Fruits of the Cross

Author(s):  
Robert L. Kendrick

This study of some sixty-odd Italian-language music-theater pieces for Holy Week in seventeenth-century Vienna addresses the issues of Habsburg dynastic piety, memory and commemoration, Passion devotion, and political meaning in the works. It further considers some surprising conjunctions of poetic conceptualism in connection with surprising—and theatrical—musical techniques. The pieces were meant to be performed in front of a constructed replica of Christ’s tomb—hence their Italian sobriquet, sepolcri—and often with an additional stage-set. Flourishing during the reign of Emperor Leopold I (1657–1705), the genre was also indebted to the patronage and piety of the women around him, including his stepmother, the Dowager Empress Eleonora, his three wives, and several of his daughters. The libretti, many by the famed Nicolo Minato, show unusual textual strategies in the recollection of Christ’s Passion, as they are imagined to take place after his burial. But they also involve wider realms of the dynastic’s self-image, material possessions, and political ideology. Although both the texts and the music—the latter by a variety of composers, most notably Giovanni Felice Sances and Antonio Draghi, along with Leopold himself—are little studied today, they also combined in performance to provide a sonic enactment of mourning according to the most recent norms of Italian musical dramaturgy.

2001 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 351-390
Author(s):  
C S Knighton ◽  
Timothy Wilson

In January 1678 John Knight, the Serjeant Surgeon of Charles II, sent to Samuel Pepys a ‘Discourse containing the History of the Cross of St. George, and its becoming the Sole Distinction = Flag, Badge or Cognizance of England, by Sea and Land’. Knight argued that St George's cross should become the dominant feature in English flags and supported his argument with a history of the cross.A manuscript copy of this discourse, with Knight's original drawings, survives in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and is published here. A brief biography of Knight is presented and an account of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century controversies about St George. The latter was an issue which caused acrimony between Royalists and Puritans. An Appendix reconstructs Knight's library, principally consisting of books concerning heraldry, topography and history.


Author(s):  
David Pearson

We may believe that books should be bought to be read and studied, but there is plentiful evidence, through human history, of people being mocked for owning books more for display and self-image. This chapter looks seriously and systematically at motivations for book ownership in the seventeenth century, recognizing that there is a range of attitudes between textual utility and the valuing of books for their aesthetic or luxurious qualities. Bookbindings, bookplates, heraldic markings, wills, and other kinds of evidence are drawn on, through various case studies, to show that for most people a mixture of approaches was probably involved—that we should think more in terms of a matrix than a linear spectrum. Book historians may define the history of reading as the key interface to be explored between books and people, but this is too narrow a focus if we really want to understand why people owned books.


2021 ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Stephanie Lawson

This chapter discusses what is often regarded as the central institution, not only of domestic or national political order but also of current international or global order—the state. Alongside the state, we must also consider the idea of the nation and the ideology of nationalism—perhaps the most powerful political ideology to emerge in the modern world. There is, however, another form of international political order that has actually been far more common throughout history, and that is empire. With the rise of modernity from around the beginning of the seventeenth century, we also encounter the rise of the modern state and state system in Europe along with ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, the nation-state, and democracy. The chapter then looks at the effective globalization of the European state system through modern imperialism and colonialism and the extent to which these have been productive of contemporary global order.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-46
Author(s):  
Annalisa Baicchi

Abstract This article examines the ‘Adj em +PP’ construction in the English-Italian language pair (e.g., angry at my audacity/arrabbiato per la mia audacia) with the aim of identifying the kinaesthetic embodied schemas that motivate the language of emotions. The analysis of corpus data highlights the interplay between culture and mind, and the cross-linguistic comparison offers some interesting observations that appear to undermine some stereotypes about the way in which emotions are conceived of in the two cultures. Comparative semantics foregrounds the non-diagrammatic rendition in the translation of emotion language and allows for typological hypotheses about cultural cognition and the connection between Talmy’s dichotomy of manner-framed and path-framed languages.


Perception ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 771-787 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfredo Massironi ◽  
Ugo Savardi

This research describes two hitherto unobserved phenomena in the frescoes of the seventeenth century architect and painter, Andrea Pozzo, painted on the vaulted ceiling of the central nave of the Church of St Ignatius in Rome. The present research also reports the results of two experimental studies on the problem of the perception of shapes projected on concave surfaces. A quantitative evaluation of the phenomena perceived from various points of observation is made by means of stimuli projected at various angles on a semicylindrical surface. The validity of the assumption of invariance, and in particular of the projective invariant called the cross-ratio, is discussed within the framework of ecological theories on perception.


1986 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Forty

In a previous paper the writer considered the problems of establishing latitude at sea in the sixteenth century and in part based his conclusions on the results of experiments made with modern replicas of the quadrant, the mariner's astrolabe and in particular the cross-staff, these being the instruments in use at the time. Reference was made to the backstaff or Davis quadrant which, though first described by John Davis in its simplest form in 1595 was not in effective use in its final version until well into the seventeenth century. It remained, together with the cross-staff, the principal altitude-measuring instrument in use at sea until the introduction of instruments of reflection in the eighteenth century and indeed continued in use long after that time, no doubt because it was cheaper than the new instruments, but perhaps also in part because of the ingrained conservatism of seafarers. The name ‘backstaff’ can be used generically to refer to all those instruments with which the observer turns his back on the Sun (e.g. the Gunter's bow), but they all post-dated and derived in concept from the Davis quadrant, which remained the most common in England and elsewhere. (The French knew it as le quartier anglais.) It is in this sense that the term is used here.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Javier Díaz Noci

One of the most interesting Spanish-language newspapers of the second half of the seventeenth century was published by a Jewish printer, David de Castro Tartas, and appeared in Amsterdam at least from 1672 and at least until 1702, allegedly with continuity, under the title Gazeta de Amsterdam. It was partially based in translations of news items from other Dutch-language newspapers of its time, but at the same time it included news items presumedly collected in Castro’s (and, in the latest years, Manuel Texeira’s) office and addressed to a community of Jewish who were born as Catholics in Portugal and Spain, emigrated to the Republic of the Netherlands due to religious tolerance. David de Castro Tartas launched another Italian-language newspaper, Gazzetta d'Amsterdam. Since new issues of both newspapers have been found recently, we propose to complete the history of Castro's activity as newspaper editor, not only printer. Using content analysis, we try to underline the importance of this Spanish (and Italian) language printer and editor in the reproduction of material translated and adapted from other newspapers and in the production of news items originally managed in his office.


Eighteenth-century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century’s novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period’s philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the ‘long’ eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire seeks to reflect developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and to provide a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period’s texts can come together.


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