The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Individual Study ◽  
Material World ◽  
Autos Sacramentales ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
Sor Juana

This study analyses the autos sacramentales, or Eucharistic plays, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95). It focusses on their relationship to the changing currents of philosophical thought in the late-seventeenth century Hispanic world, from a mindset characterized by scepticism, Neostoicism, and suspicion of the material world as a source of truth, to an empirical approach to the natural world that understood the information received by the senses as a fallible, yet useful, provisional source of knowledge. By examining each play in turn, along with the introductory loa with which they were intended to be performed, the study explores how each drama seeks to integrate empirical ideas with a Catholic understanding of transubstantiation. At the same time, each individual study identifies new sources for these plays, and demonstrates how these illuminate, or nuance, present readings of the works. The study of El divino Narciso employs a previously little-known source to illuminate its Christological readings, as well as Sor Juana’s engagement with notions of wit and conceptism. The analysis of El cetro de José explores her presentation of different approaches to perception to emphasize the importance of both the material and the transcendent in understanding the sacraments. The final section, on San Hermenegildo, explores the influence of the Christianized stoicism of Justus Lipsius, and demonstrates how Sor Juana used this work to attempt her most ambitious reconciliation of an empirical approach to the material world with a Neostoic approach to Christian morality and orthodox Catholic sacramental theology.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
Material World ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
Sor Juana ◽  
Athanasius Kircher

The Introduction to this study explores the philosophical context in which Sor Juana wrote her Eucharistic plays. It traces the transition from a mindset characterized by scepticism and Neostoicism to the advent of the New Philosophy and an empirical approach to the material world. In particular, it analyses how two authors, Athanasius Kircher and Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, attempted to reconcile empirical ideas with a Christian understanding of the natural world as a reflection of the divine. This chapter then demonstrates how traces of a similar philosophical approach are present in Sor Juana’s works, in particular in her explorations of the natural world, her writings on allegory, and her engagement with Christian figuration.

scholarly journals Rational and natural theology in Anne Conway's Principia

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Jonathan Head
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Epistemology

AbstractThis paper gives an account of the religious epistemology and theological working methods used in Anne Conway's Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690). It is argued that the epistemic foundations of Conway's philosophical theology are rooted in a personal revelation of the existence and nature of God, which forms a framework through which the natural world can be approached and studied as creation. In this way, we can clarify both the place of Conway's work in the intellectual currents of the seventeenth century and various aspects of her metaphysical system, such as her account of creation.

The practice and theory of property in seventeenth-century Bengal

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
The Third ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Shared Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Theoretical Issues

This study reconstructs the connected history of socio-economic and intellectual practices related to property in seventeenth-century Bengal. From the perspective of socio-economic practices, this study is concerned with the legal transfer of immovable property between individuals. From the perspective of intellectual practice, this study is concerned with how property was understood as an analytical category that stood in a particular relation to an individual. Their connected history is examined by analysing socio-economic practices exemplified in a number of documents detailing the sale and donation of land and then situating these practices within the scholarly analysis of property undertaken by authors within the discipline of nyāya—the Sanskrit discipline dealing primarily with ontology and epistemology. In the first section of the essay, I undertake a detailed examination of available land documents in order to highlight particular conceptions of property. In the second section of the essay, I draw out theoretical issues examined in nyāya texts that relate directly to the concepts expressed in the land documents. In the third and final section of the essay, I discuss the shared language and shared concepts between the documents and nyāya texts. This last section also addresses how the nyāya analysis of property facilitates a better understanding of claims in the documents and what nyāya authors may have been doing in writing about property.

The botanical works of Nehemiah Grew, F. R. S. (1641-1712)

1973 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-231 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Material Things

NEHEMIAH GREW was the first English plant anatomist. He was one of that closely knit group of amateur scientists of the seventeenth century who were consciously applying Baconian principles to the exploration of the natural world. The questions they were asking about material things were new questions, of limited and precise range. The answers they found helped to define the scope and content of new sciences, one by one. In this way Grew mapped out the science of botany. In the writings of these men are to be found a strenuous reaching towards a rational view and an attempt to discard the speculations and superstitions of past ages. Yet their work often showed a curious ambivalence, despite their brave words. They were men of both worlds and the old lies embedded undetected beside the new in their philosophy.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Laws of God or Laws of Nature?

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Commands ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Will Of God

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.

Some Firsts

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Graham Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Northern Africa ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
The Public ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Lives

Although the public lives and history of giraffes have been well recorded in many books, the story of giraffes told in this book would be incomplete without a brief review of how giraffes first entered into the consciousness of those humans who did not live in Africa. They did so via art and literature. The first appearance of giraffes in literature is probably in the Old Testament, but after that, many other authors wrote of them, in particular Pliny the Elder. Their appearance in art begins with rock paintings in southern and northern Africa, and artwork in Egypt over the period 6000 to 3000 BC. More modern images began appearing ~AD 500 in the first texts that dealt with the natural world. Julius Caesar brought the first living giraffe to Europe, followed by Lorenzo de Medici in the thirteenth century. By the late seventeenth century they had disappeared from public view in Europe except as a stellar constellation.

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