Palazzo Tè between Science and Imagination

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 429-461
Author(s):  
David Malkiel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Diffusion Of Knowledge ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Modern Europe

This study focuses on the observations of two eighteenth-century visitors to Mantua’s Palazzo Tè, Rabbis Isaac Lampronti of Ferrara (1679-1756) and Hayyim Yoseph David Azulay of Jerusalem (1724-1806), especially their impressions of the echo in its Chamber of the Giants. The rabbis’ response to Palazzo Tè closely resembles that of dozens other European travelers, whose writings about the echo chamber exhibit the same fascination with recent advances in scientific knowledge, and like them, Lampronti and Azulay labor to synthesize their experience with the traditions and beliefs that make up their worldview. The Palazzo Tè literature emblematizes the explosive increase in the diffusion of knowledge in early modern Europe, in the arts as well as the sciences, and the importance of travel and travel writing in that process.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Europe

There were few subjects that animated people in early modern Europe more than lying. The subject is endlessly represented and discussed in literature; treatises on rhetoric and courtiership; theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence; travel writing; pamphlets and news books; science and empirical observation; popular culture, especially books about strange, unexplained phenomena; and, of course, legal discourse. For many, lying could be controlled and limited even if not eradicated; for others, lying was a necessary element of a casuistical tradition, liars balancing complicated issues and short-term pragmatic considerations in the expectation of solving more problems than they caused through their deceit....

Sex and Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-119
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Classical Philology ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Independent Field ◽  
Moral Perspective ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Europe

This chapter looks at examples of scholars who, in the early eighteenth century, worked on texts that were highly controversial from a moral perspective. The focus is on Pieter Burman’s edition of Petronius (1709) and Bentley’s work on Horace. Looking at this material from a perspective of textual criticism allowed Burman and Bentley to avoid delving too deeply into passages of a sexually loaded nature. Nevertheless, political and scholarly opponents of both men tried to blacken their reputation by connecting their research interests with their private lives. It is demonstrated that the association of textual critics with immorality was a commonplace in early modern Europe and that the tensions between in particular Burman and his opponents reveals a struggle to make classical philology a more independent field of enquiry versus other disciplines, such as theology.

The Loving Community

Caritas ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cultural Norm ◽  
Family Household ◽  
The Family ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
A Site

Caritas was an idea with resonance across early modern Europe, but given shape and form within particular national or religious contexts. This chapter introduces how the Scottish Kirk envisioned caritas as an embodied ethic—an experience of love that was manifested in deportment, thought, feeling, and behaviour—as well as its widespread take-up as a cultural norm. It particularly highlights that the family—the holy household—was imagined as the basis of a social order founded on caritas and introduces how the idea of caritas shaped the practice of the family-household relationships in eighteenth-century Scotland. It explores how the family was located not just as a site of patriarchal discipline, but also of peace and comfort, where fighting and quarrelling (excesses of passion) should be minimized. The family-household was not formed in private, however: its loving behaviours were interpreted and given meaning by a watching community.

Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Edited by Patrick Karl O'Brien, Derek J. Keene, Herman Van der Wee, and Majolein't Hart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 361. $64.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-250
Author(s):  
Anne E. C. McCants
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Science Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Modern Europe

This edited volume is the result of a series of interdisciplinary conferences and seminars sponsored by the Renaissance Trust between 1990 and 1995 to examine “Achievement in Intellectual and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe” (p. 3). Historians of science, culture, the economy, and architecture and urban design were brought together to reflect on the intersections between past achievements in their respective fields within urban centers, as well as on the transfer of those achievements from one urban place to the next over time. These scholars were also called upon to consider the connections between the findings of more traditional “case-study” urban history and the grand narratives of modern development and geopolitical conflict. All of the contributors to this volume agreed to address the same meta question: “Why do recognized and celebrated achievements, across several fields of endeavor, tend to cluster within cities over relatively short periods of time?” (p. 5). In a schema entirely consistent with the Braudelian paradigm of early modern development (Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. New York, 1981–84.), three cities in particular were chosen as representative of these episodic peaks of early modern achievement: Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in roughly the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries respectively. The chapters of the book are thus organized in groups of three, with one chapter devoted to each area of endeavor in each of the three cities, beginning with their material bases in economic growth and ending with high culture as exemplified by the arts, books, and scientific research and discovery.

scholarly journals The Hermeneutics of Transmission: Deciphering Discourses on Poetry and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)

2011 ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Déborah Blocker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

This article discusses how the constitution, circulation and institutionalization of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe could best be accounted for from a historical point of view. Pointing to various inconsistencies in the way historians of ideas have traditionally explained the rise of aesthetic discourses, the article examines the usefulness of the tools crafted by historians of the book for the development of such a project. Through an example, the drawbacks of interpretations based solely on serial bibliographies are also addressed, as the author argues for the importance of case studies, grounded in social, cultural and political history, through which various types of aesthetic practices may be made to appear. She also suggests that, to bypass the theoretical and practical deadlocks of traditional Begriffsgeschichte as far as the study of aesthetic practices is concerned, intellectual traditions and the actions that make them possible — that is “actions of transmission” — are to be promoted to the status of primary hermeneutic tools.

Peasants and Debt in Eighteenth-Century Champagne

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
High Risk ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rural Households ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Modern Europe

Recent scholarship about debt in early-modern Europe has replaced an old model of misery and exploitation with a new paradigm that emphasizes the entrepreneurial rationale for going into debt. Reassessment of these arguments on the basis of detailed information about 5,000 rural households in France finds that debt posed a high risk of ruin to nearly half of the region's debtors and that viticulture played a unique role in stimulating a borrowing frenzy in the countryside.

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