Astrology in court: The Spanish Inquisition, authority, and expertise

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tayra M. C. Lanuza-Navarro

Astrology, its legitimacy, and the limits of its acceptable practice were debated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Many of the related arguments were mediated by the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the responses to it. Acknowledging the complexities of the relationship between astrological ideas and Christian teachings, this paper focuses on the Catholic debates by specifically considering the decisions about astrology taken by the Spanish Inquisition. The trials of astrologers are examined with the aim of understanding the role of experts in astrology in early modern Spain. This study brings into view the specific nature of the debate on astrology in Spain, the consequences of the actions of the Inquisition and the social control it exerted. The historical events discussed comprise a particular case and also mirror the general debates about astrology taking place in early modern Europe. The experts’ opinions expressed in trials and in reports about the discipline received by the Inquisition reveal two key traits of the debate: the dispute about who had the authority to decide on the legitimacy of astrology and the disagreement about what constituted natural and judicial astrological practices. These led to different opinions about what was to be done with each defendant and about what content in their books ought to be forbidden.

Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo

The purpose of this book is to present the philosophical thought of John Locke as the work of a Christian virtuoso. In his role as ‘virtuoso’, an experimental natural philosopher of the sort that flourished in England during the seventeenth century, Locke was a proponent of the so-called ‘new philosophy’, a variety of atomism that emerged in early modern Europe. But he was also a practicing Christian, and he professed confidence that the two vocations were not only compatible but mutually sustaining. Locke aspired, without compromising his empirical stance, to unite the two vocations in a single philosophical endeavor with the aim of producing a system of Christian philosophy. Although the birth of the modern secular outlook did not happen smoothly or without many conflicts of belief, Locke, in his role of Christian virtuoso, endeavored to resolve apparent contradictions. Nuovo draws attention to the often-overlooked complexities and diversity of Locke’s thought, and argues that Locke must now be counted among the creators of early modern systems of philosophy.


Author(s):  
Fatri Hanifah

The reality, premarital sexual behavior almost increased every year in adolescents. The adolescents assumed that do activity of sex with homosexual or heterosexual likes daily activity, thereby they will feel degradation in social norm of adolescent itself. In this case, role of parents are very important to give strong social control through of education, protection, controling, and reinforcement the social norm in order that adolescents were avoided from premarital sexual behavior. Therefore, this research purposed to reveal how the relationship between social control of parents with premarital sex behavior in adolescents. This research used a quantitative of metode with kind the correlational of description. The result in this research was can get a not significant relationship between social control of parents with premarital sexual behavior in adolescents, it means that social control parents was not always influence premarital sexual behavior of adolescents. So that the parents must found the other factor to influence of premarital sexual behavior in adolescents to protected the adolescents from premarital sexual behavior.


Author(s):  
Kieran McEvoy ◽  
Ron Dudai ◽  
Cheryl Lawther

This chapter explores the intersection between criminology and transitional justice. The chapter begins with a critical discussion on the utility of criminological scholarship from settled democracies to the exceptional circumstances of post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies. It then explores a range of debates related to the punishment of offenders in such contexts including the role of prosecutions, amnesties, the reintegration of former combatants, and the role of restorative justice. The chapter next considers the social and political construction of victimhood in transitional contexts including competing notions of the ‘idealized’ victim. The relationship between transitional justice and social control is then examined including the importance of countering denial, the relationship between deviance and memory and the particular contribution of efforts ‘from below’ to counter elites-level narratives on past abuses. The chapter concludes that a criminology of transitional justice provides the basis for revisiting some of the foundational questions on responding to crime and justice in the most challenging of settings—a sobering but intellectually rich research agenda for years to come.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Maria Salomon Arel

Abstract This article discusses the gift-giving behaviour of English merchants involved in the Russia trade in the Muscovite era. Drawing on a small, but growing body of historical literature relating to the role of gifts in the cultivation of mutually beneficial relations between people across the social spectrum in early modern Europe, it explores the various ways in which the English deployed the practice of giving to their advantage, both in England and in Russia. In particular, as ‘strangers’ in Russia who operated beyond the parameters of traditional kin- and community-based networks of support, English merchants (and other foreigners, such as their Dutch competitors) needed to both ‘befriend’ Russian clients on the ground in every-day trade and nurture relationships in high places to ensure smooth, profitable, and secure business. As the sources reveal, they engaged in a variety of gift-giving behaviours in building relationships with Russians advantageous to their enterprise.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Hellerstedt

This article explores the problem of innate, natural talent vs acquired skill, knowledge, and virtue in dissertations from Uppsala University around 1680. These texts have never before been studied. It discusses questions such as: how did Swedish academics of the period conceive the relationship between ingenium (innate potential) and (acquired) virtue or knowledge? Which teaching methods did they advocate? How do the texts relate to developments in seventeenth century society? The study uses a combination of contextual analysis and a ‘history of concepts’ approach to answer these questions. The analysis reveals that the Swedish dissertations respond to contemporary debates (involving well-known authorities such as Vives, Huarte, Erasmus, and Comenius) and that they were affected by the immediate context: the growth of the early modern state and the social mobility which accompanied that growth. Education is described in Renaissance humanist terms, with a clear affinity to moral philosophical concepts such as virtue and habituation. The learning process described is analogous to the acquisition of moral virtue and education itself is to a large extent legitimated with reference to moral socialization. The educational ideas put forward balance discipline and playfulness, and represent a relatively democratic view of the distribution of human capabilities, showing a great trust in the potential of education. However, there is also a distinct stress on medical explanations of differences in individual talent.


2020 ◽  

These essays discuss approaches to early modern literature in central Europe, focusing on four pivotal areas: connections between humanism and the new scientific thought the relationship of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature to ancient and Renaissance European traditions the social and political context of early modern writing and the poets' self-consciousness about their work. As a whole, the volume argues that early modern writing in central Europe should not be viewed solely as literature but as the textual product of specific social, political, educational, religious, and economic circumstances. The contributors are Judith P. Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Thomas W. Best, Dieter Breuer, Barton W. Browning, Gerald Gillespie, Anthony Grafton, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Uwe-K. Ketelsen, Joseph Leighton, Ulrich Maché, Michael M. Metzger, James A. Parente, Jr., Richard Erich Schade, George C. Schoolfield, Peter Skrine, and Ferdinand van Ingen.


Author(s):  
David Randall

This chapter focuses upon the transformation from roughly 1400 to 1700 of the conception of conversation itself, both within treatises touching on theories of conversation and in the practice of the literary genre of dialogue, that literary emulation of sermo whose changing form registered conversation’s transformations. This transformation began with the Renaissance humanists, who intensified the Petrarchan abstraction of conversation-as-metaphor from actual conversation. The changing role of Renaissance conversation was linked to the simultaneous expansion of oratory’s ambitions, which inspired both the use of conversation as a refuge from oratory and, in a revolutionary riposte, the counter-claim that conversation should expand the scope of its subject matter supplant oratory. The innovative genre of Utopian dialogue provided a climax to this last development, by transforming the old debate as to the optimus status rei publicae into a conversation, and thus incorporating the ends of political action within the genre of sermo. Finally, in seventeenth-century France, the preceding expansion of conversation culminated in a revolutionary triumph, as conversation replaced oratory as the default mode of rhetoric. These changes collectively set the stage for the centrality of conversation in the intellectual world of early modern Europe.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
MOLLY COPELAND ◽  
BRYCE BARTLETT ◽  
JACOB C. FISHER

AbstractPrevailing social network frameworks examine the association between peer ties and behaviors, such as smoking, but the role of social isolates is poorly understood. Some theories predict isolated adolescents are protected from peer influence that increases smoking, while others suggest isolates are more likely to initiate smoking because they lack the social control provided by peer friendships. Building on a growing literature that seeks to explain these contradictions by moving beyond a homogeneous understanding of isolation, we identify the relationship between smoking and three distinct dimensions of isolation: avoided (adolescents who do not receive ties), withdrawn (adolescents who do not send ties), and externally oriented (adolescents who claim close out-of-grade friends). We examine the co-evolutionary effects of these dimensions and cigarette smoking using an autoregressive latent trajectory model with PROSPER Peers, a unique, longitudinal network dataset. These data include students (47% male and 86% white) from rural Iowa and Pennsylvania, ranging successively from grades 6–12 in eight waves of data. We find avoided isolation is associated with decreased subsequent smoking in high school. Smoking increases subsequent avoided and withdrawn isolation, but decreases external orientation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 223386592110402
Author(s):  
Prashant Hosur Suhas ◽  
Shelli Israelsen

This article addresses the scholarly debate on the relationship between interstate rivalry and military capacity. We draw on Tilly's bellicist theory of state formation in early modern Europe and Thies’ modifications to predatory theory, which prioritizes the role of interstate rivalry on state building, to explain variation in military capacity. We unpack the rivalry mechanism into spatial and positional rivalries and test how these two types of rivalry affect military capacity, and how positional rivalries affect military capacity in the long-term. Using time-series cross-sectional data analysis, we find that positional rivalries increase military capacity in the long term. Also, we find that spatial rivalry influences military capacity in the long-term, but its effects are uneven across indicators of military capacity, and it has a smaller effect on military capacity in comparison to positional rivalries. We conclude that not all types of rivalries have a uniform effect on military capacity and that competition over regional dominance, that is, positional rivalries, are the most impactful on military capacity. This study offers a more nuanced test of Tilly's bellicist theory and Thies’ modified predatory theory on state capacity.


Author(s):  
Teofilo F. Ruiz

This chapter assesses the relationship between Carnival and the annual Corpus Christi celebrations in late medieval and early modern Spain. Carnival has always been associated with revelry, subversive inversions of the social order, and transgressive behavior. Meanwhile, Corpus Christi is the high point of the Catholic devotional cycle in early modern Spain. Although it seems odd to juxtapose a feast such as Carnival with that of the Corpus Christi, there was a progression—uneven but perceptible—from the carnivalesque to the elaborate appropriation of some of these allegedly subversive themes of Carnival by the carefully programmed procession of the living body of Christ through the streets of Iberian cities.


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