From Fear to Awe in Luzzatto’s Mesillat Yesharim

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-299
Author(s):  
Jonathan Garb
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
Religious Influence ◽  
Canonical Texts

Abstract Perhaps the key term in musar writing is yir’ah. In early modern musar texts, usually incorporating kabbalistic discourse, this term is rendered as ‘fear.’ A striking exception is R. Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto’s Mesillat Yesharim, arguably one of the canonical texts of Jewish modernity. A close reading of the chapters devoted to yir’ah reveals that Luzzatto frames this term as ‘awe,’ moving away from the discourse on punishment and hell typical of early modern musar. An examination of the psychology behind this move shows that Luzzatto associates fear with the lower instinct of self-preservation, calling for its sublimation into self-abnegation in awe of divine presence. Mesillat Yesharim then became foundational for similar moves in later Jewish modernity. Without wishing to venture into claims as to inter-religious influence and response, it is instructive to compare Luzzatto’s approach to that of his Christian contemporaries, the ‘fire and brimstone’ preachers of the Great Awakening.

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Valerio Zanetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Lilo Moessner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Computational Analysis ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Present Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Periods

This chapter sets the present book off against previous studies about the English subjunctive in the historical periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). The aim of the book is described as the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. The key term subjunctive is defined as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category root modality. The corpus used in the book is part of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, comprising nearly half a million words in 91 files. The research method adopted is a combination of close reading and computational analysis.

25 March 1616

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-195
Author(s):  
Lena Cowen Orlin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Personal Meaning ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Second Best

This chapter is a close reading of William Shakespeare’s last will of 25 March 1616. The three-page document, signed by Shakespeare on each page, comprises one page from an earlier will and two new pages. Thorough revision was required in consequence of the February marriage of Shakespeare’s daughter Judith to Thomas Quiney, the son of Richard and Elizabeth Quiney. Shakespeare ensured that Judith was provided for and protected in the eventuality of her husband’s death. His principal heir was his older daughter Susanna, who had married the physician John Hall. The chapter reviews many aspects of early modern inheritance, including the duties of executors, customs surrounding children’s ‘portions’, and dower rights for widows. While other biographers doubt that Anne Shakespeare would have been protected by dower law, in fact her dower rights in the family’s property holdings were assured. Shakespeare also bequeathed her his second-best bed, and the chapter reviews evidence from other wills of the period about best beds, second-best beds, third- and fourth-best beds, and worst beds; it concludes that these were identifying terms (how to tell one bed from another) and not expressions of approval or disapproval. Like all men of property, Shakespeare concentrated on the distribution of property, and he made very few direct chattel gifts. For this reason, the goods he gave may have had personal meaning, and the chapter speculates about what that significance may have been.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-216
Author(s):  
J. V. Fesko
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Roman Catholics

The conclusion summarizes the study. The doctrine stands in continuity with patristic versions and does not arise de novo in the sixteenth century. Roman Catholics were also some of the first sixteenth-century theologians to teach an Adamic covenant. The doctrine is a construct based on a good and necessary consequence. This means that the doctrine has a broad scriptural foundation. There are also different variants of the doctrine and even confessional formulations allow for a diversity of opinion. These points stand in contrast to the claims of critics who rarely engage a close reading of primary sources. Moreover, with the development of biblicism, critics have approached the question with a different hermeneutic methodology than early modern Reformed theologians. Lastly, one of the most important themes in the covenant of works is love, something that most critics of the doctrine fail to factor.

Courtesan Editor

T oung Pao ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 99 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 173-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daria Berg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Comme Agent

This article focuses on female editorship and sexual politics in late Ming and early Qing China, using Hua suo shi, an anthology edited by the courtesan poet Xue Susu, as a case study. It traces textual production and transmission, and reconstructs the literary and cultural contexts of this work to explore the courtesan’s editorial gaze and representation of gender through a close reading of it. The analysis of its two main themes—women as commodities, and women as agents—shows how the courtesan editor re-imagined China’s cultural landscape from her point of view. New examples of female agency are discovered in analyzing the cultural process of editing as a “web of discourses,” providing a window on the emergence of a new female editorial voice in early modern China’s cultural discourse.
Cet article se concentre sur le rôle éditorial des femmes et sur les politiques sexuelles en Chine à la fin des Ming et au début des Qing. Une anthologie éditée par la courtisane et poétesse Xue Susu, le Hua suo shi, sert d’étude de cas. Le processus de production et de transmission textuelle est examiné et le contexte littéraire et culturel de l’ouvrage restitué, permettant d’explorer le regard éditorial et le jeu de genre de la courtisane à travers une lecture serrée du texte. L’analyse des deux thèmes dominants — la femme comme marchandise, la femme comme agent — démontre la façon dont la courtisane éditrice ré-imagine le paysage culturel chinois de son propre point de vue. D’autres exemples d’intervention féminine se révèlent lorsqu’on analyse le processus culturel d’édition en tant que “réseau de discours”. Ainsi s’ouvre une fenêtre sur l’émergence d’une nouvelle voix éditoriale féminine au sein du discours culturel chinois au début des temps modernes.


YOUTH, RELIGIOUS IDENTITY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT THE ENGLISH COLLEGES IN ROME AND VALLADOLID, 1592–1685

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUCY UNDERWOOD
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Young People ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Oral Examinations ◽  
Set Up

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the records of 595 entrants to the English College, Rome, and 309 entrants to the English College, Valladolid. These Colleges, set up to train young English men as Catholic priests at a time when Catholicism was proscribed in England, required all entrants to complete questionnaires covering their social, educational, and religious background. The Responsa Scholarum are the autograph manuscripts of students at Rome; the Liber Primi Examinis consists of summaries of oral examinations written down by the interviewers. Through a combination of quantitative analysis and close reading of individual accounts, this article explores responses to the questionnaires, focusing on the engagement of young people with religion and religious identity. It argues that their self-writings shed important light on our understanding of both early modern religion and of early modern childhood and adolescence.

Writing to redundancy: approaches to spiritual journals and early modern spirituality

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Webster
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cultural Resources

ABSTRACTThe ‘puritan diary’ has received attention from historians and literary critics with little exchange between the approaches. Placing the diary in the context of experimental Calvinist personal discipline reveals that the form emerged independently of the literature of practical divinity. Considering the practice as a ‘technology of the self’ draws attention to the meanings of writing in a protestant context and encourages us to consider the cultural resources available to early modern protestants. Close reading of these texts suggests a greater degree of complexity than is often admitted and allows for a tension between different views of the salvific process. This tension between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms is helpful in understanding the religiosity of early modern protestants.

scholarly journals The Matter of Ephemeral Art: Craft, Spectacle, and Power in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela H. Smith ◽  
Tianna Helena Uchacz ◽  
Sophie Pitman ◽  
Tillmann Taape ◽  
Colin Debuiche
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Ephemeral Art

Through a close reading and reconstruction of technical recipes for ephemeral artworks in a manuscript compiled in Toulouse ca. 1580 (BnF MS Fr. 640), we question whether ephemeral art should be treated as a distinct category of art. The illusion and artifice underpinning ephemeral spectacles shared the aims and, frequently, the materials and techniques of art more generally. Our analysis of the manuscript also calls attention to other aspects of art making that reframe consideration of the ephemeral, such as intermediary processes, durability, the theatrical and transformative potential of materials, and the imitation and preservation of lifelikeness.

Almost Encountering Ronsard’s Rose

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip John Usher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Book History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Artefact

This chapter takes up the French poet’s most famous ode ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose…’ in order to ask a simple but important question: what are the barriers to close-reading a poem such as this one, a poem made of ‘signs’, if we (also) try to access through it the nature—or Nature— of which it perhaps claims to be an imitation? To explore such a question, Usher experiments with three ways of reading the ode. He first explores the cultural/historical approach offered by book history. A second approach seeks out connections between Ronsard’s poem and early modern botany’s own discussion of roses. The third and final method strives to get beyond the poem as cultural artefact by drawing on contemporary plant theory (Jeffrey Nealon, Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray).

Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis1

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frans-Willem Korsten
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Political Event ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Peculiar Case

The distinction between the theatrical and the dramatic is pivotal for different modes of subjection in the early modern era. Institutionally speaking, society was organized ideologically, theatrically by the introjection of what was shown publicly to private, but equally collective, theatres of the mind. This could be described as a logic of torture. In contrast, and on the other hand, the dramatic application of punishment on ships, and the pain it involved, served what Robert Cover called a ‘balance of terror’, based on a logic of what Deleuze defined as ‘cruelty’. In order to clarify this distinction, and the implication it has for our ideas on gouvernmentalité, this chapter will propose a close reading of a painting by Lieve Verschuier that either depicts a peculiar case of keelhauling or, allegorically, the lynching of the brothers De Witt in 1672. Although the painting is clearly theatrical, formally speaking, it superimposes a dramatic logic on the traumatic political event of the lynching of the brothers De Witt. This will be considered in the chapter as one instance of a more general shift in the seventeenth century: a shift away from the theatrical logic of torture to the dramatic logic of cruelty.

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