Conclusion and Prospect

2018 ◽  
pp. 206-208
Author(s):  
Adriaan C. Neele
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Initial Attempt ◽  
Intellectual Context

The conclusion makes several observations about Edwards and his intellectual context. The portrait of Edwards is of a private scholar pastoring churches in New England. As such, he stands in discontinuity with the seventeenth-century theologians and philosophers he admired. Furthermore, Edwards is positioned as a transitional figure between the pre-enlightenment and enlightenment era, though firmly rooted in early modern Reformed theology. Methodologically, the conclusion states that the inclusion of early New England history and theology, the period from circa 1625 to circa 1750, into the field of post-Reformation studies assists one in a more careful examination of the rise and development of Reformed Orthodoxy in New England than has been researched thus far. Secondly, this study offers an initial attempt to fulfill the first consideration by placing Edwards in a broader theological context. Thirdly, reading Edwards against the background of early modern intellectual history offers several areas of unexplored research.

Building Bensalem at Massachusetts Bay: Francis Bacon and the Wisdom of Eden in Early Modern New England

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-606
Author(s):  
Zachary Mcleod Hutchins
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Religious Leaders

Francis Bacon's influence on seventeenth-century New England has long passed unnoticed, but his plan for the restoration of prelapsarian intellectual perfections guided John Winthrop's initial colonization efforts, shaped New England's educational policies, and had an impact on civic and religious leaders from John Cotton to Jonathan Edwards.

The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed

1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Delbanco
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Family Studies ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
The Core ◽  
Lay Piety ◽  
New Beginnings ◽  
The Many

In the twenty years since Perry Miller's death there have been many new beginnings in the field he inspired. We have witnessed an impressive recovery of the Puritans' gift for metaphoric adventure, and a number of town and family studies have given us a fuller sense of Puritan life “from the bottom up.” More recently, there have appeared some sensitive explorations of “lay piety,” and of the expressive significance of artifacts, shaped space, dress, gravestones, and the like — “evidence as powerful as any sermon of the deeper values that existed in tension at the core of seventeenth-century New England culture.” Yet despite these advances and the many spirited revisions of Miller's own views on more traditional issues in intellectual history such as the precise nature of “non-separating congregationalism,” the validity of “declension” as a way of describing generational change, and the importance of Ramistic rationalism to Puritan thought, a suspicion is in the air that we may be stalled.

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Research

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture provides a fresh look at the important, burgeoning field of Edwards and the Bible. For too long, Edwards scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology, but what is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Christian Scripture and had plans for major treatises on the Bible before he died. Edwards scholars need to take stock of the place of the Bible in his thought to do justice to his theology and legacy. In fact, more and more experts are recognizing how important this aspect of his life is, and this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. This volume seeks to increase our understanding of Edwards’ engagement with Scripture by setting it in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. It provides case studies of Edwards’ exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probes his use of Scripture to develop theology. It also sets his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards’ work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

Scholastic Approaches to Reasonable Disagreement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Schuessler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Reasonable Disagreement ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
European Intellectual History ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
First Time ◽  
Modern Era

The scholastic controversy on probable opinions in the seventeenth century was one of the most extensive and acrimonious debates of the early modern era. Historiography has treated it as a quarrel over moral casuistry, but this underestimates its import. The scholastic preoccupation with the ‘use of opinions’ should be understood as a search for a general framework for dealing with reasonable disagreement between competent evaluators of truth claims (not only moral ones). In the early modern era, scholastic analyses as well as regulations concerning the prudent and legitimate use of opinions acquired an unprecedented scope and depth. For the first time in European intellectual history, detailed theories of reasonable disagreement emerged, based on explicit characterizations of competing probable opinions as reasonably tenable.

Ruling Eldership in Civil War England, the Scottish Kirk, and Early New England: A Comparative Study of Secular and Spiritual Aspects

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Religiously Based ◽  
Spiritual Body ◽  
Church Government

Within early modern Christianity the idea of church government always entailed a basic contradiction. How could a spiritual body, devoted to Christ's teachings of love and forgiveness, exercise coercive authority? Given the widely accepted need of any sixteenth- or seventeenth-century government to enforce religiously based codes of behavior, churches and church officials were inevitably involved with the secular authorities in detecting and judging offenders. Inasmuch as such judgment had to include the threat of punishment, church officials of any kind were open to the charge of violating their Christian mission, which by nature was to be persuasive and educative rather than punitive, and also their Christian character, which, even among more radical Protestant sects, was to be more otherworldly than that of the laity.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Gina M. Martino
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
New France ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
Almost Continuous

The introduction sets out the book’s major topics and arguments and discusses its methodology, sources, and organization. It states that seventeenth and eighteenth-century women living in the borderlands of the northeastern America participated as essential, martial actors in wars fought by New England, New France, and Native polities. English, French, and Native societies’ existing gender ideologies included space for women to act as combatants, spies, and leaders. Women made war with the approval of their societies, and their presence in remote towns, holding the line in fortified communities was essential to polities’ strategies of expansion and colonization. In English and French colonies, European ideas that supported women taking on substantial roles as public actors in the early modern period are significant throughout the book and are introduced here. Although the book argues that these were centuries of almost continuous war, conflicts that receive particular attention include: the Beaver Wars (mid-seventeenth-century), King Philip’s War (1675-1676), King William’s War (1688-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), Dummer’s War (1723-1726), King George’s War (1744-1748), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

Poetics, Polymathy, and Critice. On Some Controversial Notions in Early Modern Intellectual History

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Luc Deitz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Sextus Empiricus

Abstract In this article, Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem and Johannes Wower’s De polymathia tractatio are analyzed and contrasted with each other, and a number of hitherto unnoticed similarities between the two works are brought to the fore. It is argued that these similarities are rooted in a shared understanding of the notions of grammatice and of critice, which, in turn, is traced back to a number of passages in Sextus Empiricus’s Adversus grammaticos. It is further argued that Sextus Empiricus was initially not read as a Pyrrhonian sceptic in the fifteenth century, but that at least some of his arguments were used in order to structure the encyclopedia of grammatical knowledge, understood in the widest possible meaning of this word. It is finally argued that Poliziano was the driving force behind this initial understanding; that poetics and polymathy were almost indistinguishable intellectual pursuits in the context of early modern erudition; and that their eventual drifting apart was mainly due to the key notion of critice being invested with different, irreconcilable meanings in the course the seventeenth century.

Leaving Kashi: Sanskrit knowledge and cultures of consumption in eighteenth-century South India

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-581
Author(s):  
Anand Venkatkrishnan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
South India ◽  
Elite Education ◽  
Entrepreneurial Spirit ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
To Receive

Recent studies of scholarly life in early modern India have concentrated on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My essay has two aims: to push this study into the long eighteenth century, and to contextualise the new configurations of Sanskrit scholarship in the movement of people between Banaras and Thanjavur, theorised here as centres of gravity and of levity, respectively. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Maharashtrian scholar Raghunātha Gaṇeśa Navahasta moved from his post as temple priest at Chāphaḷ, in the Sātārā district, down south to Thanjavur, to receive the patronage of Queen Dīpābāī. At the behest of the queen, Raghunātha began writing in Marathi instead of Sanskrit, in order to reach a wider audience. Despite his elite education as a young man in Banaras, his Sanskrit writing itself was likely accessible to the same audience that the queen had envisioned. What were Raghunātha’s true aspirations, and how did changes in his working conditions shape his career? In this essay, I trace Raghunātha’s entrepreneurial spirit through his Bhojanakutūhala, or Curiosities on Consumption. Although traditionally the prerogative of cultural historians of food, the Bhojanakutūhala reveals just as much about the intellectual context of its author as he travelled from north to south. I conclude by comparing Raghunātha’s career with that of his contemporary and namesake, Raghunātha Paṇḍita.

Descartes's Proofs of God and the Crisis of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways in Early Modern Thomism: Scholastic and Cartesian Debates

2015 ◽  
Vol 108 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Agostini
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Crucial Problem ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Epistemological Position ◽  
Theology And Philosophy

It is well known that the demonstration of God's existence is a crucial problem in early modern theology and philosophy. In contrast to the medieval period, in the seventeenth century atheism became not only an individual standpoint, but a true philosophical and epistemological position. Accordingly, any attempt to prove the existence of God had to address both atheist and libertine attacks against the classical proofs of his existence. In this sense, it is not possible to understand fully Descartes's metaphysical project, including his proposal of new proofs for the existence of God, without reading it as a reaction to this intellectual context. In spite of the charge of atheism brought against him in theAdmiranda methodus novæ philosophiæ Renati Des Cartes(Utrecht, 1643) by the Utrecht Theologian Gijsbert Voetius (1589–1676) and his follower Maarten Schoock (1614–1669) (who accused Descartes of replacing the traditional arguments for God's existence with new proofs intentionally made susceptible to the criticism of atheists), Descartes consistently claimed that the demonstrations proposed in theMeditationes de prima philosophia(Paris, 1641) aimed to establish the existence of God against the atheists.

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