scholarly journals Speelgoed van de slager: slachtdieren en kinderspel in de vroegmoderne Nederlandse literatuur

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 33-65
Author(s):  
Joanna Kozikowska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
Animal Body ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
Dutch Literature

Toys of the Butcher: Slaughter Animals and Children’s Play in Early Mod-ern Dutch LiteratureThis article discusses cultural representations of slaughter animals from the early modern period, setting them against the post-modern approach to animals. The point of departure constitutes a con­temporary story about a girl eating the heart of a deer, which she has shot. Then the author moves on to a discussion of the poem ‘Kinder-spel’ 1618/1625 by the seventeenth-century Dutch poet Jacob Cats and focuses on the socio-cultural notions of humans and animals which these two texts present. When discussing the poem, the author elaborates on the symbolic meaning of two situations where children play with animal body parts — a game of knucklebones and playing with an inflated bladder. The interpretation of Cats’ text shows that the stereotypical social perceptions of slaughter animals which can be found in the early modern Dutch literature are in fact meant to offer a certain view on humans, by which their domination over the natural world and exploitation of animals is justified. The methodologies applied in this study involve the so-called ‘activist ecocriticism’ and the New Historicism, both being the reading methods, which emphasize the topicality of historical research. By placing Cats’ texts in a broad context, it is shown that the motif of children playing with animal body parts refers to early modern polemics about such issues as the relationship between the human and animal, the tension between culture and nature, as well as children and upbringing models.

Devotional Landscapes: God, Saints and the Natural World in Early Modern Ireland

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 217-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Relationship

Reconstructing the relationship of the inhabitants of early modern Ireland with the natural world and its Creator is both a difficult and a straightforward task. At one level those who lived in Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, had much in common with other contemporary Europeans, and they shared similar ideas about the existence of God, his actions in creating the world and how that world worked. At another level the relationship between the inhabitants of early modern Ireland and the natural world is rather different from that observable in other places. In terms of pilgrimage, the inhabitants of Ireland before the Reformation in the early sixteenth century had litde interest in visiting corporeal relics, and body parts of saints were in short supply in Ireland by comparison with other European countries. Rather, the devout preferred to visit places in the natural world that had reputed associations with a saint, such as a well created by a saint or a cave where he had lived. Why this should be so is difficult to explain, but it certainly created an experience of the natural world which, though not unique to Ireland, was certainly more intense there. In turn, this affected local religious experiences as they were reshaped through the process of religious change in the early modern period, giving a particular hue to the local forms of religious devotion practised by both Catholics and Protestants. This essay aims to reveal something of the distinctive traits of local religion that formed as a result of the conscious interaction of the inhabitants of Ireland with God’s creation.

scholarly journals “[…] Non urbs, tamen urbibus ipsa major.” The Image of The Hague in the Dutch Literature and Art of the 17th and 18th Century

Werkwinkel ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-66
Author(s):  
Marcin Polkowski
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Northern Renaissance ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Dutch Literature

Abstract Although in the early-modern period The Hague was not officially a city, its identity was based on specifically urban features. During the 17th and 18th century, its ambiguous status was explored by the authors of verse urban encomia and prose descriptiones urbium. In this article, the presentation of The Hague will be first discussed on the example of Caspar Barlaeus’ Latin poem “Haga”, and Constantijn Huygens’ Dutch encomium “’s Gravenhage” from the Dorpen [Villages] cycle of epigrams. Then, the image of The Hague will be examined in the context of an allegorical representation by Jan Caspar Philips in Jacob de Riemer’s Beschryving van ‘s Graven-hage [Description of The Hague, 1730]. The concluding remarks address the question of how the transformation of the status of The Hague undertaken by these writers and artists may be understood in the context of the literary-historical geography of the Northern Renaissance which has been a special subject of research by Professor Andrzej Borowski.

scholarly journals Branding Books Across the Ages

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Marketing Process ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Academic Discussion ◽  
Dutch Literature

As marketing specialists know all too well, our experience of products is prefigured by brands: trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. This process of branding has hitherto gained little academic discussion in the field of literary studies. Literary authors and the texts they produce, though, are constantly 'branded': from the early modern period onwards, they have been both the object and the initiator of a complex marketing process. This book analyzes this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the case of the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, the volume seeks to show how literary scholars can account for the phenomenon of branding.

scholarly journals ‘The Miraculous Mathematics of the World’: Proving the Existence of God in Cardinal Péter Pázmány’sKalauz

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 248-259
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó Hannracháin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
Insight Into

This paper offers a brief examination of Cardinal Péter Pázmány’s meditation on the role of the beauty and wonder of the natural world in leading to the true knowledge of God, which is placed at the beginning of his most important work, theGuide to the Divine Truth (Isteni Igazsàgra Vezérlô Kalauz). Pázmány’s treatment of this subject offers an insight into the Catholic intellectual milieu which ultimately rejected the Copernican cosmology championed by Galileo in favour of a geocentric and geostatic universe. In this regard, the confidence with which Pázmány asserts the harmony and compatibility between secular knowledge and apprehension of nature and the conviction of the existence of a creator God is of particular importance. An analysis of this section of his work also points up a surprising contrast with Calvin’s treatment of the same subject in theInstitutes of the Christian Religion.’ Pázmány was raised within the Reformed tradition until his teenage years and as a Catholic polemicist he devoted great attention to Calvin’s writings. Indeed, to some extent it can be suggested that theInstitutesserved as both target and model for his own great work. Yet his handling of the topic of nature as a proof of the existence of God, an area where relatively little difference might have been expected in view of its non-salience as a polemical issue, not only offers a revealing insight into the confident intellectual perspective of seventeenth-century Catholicism, but also suggests some additional ramifications of the greatsola scripturadebate which split European Christianity in the early modern period.

Environment and the Natural World

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Ecology ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Term

Over the course of the early modern period, Europeans came to look at, engage with, and even transform nature and the environment in new ways, as they studied natural objects, painted landscapes, drew maps, built canals, cut down forests, and transferred species from one continent to another. The term “nature” meant many things during this period, from the inmost essence of something to those parts of the world that were nonhuman, such as the three famous “kingdoms” of nature: the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral. This article focuses on nature in this latter sense and broadens it out to include more recent understandings of the modern term “environment,” so as to encompass not only plants, animals, and rocks but also entire landscapes. Scholars from a wide variety of fields, ranging from the histories of science, art, and literature through historical geography, historical archeology, historical ecology, and landscape history, have long been interested in issues related to the environment and the natural world; more recently, they have been joined by practitioners of “environmental history” and additional branches of the environmental humanities and social sciences, who have drawn on these preexisting approaches and brought still further perspectives to the table.

scholarly journals Loath This Growth: Sources of Sustainability in the Early Modern World

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy L. Caradonna
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Sustainability Movement

This chapter begins in the period that historians of Europe and the Atlantic world call “early modernity” (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). It could have begun in the Middle Ages, with the hunting reserves and protected forests established by European rulers in Venice and elsewhere. It could start with an analysis of indigenous societies, from Easter Island to the Maya, that failed to live sustainably and eventually collapsed. It could even begin in antiquity, with Pliny the Elder and his encyclopedic Natural History that tells us so much about Roman conceptions of the natural world. But we begin in the early modern period because of the clear linkages between the modern sustainability movement of the twenty-first century and the consciousness and practices that developed in early modernity. After all, the concept of “sustainability” was given a name in the early eighteenth century by a Saxon bureaucrat who coined the term “Nachhaltigkeit” to describe the practice of harvesting timber continuously from the same forest. Indeed, sustained yield forestry took shape at this time not only in Western Europe but also in Japan, around other parts of Asia, and on colonial islands in both the West and East Indies. The practice of exploiting forests sustainably was but one indication of an incipient awareness about the value of living within biophysical limits and the need to counteract resource overconsumption. Many documents that survive from this period demonstrate that it was possible to have at least a rudimentary idea about the complex relationship between social well-being, the economy, and the natural world. That is, the “systems thinking” of sustainability—the method of studying complex, interrelated systems—clearly has roots that stretch back to this largely pre-industrialized world. In 1700, the global population of homo sapiens was somewhere between 600 million and 650 million. Beijing might have approached a population of 1 million, which would have constituted a megacity at the time, but most “cities” had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.

Arrivals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter describes the larger historical and social context in which Caribbean epistemological transformations concerning the natural world and human bodies transpired. These transformations directly resulted from encounters that occurred between the thousands of people who arrived in the Caribbean from all over the globe during the early modern period. Most of these immigrants were of African descent, and by the end of the seventeenth century they had transformed the Caribbean into a cosmopolitan place where a new type of blackness was normative—one that used African inspirations to invent new realities. The chapter shows how Africans’ appropriation of the social and cultural landscapes of the Caribbean depended not only on the population of the realm of the living, but also of the underground. Otherworldly colonizers, the dead, represented powerful forces in Caribbean locales where cultural and social mores shaped by people of African descent were normative.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document