scholarly journals Envy's pathology: Historical contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Lina Minou
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Status ◽  
Century Health ◽  
The Way

This article is concerned with the physicality of envy primarily in early –modern, but also in eighteenth-century health contexts. The discussion brings together descriptions of the effects of envy on the body of the envier, mainly from works of physiology and health preservation, but also from literary and spiritual writings. These depictions of envy are studied beyond their symbolism and with a view to establish whether they are meaningful according to the medical theories of the time in which they occur. The discussion begins by acknowledging the status of envy as a ‘disease’ and looks to the specific ways in which the discourse of envy conveys this sense. I find that in the early modern discourse envy is always pathological, that is, it is experienced as disease and signifies disease in general and several diseases in particular. Moreover, envy is uniquely placed to convey pathology on account of its being connected to inherently pathogenic elements of the humoural theory. Specifically, envy is physiologically connected to melancholy, and the way it is presented comes close to attributes assigned to black bile. In addition, envy realizes pathology, the occurrence of disease in the body, by impairing the vital process of digestion and thus depriving the person from proper nourishment and sustenance. The analysis further considers how this impairment of the body fits with the physiological manifestation of envy as ‘corrosion’ and ‘consumption’. Finding commonalities with other maladies mediated by these physiological signs the article concludes by considering the function of pathology in the conception of early modern envy.

scholarly journals Envy's pathology: Historical contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Lina Minou
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
The Status ◽  
Century Health ◽  
The Way

This article is concerned with the physicality of envy in early modern- and eighteenth-century health contexts. The discussion brings together descriptions of the effects of envy on the body of the envier, mainly from works of physiology and health preservation, but also from literary and spiritual writings. These depictions of envy are studied beyond their symbolism and with a view to establish whether they are meaningful according to the medical paradigms of the time in which they occur. The discussion begins by acknowledging the status of envy as a ‘disease’ and looks to the specific ways in which the discourse of envy conveys this sense. I find that in the early modern discourse envy is always pathological, that is, it is experienced as disease and signifies disease in general and several diseases in particular. Moreover, envy is uniquely placed to convey pathology on account of its being connected to inherently pathogenic elements of the humoural theory. Specifically, envy is physiologically connected to melancholy, and the way it is presented comes close to attributes assigned to black bile. In addition, envy realizes pathology, the occurrence of disease in the body, by impairing the vital process of digestion and thus depriving the person from proper nourishment and sustenance. This article concludes by looking at envy within an eighteenth-century context. It finds that by the end of the century envy undergoes a significant shift away from its status as disease and considers the reasons for this change.

Wicked Mysteries and Notorious Conjurors: Magic, Rape, and Violence in Two Early Modern Pamphlets

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-551
Author(s):  
Laura Levine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Way

Toward the end of the 1628 pamphlet A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Iohn Lambe, the pamphleteer describes the violence a crowd inflicts on John Lambe, a cunning man who dabbled in the dark arts. This violence, ultimately fatal, seems to be a response to Lambe's rape of an eleven-year-old child, a rape which he is convicted of but ultimately pardoned for. Earlier in his career, however, Lambe is indicted for using magic to disable the body of a gentleman as well as for invoking evil spirits. What connection exists between the charges against Lambe as a witch and magician and the charges against him as a rapist? This essay argues that long before Lambe gives those around him a basis for violence, he triggers anxieties about what he is, and that these anxieties play a role in the violence against him. The text of A Briefe Description demonstrates the way mechanisms of justice ultimately repeat—reenact and perform—versions of the crimes they seek to examine.

Penal Slavery in Early Modern Scandinavia

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-368
Author(s):  
Johan Heinsen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Exceptional Set ◽  
Security Breaches ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Penal Institution ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Atlantic Slavery

Abstract In Scandinavia, a penal institution known as “slavery” existed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Penal slaves laboured in the creation and maintenance of military infrastructure. They were chained and often stigmatized, sometimes by branding. Their punishment was likened and, on a few occasions, linked to Atlantic slavery. Still, in reality, it was a wholly distinct form of enslavement that produced different experiences of coercion than those of the Atlantic. Such forms of penal slavery sit uneasily in historiographies of punishment but also offers a challenge for the dominant models of global labour history and its attempts to create comparative frameworks for coerced labour. This article argues for the need for contextual approaches to what such coercion meant to both coercers and coerced. Therefore, it offers an analysis of the meaning of early modern penal slavery based on an exceptional set of sources from 1723. In these sources, the status of the punished was negotiated and practiced by guards and slaves themselves. Court appearances by slaves were usually brief—typically revolving around escapes as authorities attempted to identify security breaches. The documents explored in this article are different: They present multiple voices speaking at length, negotiating their very status as voices. From that negotiation and its failures emerge a set of practiced meanings of penal “slavery” in eighteenth-century Copenhagen tied to competing yet intertwined notions of dishonour.

Continuity and Intuition in Eighteenth-Century Analysis and in Kant

2020 ◽  
pp. 158-186
Author(s):  
Daniel Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Analysis ◽  
The Continuum ◽  
Interesting Account ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers the status of geometrical and kinematic representations in the foundations of 18th century analysis and in Kant’s understanding of those foundations. It has two aims. First, relying on relatively recent reassessments of the history of analysis, it will attempt to bring forward a more accurate account of intuitive representation in 18th century analysis and the relation between British and Continental mathematics. Second, it will give a better account of Kant’s place in that history. The result shows that although Kant did no better at navigating the labyrinth of the continuum than his contemporaries, he had a more interesting and reasonable account of the foundations of analysis than an easy reading of either Kant or that history provides. It also permits a more accurate and interesting account of how and when a conception of foundations of analysis without intuitive representations emerged, and how that paved the way for Bolzano and Cauchy.

scholarly journals The Hermeneutics of Transmission: Deciphering Discourses on Poetry and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)

2011 ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Déborah Blocker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

This article discusses how the constitution, circulation and institutionalization of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe could best be accounted for from a historical point of view. Pointing to various inconsistencies in the way historians of ideas have traditionally explained the rise of aesthetic discourses, the article examines the usefulness of the tools crafted by historians of the book for the development of such a project. Through an example, the drawbacks of interpretations based solely on serial bibliographies are also addressed, as the author argues for the importance of case studies, grounded in social, cultural and political history, through which various types of aesthetic practices may be made to appear. She also suggests that, to bypass the theoretical and practical deadlocks of traditional Begriffsgeschichte as far as the study of aesthetic practices is concerned, intellectual traditions and the actions that make them possible — that is “actions of transmission” — are to be promoted to the status of primary hermeneutic tools.

‘A Precarious Gift’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Robert Burton ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ars Poetica ◽  
The Way

This chapter (along with those following) concerns reception, broadly conceived, beginning with the Romantic reception of classical and early modern commonplaces about poetic madness. The chapter examines the status of earlier topoi such as the furor poeticus and the vesanus poeta in the Romantic period, by looking at the way in which these topoi were handled or discussed in the period. Subjects include Plato’s dialogue Ion, via Coleridge’s notebooks and Shelley’s Platonic translations, the Aristotelian Problems, Byron’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, and figurations of Renaissance melancholy in Ficino, Robert Burton, and Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, as they were discussed by Romantic writers, especially Coleridge in his influential lectures on the play.

The Status of Animals in Scottish Enlightenment Philosophy

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Wolloch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
Social Improvement ◽  
John Gregory ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

This article examines the consideration of animals by various eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, with special attention given to the physician and philosopher John Gregory, who utilized the comparison of human beings with animals as a starting point for a discussion about human moral and social improvement. In so doing Gregory, like most of his contemporary fellow Scottish philosophers, exemplified the basic anthropocentrism of the common early modern consideration of animals.

Denaturalising Security

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-102
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
State Practice ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

This chapter assesses how security was established as the first absolute and natural right of the subject. Thomas Hobbes remains in focus, insofar as he articulated the furthest what had already become an established dogma of early modern thought, notably in natural right theories, and of nascent state practice. The chapter then considers the different kinds of natures that troubled the enterprise of naturalisation. For nature was also appearing, as a result of the scientific revolution, as a source of disorder. It was no longer simply the stable referent for the task of political ordering. This new, epochal instability in the constructions of nature and the way it was addressed by Hobbes in his epistemological writings contains resources for short-circuiting the naturalising work that Hobbes, amongst others, was engaged in. These resources include Hobbes’s nominalism, which marks him as the original constructivist, and his critique of universals, including ‘paternal dominion’, his term for patriarchy. Hence, the purpose of the chapter is to parse the initial naturalisation of security as the subject’s constitutive right, in order to denaturalise it. Ultimately, Hobbes played a central role, not only in theorising the state, but in securing what the author seeks to unsettle with this book: the body as history’s great naturaliser.

Grotius's Mare Liberum in the Political Practice of Early-Modern Europe

Grotiana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Weindl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Status

AbstractIn this article Mare liberum is placed within the context of seventeenth-century European politics. It focuses on the development of conventional relations between European States regarding their interests outside of Europe and their importance concerning the status of Asian and African 'actors'. It turns out that in spite of Mare liberum's high-sounding proclamation of equality of non-European sovereigns with European States, Grotius's position as well as Dutch policy was inspired by self-interest and was essentially opportunistic. The Dutch Republic – as well as other European States – used the 'liberal' principles of Freedom of trade and the Universality of the Law of Nations to attack the Portuguese/Spanish claims of monopoly. However, as the Dutch Republic, Great Britain and France developed their own 'Spheres of Interest' in Asia, Africa and the Americas, they effectively excluded would-be competitors. Indeed, in the eighteenth century the 'pacte colonial' constituted a distinctive characteristic of the conventional and customary 'European Law of Nations'. As non-European political actors in the eighteenth century relatively lost military and political power, the European States finally relegated them to an inferior position, beyond the charmed circle of full 'subjects of Public International Law'. The article also is a contribution to the ongoing discussion about the relation between European imperialism and the development of the doctrine of European International Law.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document