Tracking Jesuit Psychologies

Author(s):  
Fernanda Alfieri

This chapter analyzes forms, meanings, and functions of psychology in the history of the Society of Jesus. Interpreted as an interest for the interior dimension of the subject, psychology is an implicit and multifaceted presence in the Ignatian order. The examination of the self is the first step for those who desire to enter the Society of Jesus, and the obedience imperative is a characterizing feature of the regulation in the Society. If psychology is given the meaning of the science of the soul as the life principle, then it can be tracked down not only in philosophical works providing the basics for the curriculum in the Jesuit colleges since the late sixteenth century but also in the coeval practical science of moral theology. Only after the late nineteenth century, with the emergence of experimental psychology, did the discipline obtain its own place in Jesuit episteme, between continuity and rupture.

Author(s):  
Henry A. McGhie

This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is also an exploration of ornithology during a period when the subject changed dramatically. The book is based on previously unpublished letters, diaries and photographs to provide the first detailed biography of any of the independent industrialist–naturalists who dominated nineteenth century British ornithology. Dresser travelled widely in Europe, New Brunswick and to Texas during the American Civil War before settling down to work in London in the timber and iron trades. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds, many of which came from famous travellers and collectors. These collections formed the basis of over 100 publications on birds including some of the finest and some of the last of the great bird books of the late nineteenth century, combining cutting-edge scientific information with masterpieces of bird illustration. Dresser played a leading role in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement. His correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists. This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history, and as a textbook for courses relating to history, history of science and museum studies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Andrew E. Clark-Huckstep

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality has been the subject of debate among historians for decades. More specifically, his assertion, ‘the sodomite was a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species,’ has been used to support an ‘acts-to-identity’ theory that locates in the late-nineteenth century a shift in thinking about sexuality. The author argues that a re-reading of Foucault shifts the focus of historical inquiry from identities towards the process of knowledge creation, allowing for ambiguity that the concept ‘identity’ might foreclose. This essay examines the debate and offers a new reading of Foucault based on the work of Lynne Huffer. Finally, the author seeks to centre a source-driven approach in conjunction with The History of Sexuality, providing readings of patients and informants from the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis.


1991 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 409-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wright

Olden Times in Zululand and Natal …depends primarily on tribal lore garnered during four decades of exhaustive interviews with native elders.…[I]t is safe to say [Bryant's] work will never be exceeded. Almost everything published on the subject since depends on him.…This paper needs to be read against the background of the critique which has gradually been gathering force over the last half-dozen years or so of the concept of the mfecane. By the mfecane is meant the idea that in the 1820s much of the eastern half of southern Africa was thrown into turmoil by a series of wars and population migrations set in motion by the explosive expansion of the Zulu state under Shaka. Ever since Theal first popularized it in the late nineteenth century, this idea has remained one of the bedrock concepts around which the history of southern Africa in the later eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century has been written. The term mfecane itself did not become widely used until as recently as 1966, when, in his widely influential book, The Zulu Aftermath, Omer-Cooper repackaged what had previously been called “the wars of Shaka” for an emerging Africanist readership. Since then the concept of the mfecane has permeated the literature, both popular and academic, inside and outside southern Africa, to the point where it is regarded as a fixed fact of the sub-continent's history.


Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine

Chapter One describes the uncertain beginnings of Zen and Zen art within modern intercultural encounters between Japan and Europe and North America. The representations and perceptions of Zen in the West arising from initial contacts in the sixteenth century and thereafter from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth were not uniform with what we discover from the 1920s and 1930s onward, and certainly not identical to those of the postwar Zen boom. As a genealogical sketch, this history of Zen art before “Zen art,” suggests a sensibility of ambivalence or nascent interest during the mid-to-late nineteenth century leading to one of infatuation in the early twentieth, at which time there emerged a range of geo-political conditions and a group of active Zen campaigners promoting the formation of a specifically differentiated and instrumentalized Zen and Zen art.


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


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