Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Tracey A. Sowerby ◽  
Joanna Craigwood
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Core ◽  
Theoretical Import

The Introduction outlines the inter-penetration of literary and diplomatic cultures within European and some non-European diplomatic practices, emphasizing the wide-ranging and sophisticated ways in which early modern diplomats utilized literary motifs. It introduces readers to existing research within the emerging field of diplo-literary studies and those areas of the ‘new diplomatic history’ which are most pertinent to the core thematic focus of the collection. While situating contributions within this literature, it also outlines the collective methodological and theoretical import of the volume. Paying particular attention to literary representations of diplomacy, diplomacy, and translation, the diplomatic dissemination of texts, and the texts used in diplomatic practice, it draws out a series of findings for the field.

Benedict de Spinoza’s Virtue

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Columbus N. Ogbujah ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Ethical Relativism ◽  
Ethical Egoism ◽  
Absolute Truth ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Seminal Roots

Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was about the most radical of the early modern philosophers who developed a unique metaphysics that inspired an intriguing moral philosophy, fusing insights from ancient Stoicism, Cartesian metaphysics, Hobbes and medieval Jewish rationalism. While helping to ground the Enlightenment, Spinoza’s thoughts, against the intellectual mood of the time, divorced transcendence from divinity, equating God with nature. His extremely naturalistic views of reality constructed an ethical structure that links the control of human passion to virtue and happiness. By denying objective significance to things aside from human desires and beliefs, he is considered an anti-realist; and by endorsing a vision of reality according to which everyone ought to seek their own advantage, he is branded ethical egoist. This essay identified the varying influences of Spinoza’s moral anti-realism and ethical egoism on post-modernist thinkers who decried the “naïve faith” in objective and absolute truth, but rather propagated perspective relativity of reality. It recognized that modern valorization of ethical relativism, which in certain respects, detracts from the core values of the Enlightenment, has its seminal roots in his works.

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-228
Author(s):  
David Hershinow
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Truth Teller

In this book, I have tried to show that it is only with the rise of dramatic realism that the figure of the Cynic truth-teller begins to provoke sustained interpretive crisis, a crisis that takes shape in the sixteenth century and that goes on to drive key developments in our literary, philosophical and political history. Through my readings of Shakespeare’s plays, I have also tried to show that literature – along with its academic offspring, literary criticism – is uniquely positioned to diagnose the interpretive errors that consequently underwrite philosophical and political ideas about the means of achieving extreme critical agency. What these two overarching aims have in common is the critical methodology I develop in order to advance them, and I conclude this book by briefly commenting on the value this method holds for early modern studies in particular and for the discipline of literary studies in general....

Bunster, Patricio (1924–2006)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Richard Giersdorf
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Corporeal Awareness

Patricio Bunster’s career was emblematic of a Latin American engagement with European modernism and unique in its exchange with German modern dance (Ausdruckstanz). Trained in Chile by immigrant German members of Kurt Jooss’s company, Bunster merged a local vocabulary with globalized movements—such as modern dance vocabulary derived from Ausdruckstanz and ballet—with the goal of restructuring existing nationally defined movement. This merger was utopian in its rethinking of national culture toward a global artistic expression. Such a utopian understanding of the capacity of movement as a global unifier and transformer recalled early modern dance’s vision for a changed world through corporeal awareness and choreographed emancipation. Influenced by Laban as well as Jooss and Leeder, Bunster observed and deployed movement found in manual labor, leisure, daily rituals, nature, and the structure of architecture. In Bunster’s opinion, all of these sources carried traces of future choreographies that could express a new transnational, (Latin) American, and utopian society. Different utopian models, such as the radical rethinking of political structures through a breakdown of the barrier between art and life or the embracing of technology in relation to design for the bettering of society were at the core of modernist conviction that the world needed to be fundamentally changed.

The Ontological Status of Causal Powers

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hill
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Core ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
Popular View

Benjamin Hill seeks to initiate deeper contemporary discussion of the ontological challenges that drove early modern philosophers (namely, several early Cartesians, Berkeley, and Hume) to accept the negative thesis of occasionalism, that no physical object can truly be an efficient cause. He argues that we should be looking past Hume and his empiricist’s approach to secondary causation to bring the core metaphysical, issues he believes are still lingering, into sharper focus. Hill walks us backwards from Hume’s empirical critiques of powers in the Enquiry and Treatise to Locke’s presentation of the ‘popular’ view that experience lead us to postulate powers as a response to occasionalism. This, he suggests, reveals that the early modern debate about causal powers tracked not the divide between scholastics and mechanical philosophers but the divide between realists and occasionalists and revolved around a confusion between them regarding what was the underlying question of the debate. For the occasionalists, it was not really about whether or not causal powers did exist, but about explaining how they could exist. This leads Hill to explore the metaphysical worries animating seventeenth-century occasionalists.

scholarly journals Mixed Company in the Contact Zone: the “Glocal” Diplomatic Efforts of a Prussian East Indiaman in 1750s Cape Verde

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 423-441
Author(s):  
Felicia Gottmann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract This article takes a micro-historical actor-centered approach to study the encounter between the officers of a Prussian East India Company Ship and local elites in 1750s Praia, Cape Verde. Combining recent advances in New Diplomatic History and in Company Studies with insights from the study of Contact Zones and transculturation, it analyzes the diplomatic strategies marginalized and hybrid players could adopt to project themselves onto the early modern global stage and locally counterbalance the hegemonic Northern European Atlantic powers. It thus proposes an alternative model of nonprofessional diplomatic interaction in the early modern period.

“We are of the Sea!”

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-201
Author(s):  
Laurie Ellinghausen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Religion And Nationalism

The figure of the renegade has been widely discussed in the field of early modern literary studies, with scholars situating rogue behavior within discourses of race, religion, and nationalism. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed how domestic discourses of class and labor also shaped representations of renegades. My paper fills this gap by paying particular attention to English anxieties about vagrancy, a domestic phenomenon that manifested itself in new forms abroad, among pirates, apostates, and other traitors operating outside the geographical boundaries of the English state. Specifically, I examine the figure of Captain John Ward in Robert Daborne’s play A Christian Turned Turk (pub. 1612), in order to demonstrate previously overlooked connections between Ward’s reputation and his actual background as a lowly fisherman and conscripted sailor. This paper, by closely examining how the play and its sources construct Ward as a masterless man, sheds new light on the neglected issues of class and labor in the construction of the early modern English renegade.

scholarly journals Missionaries as bridge builders in Buddhist kingdoms: Amity amid radical difference

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Eva M. Pascal
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Core ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
The World

Buddhism and Christianity are major world religions that both make universal and often competing claims about the nature of the world and ultimate reality. These claims are difficult to reconcile and often go to the core of Buddhist and Christian worldviews. This article looks at the age of encounter in the early modern period for ways Christians and Buddhists forged friendship through common spiritual commitments and action. Beyond seeking theological and philosophical exchange, convergences along spirituality and practice proved important vehicles for friendship. With the examples of Christian–Buddhist friendship from historical case studies, this article explores the ways contemporary Christian expressions of spiritual practice and advocacy allows Christians to connect with Buddhists. Early modern encounters have important lessons for furthering Christian–Buddhist friendship that may also be applied to other religious traditions.

The Hurt(ful) Body

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatre Studies

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

Consuls-of-State and the Redemption of Slaves: The Dutch Republic and the Western Mediterranean, 1616–1651

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Erica Heinsen-Roach
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Customary Practices

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch Republic developed a trade empire of global proportions. The Dutch government played a substantial role in building and sustaining merchant enterprises by allowing chartered companies to act on its behalf. In the Mediterranean, however, the authorities relied on a variety of commercial-diplomatic agents to promote commerce. This article argues that Dutch consuls in the western Mediterranean transformed from merchant-consuls into state-representatives and played a crucial role in sustaining diplomatic relations with states in the Maghreb. By comparing the conditions under which consuls liberated captives in Algiers and Morocco during the first half of the seventeenth century, the article examines how consuls continuously had to adjust their mission to the interests of different institutions and individuals. The article concludes that the expansion of Dutch global commerce in the Mediterranean did not evolve according to a standard script but in consuls’ interactions with local conditions and customary practices. The article contributes to the New Diplomatic History that emphasizes how successful diplomatic relations in the early modern world depended on a range of different diplomatic actors who created forms of state diplomacy beyond treaty making and alliances.

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