Machine Plays

2019 ◽  
pp. 385-408
Author(s):  
Hélène Visentin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Theater Companies ◽  
The Law ◽  
Mechanical Devices ◽  
Public Theater

This article focuses on the practice of machine theater that originated from courtly spectacles in Italy during the Renaissance and developed throughout Western and Central Europe during the seventeenth century. Defined by rapid scene changes and special effects, machine plays reflect the Baroque fascination with both mechanical devices and the law of optics—or scenery perspective—to produce wonder while displaying royal power and prestige. The aim of this article is threefold: to provide an overview of the origins and development of machine theater, to examine the transmission and dissemination of stagecraft knowledge, and to look at the changing nature of machine plays performed by public theater companies, which took advantage of stage machinery innovations to broaden their repertoire, attract a larger audience, and remain competitive.

The Seventeenth Century and the Westminster Assembly

2019 ◽  
pp. 28-49
Author(s):  
Chad van Dixhoorn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
High Point ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Westminster Assembly

The seventeenth century marked a high point in the Presbyterian experiment. A variety of models were tested internationally, and apologists for its polity offered a rigorous defense against Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Erastians. The Westminster Assembly offered Presbyterians the first opportunity since the Reformation to model a fully Reformed church in England, and the gathering looked closely not only at the teachings of Scripture on ecclesial governance, but also at historical and contemporary models of connectional, nonhierarchical government to guide their formulations on church polity. The century also saw some of the worst persecution of Presbyterians, especially in France and Scotland, but also in England and central Europe. During their seasons of suffering, some Presbyterians found subtle ways to articulate their polity or identify essential elements of Presbyterianism. Others fought or fled hostile authorities, supplying a legacy of martyr narratives and missionary impulses for later Presbyterians.

Religion, Politics, and Oaths in the Glorious Revolution

1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Mullet
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Although at the end of the seventeenth century men were shifting their political terminology from the spiritual to the secular, from God to nature, they still invoked the absolutes of history, law, and scripture. They did not lightly overturn their monarch, but when the necessity for such action arose they sought absolution in concepts which the most rigorous and learned mediaeval theologian would have understood. They appealed to the law of nature but they meant the law of God; and the shift involved no betrayal of absolute standards, no withdrawal from the same ethical doctrines that had nourished their forebears. The time was soon to come when secular phrases expressed a secular outlook, but in 1689 they continued to cover the religious convictions of centuries. As soon as the bars were down and men grappled in hectic controversy, the secular side of their politics diminished and the ethical and spiritual aspects became pronounced.

Milton and Legal Reform

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 529-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison A. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Judicial System ◽  
The Law ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
Political Pamphlets ◽  
Contemporary Context

AbstractThe second half of the seventeenth century was the first great period of legal reform in England’s history. This article situates John Milton in relationship to this contemporary context, arguing that he comments frequently on the need to change England’s laws and displays a finely tuned awareness of some of the major legal debates of his time. This article surveys Milton’s writings about the law and legal education, and it concludes by examining his 1659–60 political pamphlets where he calls for reform of the judicial system and the establishment of local courts.

scholarly journals The English Connection: Jacob and Johann Philipp Breyne, James Petiver and Plants: The Correspondence between the Breynes and Petiver from the 1690s

2022 ◽  
Vol 128 (5) ◽  
pp. 167-198
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Pękacka-Falkowska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central

The article discusses the hitherto unknown correspondence between the Danzig (present-day Gdańsk) botanist Jacob Breyne, his son Johann Philipp Breyne, and James Petiver in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Their correspondence documents contacts between one of the most important naturalists of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the seventeenth century and members of the Royal Society. The content of the letters reveals how books, naturalia and various artefacts circulated between Western and East-Central Europe. It also reveals the principles of reciprocity and friendship followed by those who conducted inquiries into natural history.

Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-century Indian Ocean: Sharīʿa, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast Asia and the Maldives

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
A. C. S. Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Right ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Peacock’s chapter examines the circulation of Seventeenth-century Sufi scholars to the ‘contested peripheries’ of the Indian Ocean. He argues that notable Muslim Sufi shaykhs did not travel to maritime kingdoms such as Banten, Aceh, and the Maldives to learn from locals, but rather to propagate ‘shariʿa-minded piety’ focused on ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’. Peacock describes how the ambitions of religious scholars like the Syrian Qādirī preacher Muḥammad Shams al-Dīn intersected with early modern state-building in the Indian Ocean world. This chapter chronicles how Shams al-Dīn not only gained great political influence in Aceh, but was even made the actual ruler of the Maldives after his followers overthrew the sultan there. Peacock concludes that the cosmopolitanism of Sufi itinerants relied less on the fusion of pre-Islamic and Islamic practices than on universalist agendas of social transformation founded upon prophetic Sunna and enacted through the mechanisms of political coercion.

From Liberties to Liberty

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-130
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
House Church ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphorical body—the medieval corporation—to being rooted instead in the individual body across a range of practices in seventeenth century Europe. It analyses the early modern forms of toleration that developed from the ground-up in Protestant Europe (Holland and Germany in particular), including the practices of ‘walking out’ (auslauf) to worship one’s God, and the house church (schuilkerk). These practices were key to delinking liberty from place, and thus to paving the way to attaching it instead to territory and the state. The chapter also considers the first common law of naturalisation, known as Calvin’s Case (1608), which wrote into the law the process of becoming an English subject—of subjection. This law decisively rooted the state-subject relation in the bodies of monarch and subject coextensively. Both of these bodies were deeply implicated in the process of territorialisation that begat the modern state in seventeenth-century England, and in shifting the political bond from local authorities to the sovereign. The chapter then examines the corporeal processes underwriting the centralisation of authority, and shows how the subject’s body also became—via an increasingly important habeas corpus—the centre point of the legal revolution that yielded the natural rights of the modern political subject. Edward Coke plays a central role in the chapter.

Equivocation, Donne, and the Political Interior

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-44
Author(s):  
Todd Butler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Deliberative Processes ◽  
The Mind

As a tactic that sought to enable individuals to answer judicial interrogatories while simultaneously disguising the full substance and meaning of their answers, the Catholic doctrine of equivocation responded to the precarious position of Catholics in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. In providing a highly contested model for the shielding of one’s thoughts, equivocation also demonstrates the centrality of human cognition to the religious and political conflicts of the seventeenth century. Writers such as John Donne (Ignatius His Conclave) and Francis Bacon (Essays) evidence a similarly deep concern with the mind and its deliberative processes as marking boundaries for political citizenship and royal power. Viewed in these terms, mental reservation and equivocation become less a matter of theology than one of statecraft.

The High Point (II): Jewish Society (1650–1713)

1997 ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
The Political ◽  
High Point ◽  
The Third ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Czech Lands

This chapter addresses how the climax of the European debate over Jewish readmission came during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. For a quarter of a century, conferences, commissions, and petitions published and unpublished over whether or not to tolerate Jews, and if so on what terms, abounded from Poland to Portugal and from Hungary to Ireland. Why did the political and intellectual process of readmission culminate at this particular time? Several factors converged to intensify previous trends but what was the most crucial was the widespread backlash in Germany, following the evacuation of the Swedish, French, and other foreign garrisons at the end of the Thirty Years War. The substantial gains made by the Jews of central Europe during the conflict, of Austria and the Czech lands as well as Germany, had aroused intense opposition and controversy, so that the coming of peace was almost bound to be accompanied by a formidable reaction. The chapter then considers the Jewish population and Jewish economy during this period.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document