scholarly journals Ruthenian Devotional Songs As Collectors’ Items?

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-150
Author(s):  
Dieter Stern

At the turn of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, syllabic devotional songs in Ruthenian (RDS) make their first appearance as occasional appendices or notes in the margins of manuscripts serving quite divergent functions (triodia, evangelia and the like). The first systematic collections of RDS were compiled abroad by Ruthenian monks having left Ukraine for monasteries around Moscow from the 1660s onwards. It required several more decades, till the beginning of the eighteenth century, before these songs were also being systematically collected in song manuscripts throughout the Ruthenian lands themselves. The article argues against established views to the effect that this documentary gap was due to a massive loss of seventeenth-century Ruthenian song manuscripts. It should rather be taken at face value as an indication that some perceptual change with respect to devotional songs is likely to have taken place among Ruthenian literate classes at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is argued that the rise of Ruthenian song manuscripts marks the beginning of a collecting culture, which treats devotional songs as a cherished and coveted collectable, where heretofore no particular value seems to have been accorded to these songs. The article explores the social profiles of song collectors and the individual makeup of song collections to offer a hypothetical outline of this emerging collecting culture, addressing issues of modes of exchange, methods of collecting and compiling, the specific relationship between collector and collectable, with a view to arguing for a highly individualized and intimate culture between private devotion and incipient object-oriented consumerism.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.


PMLA ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 1130-1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Chew

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” and says that he enthusiastically preached the “Neo-Stoic brand of theology” to which Sir Thomas Browne objected. This theology maintained that “to follow ‘right reason’ was to follow nature, which was the same thing as following God.” Smith goes on to say that “what most attracted seventeenth-century Christian humanists like Bishop Hall was the fact that Stoicism attempted to frame a theory of the universe and of the individual man which would approximate a rule of life in conformity with an ‘immanent cosmic reason‘”—though in the same paragraph he also mentions the point “that Neo-Stoic divines of the seventeenth century were interested in Stoicism almost exclusively from the ethical point of view.” He cites Lipsius to show how a Christian might reach an approximation between the Stoic Fate and Christian Providence, leaving the reader to assume that Hall might also have made this approximation. He says that “the natural light of reason, as expounded by the Stoic philosophers, became, for seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics, the accepted guide to conduct” and that “religious and moral writers endeavored to trace a relationship between moral and natural law which in effect resulted in the practical code of ethical behavior commonly associated with Neo-Stoicism.”


Author(s):  
Gershon David Hundert

This chapter shows how, during the period beginning in the latter part of the seventeenth century, works that popularized kabbalistic ideas in homiletic and ethical treatises and in regimens of daily life appeared in substantial numbers. This reflected the significant increase in interest in popular kabbalistic teachings at precisely this time. This increased interest generated a growing market for the large number of books of conduct and other works informed by kabbalistic teachings that were published in these years. And the literature itself served to stimulate further interest in popular kabbalah. Many of the publications in question were essentially inexpensive pamphlets written in accessible language and guiding the reader through prayer services and rituals associated with the life cycle. All these were imbued with mystical significance. In this way the individual could feel privy to the esoteric realm and attain the conviction that they were indeed acting in accordance with God’s will. Moreover, the spread of this popular literature created a constituency for the emerging kabbalistic elite.


PMLA ◽  
1904 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-114
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin

To say that the seventeenth century Character holds an important place in the development of prose fiction is a commonplace of criticism. That it was through the periodical essay of the eighteenth century that it influenced the development of fiction is equally well known. But the Character of the periodical essay, written by men more interested in the individual than in the type, was quite different from the old formal Character of the beginning of the seventeenth century. Through what changes it passed in the course of its development; and why it was through the periodical essay, rather than in its own proper form, that it came to exert the influence it did, are two questions which I shall attempt to answer.


2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN COWAN

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.


2020 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-458
Author(s):  
Eugene Heath

AbstractSeventeenth-century English common lawyer Sir John Davies sets forth, in his Irish Reports, a provocative and interesting argument on the nature of custom and its relation to the common law. This relatively unexplored argument shows how actions may emerge from conditions of liberty and slowly acquire qualities of social benefit and agreeability that are essential if the common law is to be identified with custom. Davies not only provides a coherent account of how custom might possess some reasonability, but he also seems to suggest that custom is unintended, thereby anticipating a theme found in eighteenth-century thinkers such as Mandeville, Hume, Ferguson, and Burke. In addition, Davies's account has important implications for political theory: the priority of the social over the political and a notion of political consent that arises via custom itself.


Author(s):  
Pedro Ruiz Pérez

RESUMENDesde la segunda mitad del XVII hasta mediados del siglo siguiente se extiende una línea poética que trabaja con elementos persistentes desde la primera fase del barroco, pero con una articulación y un significado en el que se perciben las huellas del cambio. Una de las líneas de esta estética bajobarroca representa un paso en la dirección adoptada después por la poética neoclásica e ilustrada, y puede concretarse en la reordenación de las relaciones entre sentimiento y razón. Este estudio toma como punto de partida el poemario anónimo Fragmentos del ocio (1668, reeditado en 1683), reconocido como de Juan Gaspar Enríquez de Cabrera, y, a partir de un análisis del empleo del término «razón» y su concepto, se apoya en las variantes de una diacronía que lo acerca al siglo XVIII para abordar una proyección de los rasgos observados en la caracterización de la poética bajobarroca. Se destacan como elementos distintivos un novedoso sentido de la inmanencia, la redefinición del lugar social de la poesía y de la posición de su autor y, finalmente, la tendencia a la poesía de circunstancias. Con ellas la sentimentalidad abandona su condición de componente definitorio de la lírica y abre paso a una racionalidad ligada a los nuevos modelos de sociabilidad e ideales expresivos.PALABRAS CLAVEEnríquez de Cabrera, Fragmentos del ocio, razón, bajo barroco, poética, campo literario. ABSTRACTSince the second half of the seventeenth century a poetic current is developed until the middle of the next century, working with persistent elements from the first phase of the Baroque, but with a joint and a meaning where the traces of change are perceived. One line of this bajobarroca aesthetic represents a step in the direction that the neoclassical and illustrated poetry take after, and it may be materialized in the reconstructing of the relationship between feeling and reason. This study takes as its starting point the anonymous book of poetry Fragmentos del ocio (1668, reprinted 1683), whose author was Juan Gaspar Enriquez de Cabrera. From an analysis of the use “reason” and its concept, the study is based in the variants in a diachrony that brings the work near the eighteenth century. So, it is possible to map out the features observed in the characterization of the low baroque poetic. They are outstanding categories a new sense of immanence, the redefinition of the social place of poetry and of position of the author, and, finally, the tendency to the poetry of circumstances. With them, the sentimentality leaves his condition of essential component of lyric and gives way to rationality linked to models  of sociability and expressive ideals.KEYWORDSEnríquez de Cabrera, Fragmentos del ocio, reason, low baroque, poetics, literary field


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