scholarly journals The Classics at World’s End.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tycho Maas
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Native People ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Ways Of Life

The Dutchman Johannes Willem van Grevenbroek (1644-circa 1726) was secretary of the Dutch East India Company’s Council of Policy at the Cape from 1684 to 1694. In the years that had passed since Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape in 1652, marking the first permanent European settlement in modern-day South Africa, regular expeditions had been launched into its hinterland. A year after his retirement from VOC service, Grevenbroek wrote a letter in Latin about the Cape’s native inhabitants: Elegans et accurata gentis Africanae circa Promontorium Capitis Bonae Spei vulgo Hottentotten Nuncupatae Descriptio Epistolaris (An Elegant and Accurate Account of the African Race Living Round the Cape of Good Hope, Commonly Called Hottentots). In this paper, I consider Grevenbroek’s engagement with ancient (Greek and Roman) antiquity in his framing of the Khoi. Ancient times had left early modern Europe with an authoritative literature on the world’s geography and history, descriptions about its then-known people, and suppositions about the ways of life of its many un-known people in yet to be discovered realms. In his letter, Grevenbroek returns to the Classical sources to meaningfully recapture the Cape native people and thus renegotiate the popular contemporary European image about them.

scholarly journals Alternative Pasts and Colonial Engagements in the North: The Materiality and Meanings of the Pajala ‘Runestone’ (Vinsavaara Stone), Northern Sweden

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-628
Author(s):  
Vesa-Pekka Herva ◽  
Janne Ikäheimo ◽  
Matti Enbuske ◽  
Jari Okkonen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
General Level ◽  
Northern Sweden ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cosmological Context ◽  
Ancient Times

The unknown and exotic North fascinated European minds in the early modern period. A land of natural and supernatural wonders, and of the indigenous Sámi people, the northern margins of Europe stirred up imagination and a plethora of cultural fantasies, which also affected early antiquarian research and the period understanding of the past. This article employs an alleged runestone discovered in northernmost Sweden in the seventeenth century to explore how ancient times and northern margins of the continent were understood in early modern Europe. We examine how the peculiar monument of the Vinsavaara stone was perceived and signified in relation to its materiality, landscape setting, and the cultural-cosmological context of the Renaissance–Baroque world. On a more general level, we use the Vinsavaara stone to assess the nature and character of early modern antiquarianism in relation to the period's nationalism, colonialism and classicism.

Dares Printed and Philologized

2020 ◽  
pp. 211-250
Author(s):  
Frederic Clark
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe

Chapter 5 looks in closer depth at just why Dares remained a source of debate in early modern Europe, even after some critics had seemingly demolished him once and for all. The first part of the chapter examines phenomena traditionally associated with the rise of criticism and the downfall of forgeries, including print culture, the recuperation of ancient Greek texts, and scientific empiricism. It argues that these phenomena actually bolstered the reputation and credibility of Dares Phrygius. From the Elizabethan Philip Sidney’s neo-Aristotelian poetics to the proliferation of printed reference works by Conrad Gessner, Jean Bodin, and others, Dares remained a canonical first in the history of history. The second part of the chapter examines how, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both the increasingly professionalized world of classical scholarship and the confessional polemics engendered by the Reformation and Counter–Reformation responded to this perpetuation of Dares’ longevity with renewed attacks.

Luís de Camões’s The Lusiads and the paradoxes of expansion

2018 ◽  
pp. 190-208
Author(s):  
João R. Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Luis De Camoes ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Narrative Framework ◽  
Roman Province

Following a well-known trend in early-modern Europe, the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões widely refashioned the myth of Lusus, an obscure son of Bacchus mentioned by Pliny, with two main purposes: to explain the etymology of the words "Lusitania" (the former Roman province used as a synonym for Portugal) and "Lusíadas" (the descendants of Lusus and the title of epic poem, published in 1572); and to set in motion the narrative framework of Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, insofar Bacchus, the mythical ancestor of the Portuguese and former conqueror of India, fiercely opposes the king of Portugal's expansionist plans. To address such questions, Camões vies with Ovid and Pliny, two basic tenets of the classical revival in early-modern Europe, in creating a bigger-than-life metamorphosis: the Giant Adamastor, turned into stone at the nethermost tip of Africa, whose autobiography is the etiology of the Cape of Good Hope.

Jacob Baldes Batrachomyomachia Homeri Tuba Romana cantata (1637) und der Dreißigjährige Krieg

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-228
Author(s):  
Dirk Werle ◽  
Katharina Worms
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Greek Epic ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Latin Version

Abstract One of the most extensive texts of the neolatin poet and Jesuit Jacob Balde is his ›Battle of the Frogs and Mice‹, a Latin version of the Batrachomyomachia, an ancient Greek epic, which for a long time was seen as a work of the founder of European literature, Homer. The pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia was read as a humorous travesty of the Iliad. By assigning the comic text to Homer, scholars implied the appealing, yet wrongful idea that the author of the greatest mythical war was mocking his own work, thereby parodying the respectable genre of heroic epics. With Balde’s creation of a new version of this Greek poem during the Thirty Years’ War, the question arises as to whether his text is no more than an intertextual play on a famous literary genre, or whether it reacts to the recent historical events in early modern Europe - or both.

Ancient Greek Tragedy Speaks to Democracy Theory

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-207
Author(s):  
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
Normative Principle ◽  
Democracy Theory

Abstract This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call ‘hyphenated-democracies’, each of which adds a conceptual framework developed in early modern Europe to the language of democracy: representative-democracy, liberal-democracy, constitutional-democracy, republican-democracy. These hyphenated-democracies emphasize the restraints placed on the power of political authorities. In contrast, Athenian democracy with the people ruling over themselves rested on the fundamental principle of equality rather than the limitations placed on that rule. However, equality as the defining normative principle of democracy raises its own problems, namely: How do we – of limited vision – identify who is equal, and what injustices attend the criteria used to establish who is equal? Consideration of several ancient tragedies illustrates how the Athenian playwrights explored these questions and how they identified the challenges faced by those who understand democracy as grounded on egalitarian principles.

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