Knowledge and Cartography in the Early Atlantic

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Edney
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Knowledge Domains ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
The Way

This article considers the configuration of the Atlantic by Europeans through the production, circulation, and consumption of spatial information, specifically in the form of maps. It examines each of the several cartographies associated with the early modern Atlantic within their respective knowledge domains. Europeans slowly developed the idea of the Atlantic in order to organise and understand the waters, shores, peoples, and places that they encountered as they sailed westward and southward away from Europe. Understanding the contributions of cartography to the formation of the Atlantic requires an appreciation of the historical limits to the various practices and institutions of making and using maps. It should be considered, for example, the way in which Christopher Columbus, when he headed out into the Ocean Sea in 1492, set aside one way of conceptualising and representing the world and began working in another. He had conceived of his direct voyage to the Indies through participation in the general scholarly discourse of geography (then generally known as ‘cosmography’), which understood the earth to be a sphere and already mapped it using latitude and longitude.

‘Shrieking soldiers … wiping clean the earth’: hearing apocalyptic environmentalism in the music of Botanist

Popular Music ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (03) ◽  
pp. 481-497
Author(s):  
Olivia R. Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Black Metal ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Extreme Metal ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article presents a case study of ecocritical black metal, delving into the apocalypticism of the California-based black metal band Botanist, who conjures a world in which plants have violently destroyed human civilisation. It first contextualises Botanist amidst the broader current of environmentalism in extreme metal as well as within wider cultural explorations of plants as subjective beings capable of violence. The article then examines how Botanist taps into the logic of apocalyptic environmentalism, as the music presents the essential narrative of apocalyptic bioterrorism: humanity, with wanton hubris, has sown the seeds of its own destruction, and earned whatever horrors befall it on the way to elimination. With its bleak outlook and strident sound world, Botanist's music threatens to destabilise listeners’ assumptions about their place in the world and offers an example of what apocalyptic ecological urgency in music could sound like.

Bacon’s Novum organum

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-46
Author(s):  
Elodie Cassan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
The Way

Dan Garber’s paper provides materials permitting to reply to an objection frequently made to the idea that the Novum Organum is a book of logic, as the allusion to Aristotle’s Organon included in the very title of this book shows it is. How can Bacon actually build a logic, considering his repeated claims that he desires to base natural philosophy directly on observation and experiment? Garber shows that in the Novum Organum access to experience is always mediated by particular questions and settings. If there is no direct access to observation and experience, then there is no point in equating Bacon’s focus on experience in the Novum Organum with a rejection of discursive issues. On the contrary, these are two sides of the same coin. Bacon’s articulation of rules for the building of scientific reasoning in connection with the way the world is, illustrates his massive concern with the relation between reality, thinking and language. This concern is essential in the field of logic as it is constructed in the Early Modern period.

Street Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-224
Author(s):  
Adam Fox
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Places ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Street Literature ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 explores the way in which cheap print was sold on the streets in early modern Scotland, and particularly in Edinburgh. It examines the world of outdoor commerce in general, before detailing the ways in which broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers were vended in public places. It focuses on the ‘paper criers’ and ‘running stationers’ who plied their trade in the markets and thoroughfares. The coffeehouses of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and other burghs are identified and described, and the ways in which print circulated in them are recovered. The chapter illustrates the public and communal nature of much cheap print and suggests that this characteristic helps to explain why so little of it has survived.

scholarly journals Before and after Columbus

1994 ◽  
Vol 68 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 309-316
Author(s):  
Peter Mason
Keyword(s):  
New Brunswick ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
A Value ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After

[First paragraph]Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric As Conquering Ideology. DJELAL KADIR. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xiv + 256 pp. (Cloth US$ 30.00)The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. VALERIE IJ. FLINT. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xx + 233 pp. (Cloth US$ 30.00)Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America. EVIATAR ZERUBAVEL. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. xiv + 164 pp. (Cloth US$ 17.00)Imagining the World: Mythical Belief versus Reality in Global Encounters. O.R. DATHORNE. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. x + 241 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95)Three of the books under review were published in 1992, and each of them approaches the significance of Columbus's landfall 500 years earlier in a different way. What they have in common, as their titles and subtitles indicate, is that they all purport to be about a mental framework - an "imaginative landscape" (Flint), a "mental discovery" (Zerubavel), "Europe's prophetic rhetoric as conquering ideology" (Kadir), or "imagining the world" (Dathorne).The 1992 commemoration led to a flood of books on Columbus and on the discovery of America. Now that the commotion has died down, it becomes easier to separate the wheat from the chaff, to distinguish between occasional publications hastily put together for the occasion, and solid contributions to scholarship which, while never immune to their own times, may be expected to retain a value that is more than temporary.

Traducing the Soul: Donne's Second Anniversarie

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1493-1508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramie Targoff
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

Readers have long acknowledged John Donne's lament for the decay of the world in the two Anniversarie poems commemorating Elizabeth Drury. What has not been acknowledged is the extent to which the second of these poems stages the reluctance of the soul to depart from the carcass of the earth so vividly depicted in the first. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne does something unprecedented in early modern literature: he gives voice to a soul that cannot bear to leave its earthly body behind. This essay argues that Donne represents a mutual longing between soul and body that stands in marked contrast to conventional Protestant depictions of the relationship between the two parts of the self. His explanation for such mutual longing, I contend, derives from his belief in the corporeal origins of the soul. (RT)

On the Rationality of Radical Theological Non-Naturalism

1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Time And Being ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
The Way

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism, I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. (I) While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable (confirmable or disconfirmable) in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. (2) Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. (3) When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can.

scholarly journals “Obedezco pero no cumplo”: Surviving Censorship in Early Modern Spain

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-74
Author(s):  
Rolena Adorno
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Old World ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Bartolome De Las Casas ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Better known by the royal decrees that governed it than by its practice, book censorship in Early Modern Spain remains an elusive topic. How did it work in individual instances? Were there authors who defied it? I take up here two works, one an imprint published and expurgated; the other a manuscript, approved for printing but never published. Both reveal the marks of the censor’s pen (occasionally, knife) but also the literary personalities of the authors whose writings were scrutinized. Both works belong to the genre of “proto-anthropology” that studied civilizations ancient and modern, from the Old World and the New. Please meet Fray Jerónimo Román y Zamora and his Repúblicas del mundo [Republics of the World] and Fray Martín de Murúa, author of Historia General del Piru [General History of Peru]. Along the way we encounter their respective readers, “Dr. Odriozola” and Fray Alonso Remón, as well as the larger-than-life presence of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.

4. The age of exploration

2015 ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Stewart A. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Europe

‘The age of exploration ’ considers why textbooks and teachers privilege late-medieval and early-modern Europe when designating “the age of exploration” and not the earlier Greek, Roman, Arab, Norse, Polynesian, or Mongol achievements in terms of exploration and cultural reach. It is for three main reasons. Firstly, because the late-medieval extrusion of European maritime power and the associated record of exploration were global in reach. Secondly, they were unprecedented in scope and daring. Thirdly, the exploration of the world by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European mariners, such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, permanently and decisively altered the lineaments of global power and set human history on the broad common course that it still to this day follows.

scholarly journals An Overview of the Impacts of Geological Hazards on Production

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-165
Author(s):  
Tamer Rızaoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
High Probability ◽  
Volcanic Hazard ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Geological Hazards ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Geological Disasters ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Abstract Throughout history, human beings have been affected by the ongoing events in their environment. While some of the events take place in the sphere they live on, some of them are in the way that events outside the earth affect the world. Necessary measures should be taken on time and in place so that people are not adversely affected or at least minimally affected by the aforementioned events. Geological hazards are the most important risks that occur in the environment of human beings and have a high probability of damaging people’s life and property. In terms of risk management of geological hazards, which are divided into four main groups as seismic, hydro-meteorological, terrain instability and volcanic hazard and have their own characteristics, the efforts to prevent and reduce losses for each of them also differ within themselves. In this review article, geological hazards were introduced in general by giving various examples from the world, the effects of geological disasters on the economy and production were discussed, and the points to be considered for each risk were tried to be emphasized.

scholarly journals The Poet’s “Caressive Sight:” Denise Levertov’s Transactions with Nature

Text Matters ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 145-152
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Poks
Keyword(s):  
Nature Poetry ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Holistic Perception ◽  
Human World ◽  
A Site ◽  
Sense Of Wonder ◽  
The Way ◽  
Denise Levertov

The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative—or romantic—modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday.

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