a curious comic character who receives little critical attention. Grim appears in three key plays, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets, herbals, and ballad culture. This article examines, and rejects, Grim as a potentially useful figure for environmental awareness. I dispel legends about the basis of this character, and examine how the labile significance of the name ‘Grim’ implicates it in networks of superficial similarity between devils, colliers, and racialized black skin. These networks link to the proverb that underlies most early modern depictions of Grim: ‘like will to like quoth the devil to the collier’.

Pretty and Apt

2016 ◽  
pp. 627-640
Author(s):  
Evelyn Tribble
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Skilled Subject ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Erotic

Critical attention to the cross-dressed boy player has tended to focus on the erotic appeal of the boys. The boy player may have been an object of desire, but he was equally a skilled subject. Indeed, ‘boyishness’ is constituted by certain forms of skill display, and redirecting our attention to the skill of the boy player can provide a fuller account of the nature of embodiment on the early modern stage. The childishness of the boy actor allows him to play a double game, a dialectic of revealing and concealing skill, of presentation and representation that draws attention to the animate and quicksilver qualities of the young actor. This argument is made by contrasting the presentational and representational strategies in Lyly’s Galatea and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and Twelfth Night.

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