Who Wants to Live Forever? Astrological Methods for Calculating Lifespan in Western Culture and Perspectives on Determinism in Astrology

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-188
Author(s):  
Helena Avelar
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Life Span ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
Length Of Life

Abstract The calculation of an individual’s life span has been a constant presence in premodern astrological practice. It was used by physicians to calculate the expected life of a patient or to ascertain if an illness was likely to be fatal. On a personal level, this knowledge could also offer a means of control over one’s life and, more importantly, a way to prepare their access to a rewarding afterlife. This article contains an overview of determinism in astrology and a brief survey of the main methodologies used to determine the length of life, exploring their history, primary sources, and variations from antiquity to the early modern period. Although it discusses to some extent the chief methods for determining the lifespan, an in-depth study of the techniques, with all their details and discrepancies is out of its scope. The goal is to correlate the astrological practice with different perspectives on determinism and free will.

Patrick Boyle, The Irish Colleges and the Historiography of Irish Catholicism

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Significant Feature ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Irish College ◽  
History Of

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.

"Amore regolato": Papal Nephews and Their Palaces in Eighteenth-Century Rome

2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-91
Author(s):  
Heather Hyde Minor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Modern Period

In the early modern period, families of popes had an extraordinary ability to shape Rome's architectural and urban fabric. The most important architectural project of any papal family in the papal capital was their palace. In 1753, when Cardinal Neri Corsini contentedly surveyed his palace, the satisfaction he felt would have been familiar to papal relatives for more than 250 years. But unlike generations of papal nephews before him, Neri could take added pride in the fact that he had done it all on his own, relying on his wit rather than the papal coffers. The Palazzo Corsini, like the Palazzo Albani and the Palazzo Braschi, was a rarity in eighteenth-century Rome. Through a combination of the traditional practice of careful study of primary sources with cultural history, broadly conceived, this article illuminates the set of political exigencies and social circumstances that led to the extinction of this architectural form, which had shaped the Eternal City for centuries.

Financing Jesuit Missions

2017 ◽  
pp. 127-150
Author(s):  
Frederik Vermote
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Managerial Skills ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
State Patronage ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter outlines the less studied finances of Jesuit overseas missions in the early modern period, drawing from incomplete sources for Portuguese Asia and more substantial primary sources (and secondary literature) for Spanish America. It discusses several conceptual points: How did Jesuits and outsiders reflect on their wealth? How and why was the relationship between God and Mammon problematic? In what regions were the Jesuits wealthy, and was this a result of Jesuit managerial skills? The chapter provides an overview of Jesuit missions’ finances through four sources of income: state patronage, private benefactors, trade, and lands/properties. While it is impossible to exhaustively discuss the finances of every Jesuit mission through these categories, female donors and the finances of Jesuit missions in China are given special attention.

scholarly journals Endless world of Blaise Pascal : a working bibliography.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Akmut
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Blaise Pascal ◽  
Modern Period

I - A first overview of primary sources and their peculiar conventions(ie. editions, archives, locations of original texts, summaries...),II - Resources for the Early modern period (major works, encyclopedia...).

Sources for the History of Women in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Case of Dorothea Herberts Retrospections

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Poor Survival ◽  
Evidential Value ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

The poor survival rate of primary sources for the history of Irish women in the early modern period is mitigated by the sophistication with which extant sources are now being analysed. When re-examined without reference to the demands of the traditional historical grand narrative, when each text itself is permitted to guide its own interrogation, previously undervalued texts are revealed to be insightful of individual existential experience. The memoir of eighteenth-century Dorothea Herbert, hitherto much ignored due to the authors mental illness, is becoming increasingly respected not just for its historic evidential value but for the revelations it contains of a distressed individuals use of literature to manage her circumstances. The interpretive tools deployed on such a text by different research specialisms necessarily lead to divergent conclusions; this in turn may lead to creative re-imagining of history although they cannot all equally reflect what was likely to have been the lived reality of the original author.

Across Europe: Educational Travelling of German Noblemen in a Comparative Perspective

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 417-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathis Leibetseder
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Source Material ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Modern Period

AbstractIn recent years, cultural historians interested in the Grand Tour have written divided histories focusing on travelers from one particular nation or region. Drawing from what these researchers report on educational traveling as well as from primary sources, it is now possible to put the Grand Tour into a European perspective. As to travelers from Germany, there is a wide scope of source material at hand, comprising funeral sermons, university rolls, travelogues, travel accounts, and correspondence. As a comparative perspective clearly reveals, educational travelling was vital in shaping the identity of gentlemanly travelers. Though starting out as a transnational social practice common to most aristocrats from northern and eastern Europe and to a lesser degree also to the nobilities from Romance countries, it contributed to sharpen notions of “the own” and “the other” towards the end of the Early Modern Period.

“The Immortal Traveler”: How Historiography Changed Judaism

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-134
Author(s):  
Cristiana Facchini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
European Society ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
European Thought

Abstract:The historiography of Judaism as a scholarly enterprise primarily developed during the nineteenth century as the byproduct of a number of historical conditions that influenced Western culture at large. First and foremost, European society at the time was shaped by the dynamism and social change brought on by industrialization. Moreover, the nineteenth century’s culture held on to a romantic image of the past in its multifarious guises – the ancient or the medieval, and in some cases the age of the Renaissance – to which various currents of European thought had contributed. The past, and therefore history as a cultural practice, was particularly important in the age of nationalism and empires. In this article I analyze how certain religious topics such as the ‘historical Jesus’ and the relevance of the Kabbalah were elaborated in the early modern period and readdressed, with different religious and cultural agendas, in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Spoken Latin in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (42) ◽  
pp. 66-71
Author(s):  
Terence Tunberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Latin Culture

An article by Jerome Moran entitled ‘Spoken Latin in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance’ was published in the Journal of Classics Teaching in the autumn of 2019 (Moran, 2019). The author of the article contends that ‘actual real-life conversations in Latin about everyday matters’ never, or almost never took place among educated people in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. A long-standing familiarity with quite a few primary sources for the Latin culture of Renaissance and early modern period leads us to a rather different conclusion. The present essay, therefore, revisits the main topics treated by Moran.

From Craft to Institution: Accounting in Italy from the Middle ages to the Early Modern Period

2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Professional Field

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.

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