“The Meruailouse Site”: Shakespeare, Venice, and Paradoxical Stages*

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter G. Platt

This essay begins by providing some early modern definitions, as well as a brief history, of paradox in the Renaissance. But paradox could be more than a rhetorical figure. Thus, the paper turns to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century descriptions of Venice in English and explores how a geographical site could do the work of the verbal paradox. The essay then reads Othello's complicated epistemological, ontological, and sexual issues through Venice's symbolic geography. Finally, it will suggest briefly that the stage — and particularly the interaction between audience and play — is also a site of paradox, a place where spectators, dazzled and destabilized by unresolved and unresolvable problems, are forced to reevaluate their cognitive and cultural worlds.

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Charles Zika

This article aligns with recent attempts to challenge the notion that pilgrimage shrines were unified centres of sacred power. It aims to demonstrate that pilgrimages offered varied and changing benefits through their various cultic objects, and that these benefits were transformed as meanings attributed to objects changed over time in response to changing historical pressures and needs. It explores the different emotional benefits cultic objects generated – whether consolation, gratitude, joy, fidelity, self-abasement or resilience – within a broader economy of emotional exchange, promotion and control. The history of three significant objects in the Mariazell basilica – the Statue of Mercy, the Marian Column and the Treasury Image – demonstrates how physical and cultural framing, associated religious rituals, and broader political patronage and association, promoted different emotional responses around these objects. Under pressure of the Hapsburgs’ close association with the shrine from the seventeenth century, changes in the promotion of objects like the Marian Column and the Treasury Image, as well as more structured and choreographed pilgrimage practices, reflected the transformation of Mariazell into a site for the expression of collective and proto-national emotions, in addition to the individual emotional benefits that continued to be critical for the shrine’s ongoing popularity and survival.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 570
Author(s):  
James W. Watts

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern institutions resembled the biblical model. It then exposes widespread knowledge of Leviticus 25 in early modern political and economic debates. Demonstrating this awareness shows with high probability that colonial cultures presupposed the two-tier model of slavery in Leviticus 25:39–46 to naturalize and justify their different treatment of White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves.


Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Javier Ruano García

The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent scarcity of sources which supply trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical scene of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might help us contribute to complete the sketchy map of lexical provincialisms at the time.


The Perraults ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch

The introduction sets the story of the Perraults against the backdrop of early modern France. It covers the transformation of French culture in the seventeenth century (in its different dimenstion: geographical, social, and institutional, including the rise of academies and salons, the court at Versailles), the history of intellectual families, notions of family strategy, and the use of networks in historical analysis. It also includes an outline of the chapters.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
LISA SHAPIRO

ABSTRACT:I reflect critically on the early modern philosophical canon in light of the entrenchment and homogeneity of the lineup of seven core figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. After distinguishing three elements of a philosophical canon—a causal story, a set of core philosophical questions, and a set of distinctively philosophical works—I argue that recent efforts contextualizing the history of philosophy within the history of science subtly shift the central philosophical questions and allow for a greater range of figures to be philosophically central. However, the history of science is but one context in which to situate philosophical works. Looking at the historical context of seventeenth-century philosophy of mind, one that weaves together questions of consciousness, rationality, and education, does more than shift the central questions—it brings new ones to light. It also shows that a range of genres can be properly philosophical and seamlessly diversifies the central philosophers of the period.


2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 866-903 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Trevisan

AbstractThe relationship between poetry and painting has been one of the most debated issues in the history of criticism. The present article explores this problematic relationship in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, taking into account theories of rhetoric, visual perception, and art. It analyzes a rare case in which a specific school of painting directly inspired poetry: in particular, the ways in which the Netherlandish landscape tradition influenced natural descriptions in the poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) by Michael Drayton (1563–1631). Drayton — under the influence of the artistic principles of landscape depiction as explained in Henry Peacham’s art manuals, as well as of direct observation of Dutch and Flemish landscape prints and paintings — successfully managed to render pictorial landscapes into poetry. Through practical examples, this essay will thoroughly demonstrate that rhetoric is capable of emulating pictorial styles in a way that presupposes specialized art-historical knowledge, and that pictorialism can be the complex product as much of poetry and rhetoric as of painting and art-theoretical vocabulary.


2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EDWARDS

The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rowland

This essay charts the ways in which the story of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira was received in early modern Europe. In particular, it traces the reception history of the ninth of Ovid's Heroides, in which Deianira writes a letter of complaint, about her husband's sexual violence, and her disastrous attempt to reclaim his affections. Responses to Ovid's poem ranged from outrage – male poets angrily refuted Deianira's accusations – to vernacular translations that, in the hands of the Tudor writer George Turberville, sympathetically conveyed the anguish of the abused wife, but in the hands of Turberville's seventeenth-century successors, muted or silenced Deianira's complaints. The essay locates this reception history in the context of debates about domesticity, sexual (mis)conduct, and female literacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-108
Author(s):  
FEBBY NANCY PATTY

Leonard  Andaya adalah guru besar Sejarah Asia Tenggara di Universitas of Hawaii at Manoa. Ia menyelesaikan pendidikan sarjana di Yale University (1965) dan menyelesaikan pendidikan S2 dan S3 di Cornell University pada bidang sejarah Asia Tenggara. Beberapa karya buku yang dihasilkan di antaranya The Kingdom of Johor (1975); The Heritage of Arung Palakka : History of South Sulawesi (Celebes) in the Seventeenth Century (1981); History of Malaysia (1982); The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in Early Modern Period (1993); Leave of the Same Tree: Trade and Etnicity in the Straits of Melaka (2008); History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400-1830 (2015).


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