Humanist Culture and Renaissance Mathematics: The Italian Libraries of the Quattrocento

1973 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 46-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lawrence Rose
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Renaissance Mathematics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

There are two major problems in renaissance science, each of which has a cultural, as well as a scientific, dimension. The first problem concerns the impact of humanism upon the science of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is often claimed that the humanist influence was malign: by attacking scholastic thought, the humanists tried to interrupt the steady evolution of modern science from its medieval scholastic form to the more advanced structure of Galileo. A necessary foundation of this claim is, of course, the internal history of science argument, known as the Duhem thesis, which holds that the main ancestry of Galileo's thought is indeed the scholastic natural philosophy of the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals NATIONALHISTORIE EFTER MODERNISMEN - FOLKEBEGREBET I LYSET AF EUROPAS STORE FORTÆLLINGER

1970 ◽  
Vol 42 (117) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Michael Böss
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Main Role ◽  
National History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY AFTER MODERNISM: THE HISTORY OF PEOPLEHOOD IN LIGHT OF EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES | The purpose of the article is to refute the recent claim that Danish history cannot be written on the assumption of the existence of a Danish people prior to 19th-century nationalism. The article argues that, over the past twenty years, scholars in pre-modern European history have highlighted the limitations of the modernist paradigm in the study of nationalism and the history of nations. For example, modernists have difficulties explaining why a Medieval chronicle such as Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum was translated in the mid-1600s, and why it could be used for new purposes in the 1800s, if there had not been a continuity in notions of peoplehood between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Of course, the claim of continuity should not be seen as an argument for an identity between the “Danes” of Saxo’s time and the Danes of the 19th-century Danish nation-state. Rather, the modern Danishness should be understood as the product of a historical process, in which a number of European cultural narratives and state building played a significant role. The four most important narratives of the Middle Ages were derived from the Bible, which was a rich treasure of images and stories of ‘people’, ‘tribe’, ‘God’, King, ‘justice’ and ‘kingdom’ (state). While keeping the basic structures, the meanings of these narratives were re-interpreted and placed in new hierarchical positions in the course of time under the impact of the Reformation, 16th-century English Puritanism, Enlightenment patriotism, the French Revolution and 19th-century romantic nationalism. The article concludes that it is still possible to write national histories featuring ‘the people’ as one of the actors. But the historian should keep in mind that ‘the people’ did not always play the main role, nor did they play the same role as in previous periods. And even though there is a need to form syntheses when writing national history, national identities have always developed within a context of competing and hierarchical narratives. In Denmark, the ‘patriotist narrative’ seems to be in ascendancy in the social and cultural elites, but has only partly replaced the ‘ethno-national’ narrative which is widespread in other parts of the population. The ‘compact narrative’ has so far survived due the continued love of the people for their monarch. It may even prove to provide social glue for a sense of peoplehood uniting ‘old’ and ‘new’ Danes.

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.

scholarly journals The evolution of the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope in the Catholic beliefs. "An historical contract study"

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 185
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abd Al Awaisheh ◽  
Hala Ghassan Al Hussein
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Middle Ages

This study examines the history of the development of the doctrine of infallibility of the Pope (Bishop of Rome) in the Catholic Church, from the Middle Ages to its adoption as a dogmatic constitution, to shed light on the impact of the course of historical events on the crystallization of this doctrine and the conceptual structure upon which it was based. The study concluded that the doctrine of infallibility of the Pope was based on the concept of the Peter theory, and it went through several stages, the most prominent of which was the period of turbulence in the Middle Ages, and criticism in the modern era, and a series of historical events in the nineteenth century contributed to the siege of the papal seat, which prompted Pius The ninth to endorsing the doctrine of infallibility of the Pope to confront these criticisms in the first Vatican Council in 1870 AD, by defining the concept of infallibility in the context of faith education and ethics, and this decision was emphasized in the Second Vatican Council in 1964 AD, but in more detail.

scholarly journals XXXI.—On some early Latin Stories, imitated at a later period by Chaucer and Shakespeare. By Thomas Wright, F.S.A.

Archaeologia ◽  
1846 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-367
Author(s):  
Thomas Wright
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Wide Field ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Manuscript Collections ◽  
The Middle Ages

There are many obscure nooks and corners in the wide field of antiquarian research, which must be carefully explored, if we would make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with the history, or the literature and science, or the archæology of the Middle Ages. We shall find facts in the history of science and art among the heavy folios of the scholastic writers, which seem at first sight to forbid all attempt at perusal. Historical events are often cleared up from what has been looked upon as the refuse of manuscript collections, and hardly to be distinguished from the dust in which it has so long lain buried. Manners and customs of private life receive the most interesting illustration from the bills of butlers and cooks, from the parish register, or from the local court book.

scholarly journals What Is the History of Science the History of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-62
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

The title of the article prompts at least two questions: (1) how to determine that any particular research topic or problem belongs to the history of science and (2) the effect of the history of science and other research in problematizing the very idea that science is a natural category. The category of “science” itself has become so historicized and slippery that it calls into question the integrity of what historians of science are engaged in. The thesis of the article is that the integrity of the history of science as a distinct field of scholarship may lie in understanding the antecedents to modern science as well as its ongoing development. The evident mismatch between the common representations of “science” and the miscellany of materials typically studied by a historian of science comes from a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced back to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy was held (most famously by Francis Bacon) to involve both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are typified in the 18th century by Buffon’s views. The new enterprise that was called science in the 19th century arrived at an unstable ideology of natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements in the ideology of modern science may be described as “natural philosophy” (a discourse of contemplative knowledge) and “instrumentality” (a discourse of practical or useful knowledge). The history of science in large part deals with the interrelations — always shifting and often repudiating each other — between those two poles.

Time on a Tablet: Early Ivory Sundials Incorporating Wax Writing Tablets

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Schewe ◽  
John Davis
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comprehensive Study ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract This article offers the first comprehensive study of a newly discovered type of medieval sundial made of ivory which might well be the precursor of the well-known diptych dial form made from ivory and wood. These sundials are unique for the combination with a wax writing tablet (tabula cerata) on the reverse side, such as has been deployed as a reusable and portable writing surface in Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages. Three previously unpublished examples of this type of sundial have been located in Germany, Italy and England. This article gives a detailed analysis of the sundials and the underlying construction principles, including considerations from the history of science, chronology and cultural history in order to answer the questions of where, when and by whom these sundials were made.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document