scholarly journals Rhetorical Action and Constitutive Politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-320
Author(s):  
J. Matthew Hoye

This article reconstructs the concept of rhetorical action to excavate its original, recurrent, and—for many—discomforting links to constitutive politics. By examining the history of rhetorical action through the ancient period to the mid-17th century, I will argue that that relationship between rhetorical action and constitutive politics is a powerful prism for understanding actio. The article's contributions are twofold and compounding. The first is the establishment of a positive account of the relation between actio and constitutive rhetoric for the ancient politicians and early modern dramatists, which pushes the usual bookends of actio's history both backward and forward, providing analytical leverage to critically reflect on its standard history. The second contribution is a demonstration that much of the confusion and discomfort surrounding actio results from formulating actio negatively against its constitutive political threat. In sum, this article contributes to both the theoretical and historical understanding of rhetorical action.

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 816-862
Author(s):  
Morgan Ring

This article discusses annotations to some eighty surviving copies of William Caxton's “Golden Legend.” It assesses reactions from male and female readers across the religious spectrum, exploring the varied ways in which early modern readers engaged with a book that quickly became—and has remained—a shorthand for medieval religion. It seeks to contribute to the history of the “Legend” itself, to historical understanding of annotation, and to the history of reading during the Reformation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-101
Author(s):  
Ulrike Demske

Abstract Regarding verbal mood and complementation patterns of reporting verbs, the distinction between direct and indirect reported speech is well established in present-day German. This paper looks into the history of German: Common knowledge has it that both the use of verbal mood as well as the quality of clause linkage undergo considerable changes giving rise to the question how these changes affect the manifestations of indirect reported speech in earlier stages of German. The historical record of the 16th century (with an outlook on the 17th century) shows that the distinction between direct and indirect reported speech is not yet grammaticalized in historical sources at the time. In particular with respect to dependent (in)direct reported speech, both types prefer V2-complements with only verbal mood differentiating between the types. Although present and past subjunctive have a much wider distribution in earlier stages of German, the occurrence of free indirect speech likewise testifies to its increasing use as a marker of indirect reported speech. The growing conventionalization of patterns of indirect reported speech in the course of Early Modern German may be considered as an example for an increase of subjectification in its development.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 225-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Love

AbstractFrom at least the 17th century onward, a sizeable Maghribi Ibadi community lived, studied, and worked in the city of Cairo, centered around a trade agency, school, and library known as the ‘Buffalo Agency’ (Wikālat al-Jāmūs). Over nearly four centuries, this agency served as a hub for Ibadi intellectual activity and manuscript production. Despite its place of prominence in the history of early-modern Ibadi communities, manuscripts are some of the only surviving evidence of its existence. Using manuscript notes from and catalog data on manuscripts either held at the agency’s library or copied there, this article suggests that Ibadis were far from the small, isolated minority community in northern Africa they are often imagined to have been. Instead, the story of the Buffalo Agency points to the ways in which Ibadis very much belonged to the intellectual and commercial worlds of Sunni-dominated Cairo from the 17th–20th centuries.


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 177-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Fudge

This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure from humanism. Taking a journey through ways of thinking that will, perhaps, be unfamiliar, the revised vision of human-animal relations outlined here emerges not from a history of philosophy but from an archival study of people’s relationships with and understandings of their livestock in early modern England. At stake are conceptions of who we are and who we might have been, and the relation between those two, and the livestock on 17th-century smallholdings are our guides.


2020 ◽  
pp. 251385021993735
Author(s):  
John D. Phan

In East Asia, the relationship between script and language is determined to a great extent by the typological character of the languages involved. This is particularly so because sinographic writing generally relies on the syllable as the smallest unit of sound expressible. However, many languages that have adapted Sinitic writing throughout history display complex syllable structure not easily expressible by the monosyllabically inclined sinograph. Moreover, some languages have even displayed changing syllable structure throughout documented history. This article examines the so-called “monosyllabicization” of the Vietnamese language, and its impact on the history of the sinographic vernacular script known as Chữ Nôm. I argue that by the 17th century, the emergent monosyllabic character of Vietnamese was remarked upon by elites as a new justification for embracing vernacular writing, previously considered uncouth.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43
Author(s):  
Herbert Jaumann

Abstract The two treatises of 1655, entitled Prae-Adamitae and Systema theologicum ex Praeadamitarum hypothesi, are among the principal works of the French Huguenot author Isaac La Peyrere (1596-1676). Peyrere ‘s theses have occupied a key position within the heretical branch of 17th-century Biblical Criticism: God must have created a human race before Adam, the Bible does not tell the history of mankind but of the elect people of Israel only, and the books of the Pentateuch were certainly not written, if at all, by Moses alone. The present contribution offers an outline of the recent La Peyrere Edition of 2019 and considers a few questions for further study. (1) How close are the Preadamites to early modern utopian literature? (2) What are we to make of Adriaan Beverland’s reference to the Praeadamitae in his infamous book on the Peccatum originale of 1678? (3) Taking up Isaac Popkin’s (1987) interesting suggestion, should we not as well consider a “pre-Eveite theory” alongside La Peyrere’s Preadamite hypothesis? This article concludes by addressing (4) another special desideratum: the early reception of La Peyrere and its continuing effects after the first critical responses as early as 1655/56.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-91
Author(s):  
Anna Tropia

This paper analyses the criticisms put forward by the Scotists of the 17th century to Thomas Aquinas’ commentators on the subject of the intellect’s first object. What the intellect knows first, and what the extension of human cognition is, are questions that Aquinas addressed in several places in Summa theologiae, presenting conclusions which Scotus famously criticised. From the 15th century on, observed the tendency among Aquinas’ commentators to adjust themselves to Scotus’ opinion concerning this matter. The paper includes a collection of the texts they mention and focuses on this ‘shift’ in the history of Aquinas’ readings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 405-419
Author(s):  
Cornelis M. in ’t Veld

In this contribution I am tracing the legal history of the concepts coutume and usage back from today’s international mercantile law to the Tribunal de la Conservation in early modern Lyon. From the late 19th century some theorists were regarding usage as normative when it could be derived from the consensus between contracting parties. We find this conception of usage, for example, in the CISG. On the other hand, the more romantical strain of theorists on the law merchant was stressing that customary law was normative regardless of the possibility to derive it from the parties’ agreements. In early modern Lyon merchants were invoking usages (and to a lesser extent also coutumes) at the Conservation frequently. Because of the juridification of this tribunal in the late 17th century, we expected that the use of the words coutume and usage was in line with the doctrinal conceptions of their days (according to which coutume was a form of written normative customary law and usage was a non-written normative customary law). This, however, was not always the case: sometimes the judges of the Conservation were using the words in a rather loose sense.


Author(s):  
L. V. Peck

Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, was the most important collector in early 17th Century Britain. Much attention has been paid to his collections of painting and sculpture, his patronage of painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck and architects such as Inigo Jones, and his search through Greece and Turkey for antiquities. Little, however, has been written on the Arundel Library, which was equally famous. The cause is not hard to find: the library has been dispersed whereas the marbles and antiquities have found a home at Oxford, the manuscripts at the British Library and the College of Arms, and the paintings and sculpture remain identifiable whether at Arundel Castle or in British, continental or American museums. Yet the Arundel Library is of great significance: to the history of book–collecting by the great bibliophiles Willibald Pirckheimer and Arundel himself; to the study of the reading practices and libraries of members of the Howard family, possibly including Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and, certainly, his son, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton; and, more generally, to the history of the book in the Renaissance and early modern Europe and the concomitant study of communities of readers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Svetlana V. Bliznyuk

The era of the Crusades was also the era of pilgrims and pilgrimages to Jeru­salem. The Russian Orthodox world did not accept the idea of the Crusades and did not consider the Western European crusaders to be pilgrims. However, Russian people also sought to make pilgrimages, the purpose of which they saw in personal repentance and worship of the Lord. Visiting the Christian relics of Cyprus was desirable for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Based on the method of content analysis of a whole complex of the writings of Russian pil­grims, as well as the works of Cypriot, Byzantine, Arab and Russian chroniclers, the author explores the history of travels and pilgrimages of Russian people to Cyprus in the 12th–18th centuries, the origins of the Russian-Cypriot reli­gious, inter-cultural and political relationships, in addition to the dynamics of their development from the first contacts in the Middle Ages to the establish­ment of permanent diplomatic and political relations between the two coun­tries in the Early Modern Age. Starting with the 17th century, Russian-Cypriot relationships were developing in three fields: 1) Russians in Cyprus; 2) Cypri­ots in Russia; 3) knowledge of Cyprus and interest in Cyprus in Russia. Cyp­riots appeared in Russia (at the court of the Russian tsars) at the beginning of the 17th century. We know of constant correspondence and the exchange of embassies between the Russian tsars and the hierarchs of the Cypriot Ortho­dox Church that took place in the 17th–18th centuries. The presence of Cypri­ots in Russia, the acquisition of information, the study of Cypriot literature, and translations of some Cypriot writings into Russian all promoted interactions on both political and cultural levels. This article emphasizes the important histori­cal, cultural, diplomatic and political functions of the pilgrimages.


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