The Construction of Humanism

Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart

This chapter starts with a very concise discussion of how the different approaches to classical literature debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be traced back to the ancient world and the Middle Ages. The rest of the chapter demonstrates how scholars in the early eighteenth century reflected on the work of their predecessors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based on their own scholarly concerns. The first example is Pieter Burman (1668–1741) and his Sylloge epistolarum (1724–7), the edition of unpublished writings by the French critic Henri Valois (1603–76; edition published in 1740), and the edition of George Buchanan (1506–82), published in 1725. In the Sylloge, for example, Burman focuses on letters that show how eminent scholars thought about the correct reading of classical texts, while a ‘popularizer’ like Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) is criticized. Valois’s work was used as a starting point to reflect on what Burman and his nephew Pieter Burman the Younger (1713–78) saw as the downfall of French textual criticism. Finally, Burman’s own interest in the stylistic and rhetorical aspects of texts also allowed him to avoid involvement in politically sensitive matters, as was the case for Buchanan’s views in contemporary Scotland. The final example discussed in this chapter is the prefatory material written by Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) for the edition of Erasmus’ Opera omnia (1703–6), in which Le Clerc dwells on the relationship between the study of ancient literature and other academic disciplines such as philosophy and theology.

Author(s):  
Nguyễn Quang Ngọc

Vietnam is a country of an early history establishment with three archaeological centres: Dong Son in the North, Sa Huynh in the Central, and Oc Eo in the South. In the long history, these three centres unite and gather into a unified block, step by step, becoming a mainstream development trend. By the eleventh century, Thang Long capital (Hanoi) is a typical representative, the starting point for the course of advancement to the South of the Vietnamese. Later, Phu Xuan (Hue) from the fourteenth century and Gia Dinh (Saigon) from the seventeenth century directly multiply resources, deciding the success of the course of territory expansion and determining the southern territory of the nation Dai Viet – Vietnam in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Tay Son movement at the end of the eighteenth century starts unifying the country, but the course is not completed with numerous limitations. The mission of unifying the whole country is assigned back to Nguyen Anh. Nguyen Anh continually builds Gia Dinh into a firm basement for proceeding to conquer the imperial capital of Hue and the citadel Thang Long, completing the 733-year journey to expand the southern territory (1069–1802) and unifying the whole country into a single unit. Hanoi – Hue – Saigon in the relationship and mutual support has become the three pillars that determine all successes throughout the long history and in each stage of expansion and shaping of territory and unification of the country.


Author(s):  
Alan Montgomery

The Introduction summarises the origins of Scotland’s patriotic historiography, highlighting the importance of medieval chronicles and the Renaissance histories of Hector Boece and George Buchanan in laying the foundations of early modern Scottish national identity. In particular, it identifies the long-held belief that Scotland was one of the few places to have successfully resisted Roman conquest. As well as looking at the importance of classical literature and authors such as Cicero and Livy in the development of Scottish scholarship, it also outlines eighteenth-century Scottish attitudes towards ancient Rome, its culture and its imperial ambitions, and explores the importance of the Grand Tour in the formation of early modern interpretations of the classical past.


Author(s):  
Dale Townshend

This book seeks to provide the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction, poetry, drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the literature/architecture relation is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains no monograph-length study of the intriguing interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only cursory treatment in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. Addressing this gap in scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of texts. In turn, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its ‘survivalist’ and ‘revivalist’ forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was much more than a matter of style. Incarnating the memory of a vanished ‘Gothic’ age in the enlightened present, Gothic architecture, whether ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation’s past—a notable ‘visionary’ turn in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. Through initiating a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, the book argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.


2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-136
Author(s):  
Emma Bridges ◽  
Joanna Paul

With Killing Hercules, Richard Rowland has produced a wide-ranging trans-historical discussion of re-workings of the relationship between the mythical Hercules and Deinaira, from Sophocles’ fifth-century bceTrachiniae to Martin Crimp's 2004 play, Cruel and Tender, and a 2014 staging of Handel's operatic Hercules. Impressive for the breath-taking variety of receptions of the story of Deianira's killing of her husband, the volume devotes as much attention to medieval, post-Reformation, and eighteenth-century versions as to ancient texts (including, as well as Sophoclean tragedy, receptions in Latin – for example, the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus and Ovid's Heroides – which lie behind many post-classical re-workings of the story) and contemporary retellings; the study touches on several Italian, French, and German versions as well as those in English. As a scholar who has direct experience of theatre practice, Rowland draws on his involvement in staged versions of both Trachiniae (his own verse translation, which he includes as an appendix) and Cruel and Tender in order to provide fresh insights on both of these texts. The resulting volume, which illustrates the complex and varied reflections on masculinity and sexual identity prompted by the characters of Hercules and Deianira, has at its heart questions relating to the gendered role of violence in retellings of the myth both on a domestic level and in relation to international politics. Hercules has been seen as everything from the epitome of masculine virtue and heroic self-sacrifice to abuser and serial adulterer, ‘sexual deviant and disastrous husband’ (115); in her turn, Deianira – in some versions denied a voice altogether – has been variously portrayed as duplicitous or insane, or as a victim whose killing of her abuser is deserving of sympathy. The chapter on the Middle Ages illustrates well the re-appropriation of the story to serve a range of political, religious, and social agendas – from condemnation of Hercules’ lack of self-control by Augustine to valorization of his sexual violence, as well as the misogynist and misogamist interpretations of Deianira which were marshalled in service of debates on the role of marriage. Elsewhere, Rowland shows how the tale could be used simultaneously on both sides of a single political conflict – during the Civil War period, both regicides and royalists used lines from Seneca's Hercules Furens to insist on the rectitude of their respective stances (153–4). Even those already familiar with the reception of the figure of Hercules will find something new in this rich exploration of the pliability of one mythical story.


Author(s):  
Pedro Ruiz Pérez

RESUMENDesde la segunda mitad del XVII hasta mediados del siglo siguiente se extiende una línea poética que trabaja con elementos persistentes desde la primera fase del barroco, pero con una articulación y un significado en el que se perciben las huellas del cambio. Una de las líneas de esta estética bajobarroca representa un paso en la dirección adoptada después por la poética neoclásica e ilustrada, y puede concretarse en la reordenación de las relaciones entre sentimiento y razón. Este estudio toma como punto de partida el poemario anónimo Fragmentos del ocio (1668, reeditado en 1683), reconocido como de Juan Gaspar Enríquez de Cabrera, y, a partir de un análisis del empleo del término «razón» y su concepto, se apoya en las variantes de una diacronía que lo acerca al siglo XVIII para abordar una proyección de los rasgos observados en la caracterización de la poética bajobarroca. Se destacan como elementos distintivos un novedoso sentido de la inmanencia, la redefinición del lugar social de la poesía y de la posición de su autor y, finalmente, la tendencia a la poesía de circunstancias. Con ellas la sentimentalidad abandona su condición de componente definitorio de la lírica y abre paso a una racionalidad ligada a los nuevos modelos de sociabilidad e ideales expresivos.PALABRAS CLAVEEnríquez de Cabrera, Fragmentos del ocio, razón, bajo barroco, poética, campo literario. ABSTRACTSince the second half of the seventeenth century a poetic current is developed until the middle of the next century, working with persistent elements from the first phase of the Baroque, but with a joint and a meaning where the traces of change are perceived. One line of this bajobarroca aesthetic represents a step in the direction that the neoclassical and illustrated poetry take after, and it may be materialized in the reconstructing of the relationship between feeling and reason. This study takes as its starting point the anonymous book of poetry Fragmentos del ocio (1668, reprinted 1683), whose author was Juan Gaspar Enriquez de Cabrera. From an analysis of the use “reason” and its concept, the study is based in the variants in a diachrony that brings the work near the eighteenth century. So, it is possible to map out the features observed in the characterization of the low baroque poetic. They are outstanding categories a new sense of immanence, the redefinition of the social place of poetry and of position of the author, and, finally, the tendency to the poetry of circumstances. With them, the sentimentality leaves his condition of essential component of lyric and gives way to rationality linked to models  of sociability and expressive ideals.KEYWORDSEnríquez de Cabrera, Fragmentos del ocio, reason, low baroque, poetics, literary field


PMLA ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth McKenzie

Italy, for obvious reasons, always kept closer than other countries to ancient classical literature. There the classic spirit was native, for the Italians were always conscious of being the heirs of the ancient Roman Empire; there Humanism and the Renaissance arose; there the counter-Reformation resisted the Protestant spirit of the northern countries; there Arcadian academies and pseudo-classicism flourished. But the Romantic attitude was present in many Italian writers from the Middle Ages on. Petrarch was romantic in his introspective melancholy, Ariosto was romantic in his love of picturesque adventure; yet both are classic in the perfection of their style as well as in their knowledge of antiquity. Thus the two tendencies existed side by side, frequently in the same man, although in theory Italy remained classicist until the end of the eighteenth century. The pre-romantic literature of France, England, and Germany was modified in Italy by the prevalent classical tradition, but it found there a fertile soil. As a literary movement, Romanticism in Italy is best considered as represented by a group of writers in the period which followed the collapse of Napoleon's empire.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Janne Tunturi

This paper concentrates on darkness as a metaphor in eighteenth century historical writing. In contrast to the celebration of light as a symbol of knowledge and progress, the interpretations of the meaning of darkness varied. For many historians, it symbolised backwardness, or decline, which culminated in medieval society. Yet, the relationship between eighteenth century historiography and the Middle Ages was not as explicit as the usual suspects such as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon suggest. First of all, the understanding of the culture or texts of the Dark Ages signalled the skilfulness of the interpreter. Secondly, some supposed features of the medieval culture, such the free use of the imagination, gradually became more appreciated.


2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW R. HOLMES

AbstractIn his presidential address to the Belfast meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874, John Tyndall launched what David Livingstone has called a ‘frontal assault on teleology and Christian theism’. Using Tyndall's intervention as a starting point, this paper seeks to understand the attitudes of Presbyterians in the north of Ireland to science in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The first section outlines some background, including the attitude of Presbyterians to science in the eighteenth century, the development of educational facilities in Ireland for the training of Presbyterian ministers, and the specific cultural and political circumstances in Ireland that influenced Presbyterian responses to science more generally. The next two sections examine two specific applications by Irish Presbyterians of the term ‘science’: first, the emergence of a distinctive Presbyterian theology of nature and the application of inductive scientific methodology to the study of theology, and second, the Presbyterian conviction that mind had ascendancy over matter which underpinned their commitment to the development of a science of the mind. The final two sections examine, in turn, the relationship between science and an eschatological reading of the signs of the times, and attitudes to Darwinian evolution in the fifteen years between the publication ofThe Origin of Speciesin 1859 and Tyndall's speech in 1874.


Author(s):  
Jennifer F Kosmin

Abstract This article takes the commission of an elaborate and life-like obstetrical machine by the Italian midwifery instructor, Vincenzo Malacarne, in 1791 as a starting point for considering the ways that medical practitioners were renegotiating the relationship between the senses at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, it focuses on the cultivation of touch as an authoritative and professionalised source of bodily knowledge. The article argues that Malacarne's obstetrical machine reflects an important moment of transition in the way medical practitioners were trained to interact with female patients, in which the manual exploration of a woman’s genitals was re-contextualised as an expression of scientific rationality and medical authority. A close examination of the use of obstetrical machines in midwifery training suggests, moreover, that women, too, whose touch had often been accused of irrationality and ignorance, had to be taught how to perform manual procedures in a rational and scientific manner.


Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.


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