Galenic Medicine and Social Stability in Early Modern Florence and the Islamic Empires

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasileios Syros
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Political Values

Abstract Modern perceptions of cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Islamic empires have centered around the differences between the European and Islamic systems of political organization in an effort to valorize Western political values and styles of rulership. The present article challenges some of the assumptions that inform scholarship on contacts between Europe and the Islamic world in the early modern period by pointing to hitherto unexplored affinities between the Florentine and Islamic traditions of political thought. In particular, it investigates the use of ancient Greek theories of the four humors/elements of the human body in an extensive corpus of writings produced by seminal political theorists, historians, and figures of intellectual and political life in early modern Florentine (Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Donato Giannotti), Persian (Ṭūsī, Dawwānī, Kāshifī), Mughal (Khwāndamīr, Abūʾl-Fazl), and Ottoman (Kınalızâde, Kâtib Çelebi) traditions from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. My analysis demonstrates that Galen’s humoral theory served the aforementioned writers as a conceptual tool for identifying the mutual dependency of the component parts of the body politic as one of the key determinants of domestic balance and harmony and for theorizing remedies against strife and friction.

Self and Body

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Sassatelli
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Specific Configuration ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Late Modern

This article investigates the historical formation and specific configuration of a threefold relation crucial to contemporary society, that between the body, the self, and material culture, which, in contemporary, late modern (or post-industrial) societies, has become largely defined through consumer culture. Drawing on historiography, sociology, and anthropology, it explores how, from the early modern period, the consolidation of new consumption patterns and values has given way to particular visions of the human being as a consumer, and how, in turn, the consumer has become a cultural battlefield for the management of body and self. The article also discusses tastes, habitus, and individualization.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunts

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.

Et Cetera/Etcetera/&c; or, the Aposiopetic Page

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-170
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Punctuation Mark ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Physical Functions ◽  
Rhetorical Figure ◽  
Stage Directions

Chapter 2 looks at the etcetera, a mark which today functions solely as an abbreviation, indicating the continuation of properties in a list. But in the early modern period that was only one of its several meanings. As a noun and a verb, early modern etcetera represents the body and bawdy (sexual parts and activities, or physical functions such as urination or defecation). As a punctuation mark, it is a forerunner of the punctuation mark which indicates silence or interruption—the em-dash. As a rhetorical term, it represents silence or the form of breaking off known rhetorically as aposiopesis. As an abbreviation at the ends of lists in stage directions, or lines in actors’ parts, it represents stage action, inviting continuation of dialogue or listed props. These four categories are linked in that etcetera directs the eye to a vacancy. We can see why it might be associated with aposiopesis, a rhetorical figure that is paradoxically about silence.

Part II Approaches, Ch.14 Natural Law in International Legal Theory: Linear and Dialectical Presentations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Geoff
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Modern Period

This chapter presents an overview of three active periods of natural law scholarship bearing on international legal theory, via two stories that illustrate these to effect. The first story relates in brief the renewed attention to natural law doctrine as part of historiographical and epistemological inquiries in international law and legal theory. The second presents still another means of understanding natural law and its ongoing role in international law, namely as a dialectic by which new conceptions and vocabularies of political organization have arisen under varying historical circumstances. The chapter then traces the role of natural law doctrine as part of a linear consolidation of liberal hegemony internationally from the early modern period forward, and offers the dialectical presentation covering the same time frame. The chapter concludes by returning to how natural law continues to contribute both to the possibility of new normative programs internationally, as well as the hegemonic.

Doctoring the Body and Exciting the Soul: Drugs and consumer culture in medieval and early modern Iran

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 554-617
Author(s):  
RANIN KAZEMI
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

AbstractThis article focuses on the development of early modern consumerism in a part of the Middle East that historians of consumer culture are yet to fully explore. Making use of a wide variety of unexplored and underexplored original sources, the article contends that early modern consumer culture in Iran was grounded deeply in the ever-widening patterns of exchange and use that had developed slowly over the course of the previous centuries. The discussion below takes the growing popular interest in a few key psychoactive substances as a useful barometer of the dynamics of mass consumption, and chronicles how the slow and ever-expanding use of alcohol, opium, and cannabis (or a cannabis-like product) in the medieval period led to the popularity of coffee, tobacco, older drugs, and still other commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim here is to use the history of drug culture as an entry point to scrutinize the emergence of early modern consumerism among the elites and the non-elites in both urban and rural areas of the Middle East. In doing so, this article reconstructs the cultural and social history of recreational drugs prior to and during the early modern period, and elucidates the socio-economic context that helped bring about a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the Safavid state (1501–1736).

Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Lynneth J. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Divine Judgment ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Using writings from observers of the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague, this article explores the various understandings of dancing mania, disease, and divine judgment applied to the dancing plague's interpretation and treatment. It argues that the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague reflects new currents of thought, but remains closely linked to medieval philosophies; it was an event trapped between medieval and modern ideologies and treated according to two very different systems of belief. Understanding the ways in which observers comprehended the dancing plague provides insight into the ways in which, during the early modern period, new perceptions of the relationship between humanity and the divine developed and older conceptions of the body and disease began to change, while at the same time, ideologies surrounding dance and its relationship to sinful behavior remained consistent.

The Hurt(ful) Body

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatre Studies

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

Water of Life, Water of Death: The Controversy over Brandy and Gin in Early Modern Augsburg

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
B. Ann Tlusty
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Good For ◽  
Prevention And Cure

“It is good for those who are sad or down-hearted […] It brings one back to bodily strength, and makes one lusty and merry,” wrote Hieronymus Brunschwig of brandy in his Book of Distilling in 1532. Distilled liquors were was “wonder drugs” of the early modern period, prescribed medicinally both as prevention and cure for virtually every known malady, of the spirit as well as the body. According to Brunschwig, the capacity of brandy actually to lengthen one's life was the basis for its medieval appellation aqua vitae (water of life). The potential for the abuse of these “medicines,” however, was evident to medical and legal bodies alike; the “water of life” could become a “water of death,” as physician Sigismund Klose noted in 1697.

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