scholarly journals The Devil of Delft in England

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-495
Author(s):  
Gary K. Waite

Abstract The Dutch glasspainter and Anabaptist prophet David Joris (1501–1556) was the Netherland’s most infamous heretic who became a spiritualist who depreciated the scriptures, condemned confessional conflict, and argued that the devil did not exist external to a person’s mind. Unlike the Dutch founder of the Family of Love, Hendrik Niclaes, Joris had no following in England, yet English writers condemned him with increasing frequency over seventeenth century. This paper examines that response, showing that for most writers Joris was the exemplar of the dangers of visionary mysticism, while Catholics used him to condemn Protestantism in general. English writers remained largely unaware of Joris’s denial of demons until ca. 1647, when they began to attack the idea, unintentionally publicizing it. Such polemical dissemination had decades earlier helped to calm fears of demonic witchcraft in the Dutch Republic; in England it may have also influenced the demonologies of some English nonconformists.

Author(s):  
Jetze Touber

Spinoza’s time was rife with conflicts. Historians tend to structure these by grouping two opposing forces: progressive Cartesio-Cocceian-liberals versus conservative Aristotelian-Voetian-Orangists. Moderately enlightened progressives, so the story goes, endorsed notions such as human dignity, toleration, freedom of opinion, but shied away from radicalism, held back by the conservative counterforce. Yet the drift was supposed to be inevitably towards the Enlightenment. This chapter tries to capture theological conflicts in the Dutch Republic of the Early Enlightenment in a triangular scheme, that covers a wider range of conflicting interests. Its corners are constituted by ‘dogmatism’ (Dordrecht orthodoxy), ‘scripturalism’ (Cocceianism), and ‘rationalism’ (theology inspired by Cartesianism, Spinozism, or any other brand of new philosophy). Dogmatics and rationalists battled in terms of philosophy, whereas the scripturalists and their respective opponents fought each other rather in the field of biblical scholarship. This multilateral conflict within Dutch Calvinism made the ideal of a unified church untenable.


2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 163-184
Author(s):  
Elise Watson

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.


Tempo ◽  
1950 ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
Dennis Arundell

Ever since the seventeenth century composers of English operas have been handicapped by the snob-preference for foreign works irrespective of their merits. In Purcell's day a second-rate French composer, whose past is still shrouded in Continental mystery, was so boosted in London even by Dryden that it was only through an open-air performance by Mr. Priest's school-girls at Chelsea that Dido and Aeneas convinced both London theatre managers and eventually Dryden himself that Purcell was “equal with the best abroad.” In this century, when the usual opera favourites were established, it has been even more difficult for English opera-composers to get a showing (at one time it had not been unheard of for English operas to be translated into Italian or German for production in this country): but twenty-five years ago the Royal College of Music followed the example of Mr. Priest by producing for the first time Vaughan Williams' Hugh the Drover, which was afterwards given publicly by the British National Opera Company, and in 1931 under the auspices of the Ernest Palmer Opera Fund, introduced The Devil Take Her, the first opera by the Australian composer Arthur Benjamin. The enthusiasm of the singers, headed by Sarah Fischer and Trefor Jones, the cunning skill of the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham and the practical knowledge of the producer, John B. Gordon, who had had so much experience at Cologne and who was at the time doing such good work for opera at the Old Vic, all combined to make the performance outstanding.


History ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 91 (304) ◽  
pp. 630-631
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH EDWARDS

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-133
Author(s):  
Ioan Pop-Curșeu

"Sexual Acts, Horror and Witchcraft in Cinema. The Copulation with the Devil: a Psychoanalytical Perspective. This paper tries to approach, taking as a starting point a Romanian painting from the 18th century, a scene with a strong phantasmatic load: the sexual act of a woman, who is considered a witch, with the devil. Several films are analyzed: Häxan by Benjamin Christensen (1922), Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski (1968), L’Anticristo by Alberto de Martino (1974), Angel above, Devil below by Dominic Bolla (1975). These films share some common features, important for the analytical process: the copulation with the devil, the presence of traumatized characters who are submitted to a psychological cure, the recycling of psychoanalytical vocabulary, especially “hysteria”, the problems with parental instances. In order to interpret these films, there is a coming back to Freud’s ideas on the Devil, as expressed in the letters to Wilhelm Fliess or in the study A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis (1923). The devil as an image of unconscious impulsions or as a substitute of the father are the main Freudian intuitions used here for an optimal interpretation of the chosen films. Keywords: sex, sexual act, horror, witchcraft, psychoanalysis, Freud, cinema. "


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