Greek Rhetorics After the Fall of Constantinople: An Introduction

2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-294
Author(s):  
Thomas Conley

Abstract: This short paper will sketch the twilight years of Greek rhetorics, roughly from 1500 until just after the Greek War of Independence. This is an area that, like much else in neo-Greek intellectual history, has been sadly ignored in “Western” scholarship. Greek scholars played an important part in the reception of the works of Hermogenes, Longinus, and pseudo-Demetrius in the mid- and late-sixteenth century. But other Greek teachers and scholars at the College of St. Athanasius in Rome, at the University of Padua, at the Flanginian Academy in Venice, and at schools in Bucharest, Jannina, and Constantinople itself continued to add to those traditions with numerous school texts, homiletic handbooks, and some interesting philosophical treatments of rhetoric. Their names (Korydaleus, Skoufos, Mavrokordates, Damodos, and many others) are unknown to most students of the history of rhetoric—a situation this paper will try in its small way to change.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
KAARLO HAVU

Abstract The article analyses the emergence of decorum (appropriateness) as a central concept of rhetorical theory in the early sixteenth-century writings of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In rhetorical theory, decorum shifted the emphasis from formulaic rules to their creative application in concrete cases. In doing so, it emphasized a close analysis of the rhetorical situation (above all the preferences of the audience) and underscored the persuasive possibilities of civil conversation as opposed to passionate, adversarial rhetoric. The article argues that the stress put on decorum in early sixteenth-century theory is not just an internal development in the history of rhetoric but linked to far wider questions concerning the role of rhetoric in religious and secular lives. Decorum appears as a solution both to the divisiveness of language in the context of the Reformation and dynastic warfare of the early sixteenth century and as an adaptation of the republican tradition of political rhetoric to a changed, monarchical context. Erasmus and Vives maintained that decorum not only suppressed destructive passions and discord, but that it was only through polite and civil rhetoric (or conversation) that a truly effective persuasion was possible in a vast array of contexts.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Zanatta ◽  
Fabio Zampieri ◽  
Cristina Basso ◽  
Gaetano Thiene

[first paragraph of article]Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), professor of mathematics at the University of Padua from 1592 to 1610, was a pillar in the history of our University and a symbol of freedom for research and teaching, well stated in the university motto ‘‘Universa Universis Patavina Libertas’’ (Total freedom in Padua, open to all the world). He invented the experimental method, based on evidence and calculation (‘‘science is measure’’) and was able, by using the telescope, to confirm the Copernican heliocentric theory, a challenge to the Bible. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), in his book ‘‘The Problems of Philosophy’’ stated: ‘‘Almost everything that distinguishes modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved the most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. Together with Harvey, Newton and Keplero, Galileo was a protagonist of this scientific revolution in the late Renaissance’’. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-55
Author(s):  
DANIEL S. ALLEMANN

AbstractThe sixteenth-century theologians of the School of Salamanca are well known for their sophisticated reflections on the Spanish conquest of the New World. But the nature of their responses seems far from clear and is subject to historiographical debate. Recent studies from the discipline of intellectual history suggest that the Salmantine theologians challenged the legitimacy of Spanish claims to the Americas. Scholars associated with the field of post-colonial studies, on the other hand, forcefully stress their entanglement in Spain's imperial venture overseas. This article, however, argues that these seemingly irreconcilable approaches are not in fact mutually exclusive. It shifts our attention to the sorely neglected ius praedicandi, the right to preach the gospel, which served to translate the Spanish theologians’ deeply rooted belief in the hegemonic truth of the Christian faith into a discourse of otherwise ‘secular’ natural rights. In adopting this novel lens, the article makes a case for assessing the language of the university theologians in its own terms while simultaneously exposing the support of Salamanca for Spain's imperial venture.


Author(s):  
Stella Fletcher

The humbly born Ligurian Francesco della Rovere (b. c. 1414–d. 1484) was entrusted to the Franciscan Order from the age of nine and educated in Chieri, near Turin, and at the university of Padua. By 1460 his distinguished academic career had taken him from Padua to Bologna, Pavia, Siena, Florence, and Perugia. He then served as Roman procurator and vicar general of the Friars Minor, and minister general from 1464, before being made a cardinal by Pope Paul II in 1467. His learning was demonstrated in three theological treatises: De sanguine Christi, De potentia dei, and De futuris contingentibus. If the cardinals reckoned on securing a meek scholar-pope when they elected him to the highest office in August 1471 they miscalculated, for what emerged from the Franciscan chrysalis was an enthusiastic player of papal politics who advanced the interests of his kinsmen with greater zeal than had any of his recent predecessors. Pope Sixtus IV was a rarity in the higher echelons of the Church precisely because he was of non-noble birth, and he clearly sought to compensate for this not only by promoting so many of his relatives, both clerics and laymen, but by commissioning numerous building projects that could be decorated with oak trees and acorns, the Della Rovere emblems. The holy year or jubilee of 1475 presented the ideal opportunity for such assertions of the family’s newly established status. Toward the end of the pontificate, Sixtus’s taste for entering political alliances embroiled the papacy in a sequence of peninsular wars, the first of which was triggered by the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478: one of the pope’s lay nephews, Girolamo Riario, supported the plot against Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, and another, Cardinal Raffaele Sansoni-Riario, witnessed the murder of Giuliano in the Florentine duomo. The Pazzi War was followed by a realignment of the Italian powers, which then went to war over the duchy of Ferrara in 1482–1484. Sixtus’s death on 12 August 1484 was said to have been caused by his fury at the peace terms agreed between Milan and Venice. Relations between Sixtus and the secular powers beyond Italy are perhaps best approached via the ecclesiastical policies of the relevant princes. The broad outline of his pontificate can be traced in various Reference Works, but attention should focus on the sheer quantity of Primary Sources, which are so numerous that they are divided between Histories, Letters, and Panegyrics and Polemics in this article. Collections of Papers also form so rich a resource that relatively few individual articles have been selected for individual treatment. Lives and Times can be consulted for the political, diplomatic, and military history of Sixtus’s pontificate, while A Franciscan Pope addresses some aspects of its ecclesiastical history. Again reflecting the quantity of available publications, it seems appropriate to allow Culture to be subdivided into Architecture, the architectural and artistic composite that is the Sistine Chapel, and other Painting and Sculpture, before concluding with the literary culture of the Written and Spoken Word.


Traditio ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 493-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron P. Gilmore

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Fanny Marcon ◽  
Giulio Peruzzi ◽  
Sofia Talas

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, new lectures in natural philosophy based on direct and immediate demonstrations began to spread through Europe. Within this context, a chair of experimental philosophy was created at the University of Padua in 1738, and the new professor, Giovanni Poleni, established a Cabinet of Physics, which became very well known in eighteenth-century Europe. In the following two centuries, Poleni’s successors continued to acquire thousands of instruments used for teaching and research, which today are held at the Museum of the History of Physics of the University of Padua. The present paper describes the main peculiarities of the collection, comprising instruments from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We also discuss the current acquisition policy of the museum, aimed at collecting material evidence of the research and teaching activities in physics that are carried out in Padua today. We will outline both the local peculiarities of the collection and its international dimension, based on the contacts that have been established throughout the centuries between Padua and the international scientific community. Some aspects of the circulation of scientific knowledge in Europe and beyond will thus also emerge.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Janken Myrdal

This article analyzes all extant agricultural treatises produced before the sixteenth century throughout Eurasia, in order to highlight their importance for the study of agricultural praxis, their significance for constructing a transnational intellectual history of the medieval globe, and their relevance for the development of pragmatic literacies. Such texts emerged both in China and around the Mediterranean before 200 BCE, and somewhat later in India, but few have been preserved and many are difficult to date. Thereafter, the medieval transmission of agricultural knowledge moved via several different regional trajectories and traditions, with Anglo-Norman England becoming a fourth and largely independent birthplace of the agricultural treatise genre during the thirteenth century. The proliferation of these texts becomes evident throughout Eurasia around 1000 CE and increases further from the fourteenth onward. Throughout this longue durée, the contents of these treatises reflect real changes in agricultural technologies, dominant crops, and climate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Tomáš Nejeschleba

Johannes Jessenius (1566–1621) became known by his contemporaries mostly as an exponent of the Italian anatomical Renaissance in Central Europe at the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The image of Jessenius in the twentieth century was also created with respect to his activities in the area of anatomy in Wittenberg and Prague in particular. The aim of this article is to put Jessenius into the context of the development of anatomy in the sixteenth century. An important point in this progression can be seen in the change of the definition of anatomy from the art (ars) of dis- secting bodies and a “method” of instructing students to the way of acquiring knowledge (scientiaa) of bodies and nature. The crucial role in this process played anatomical writings of the second half of the 16th century and the development seems to be connected with methodological discussions at the University of Padua. Jessenius, in his anatomical writings, primarily followed the Paduan anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), whose work De humani corporis fabrica (1543) expresses the fundamental change in Renaissance anatomy. In addition, the methodological background of the anatomical Renaissance, which Jessenius became acquainted with during his studies in Padua, also echoes in Jessenius’ works.


Author(s):  
М.С. Киселева

В статье исследуется становление междисциплинарности в интеллектуальной истории XIX – начала ХХ в. Методологическим основанием историзма этого периода, соединяющего различные области исторических, филологических, социальных наук и психологии, стала идея связи человека со временем его жизни и рефлексивно со временем культуры и социума (концепт «человек во времени»). Философия абсолютного идеализма Гегеля принимала человека только как «чистую» природу, как рациональность. Показана трансформация понимания человека от «великого характера» в гегелевской философии истории к человеку времени ренессансной культуры Я. Буркхардта, сверхчеловеку будущего в философии Ф. Ницше и к целостному человеку во времени социума и культуры в науках о духе В. Дильтея. При всем различии трех концепций выявлено сходство методологических оснований в установлении связи человека со временем его жизни и историческим временем культуры и в принятии идеи человека как фундаментальной для различения эпох или типов в истории культуры. Автор считает, что Дильтей дал первый опыт философского обоснования наук о духе как междисциплинарного гуманитарного проекта, в центре которого находилась идея целостного человека времени своего «жизнеосуществления», и определил историзм как смысл гуманитарного знания в целом. The article examines the formation of interdisciplinary in intellectual history in the 19th – early 20th century. The methodological basis of the historicism of this period, which unites various areas of historical, philological, social sciences and psychology, was the idea of a person's connection with the time of his life and reflexively with the time of culture and society (the concept of “human being in time”). Historicism of the philosophy of absolute idealism by G.V.F. Hegel accepted human being only as "pure" nature, as rationality. In the 1860s at the University of Basel J. Burckhardt, F. Nietzsche and W. Dilthey developed the idea of human being in time in the history of culture, philosophy and hermeneutics. The transformation of understanding of a person is traced from a "great character" in Hegel's philosophy of history to a person of the time of the Renaissance culture developed by Burckhardt, to the Übermensch of the future in the philosophy of Nietzsche and to an integral person in the time of society and culture in the sciences of the spirit of Dilthey. The present study reveals the similarity of methodological foundations of the three concepts in establishing a connection between a person with the time of his life and the historical time of culture; and in accepting that the idea of ​​man was fundamental for distinguishing between eras or types in the history of culture. The author believes that Dilthey was the first to produce philosophical substantiation for the sciences of the spirit as the basis of an interdisciplinary humanitarian project, in the center of which is the idea of a whole person of the time of his "life-fulfillment", аnd defined historicism as the meaning of humanitarian knowledge in general.


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