Anonymous Renovators of Icons

Author(s):  
Karin Vélez

This chapter begins by examining how two peripheral artworks of the Virgin of Loreto, the eighteenth-century wooden statue from the Moxos missions and the seventeenth-century Roman painting by Caravaggio, each tapped into outside streams of Marian art. The same impetus for transformation is observed for the original icon of the Madonna of Loreto at the Italian shrine. Updates to this icon were spurred by an awareness of the world outside Loreto. The chapter concludes with a return to the frontier, to Canada, to consider some significantly named but lesser known Huron women converts who contributed to Mary's global public image. Overall, these case studies of modifications to the Virgin of Loreto reflect what mattered to people on both sides of the Atlantic about Mary at this time: she was alien, yet she was accessible; she moved, and she could also be moved.

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Hellyer

AbstractThe Society of Jesus established an extensive range of measures designed to ensure uniformity in natural philosophical questions. These culminated in the Ordinatio pro Studiis Superioribus of 1651. Such measures did have significant effects on the teaching and publishing of physics among the Jesuits in Germany; it was impossible for Jesuits to openly adhere to atomism, the Cartesian view of body or heliocentrism, for example. But many Jesuits did not agree with all the provisions governing censorship and attempted to mediate their implementation in several ways which this study identifies. The most important of these was the use of terms such as true, probable or false. Provided that Jesuit authors identified the orthodox opinions as true or most probable, they could discuss alternative views in great depth. The essay culminates in two case studies from Germany, one from the mid-seventeenth century, the other from the first half of the eighteenth century, which illustrate the interaction of censorship and physics in actual practice.


1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (89) ◽  
pp. 50-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Macafee ◽  
Valerie Morgan

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.


Tekstualia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (59) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Mirosława Modrzewska

The article explores the affi nities between Byron’s works with the seventeenth-century literary tradition of carnivalesque discourse. These affi nities can be traced in his comical burlesque writings, such as The Devil’s Drive (1813), Beppo (1818), The Vision of Judgement (1822) and Don Juan (1819–1824). There is a well-established British critical tradition which sees the author of Don Juan as a continuator of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century mock-heroic convention, but his use of the grotesque mode makes him the heir of Miguel de Cervantes or Francisco Quevedo. Byron’s literary identifi cation with the poetic style of the seventeenth-century baroque can be detected in his predilection for a comical deformation of characters, images and meanings. The poet uses the language of monstrosity and transgression to achieve political and religious provocation and to lure his reader into the world of a liberated language, freed from conventional connotations.


2007 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 342-353
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

The spectre of the seventeenth century loomed large in the eighteenth century. The Anglican orthodox were particularly aghast at the radical assault on the religio-political order during the previous century and feared a reprise during theirs. In 1734, for instance, Thomas Seeker (1693–1768) warned his audience at St James’s, Westminster, that Charles I’s execution was ‘a most peculiarly instructive example of divine judgments, brought down by a sinful people on their own heads’. In all his providential interventions in human affairs, God teaches ‘an awful regard to himself, as moral governor of the world; and a faithful practice of true religion’. And what drew his divine wrath upon Britain during the 1650s was the abandonment of’real religion’ for ‘hypocrisy, superstition, and enthusiasm’. Certainly Laud and his followers might have displayed ‘an over warm zeal, and very blameable stiffness and severity’, Seeker acknowledged. ‘But there was also, in the enemies of the church, a most provoking bitterness and perverseness; with a wild eagerness for innovation, founded on ignorant prejudices, which their heated fancies raised into necessary truths; and then, looking on them, as the cause of Christ, they thought themselves bound and commissioned to overturn whatever was contrary to them.’


Author(s):  
Tomás McAuley

This chapter traces the history of music and philosophy in the Enlightenment, with a particular focus on English thinkers in the years 1660–1750. It identifies three modes of interaction between musical and philosophical ideas: music as object of philosophy, music as inspiration for philosophy, and music as corroboration for philosophy. The chapter hones in particularly on the significance of the new, “mechanical” approach to philosophy that emerged in the later seventeenth century and on changing explanations of music’s fabled ability to cure the bite of the tarantula. Through all of this, it uncovers how ideas about musical harmony and music’s affective power were intertwined in this period. It also includes two eighteenth-century case studies showing how these ideas played themselves out in the French “high” Enlightenment and in German Idealist philosophy at the close of the Enlightenment. The chapter closes with an examination of the relative merits, in this context, of the terms “Baroque,” “scientific revolution,” and “Enlightenment.”


Utilitas ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Burns

The object of this article is to examine, with the work of Jeremy Bentham as the principal example, one strand in the complex pattern of European social theory during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was of course the period not only of the American and French revolutions, but of the culmination of the movements of thought constituting what we know as the Enlightenment. Like all great historical episodes, the Enlightenment was both the fulfilment of long-established processes and the inauguration of new processes of which the fulfilment lay in the future. Thus the seminal ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism (in moral and social theory the idea, above all, of natural law) realized and perhaps exhausted their potentialities in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The ideas with which this article is concerned, however—conveniently grouped and labelled as the ideas of utilitarianism—only began to achieve systematic development in these later decades of the eighteenth century. Within that period—during the first half and more of Bentham's long life—attempts to apply those ideas to the solution of social problems met largely with failure and frustration. Yet unrealized potentialities remained, the realization of which was reserved for a time when the world of the philosophes no longer existed. The movements for social and political reform which have played so large a part in modern history since the French Revolution may be judged in widely differing ways; but whatever the verdict, these movements surely cannot be understood without due consideration of that part of their origins which lies in eighteenth-century utilitarianism.


Author(s):  
George Marsden

This chapter sketches some of the webs of interrelated contexts that helped shape Edwards’s life and work. It surveys some of the background contexts growing out of the Reformation, Puritanism in England, and related political developments including the seventeenth-century political revolutions. Then it turns to the background of seventeenth-century Puritan New England including ecclesiastical and political developments that shaped the world Edwards was born into. Finally it looks at the major social, political, and ecclesiastical contexts shaping Edwards’s world during his years in eighteenth-century New England. That includes relations to Indians both in warfare and in missions, British wars with Roman Catholic powers, colonial politics and local colonial government, hierarchical social assumptions, slavery, church controversies, especially regarding the sacraments, and international and colonial pietism and awakenings.


Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin

This chapter explains how we can best “see” system using new tools, just as Galileo saw system using his improved spyglass. It starts with a graph of the astonishingly linear rise of the percentage of texts referencing system during the eighteenth century and then turns back to Bacon’s and Galileo’s efforts to use their new “resources” to move knowledge forward from Scholastic debate: the Jovian lunar “system” became evidence for a new “system of the world.” The chapter then engages Walter Ong’s question of how “system” took such rapid hold of the physical and intellectual worlds at the turn into the seventeenth century—a connection represented as a handshake in a 1640 frontispiece to Bacon’s Advancement of Knowledge. To Ong’s and Marshall McLuhan’s emphasis on the effect of print, the chapter turns to the concept of genre to add to the answer both a generic feature of system itself—its ability to act as a scalable technology—and a comparison to another genre—the fragmentary efforts of the “essay.” The chapter concludes with graphs comparing counts of “system” and “essay” during the eighteenth century and with an analysis of how system proliferated by scaling up parts into wholes and vice versa. That scalability allowed for both Enlightenment encyclopaedism and what the physicist David Deutsch calls “error-correction.”


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-34
Author(s):  
Mirko Jurak

One of the signs of the universality of William Shakespeare's plays is undoubtedly their influence on plays written by other playwrights throughout the world. This is also true of Slovene playwrights who have been attracted by Shakespeare's plays right from the beginning of their creativity in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Anton Tomaž Linhart (1756-1795) wrote his tragedy Miss Jenny Love.-However,-Slovene knowledge about-Shakespeare and his plays reaches back-into the seventeenth century, to the year 1698, when a group of Jesuit students in Ljubljana performed a version of the story of ''King Lear in Slovene. The Jesuits used Slovene in theatrical performances, which were intended for.the broadest circles of the population. The first complete religious play, written in Slovene, is Škofjeloški pasjon (The Passion Play from Škofja Loka), which was prepared by the Cistercian monk Father Romuald. Since 1721 this play was regularly performed at Škofja Loka for several decades, and at the end of the twentieth century its productions were revived again.In December 2009 two hundred and twenty years will have passed since the first production of Anton Tomaž Linhart's comedy Županova Micka (Molly, the Mayor's Daughter). It was first performed in Ljubljana by the Association of Friends of the Theatre on 28 December 1789, and it was printed in 1790 together with Linhart's second comedy, Ta veseli dan ali Matiček se ženi (This Happy Day, or Matiček Gets Married; which was also published in 1790, but not performed until 1848). These comedies represent the climax of Linhart's dramatic endeavours. Linhart's first published play was Miss Jenny Love (1780), which he wrote in German. In the first chapter of my study 1shall discuss the adaptation of Shakespeare's texts for the theatre, which was not practiced only in Austria and Germany, but since the 1660s also in England. Further on I discuss also Linhart's use of language as the "means of communication". In a brief presentation of Linhart's life and his literary creativity I shall suggest some reasons for his views on life, religion and philosophy. They can be seen in his translation of Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" as well as his appreciation of Scottish poetry. The influence of German playwrights belonging to the Sturm and Drang movement (e.g. G. T. Lessing, J. F. Schiller, F. M. Klinger) has been frequently discussed by Slovene literary historians, and therefore it is mentioned here only in passing. Slovene critics have often ascribed a very important influence of English playwright George Lillo on Linhart' s tragedy Miss Jenny Love, but its echoes are much less visible than the impact of Shakespeare's great tragedies, particularly in the structure, character presentations and the figurative use of language in Linhart's tragedy. 1shall try to prove this influence in the final part of my study.Because my study is oriented towards British and Slovene readers, 1had to include some facts which may be well-known to one group or to another group of readers. Nevertheless I hope that they will all find in it enough evidence to agree with me that Shakespeare's influence on Linhart's play Miss Jenny Love was rather important.


Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

Television programmes about archaeology, the Asterix series on many children’s bookshelves, Celtic-flavoured holidays in Ireland, the megalomaniacal classical style in the business buildings erected since the late 1980s—all these tell us about the enduring popularity of the past in people’s minds. The intellectual ‘other side of the coin’ are the departments of archaeology, museums of archaeology, and heritage departments operating all over the world. This interest in the past is certainly not new. Whereas the latter—the museums, university and heritage departments—only appeared in the urban landscape less than two hundred years ago, by then several generations of intellectuals with knowledge in the arts had been aware of the existence of an ancient past. A Doric folly on the bank of the river overlooked by the cathedral in the pretty city of Durham was built in 1830 by a Polish count and the eighteenth-century estate of La Alameda de Osuna on the outskirts of Madrid, with its Greek-inspired temple of love with a statue of Bacchus (substituting the original Venus statue that had been taken by the Napoleonic troops on their withdrawal to France)—are only two examples of my own personal daily encounter with the past I have had at diVerent periods in my life. Yet, a different type of past is also familiar to me, a past that is more related to the nation’s past. In La Alameda de Osuna estate, in addition to its many classical features, there is an eighteenth-century copy of a medieval hermit’s chapel, and a country house which used to have displayed automatons in traditional dress. In the seventeenth century a beautiful Gothic-style font cover was made for Durham cathedral illustrating a continuity with a medieval past. Many other examples could be added. All of them illustrate an obsession with the past which on the one hand has lasted at least several centuries. On the other, however, they also appear to indicate an initial quasi-fixation with the classical period, which gradually became counter-balanced by an appeal to each country’s past. This reveals a continuous transformation in time and space in the discourse of the past.


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