From Scipio to Nero to the Self: The Exemplary Politics of Stoicism in Garcilaso de la Vega's Elegies

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1316-1333
Author(s):  
E. C. Graf
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Classical History

What is the relation between the early modern lyric and the emergence of modern individuality? Garcilaso de la Vega's verse from early-sixteenth-century Hapsburg Spain is generally assessed in terms of Petrarchan protocols. But the emotive effects of love fictions and pastoral nostalgia provide an incomplete aesthetic picture. Garcilaso's poetry also concerns modern power relations; some of his most impressive tropes allude to contemporary politics. This essay argues that Garcilaso's most experimental and self-assertive verse manifests the political animus of the Toledan nobility. On the ideological fault line between the municipal capitalists of the comunero revolution (1520–21) and the combined forces of the Hapsburg imperialists and the great landed aristrocracy, Garcilaso's “ultramoderate” lyric production problematizes the imperialist-aristocratic coalition by demystifying the official interpretations of recent events as divinely ordered repetitions of classical history. The peculiar self-referential implosion of the second elegy suggests that the emergence of modern individuality occurs in response to imperialist tyranny.

From Scipio to Nero to the Self: The Exemplary Politics of Stoicism in Garcilaso de la Vega's Elegies

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1316-1333
Author(s):  
E. C. Graf
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Classical History

What is the relation between the early modern lyric and the emergence of modern individuality? Garcilaso de la Vega's verse from early-sixteenth-century Hapsburg Spain is generally assessed in terms of Petrarchan protocols. But the emotive effects of love fictions and pastoral nostalgia provide an incomplete aesthetic picture. Garcilaso's poetry also concerns modern power relations; some of his most impressive tropes allude to contemporary politics. This essay argues that Garcilaso's most experimental and self-assertive verse manifests the political animus of the Toledan nobility. On the ideological fault line between the municipal capitalists of the comunero revolution (1520–21) and the combined forces of the Hapsburg imperialists and the great landed aristrocracy, Garcilaso's “ultramoderate” lyric production problematizes the imperialist-aristocratic coalition by demystifying the official interpretations of recent events as divinely ordered repetitions of classical history. The peculiar self-referential implosion of the second elegy suggests that the emergence of modern individuality occurs in response to imperialist tyranny.

Immanence and Micropolitics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Conceptual Necessity ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Pure Immanence ◽  
Alternative Understanding

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.

scholarly journals The Duke of Albany's Invasion of England in 1523 and Military Mobilisation in Sixteenth-century Scotland

2020 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Neil Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
French And English ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
First Time

In November 1523 a Scottish army, led by John Stewart, duke of Albany, invaded England for the first time since the battle of Flodden. While this was a major campaign, it has largely been ignored in the extensive literature on Anglo-Scottish warfare. Drawing on Scottish, French and English records, this article provides a systematic analysis of the campaign. Although the campaign of 1523 was ultimately unsuccessful, it is the most comprehensively documented Scottish offensive against England before the seventeenth century and the extensive records detailing the expedition advances broader understanding of military mobilisation in medieval and early modern Scotland. While the national mobilisation drive which sought to gather men from across the kingdom was ultimately unsuccessful, the expedition witnessed the most extensive number of French soldiers yet sent to Scotland. Finally, the article considers how an examination of the expedition enhances understanding of regency rule and the political conditions in Scotland in the years after Flodden.

scholarly journals The Gulper and the Slurper: A Lexicon of Mistakes to Avoid While Eating with Ottoman Gentlemen

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Helen Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Partial Solution ◽  
The Self

Abstract This article examines the material culture and social etiquette of elite dining in the early modern Ottoman Empire. The challenges of eating with others were numerous, as the sixteenth-century Damascene scholar Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi (d. 1577) showed in painful and hilarious ways in his treatise entitled Table Manners (Adab al-Muʾakala). One set of problems stemmed from the objects structuring the meal, especially the relative dearth of crockery and cutlery. Far from making dining experiences simpler and more straightforward, as scholars have sometimes suggested, this necessitated greater cooperation between diners and made them vulnerable to individual misbehavior. Another set of problems arose from the material qualities of food, where sources of pleasure, handled poorly, could easily trigger disgust. The self-discipline that Ghazzi promoted in his manual offered a partial solution to these difficulties, but not a solution equally available to all.

Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Way

It has long been known that the origins of the early modern dynasties of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Mongols, and Shibanids in the sixteenth century go back to “Turco-Mongol” or “Turcophone” war bands. However, too often has this connection been taken at face value, usually along the lines of ethnolinguistic continuity. The connection between a mythologized “Turkestani” or “Turco-Mongol” origin and these dynasties was not simply and objectively present as fact. Rather, much creative energy was unleashed by courtiers and leaders from Bosnia to Bihar (with Bukhara and Badakhshan along the way) in order to manipulate, invent, and in some cases disavow the ancestry of the founders of these dynasties. Essentially, one can even say that Turco-Mongol progenitors did not beget the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid states. Quite the contrary, one can say that historians writing in these empires were the ancestors of the “Turco-Mongol” lineage of their founders. Using one or more specimens of Persian historiography, in a series of five case studies, each focusing on one of these nascent polities, the book intends to show how “Turkestan,” “Central Asia,” and “Turco-Mongol” functioned as literary tropes in the political discourse of the time.

scholarly journals GENDER IN THE HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-863 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA BECKER
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

STOICS WHO SING: LESSONS IN CITIZENSHIP FROM EARLY MODERN LUCCA

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER N. MILLER
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Political Literature ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Lucca was the smallest and least important of the three Italian republics that survived the Renaissance. Venice and Genoa still command the attention of historians. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for all that it might seem out-of-the-way, Lucca developed an extraordinary political literature. The regular election of senators was marked by the musical performance of a text, generally drawn from Roman history, that illustrated the way citizens of a republic were to behave. The poet and composer were natives and the event was a lesson in citizenship. A close look at the content of these serenades, or operas, makes clear that the republic's motto might have been Libertas but its teaching emphasized constantia. The themes and the heroes of Lucca's political literature were those we associate with neo-Stoicism. The relationship between neo-Stoicism and citizenship in early modern Lucca is the focus of this article. These texts present us with the self-image of an early modern republic and its understanding of what it meant to be a citizen. They are an important source for anyone interested in early modern debates about citizenship and in the political ideas that are conveyed in the commonplaces of baroque visual and musical culture.

Manners and Mustard: Ideas of Political Decline in Sixteenth-Century Scotland

1995 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-263
Author(s):  
David Allan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
National Culture ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
The People

With an acidity wholly typical of the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson was to observe that “oats,” which “in England is commonly given to horses … in Scotland supports the people.” It has not unnaturally been the assumption of posterity that most eighteenth-century Scotsmen, by then the self-confident inhabitants of a newly civilised and enlightened community, would have been suitably offended by what has since become a notorious imputation of national plainness and pauperism. Yet there are, I want to suggest, substantial grounds for doubting this apparently straightforward conclusion. The meagreness of the early-modern Scottish diet had in fact always been a matter for the most determined moral pride. The elderly Jacobite, Mackintosh of Borlum, for example, had as recently as the 1720s responded to the increasing sophistication of the post-Union table with open disdain: “Formerly I had been served with two or three substantial dishes of beef, mutton, and fowl, garnished with their own wholesome gravy,” the suspicious old laird complained, but “I am now served up little expensive ashets with English pickles, Indian mangoes, and anchovy sauces.” Robert Monro of Opisdale, too, writing nearly a century before, in the 1630s, had described with palpable moral outrage the flagrant indiscipline and consequent military weakness of those Scottish soldiers in the armies of Gustavus Adolphus whose “stomackes could not digest a Gammon of Bacon or cold Beefe without mustard, so farre [they] were out of use.” And in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), surely the most influential examination of the national culture ever composed, it is also obvious that that patriotic pedant, the Baron of Bradwardine, offering hospitality to his young visitor at Tully-Veolan, the seat of ancient Scottish virtue, finds himself by no means embarrassed at being unable to “rival the luxuries of [his] English table.”

Hamlet, Humanism, and Performing the Self

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-42
Author(s):  
Rhodri Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political

This chapter discusses the place of William Shakespeare's Hamlet in relation to the humanist moral philosophy of the long sixteenth century. This was principally developed around the writings of the Roman rhetorician, lawyer, politician, and moral theorist Cicero, for whom one of the governing metaphors of civic existence was derived from the stage. The Ciceronian tradition is important not only on its own terms, but because it offers the wherewithal to generate readings of life in Shakespeare's Denmark that are as novel as they are revealing, and that bind together the personal, the political, and the religious into a richly interpenetrative whole. The chapter then outlines the doctrines of moral philosophy as the humanists understood them, before demonstrating Shakespeare's familiarity with these doctrines. It suggests that Hamlet offers a portrait of refractory moral dislocation that, as it was intended to, leaves these doctrines in ruins.

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