The Corpus of Hebrew and Jewish Autos Sacramentales: Self-deception and Conversion

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-226
Author(s):  
Einat Davidi

Abstract This article identifies a set of plays written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by ‘new Jews’ in the Western Sephardi Diaspora, as autos sacramentales. It discusses essential characteristics of this genre, such as the dual—theomachic and psychomachic—level, the triangle constellation of allegorical characters with human nature in its center and the representatives of good and evil on both sides, and the parallelism created in the play between the cosmic story, the story of humanity, and the story of the individual human soul. It is argued that these characteristics are to be found in plays written by Jews in the Early Modern Era. The article maintains that the appearance of this corpus of plays in the history of Jewish writing indicates that an underlying structure of the psychic and historical consciousness of Western culture had not skipped the Jewish cultural world.

Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.


Perichoresis ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Räihä

Abstract The history of the parishioners’ right to participate in and influence the choice of local clergy in Sweden and Finland can be taken back as far as the late Medieval Times. The procedures for electing clergymen are described in historiography as a specifically Nordic feature and as creating the basis of local self-government. In this article the features of local self-government are studied in a context where the scope for action was being modified. The focus is on the parishioners’ possibilities and willingness to influence the appointment of pastors in the Lutheran parishes of the Russo-Swedish borderlands in the 18th century. At the same time, this article will offer the first comprehensive presentation of the procedures for electing pastors in the Consistory District of Fredrikshamn. The Treaty of Åbo, concluded between Sweden and Russia in 1743, ensured that the existing Swedish law, including the canon law of 1686, together with the old Swedish privileges and statutes, as well as the freedom to practise the Lutheran religion, remained in force in the area annexed into Russia. By analysing the actual process of appointing pastors, it is possible to discuss both the development of the local political culture and the interaction between the central power and the local society in the late Early Modern era.


1985 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 275
Author(s):  
E. Wayne Carp ◽  
Jack P. Greene ◽  
J. R. Pole

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Devereaux

The most celebrated and influential history of execution in England, V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (Oxford, 1994), uses a survey of execution rates to make two very striking and seemingly persuasive assertions. First, more people were being hanged in early nineteenth-century England than at any time since the early modern era; and second, that the end of capital punishment came far more suddenly than previous studies have recognized. This article acknowledges and extends the importance of Gatrell’s first insight, while arguing that he nevertheless both understates the complexity of developments and overstates the suddenness with which both the letter and the practice of capital punishment were abandoned. It does so through a careful recalculation and analysis of execution rates at London’s Old Bailey courthouse, where execution was practiced on a far larger scale than in any other jurisdiction in the Anglo-American world, and whose practice most profoundly shaped the perceptions of both critics and proponents of capital punishment alike.


Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin

The Enterprisers traces the emergence of “modern” school in Russia during the reigns of Peter I and his immediate successors, up to the accession of Catherine II. The efforts to “educate” Russia represent a trademark of Peter I’s reign and reformist program, and innovations in schooling in Russia in the eighteenth century have traditionally been presented as a top-down, state-driven process. As with many other facets of the emerging early modern state, the Petrine-era school usually appears as the product of the practical needs of the tsar’s new “regular” army, which demanded skilled technical personnel. It is also commonly taken to be the personal creation of Peter I, who singlehandedly designed it and forced it on an unwilling population. Contrary to this received wisdom, The Enterprisers argues that schools were instead invented and built by “administrative entrepreneurs”—or projecteurs, as they were also called in that era—who sought to achieve diverse career goals, promoted their own pet ideas, advanced their claims for expertise, and competed for status and resources. As the in-depth study of some of the most notable episodes in the history of educational innovation and school-related “projecting” in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century demonstrates, the creation of “modern” schools took place insofar as it enabled such enterprisers to pursue their agendas. The individual projects these enterprisers proposed and implemented served as building blocks for the edifice of the “well-regulated” state on the threshold of the modern era.


1985 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 475
Author(s):  
David W. Galenson ◽  
Jack P. Greene ◽  
J. R. Pole

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