scholarly journals The Places of Early Modern Criticism

What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires that one think about various kinds of place—material, textual, geographical—and the practices particular to those places. It also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume place criticism in Britain, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and the New World; in letters, sermons, pictures, poems, plays, treatises, manuals, discourses, defences, and manuscript miscellanies; in philosophy, theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and poetics; in workshops, theatres, studios, galleries, private houses, city halls, salons, and bedchambers. They explore the hybrid genres, disciplines, modes of thought, lexicons, identities, and practices that emerge when criticism connects or moves between different places. They examine the operations of imagination, empathy, and analogy by which artists might imagine themselves in their characters’ places, or poets and painters, readers, viewers, or audience members might critically and creatively swap places. They interrogate, in various ways, the relationship between the places of learned humanist excavation, the passing of individual judgement, and the gaining of social experience. Often taking polemic as its subject matter, The Places of Early Modern Criticism also argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Korenjak

AbstractThe “discovery” of the landscape and the growing interest in ruins in early modern times have been the objects of intense research over the last decades. The interaction between these two developments, by contrast, has only rarely been studied, and if so, mainly with regard to the visual arts. Within the literary tradition, only the travel literature of the 18th and 19th centuries has received any attention. How the relationship of landscape and ruins was conceived in the learned, mostly Latin literature of earlier centuries has never been examined in any detail. The present article tries to make good on this deficit. In the first section, it is shown how, from the Renaissance onwards, ruins came to be seen as an integral part of certain landscapes. This development was complemented by a perception of landscapes as ruins from the 17th century onwards, the theme of section two. By way of conclusion, the convergence of landscape appreciation and ruinophilia in early modern times is explained with recourse to the emergence of a new historical consciousness: the new interest in landscape, ruins, and their interplay was kindled by a growing awareness of the fact that these environmental features carried precious information about, and could even be seen as an embodiment of, the history of mankind and the earth.


2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter W. Roberts ◽  
Ray Reagans

AbstractNotwithstanding the observed positive correlations between critics' quality ratings and wine prices, the range of these correlations is quite high. In light of this, researchers must consider the factors that either strengthen or weaken the association between quality ratings and prices. In this paper, we propose that the slope of the relationship between quality ratings and wine prices is moderated by the amount of attention that producers receive. Because attention increases with a producer's critical exposure (i.e., its history of critical coverage), price-quality relationships will be steeper for producers with more critical exposure. This prediction is confirmed in an analysis of New World wines selling into the U.S. market over the 1987 to 2001 period. While a wine's price is a positive function of its own quality rating, the strength of the price-quality relationship increases with a producer's critical exposure (JEL classifications: L11, L13, L15).


Author(s):  
Matthew Lockwood

The Conquest of Death considers the concepts of violence and state power far more broadly and holistically than previous accounts of state growth by intertwining the national and the local, the formal and the informal to illustrate how the management of incidental acts of violence and justice was as important to the monopolization of violence as the creation of the machinery of warfare. It reveals how the creation and operation of everyday bureaucracy built systems of power far exceeding its original intent and allowed a greater centralized surveillance of daily life than ever before. In sum, this book forces us to think about state formation not in terms of the broad strokes of legislative policy and international competition, but rather as a process built by multiple tiny actions, interactions and encroachments which fundamentally redefined the nature of the state and the relationship between government and governed. The Conquest of Death thus provides a new approach to the history of state formation, the history of criminal justice and the history of violence in early modern England. By locating the creation of an effective, permanent monopoly of violence in England in the second-half of the sixteenth century, this book also provides a new chronology of the divide between medieval and modern while divorcing the history of state growth from a linear history of centralization.


2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 866-903 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Trevisan

AbstractThe relationship between poetry and painting has been one of the most debated issues in the history of criticism. The present article explores this problematic relationship in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, taking into account theories of rhetoric, visual perception, and art. It analyzes a rare case in which a specific school of painting directly inspired poetry: in particular, the ways in which the Netherlandish landscape tradition influenced natural descriptions in the poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) by Michael Drayton (1563–1631). Drayton — under the influence of the artistic principles of landscape depiction as explained in Henry Peacham’s art manuals, as well as of direct observation of Dutch and Flemish landscape prints and paintings — successfully managed to render pictorial landscapes into poetry. Through practical examples, this essay will thoroughly demonstrate that rhetoric is capable of emulating pictorial styles in a way that presupposes specialized art-historical knowledge, and that pictorialism can be the complex product as much of poetry and rhetoric as of painting and art-theoretical vocabulary.


1996 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 221-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joke Spaans

The Reformation in the Low Countries fascinates both church historians and general historians. Religious change and political revolution went hand in hand. The history of the Reformation is an integral part of the history of the birth of the Dutch nation. Although well-researched, its attraction is renewed with each successive historiographical fashion.


1982 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Gunnell

Recent challenges to traditional approaches and purposes for studying the history of political theory have raised questions about its constitution as both a subject matter and subfield of political science. Methodological arguments advocating what is characterized as a more truly historical mode of inquiry for understanding political ideas and recovering textual meaning have become increasingly popular. The relationship of these hermeneutical claims about historicity, such as that advanced by Quentin Skinner, to the actual practice of interpretation is problematical. Such claims are more a defense of a certain norm of historical investigation than a method of interpretation, and the implications of this norm for the reconstitution of the history of political theory require careful consideration.


2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EDWARDS

The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.


Author(s):  
Bethânia De Albuquerque Assy ◽  
Florian Fabian Hoffman

Resumo: A resposta da Escola de Salamanca à crise cognitiva gerada pelo encontro entre europeus e ameríndios no século XVI tem se convertido em um dos momentos mais referenciados na historiografia colonial devido ao papel que desempenhou na formação do direito internacional (europeu). Embora a posição tradicional sobre o uso dos direitos naturais da Escola para enquadrar o relacionamento com os ameríndios tenha mitigado a universalidade colonizadora do incipiente ius gentium (europeu), (re)leituras post/descoloniais mais recentes expuseram esse movimento como uma mera estratégia para a subjugação epistêmica dos ameríndios. No entanto, de acordo com suas premissas historicistas, ambas as posições se concentraram no impacto da doutrina de Salamanca sobre a história europeia das ideias e deixaram (relativamente) sub-explorado seu significado como resposta à experiência de alteridade radical em relação ao encontro ameríndio. O recurso a linguagem de direitos dos salamanquianos também pode ser visto como uma maneira de lidar com o desafio perspectivista fundamental que a “razão” culturalmente diferente, ainda que epistemologicamente equivalente, dos ameríndios representou. A sua “solução” de um jusnaturalismo pluricultural historicamente concretizado não era inteiramente coerente nem livre do eurocentrismo. Mas sua gênese contrafactual por meio de uma combinação de realismo universalista escolástico tardio e de multinaturalismo indígena mostra que o encontro ameríndio era intelectualmente muito menos unilateral do que a recepção europeia histórica reconheceria. No entanto, essa abordagem exige não apenas uma virada (sutil) para uma perspectiva etnográfica, mas também uma reconstrução antropológica radical da historiografia do início da era moderna do direito internacional.Abstract: The School of Salamanca’s response to the cognitive crisis which the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians in the sixteenth century generated has become one of the most referenced moments in colonial historiography for the role it played in the formation of (European) international law. While the traditional position on the School’s use of natural rights to frame the relationship with Amerindians argued that it thereby sought to mitigate the colonizing universality of the incipient (European) ius gentium, more recent post/decolonial (re-)readings have exposed this move as a mere strategy for the epistemic subjugation of Amerindia. However, in line with their historicist premises, both positions have focussed on the impact of Salamancan thought on the European history of ideas and have left its significance as a response to the experience of radical alterity vis-à-vis the Amerindian encounte (relatively) underexplored. For the Salamancan’s resort to rights language can also be seen as a way to grapple with the fundamental perspectivist challenge that the culturally different yet epistemically equivalent ‘reason’ of the Amerindians represented. Their “solution” of a historically concretized pluricultural jusnaturalism was neither entirely coherent nor free from Eurocentrism, but its counterfactual genesis through a combination of late scholastic universalist realism and Amerindian multinaturalism shows that the Amerindian encounter was intellectually much less one-sided than its European reception history would acknowledge. Yet, this approach requires not only a (subtle) shift towards an ethnographic perspective but also a (radically) anthropological reconstruction of the historiography of early modern international law.


Author(s):  
Alexander S. Wilkinson

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain was the most powerful nation in the world, controlling territories across Europe and much of the newly discovered lands west of the Tordesillas line. Although its influence would wane in the 17th century, as its empire became overstretched, and as the home nation itself was forced to confront major financial and demographic challenges, overall these centuries would represent the high point in Spain’s political and global hegemony. This was a great age—a Golden Age—in Spain’s history, and one which would see too the unleashing of powerful creative energies, especially in the fields of literature, drama, and the visual arts. Among a host of other notable figures active in this period were Miguel de Cervantes, Félix Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El Greco, and Diego Velázquez. Given such intense artistic vitality, it has seemed almost paradoxical to scholars that the publishing industries of Spain and Portugal should have remained so underdeveloped. In the broader historiography of the European book, Spain and Portugal are presented as examples of peripheral print regions. Mention is frequently made of the relatively late arrival of print to the Peninsula, as well as the unexceptional quality of its book production—particularly its rudimentary typography and uninventive ornamentation and illustration. Surveys usually point out that so poor was the caliber of printing in the Peninsula that printers in the Low Countries, France, and elsewhere saw clear opportunities for filling the void, producing both scholarly and vernacular editions to be sold to eager and grateful purchasers in Spain and Portugal. However, this established and rather somber portrait of the industry is exaggerated and misleading in some key respects.


Author(s):  
Samuele Tacconi

Abstract In 1751 Pope Benedict XIV made a donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, a scientific academy located in the city of his birth. This article reconstructs the history of this group of objects back to its origins in the Jesuit missions of the upper Amazon basin, by presenting and examining new documentary evidence. The encounter between a Jesuit missionary and Pope Benedict XIV is analysed in the context of the early modern reception of the New World and its peoples in Catholic Europe. Finally, an overview is presented of the items in this collection, which represent some of the scarcest and oldest known examples of native material culture from the region.


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