Production, Communication, and Comprehension of Knowledge of the New World: Ethnographic Descriptions in Caspar Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Britt Dams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Careful Selection ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Trading Network ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Dutch Brazil

This article deals with the textual legacy of Dutch Brazil, in particular the ethnographic descriptions in one of the most popular works about the colony: Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum. Barlaeus never set foot in Brazil, but was an important Dutch intellectual authority in the seventeenth century. To compose the Rerum per Octennium, he relied on a wide variety of available sources, not only firsthand observations, but also classical, biblical and other contemporary sources. From these, he made a careful selection to produce his descriptions. Recent research shows that the Dutch participated in networks of knowledge and imagination as well as in a more familiar early modern trading network. This article reveals that Barlaeus’ descriptions not only circulated as knowledge, but also produced new knowledge. The Rerum soon became one of the standard works about the colony due to the importance of its author and its composition. Furthermore, the article discusses the rhetorical techniques used in some selected descriptions in order to shed light upon the strategies Barlaeus used in his discourse on the strange reality of the New World. For example, his ethnographic descriptions employed parallel customs or events from the classical Antiquity or the Bible. In these comparisons he displays both his intellectual capacities and shows his desire to comprehend this exotic reality.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Relationship

The recent upturn in biblically based films in Anglophone cinema is the departure point for this Afterword reflecting on the Bible’s impact on popular entertainment and literature in early modern England. Providing a survey of the book’s themes, and drawing together the central arguments, the discussion reminds that literary writers not only read and used the Bible in different ways to different ends, but also imbibed and scrutinized dominant interpretative principles and practices in their work. With this in mind, the Afterword outlines the need for further research into the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

Aberrant Numbers

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed Z. Buchwald ◽  
Mordechai Feingold
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Ancestor ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Bible

This chapter examines early modern conceptions regarding population, which impinged crucially on contemporary views—including Isaac Newton’s—regarding chronology, and the veracity of Scripture more generally. The Bible was universally perceived as the only authoritative account of “prehistory,” its divine authorship compelling unqualified assent. The first chapters of Genesis accordingly entailed that mankind had expanded quite rapidly from a common ancestor—both before and, especially, after the Deluge. While commentators on Genesis, especially the more zealous Protestants, saw little reason to engage in vain speculations regarding the number of mankind—or to synchronize sacred and secular histories beyond what Scripture itself required—a handful of chronologers and academic theologians began treading this territory at the turn of the seventeenth century. A pioneer of this new approach was Jean Du Temps (Johannes Temporarius), a French Protestant jurist.

“Civil in any Country, if They Are So in the Fashion of France”

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-158
Author(s):  
Céline Carayon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
New World ◽  
Gestural Communication ◽  
State Control ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Nonverbal Expression ◽  
Modern France

As the 1550 Royal Entry in Rouen described in the opening of this chapter reveals, Renaissance and Early Modern France was home to a deeply ceremonial culture in which political and social rituals held complex meanings. This chapter reviews significant historical and cultural developments that transformed Europeans’ predominantly oral cultures after 1500. At the time of their explorations in the Americas, the French were familiar with a variety of sign traditions that informed their perception of Indigenous gestures and prepared them well to communicate with signs in the New World. In France, gestural communication was deeply connected to the realms of religious and secular oratory, drama (theatre), and court protocols. The seventeenth century saw a renewal of scientific and philosophical interest for manual eloquence with new universal language schemes being developed, including some of the first manuals of sign language. Increased state control over definitions of civility and ongoing distrust of theatrical gestures as unauthentic resulted in diverging types of nonverbal expression among the elite and the rest of the population. The chapter ends with an overview of early Atlantic repertoires of signs that evolved from the traditions of mariners and soldiers who participated in early voyages.

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Research

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture provides a fresh look at the important, burgeoning field of Edwards and the Bible. For too long, Edwards scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology, but what is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Christian Scripture and had plans for major treatises on the Bible before he died. Edwards scholars need to take stock of the place of the Bible in his thought to do justice to his theology and legacy. In fact, more and more experts are recognizing how important this aspect of his life is, and this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. This volume seeks to increase our understanding of Edwards’ engagement with Scripture by setting it in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. It provides case studies of Edwards’ exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probes his use of Scripture to develop theology. It also sets his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards’ work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

scholarly journals Teaching Punctuation in Early Modern England

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-49
Author(s):  
Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Oral Delivery ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Shed Light

Teaching Punctuation in Early Modern England Much has been written on the punctuation practice of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers in order to work out the ultimate function of marks of punctuation. The main point of discussion has almost ever been whether punctuation indicated syntactic relationships or represented speech pauses either to give emphasis in oral delivery or just to be able to breathe. The focus of this paper, however, is the theory rather than the practice, in particular, the set of rules and conventions used by schoolmasters to guide students in their use of stops. Thus, textbooks used at the time to teach reading and writing will constitute our main sources of information to achieve the following aims: (i) to offer a classification of the different marks of punctuation described, (ii) to establish the functions schoolbooks assigned to punctuation marks in general, and (iii) to assess the importance schoolmasters gave to pointing. The results of this study - which follows the works by Ong (1944) and Salmon (1962, 1988) - will contribute to shed light on the ever-lasting debate on the principles guiding Early Modern English punctuation usage.

Truth and the Experiential

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, black Mohanes led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world. Experientially based forms of producing and consuming medical knowledge proved essential to the creation of Atlantic nodes of knowledge production in spaces like Cartagena. Black Caribbean epistemological spaces in which the experiential overcame old dogma, even if experientially-based, were conspicuously located outside the boundaries that natural philosophers defined.In the early modern Caribbean a heterogeneous group of ritual practitioners of African descent arriving from Europe, Africa, and the New World experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and formulated material, conceptual, and social practices based on Caribbean experiential findings that they designed to interpret and establish authority over a natural world that encompassed the moral and the spiritual. As the chapter shows here, black ritual practitioners’ ways of knowing the natural world and bodies were intrinsically related to the development of novel Caribbean experientially based ways of articulating the nature of truth.

Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk Nellen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
God's Word ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The One

Did innovative textual analysis reshape the relations between Christian believers and their churches in early modern confessional states? This volume explores the hypothesis that in the long seventeenth century humanist-inspired biblical criticism contributed significantly to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims. Historiography pictures this era as one in which the dominant position of religion and church began to show signs of erosion under the influence of vehement debates on the sacrosanct status of the Bible. Until quite recently, this gradual but decisive shift has been attributed to the rise of the sciences, in particular astronomy and physics. This book looks at biblical criticism as, on the one hand, an innovative force and, on the other, the outcome of developments in philology that had started much earlier than scientific experimentalism or the New Philosophy. Scholars began to situate the Bible in its historical context. The seventeen chapters show that even in the hands of pious, orthodox scholars philological research not only failed to solve all the textual problems that had surfaced, but even brought to light countless new incongruities. This supplied those who sought to play down the authority of the Bible with ammunition. The conviction that God’s Word had been preserved as a pure and sacred source gave way to an awareness of a complicated transmission in a plurality of divergent, ambiguous, historically determined and heavily corrupted texts. This shift took place primarily in the Dutch Protestant world of the seventeenth century.

scholarly journals An Old Author in the New World: Terence, Samuel Melyen, and the Boston Latin School c. 1700

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-292
Author(s):  
Theodore R. Delwiche
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
School Building ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
Fine Grained

This article examines the fine-grained practice of a classical education at seventeenth-century Boston Latin School. Building off wider early modern European practices, schoolboy and schoolmaster in Boston adapted Roman authors like Terence and Cicero to both pious and practical ends.

Quaker Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-92
Author(s):  
Laura Rediehs
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Book Of Nature ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
Internal Sense

Abstract Quakerism emerged in the seventeenth century, during a time when philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge led to the emergence of modern science. The Quakers, in some conversation with early modern philosophers, developed a distinctive epistemology rooted in their concept of the Light Within, which functioned as a special internal sense giving access to divine insight. The Light Within provided illumination both to properly understand the Bible and to ‘read’ the Book of Nature. This epistemology can be thought of as an expanded experiential empiricism that integrates our ethical and religious knowledge with our scientific knowledge. This epistemology has carried through in Quaker thought to the present day and can be helpful in the context of today’s epistemological crisis.

The Mappe and the Bible: Nation, Empire and the Collective Memory of Jonah

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 476-500
Author(s):  
Simon Staffell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Modern Period

AbstractThis article uses the work of the English cartographer John Speed as a way to explore the role of the collective memory of Jonah in social and political discourses during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The paper engages with debates concerning nationalism during the early modern period. Collective memory theory is also used to consider how Jonah became a reified site of memory. By placing Speed's writing alongside the works of his forebears and examining the function of the Jonah text within three sermons, the evolving collective memory of the biblical text, and its imagined attachment to national identity, is traced. It is suggested that Speed's cartographic selectivity in depicting biblical narratives can be seen in relation to the nascent nationalist and imperialist worldviews and ideologies of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document