scholarly journals The Intellectual Milieu of John of Paris OP

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Milieu

Charles Williams’s Arthuriad: Mythic Vision and the Possibilities of Belief

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
J. G. Bradbury
Keyword(s):  
Religious Faith ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Devotional Poetry ◽  
Religious Worldview ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Intellectual Environment

This essay explores Charles Williams’s use of the Arthurian myth to sustain a religious worldview in the aftermath of sustained attacks on the relevance and veracity of Christian belief in the early twentieth century. The premise to be explored is that key developments in science and philosophy made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in a cultural and intellectual milieu in which assertions of religious faith became increasingly difficult. In literary terms this became evident in, amongst other things, the significant reduction in the production of devotional poetry. By the late 1930s the intellectual environment was such that Charles Williams, a man of profound religious belief who might otherwise have been expected to produce devotional work, turned to a much older mode, that of myth, that had taken on new relevance in the modern world. Williams’s use of this mode allowed him the possibility of expressing a singularly Christian vision to a world in which such vision was in danger of becoming anathema. This essay examines the way in which Williams’s lexis, verse structure, and narrative mode builds on his Arthurian source material to allow for an appreciation of religiously-informed ideas in the modern world.

The Intellectual Milieu of More’s Utopia: Some Notes

Moreana ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 1 (Number 1) (1) ◽  
pp. 40-46
Author(s):  
R.J. Schoeck
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Milieu

Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Central Belief

The Quakers were by far the most successful of the radical religious groups to emerge from the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century—and their survival into the present day was largely facilitated by the transformation of the movement during its first fifty years. What began as a loose network of charismatic travelling preachers was, by the start of the eighteenth century, a well-organized and international religious machine. This shift is usually explained in terms of a desire to avoid persecution, but Quakers, Christ and the Enlightenment argues instead for the importance of theological factors as the major impetus for change. In the first sustained account of the theological motivations guiding the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism, the volume explores the Quakers’ positive intellectual engagement with those outside the movement to offer a significant reassessment of the causal factors determining the development of early Quakerism. Tracing the Quakers’ engagement with such luminaries as Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and John Norris, the volume unveils the Quakers’ concerted attempts to bolster their theological reputation through the refinement of their central belief in the ‘inward Christ’, or ‘the Light within’. In doing so, the study challenges persistent stereotypes of early modern radicalism as anti-intellectual and ill-educated—and indeed, as defined either by ‘rationalist’ or ‘spiritualist’ excess. Rather, the theological concerns of the Quakers and their interlocutors point to a crisis of Christology weaving through the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, which has long been underestimated as significant fuel for the emerging Enlightenment

Headlong into Gryll Grange or Peacock Alley Revisited

1970 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
Charles F. Mullett
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Intellectual Milieu

Despite the seductions of the Institute for the leisure of the theory classes any historian worth his grants knows literature to be an indispensable source. How much would we know about the England of Gloriana, of Anne, of Victoria, without Shakespeare, the Spectator, and “Locksley Hall?” A lot no doubt, but how much poorer we should be without them. Not to overdo chivalry the pages that follow view Jeremy Bentham's England through the spectacles of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) whose place as a novelist may unsafely be left to those undertakers of reputations, the professors of literature, but whose value as a document may best be gauged by a historian. Indeed Peacock is a historian, the better for being a satirist. Whether all historians are satirists must be decided by others, but surely all satirists are historians. Compared to parliamentary papers, mercantile ledgers, the Benthamite corpus, Peacock's slim volumes may seem to afford an historian no more than a trial run. Yet such is far from the case. The problem for the initiate is not paucity but riches. The shafts of his satire leave scarcely a contemporary fad or fancy in darkness. What is more, it takes very little sensitivity to appreciate how brightly those shafts light up many posturings of our own day. The words, “for the initiate,” are deliberately chosen: to capture Peacock's flavor one must comprehend his intellectual milieu. To this area there is no better key than contemporary periodicals wherein the words, the phrases, often the very rhythms find echo in his novels. Having absorbed the first, one grasps the second, one understands what Peacock was saying when he knows what was being talked about when he said it.

scholarly journals Nomads under arrest: The nation-building and nation-destroying of Kalmyk nomads in Russia

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-385
Author(s):  
Saglar Bougdaeva ◽  
Rico Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Hierarchical Model ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Dalai Lama ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Imagination ◽  
Cultural Strategies ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
Intellectual Milieu

Nomads are positioned outside of the modern conception of nations, which is based on a traditional or modern hierarchical model (Kuzio, 2001) which tends to “dehistoricize and essentialize tradition” (Chatterjee, 2010: 169). Using an analysis of the narrative construction of nomadic Kalmyk nationhood, particularly through historiography and culture, this article demonstrates that in spite of nation-destroying efforts from the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, the Kalmyk nation has been flexible with reinventing cultural strategies in charting the nomadic national imaginary from Chinggis Khan to the Dalai Lama. It argues that nomadic nationhood contains a deeply imaginary response to nomads’ cultural and intellectual milieu which provided a way of freeing itself from Tsarist and Soviet modular narratives of national imagination, demonstrating how nomadic nationhood exists as a non-modular form of nationhood.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Nature of the American Indians

1975 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
José A. Fernández-Santamaria
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Bartolome De Las Casas ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Composite Nature ◽  
Juan Gines De Sepulveda ◽  
Rule Out

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda epitomizes in many ways, both personally and intellectually, the cosmopolitanism of Spanish political thought in the sixteenth century. Educated in Italy, disciple of Pomponazzi, translator of Aristotle, chronicler of the Emperor and mentor of his son Philip, Sepúlveda is best known—and often misunderstood as the defender of the more unsavory aspects of the Spanish conquest and colonization in America—for his bitter controversy with Bartolomé de las Casas. To that debate Sepúlveda brought a humanist's training and outlook anchored in his devotion to Aristotle, but strongly tempered by his attachment to Saint Augustine. It is the purpose of this paper to examine Sepúlveda's ideas on the nature of the American natives, particularly the question of whether the Indians are natural slaves. Considerations of space, of course, rule out the possibility of undertaking here a detailed scrutiny of the foundations upon which those ideas rest. It can be said, however, that they are typically Renaissance views, a blend of traditions characteristic of the composite nature of the age's intellectual milieu.

scholarly journals Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger L. Emerson
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Process ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Economic Dynamic ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
Naturalistic Account ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Travel Accounts

Abstract "Conjectural history" is used here to "denote any rational or naturalistic account of the origins and development of institutions, beliefs or practices not based on documents or copies of documents or other artifacts contemporary (or thought to be contemporary) with the subjects studied." Many recent historians have focused on the apparent emergence within Scotland of a large number of sophisticated conjectural histories around ¡750, and analysed them within the framework of a Marxist-oriented social science. This paper argues that such a perspective is "inappropriate and misguided." If one looks at these works as an outcome of what went before, rather than a forerunner of what came after, they begin to lose their modernistic flavour. Conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment were based essentially on four sources: the Bible and its commentaries, the classics, modern works of philosophy and travel accounts. Each had an influence on the works produced. The parallels between the Biblical and the secular conjectural histories are, for example, instructive and it is clear that no Scottish historian could consistently hold a doctrine of economic deter- minism or historical materialism and still reconcile this position with his Calvinist beliefs. Works such as Lucretius' On the Nature of Things had influenced the con- jectural histories of the Renaissance and continued to be used by the Scots just as they were by the English deists, whose speculations about historical development were also helpful to Scottish writers. Travel accounts provided information concerning mankind at various stages of civilization, but no explanation of the developmental process. While the study of history was a popular pursuit during the Scottish Enlightenment this inte rest followed trends on the continent and elsewhere. Furthermore, an examination of the great works of this period suggests that they were firmly based on the writings of scholars of a generation before. Certainly the leading writers of the "golden age" from roughly 1730 to 1790 gave a more sophisticated, detailed and elaborate treatment cf these ideas, but the sources, problems and concepts which they elucidated were not new. In their analyses, they did not employ historical materialism or economic determinism, though they were undoubtedly more political-economic, dynamic and secular in their attitude. They desired change for Scotland out of a patriotic regard for the comparative backwardness of their country, but the causes and cures for that condition were not fundamentally economic in nature. If these writings are examinedas a unit, and seen in context, the conjectural historians of the Scottish Enlightenment appear to be an understandable outcome of their intellectual milieu. The author supports this conclusion by a close examination of the work of Hume and Smith. This further explicates his theme that a nascent economic determinism was not the impetus for this writing that recent historians have read into these works.

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