Men's Dilemma: The Future of Patriarchy in England 1560–1660

1994 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 61-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
And Control ◽  
Development And Evolution

PATRIARCHY was very old when Queen Elizabeth ascended the English throne. Historians have sought its origins in die Old Testament record of the creation of Jewish monotiieism and in the social conditions of Hebrew society. They have explored die contributions of classical Greece and early Christian thinking to its development and evolution. By the time that the Tudor dynasty ruled in England, the institutionalised male dominance over women and children in die family and die extension of diat subordination to women in society in general, die scriptural patriarchy with which I am concerned, had become so deeply embedded diat it has appeared immutable. Something so permanent, something that was so given, has seemed not to deserve scrutiny by die historians of early modern England. It was socialist and radical feminists who took up die notion of patriarchy in die 1960s because they needed a concept which would help diem to theorise male dominance. From dieir contemporary perspective also, patriarchy appeared immovable and monumental. There was a tendency among them at first to study it as such: feminist historians approached die past wim die premise diat there has always been an undifferentiated and consistent male commitment to domination and control over women in every sphere of life. The conflation of patriarchy with misogyny, I suggest, produced an unhistorical patriarchy as die staple of women's history. It is only fairly recendy diat historical studies of gender have broken free from diese shackles, diat historians have begun to penetrate die discourses and strategies dirough which men have—or have not— coerced, or oppressed or subordinated women through die ages.

scholarly journals Ireland and the Old Testament: Transmission, Translation, and Unexpected Influence

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-169
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Social ◽  
Medieval Ireland ◽  
Religious Landscape

Abstract In spite of Ireland’s rich and complex religious history, the influence of the Old Testament in the shaping of the island is often overlooked. This study traces the use and reception of the Old Testament in Ireland through the centuries, focusing on stories of transmission, translation, and unexpected influence. In early Christian and medieval Ireland, the transmission of the Old Testament in diverse contexts points to an important role for the Old Testament in relation to social formation and notions of Irish history. Moving to early modern Ireland, the story of the translation of the Old Testament into Irish demonstrates how this collection contributed to contested issues of identity in this highly-charged era. Finally, we encounter stories of unexpected influence relating to Ireland and the Old Testament in James Ussher and John Nelson Darby. In both cases, ideas concerning the Old Testament that took shape in Ireland would go on to have impact on a global scale, even if this subsequent influence was a matter of accidence. Taken together, it is argued that the Old Testament has played a much more prominent role in the shaping of the social, cultural, and religious landscape of Ireland than is often assumed.

Union

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-74
Author(s):  
Max M. Edling
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
American Union ◽  
And Control

The preamble’s promise of “a more perfect union” suggests that the US Constitution of 1787 aimed to reform the less than perfect union established by the Articles of Confederation of 1781. The framers’ understanding of union was grounded in early modern political ideas about confederations, and their call for reform in their analysis of the flaws of the articles. Their reform of the American union was characterized by both change and continuity. Although the Constitution laid the basis for a federal government founded on popular sovereignty and capable of acting independently of the states, the fundamental purpose of the American union and the remit of the federal government remained the management of intraunion and international affairs. In the reformed American federal union the states still retained the power to regulate the social, economic, and civic life of their citizens and inhabitants with only limited supervision and control from the federal government.

The Desegregation of Spark

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
James Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Rigorous Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Control

This introductory chapter provides a comprehensive account of Spark’s critical reception, spanning the 1960s to the present day. Established critical views, it argues, have collectively developed a ‘myth’ of Spark as an author who delights in playing the role of malevolent master-puppeteer, flaunting her powers of omniscience before the reader. This tendency to liken Spark’s authorial power to that wielded punitively by the Old Testament God does a disservice to the complexity and diversity of her writing, and blunts its political anger and subversive edge. Instead, this rigid, prescriptive theologically-informed reading of Spark has postponed or even precluded more rigorous analysis of the significance of the social and historical contexts and concerns of her fiction, explorations of the relevance of her writing to diverse strands of literary and psychoanalytic theory, as well as considerations of how her literary innovations have facilitated instances of gendered social critique. Spark’s narrative perspectives – which are multifarious rather than uniform, altering drastically from one text to the next – are instead concerned intensely with reflecting and subverting the dynamics of power, knowledge and control operating within the worlds in which they are set, rather than conveying godlike omniscience.

Multiple-source Record Linkage in a Rural Industrial Community, 1680–1820

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve King
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Multiple Source ◽  
Demographic Analysis ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Broad Outline

Re-creating the social, economic and demographic life-cycles of ordinary people is one way in which historians might engage with the complex continuities and changes which underlay the development of early modern communities. Little, however, has been written on the ways in which historians might deploy computers, rather than card indexes, to the task of identifying such life cycles from the jumble of the sources generated by local and national administration. This article suggests that multiple-source linkage is central to historical and demographic analysis, and reviews, in broad outline, some of the procedures adopted in a study which aims at large scale life cycle reconstruction.

Scham und Autonomie

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-192
Author(s):  
Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Intentional Content ◽  
Conceptual Clarification ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conventional Behavior ◽  
And Control

Autonomy is associated with intellectual self-preservation and self-determination. Shame, on the contrary, bears a loss of approval, self-esteem and control. Being afflicted with shame, we suffer from social dependencies that by no means have been freely chosen. Moreover, undergoing various experiences of shame, our power of reflection turns out to be severly limited owing to emotional embarrassment. In both ways, shame seems to be bound to heteronomy. This situation strongly calls for conceptual clarification. For this purpose, we introduce a threestage model of self-determination which comprises i) autonomy as capability of decision-making relating to given sets of choices, ii) self-commitment in terms of setting and harmonizing goals, and iii) self-realization in compliance with some range of persistently approved goals. Accordingly, the presuppositions and distinctive marks of shame-experiences are made explicit. Within this framework, we explore the intricate relation between autonomy and shame by focusing on two questions: on what conditions could conventional behavior be considered as self-determined? How should one characterize the varying roles of actors that are involved in typical cases of shame-experiences? In this connection, we advance the thesis that the social dynamics of shame turns into ambiguous positions relating to motivation, intentional content,and actors’ roles.

Carthage

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara K. Gold
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This chapter discusses the rise, development, and Romanization of ancient Carthage in the early Christian period after the formation of the province of Africa Proconsularis in the Augustan period; the physical topography of the city of Carthage, including the Byrsa, the Antonine Baths, and the amphitheater; and it describes the tophet or outdoor sacrificial area and whether human sacrifice was practiced among the Carthaginians. It also covers the life, influence, and African roots of Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor during Perpetua’s life and death. Also discussed are the social, religious, and intellectual conditions for pagans in Roman Carthage, who their local gods were (Tanit, Saturn, Juno Caelestis, Baal Hammon), and the connections between civic and religious life.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

The Rhetoric of the Page

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Blank Space ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
Google Books ◽  
The Rich

This book explores blank space in early modern printed books; it addresses physical blank space (from missing words to vacant pages) as well as the concept of the blank. It is a book about typographical marks, readerly response, and editorial treatment. It is a story of the journey from incunabula to Google books, told through the signifiers of blank space: empty brackets, dashes, the et cetera, the asterisk. It is about the semiotics of print and about the social anthropology of reading. The book explores blank space as an extension of Elizabethan rhetoric with readers learning to interpret the mise-en-page as part of a text’s persuasive tactics. It looks at blanks as creators of both anxiety and of opportunity, showing how readers respond to what is not there and how writers come to anticipate that response. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter 1), the &c (Chapter 2) and the asterisk (Chapter 3). The Epilogue uncovers the rich metaphoric life of these textual phenomena and the ways in which Elizabethan printers experimented with typographical features as they considered how to turn plays into print.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Radcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Consistent Picture ◽  
And Control ◽  
Good And Evil

The Introduction offers, first, a brief historical background to Hume’s theory of the passions, which is further elaborated in the APPENDIX. Foremost among the theses of the early modern rationalists—like Reynolds, Senault, Descartes, Cudworth, and Clarke—to which Hume is responding are: that many passions left unregulated lead to the pursuit of unsuitable objects, that reason can overcome the pernicious influence of the passions and control our actions, and that the passions are states that represent good and evil. Second, the Introduction presents a sketch of Hume’s characterization of reason and passion and his account of their relationship. Third, it explains the method of interpretation used in this book and previews its chapters. The approach is coherentist: to present an intelligible and consistent picture of Hume’s theory of passion and action, accounting for as many of the relevant texts as possible.

Prostitution

2019 ◽  
pp. 644-660
Author(s):  
Carly Daniel-Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Social ◽  
Female Prostitutes ◽  
Female Prostitute ◽  
Negative Representation

This chapter shows how slavery informed the social realities of and rhetoric about prostitution and prostitutes, which informed the negative representation of female prostitutes in early Christian sources. Following Paul’s rhetoric, many Christians used sexual virtue to legitimatize themselves and bolster their triumphalist claims over others in the Roman Empire. To this end, they employed the degraded and debased female prostitute as a powerful symbolic figure as that which stood outside communal boundaries or as a threat that could undermine boundaries from within. In so doing, they marginalized prostitutes and enslaved persons, who could not, by virtue of their enslavement, sustain the sexual ethics that early Christians were promoting. The chapter concludes with debates about contemporary sex workers, arguing that it is critical for feminist historians to resist the rhetoric of the early Christian texts, which obscure the presence of prostitutes (and vulnerable slaves) in ancient Christ-believing communities.

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