Reginald Scot and his Discoverie of Witchcraft: Religion and Science in the Opposition to the European Witch Craze

1983 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 444-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leland L. Estes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
European History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Scientific Rationality ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Intellectual Integrity

Recent discussions of the major literary works of the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have advanced significantly our understanding of this important episode in European history. Clearly, our efforts no longer are controlled by the anticlerical and even antireligious sentiments that corrupted so much late nineteenth-century scholarship on this subject. Yet a more subtle nineteenth-century prejudice still remains with us. We still wish to believe that those who opposed the craze did so because in some fundamental way they were more enlightened, or more rational, or more scientific than those who accepted and even supported witch hunting. Recent anthropological research, however, stressing both the ubiquity and the intellectual integrity of a belief in witches, suggests strongly that this modern viewpoint is probably not correct. Certainly, this prejudice has seriously distorted our understanding of one important contribution to the witch debate, Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Modern commentators have invested this book with an aura of scientific rationality that it ill deserves. A closer inspection, I believe, reveals an entirely different source for Scot's ideas and, more importantly, sheds some new light on what it really was that brought witch hunting in Europe to an end.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH EGYPTOLOGY

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1083-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID GANGE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The late nineteenth century is generally considered to be the period of Egyptology’s development into a scientific discipline. The names of Egyptologists of the last decades of the century, including William Flinders Petrie, are associated with scientific technique and objective interpretation as well as colonialist agendas. This article’s thesis is that rapid developments in scientific technique were largely driven by spiritual objectives rather than any other ideologies. Egypt – after being derided and ignored during the mid-century – became of great significance to the British when spectacular finds suggested that Egyptology might offer conclusive evidence against Darwinism and the higher criticism while proving events of the Old Testament to be historically true. Other groups used ancient Egypt – professing Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley as inspirations – but the teleologies they invariably produced owe more to spiritualism than to scientific naturalism, blurring boundaries between science, the occult, and religion. In terms of popularity traditional Christian approaches to ancient Egypt eclipsed all rivals, every major practising Egyptologist of the 1880s employing them and publications receiving large, demonstrably enthusiastic, audiences. Support for biblical Egyptologists demonstrates that, in Egyptology, the fin de siècle enjoyed a little-noticed but widely supported revival of Old-Testament-based Christianity amidst a flowering of diverse beliefs.

Ordinary Masochisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Theoretical Examination ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Ordinary Masochisms argues for literary alternatives to pervasive dictatorial norms about masochism that first surface in Victorian literature, reach their pioneering pinnacle in the modernist moment, and are expressly mourned in post-modern texts. In particular, the literary works discussed all challenge the more popular term “sadomasochism” as a conglomerate form of perversion that was named and studied in the late nineteenth century. Underscoring close textual analyses with modern theories of masochism as empowering, this book argues that Charlotte Brontë Villette (1853), George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886), D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and Jean Rhys’s Quartet (1928) all experiment with masochistic relationships that extend far beyond reductive early readings of inherently feminine or sexually aberrant masochism. Ordinary Masochisms begins with a historical and theoretical examination of masochism’s treatment during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries before moving to an examination of the Biblical tale of Samson and Delilah in conjunction with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), from which masochism garners its name. An intermediary chapter treats Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1903) as a case study transitioning between sexological and psychoanalytical discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the conclusion about Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) addresses masochism’s seeming inability to recuperate itself from categories of deviance, despite the success of contemporary popular culture representations. The book closes with a brief consideration of masochistic reading, a subtle undercurrent of the project as a whole.

Ethiopian Source Material and Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth Century: The Letter to Menilek (1899) By Blatta Gäbrä Egzi'abehēr

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irma Taddia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Despite his important political and literary activities, Blatta Gäbrä Egzi'-abehēr is almost unknown to scholars of Menilek's Ethiopia. This historical period is not particularly well researched, and the author stands out as one of the few Ethiopian intellectuals to have written such an important number of literary works focused on nationalistic and anti-Italian feelings. The Amharic/Ge'ez text under discussion, his letter to Menilek written in 1899, is a remarkable document from this point of view because it reveals a strong opposition to colonialism and the Italian occupation of Eritrea. This document is one of the first Ethiopian sources to testify to the growing nationalism and the growth of concepts of unity and independence. It allows us to consider more carefully the beginning of an Ethiopian secular ideology of the modern state. And such an ideology must be placed in the colonial context. The letter to Menilek raises some important questions regarding the new source material in the late nineteenth century available to historians of modern Ethiopia. A translation of the text is given as well as a comment on its historical significance.

scholarly journals Thuggee in England: Tracing the Origin and Development of Fantasies of Thug-Invasion and Reverse Colonization in late nineteenth century British Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayusman Chakraborty ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Government Services ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Official Records

A lot has been written on Thuggee and nineteenth century British operations against it. Instead of delving directly into either of these two well investigated areas of research, this paper seeks to chart how several nineteenth century British writings exhibit a curious fear of Thug infiltration. Keeping in their minds some actual instances, early British colonial officials worried about the Thugs joining government services under them to survive and sabotage the anti-Thuggee campaign. This paper argues that this apprehension gradually developed into the fantasy of being reverse colonized by the Thugs. Late Victorian writers of fiction fantasized the Thugs invading England, or, what must have been more unnerving to them, converting the Britons themselves to Thugs. Using unpublished official records and literary works as sources, this paper tries to map how colonial anxiety of ‘Thug infiltration’ originated and later grew into the fantasy of reverse colonization by the Thugs. It also tries to link this to specific historical developments in that period.

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

John Lloyd Williams (1854–1945): profile of a Snowdonian botanist

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Plant Physiology ◽  
Marine Algae ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.

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