PICTURING THE MIDDLE AGES AND EARLY MODERNITY

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Middle Ages

Apocalypticism and Globalization in the Early Modern World: A Medievalist’s Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Rubenstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
World History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract The apocalyptic belief systems from early modernity discussed in this series of articles to varying degrees have precursors in the Middle Ages. The drive to map the globe for purposes both geographic and symbolic, finds expression in explicitly apocalyptic manuscripts produced throughout the Middle Ages. An apocalyptic political discourse, especially centered on themes of empire and Islam, developed in the seventh century and reached extraordinary popularity during the Crusades. Speculation about the end of world history among medieval intellectuals led them not to reject the natural world but to study it more closely, in ways that set the stage for the later Age of Discovery. These broad continuities between the medieval and early modern, and indeed into modernity, demonstrate the imperative of viewing apocalypticism not as an esoteric fringe movement but as a constructive force in cultural creation.

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Medieval Rhetoric ◽  
Social Contracts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Aristotelian Rhetoric ◽  
The Middle Ages

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

Hume and the Legacy of Academic Scepticism

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-76
Author(s):  
Peter S. Fosl
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
David Hume ◽  
General Framework ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
The Middle Ages

Chapter Two of Hume’s Scepticism charts the development of Academic scepticism from Cicero and Augustine, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and into early modernity. The exposition is organized around sceptical ideas that anticipated or may have influenced David Hume, who describes himself an ‘academical’ sceptic. The chapter also sets out Cicero’s influence upon Hume, scepticism at the college in La Flèche where Hume wrote much of A Treatise of Human Nature, and Hume’s self-conception of Academic scepticism. Accounts of sceptical ideas in Marin Mersenne, Simon Foucher, John Locke, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Pierre Bayle set the stage for Hume’s own Academicism. The chapter closes with a five-point General Framework defining Academic Scepticism.

scholarly journals A socio-cultural history of the machine metaphor

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Glebkin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Blow Up ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
The Middle Ages

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up, a scene of affection, after enlarging the negatives, transforms into a scene of an attempted or an actual murder. It seems a good image to characterize the change of the initial view of conceptual metaphor from a more precise perspective. The conceptual metaphor theory emerged with the claim that primary metaphors, such as Categories Are Containers, More Is Up, Affection Is Warmth, and even Time Is Money, were determined by the fundamental constants of our perceptual experience; hence, they could not change or evolve, and had no history. Later, however, plenty of studies have provided strong evidence that such metaphors, being much more complicated structures, essentially rest on the cultural-historical ground. The article can be considered as a step in this direction. It addresses the machine metaphor as a cultural-historical phenomenon examining its development from Antiquity to Early Modernity. The author reveals that conceptual machine metaphor appears in the Middle Ages, long before Newton and the Industrial Revolution, in the wake of the transformation of basic elements of the cultural model from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals The Contribution of Early Muslim Scholars to Semiotics: Selected Highlights and Implications

ICR Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-521
Author(s):  
Elma Berisha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Previous Article ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Sign Function ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Muslim Scholars ◽  
The Middle Ages

In a previous article I have argued that the contribution of early Muslim scholars to Semiotics needs to be unearthed and highlighted. Semiotics is broadly defined as the study of signs or sign-use behaviour leading to communication and understanding between humans in society. Semiotics emerged in the early twentieth century as distinct from mainstream philosophy or philosophy of language. As an institutionalised academic discipline, semiotics has acknowledged the implicit contributions of earlier scholars from antiquity, the middle ages and early modernity. However, to date the contribution of Muslim scholars is conspicuously absent. Hence, in this article I intend to recapitulate perspectives from selected Muslim scholars in order to obtain a more balanced notion of sign-function and its potential implications. This is where the unique contributions of al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Ibn Barrajan (n.d.-1141) come in, whose perspectives are reflected in key modern approaches to sign models and their interpretational tendencies. The article suggests that there is a need to explore the legacy of Muslim scholars in the field of semiotics in a much more systematic and comprehensive way, given that sign-based thinking (or the ayah doctrine) is a major theme in the Quran.

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