Handling the Theme of Hands in early Modern Cross-over Contexts

The human hand is a complex phenomenon within the contexts of early modern visual and textual culture. Its frequent presence in early modern texts and illustrations - as well as the many different types of described and depicted hands - raises a number of questions as to its functions and significances. In this article, we examine the role of the hand and two of its familiar functions –pointing and touching – against diverse and diverging understandings of human perception and cognition in the period focussing particularly on relations between bodies and minds. Through comparative analyses of cross-over examples from both medicine, manuals and drama – primarily John Bulwer’sChirologia and Chironomia, William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – we explore the questions implied by hands and their contributions to the knowledge probed and proposed by these texts and illustrations.

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Healing Touch: Clothed Images of the Virgin in Early Modern Portugal

10.31338/2657-6015ik.29.7 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 51-78

Author(s):

Diana Pereira

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Reciprocal Relationship ◽

Physical Contact ◽

Religious Art ◽

Healing Touch ◽

Devotional Art ◽

Healing Power ◽

The Many ◽

Santa Maria

Over the last decades there was a growing interest in religious materiality, miraculous images, votive practices, and how the faithful engaged with devotional art, as well as a renewed impetus to discuss the long-recognized association between sculpture and touch, after the predominance of the visuality approach. Additionally, the neglected phenomenon of clothing statues has also been increasingly explored. Based on the reading of Santuario Mariano (1707–1723), written by Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), this paper will closely examine those topics. Besides producing a monumental catalogue of Marian shrines and pilgrimage sites, this source offers a unique insight into the religious experience and the reciprocal relationship between image and devotee in Early Modern Portugal, and is a particularly rich source when describing the believers’ pursuit of physical contact with sculptures. This yearning for proximity is partly explained by the belief in the healing power of Marian sculptures, which in turn seemed to be conveniently transferred to a myriad of objects. When contact with the images themselves was not possible, devotees sought out their clothes, crowns, rosary beads, metric relics, and so forth. Items of clothing such as mantles and veils were particularly used and so it seems obvious they were not mere adornments or donations, but also mediums and extensions of the sculptures’ presence and power. By focusing on the thaumaturgic role of the statues’ clothes and jewels, I will argue how the practice of dressing sculptures was due to much more than stylistic desires or processional needs and draw attention to the many ways believers engaged with religious art in Early Modern Portugal.

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THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x18000237 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 62 (2) ◽

pp. 349-373 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

MARK R. F. WILLIAMS

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Material Objects ◽

Grand Tour ◽

Cultural Engagement ◽

The Family ◽

The Many ◽

Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

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The role of substrate transfer in the development of grammatical morphology in language contact varieties

WORD Structure ◽

10.3366/word.2015.0080 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 160-183 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Jeff Siegel

Keyword(s):

Language Contact ◽

Language Transfer ◽

General Notion ◽

Grammatical Categories ◽

Grammatical Morphology ◽

Grammatical Morphemes ◽

Different Types ◽

Morphological Processes ◽

The Many

This article shows how the psycholinguistic process of language transfer accounts for the many features of the grammatical morphology of language contact varieties that differ from those of their lexifiers. These include different grammatical categories, the use of contrasting morphological processes to express grammatical distinctions, lexifier grammatical morphemes with new functions, and new grammatical morphemes not found in the lexifier. After an introductory description of the general notion of language transfer, it presents five more specific types: transfer of morphological strategies, word order and grammatical categories, as well as direct morphological transfer and functional transfer. The article then gives some possible explanations for the distribution among different types of contact varieties of two kinds of functional transfer – functionalisation and refunctionalisation – and for the distribution of particular types of grammatical morphemes – i.e. free versus bound. The examples presented come from contact languages of the Australia-Pacific region: three creoles (Australian Kriol, Hawai‘i Creole and Tayo); an expanded pidgin (Melanesian Pidgin, exemplified by Vanuatu Bislama and Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin); a restricted pidgin (Nauru Pidgin); and an indigenised variety of English (Colloquial Singapore English).

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Towards Interoperable Network Ontologies for the Digital Humanities

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing ◽

10.3366/ijhac.2016.0157 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 22-35 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Alison Langmead ◽

Jessica M. Otis ◽

Christopher N. Warren ◽

Scott B. Weingart ◽

Lisa D. Zilinksi

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Functional Data ◽

Digital Humanities ◽

Data Models ◽

Different Types ◽

Micro Level ◽

The Many ◽

Methodological Considerations ◽

Coherent Body

Scholars have long been interested in networks. Networks of scholarly exchange, trade, kinship, and patronage are some of the many such longstanding subjects of study. Recent and ongoing digital humanities projects are now considering networks with fresh approaches and increasingly complex datasets. At the heart of these digital projects are ‘network ontologies’ — functional data models for distilling the complicated, messy connections between historical people, objects, and places. Although scholars creating network ontologies necessarily focus on different types of content, if these networks are to form a coherent body of scholarship in the future, we must work towards the creation interoperable ontological structures, rather than yet another set of competing standards. Here we examine the methodological considerations behind designing such interoperable ontologies, focusing primarily on the example of Early Modern historical networks. We argue that it would be infeasible to adopt a single ontological standard for all possible digital humanities projects; flexibility is essential to accommodate all subjects and objects of humanistic enquiry, from the micro-level to the longue-durée. However, we believe it possible to establish shared practices to structure these network ontologies on an ongoing basis in order to ensure their long-term interoperability.

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Mapping the Dissemination of the Theory of Social Representations via Academic Social Networks

Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Media and Communications - Advances in Multimedia and Interactive Technologies ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-7601-3.ch034 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 426-440

Author(s):

Annamaria Silvana de Rosa ◽

Laura Dryjanska ◽

Elena Bocci

Keyword(s):

Social Networks ◽

Big Data ◽

Social Representations ◽

Scientific Production ◽

Comparative Analyses ◽

The Social ◽

Different Types ◽

Academic Social Networks ◽

Comparative Results

This chapter examines the role of academic social networks in the dissemination of the social representations literature. In particular, it takes into account 9414 entries filed in the specialized SoReCom “A.S. de Rosa” @-library. Each entry was assessed concerning the presence of the publication in the three academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley), which amounted to 2956 total entries. The publications on social representations found in academic social networks have undergone some of the comparative analyses based on “big data” and “meta-data” filed in the SoReCom “A.S. de Rosa” @-library repositories, concerning authors' countries and institutional affiliations, years of publication by year, type of publication, etc. This allowed presenting the geo-mapping of the wider scientific production in social representations and comparative results with different types of publications. Overall, the academic social networks constitute excellent allies in spreading knowledge in spite of their still relatively modest use.

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Sex in an Old Regime City

10.1093/oso/9780190945183.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Julie Hardwick

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Female Sexuality ◽

Double Standard ◽

The Body ◽

Sexual Double Standard ◽

Old Regime ◽

History Of ◽

The Many ◽

Reproductive Consequences

Based on extensive archival research, the extraordinary stories of ordinary people’s lives in this book explore many facets of young people’s intimacy from meeting to courtship to the many occasions when untimely pregnancies necessitated a range of strategies. These might include marriage but could also be efforts to induce abortions, arrangements for out-of-wedlock delivery, charging the father with custody, leaving the baby with a foundling hospital, or infanticide. Clergy, lawyers, social welfare officials, employers, midwives, wet-nurses, neighbors, family, and friends supported young women and held young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. These practices of intimacy reframe our understanding of multiple aspects of the Old Regime. Young people’s intimate experiences challenge the belief that disciplining female sexuality was a critical early modern goal of state formation and religious reformation. They suggest rethinking the history of a sexual double standard in local and long contexts, the history of marriage, and the role of law in the politics of communities and institutions. The lives of young people also reshape many more specific debates, for instance, about the history of emotions, infanticide, attitudes to illegitimacy, pre-modern workplaces, and the body. The book reveals the important role of the young people’s working communities, where the norm was local management of intimacy with a heavy emphasis on pastoral care and pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

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Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474428521.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Gillian Knoll

Keyword(s):

William Shakespeare ◽

Early Modern ◽

Linguistic Analysis ◽

John Lyly ◽

Cognitive Theories ◽

Different Types ◽

Considerable Length ◽

The Mind ◽

Erotic Desire

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience. Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.

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The Cultural Geography of St Paul’s Precinct

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199660841.013.36 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Roze Hentschell

Keyword(s):

Physical Properties ◽

Early Modern ◽

Cultural Study ◽

Cultural Geography ◽

Criminal Activity ◽

Business Practices ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

The Many ◽

Geographical Space

This chapter is a cultural study of St Paul’s Cathedral precinct in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It discusses the physical properties of Paul’s, including the nave, Paul’s Cross pulpit, the bookshops in the churchyard, and the many and varied uses and occupations of the precinct and church, including sermons, secular business practices, and criminal activity. While recent scholarship has attended to various discreet spaces in and around the cathedral, this chapter discusses the religious and secular space and activities as mutually constitutive rather than distinct. Influenced by studies of cultural geography, the chapter investigates the role of the cathedral precinct in constructing the identity of the early modern Londoner through a discussion of the effects that geographical space has on human behaviour.

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Commentary: Writing Picture Books

LEARNing Landscapes ◽

10.36510/learnland.v4i2.386 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 55-60

Author(s):

Jane Yolen

Keyword(s):

Picture Books ◽

Picture Book ◽

Final Version ◽

Long Period ◽

Children's Picture Books ◽

Award Winning ◽

Different Types ◽

The Many ◽

Jane Yolen

In this interview Jane Yolen, award-winning author of children’s picture books, talks of how her books come into being and the sometimes long period between the first spark of an idea and the time writing begins. She explains the many types of research that can be required for different types of books, giving examples from her own work. She also provides insight as to the role of the writer, the illustrator and the editor in creating the final version of a children’s picture book. Finally, she reveals her own favourite children’s picture books and gives advice to those wishing to write in this genre.

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