scholarly journals The Impossible Striptease: Nudity in Jean Calvin and Michel de Montaigne

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-85
Author(s):  
Nora Martin Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
The Relationship

This essay examines the writings of Jean Calvin and Michel de Montaigne, two figures not commonly considered together. The article seeks to highlight a certain fascination with nudity, not only in these texts, but in sixteenth-century culture as a whole. Though it is a bodily phenomenon, I argue, representations of nudity are more than skin-deep; they go beyond the capacity of what the body is able to express. Writings about nudity, whether religious or secular, reflect a widespread anxiety about the relationship between truth and representation in early modern discourse. The preoccupation with surfaces in the texts of both writers highlights the continued epistemological crisis in sixteenth- century religion, culture, and writing. Cet essai examine les œuvres de Jean Calvin et de Michel de Montaigne, deux auteurs rarement étudiés dans leur rapport. Cet article cherche à souligner une certaine fascination pour la nudité, non seulement dans ces textes mais dans l’ensemble de la culture du seizième siècle. Bien que la nudité soit observable au niveau corporel, je soutiens que les représentations de la nudité sont bien plus profondes : elles vont au-delà de ce que le corps est capable d’exprimer. Les écrits sur la nudité reflètent une angoisse collective quant à la relation entre vérité et représentation dans le discours des débuts des temps modernes. Le souci lié aux surfaces, présent dans les textes de ces deux auteurs, souligne une crise épistémologique prolongée dans la religion, la culture et la littérature du seizième siècle.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The Body ◽  
Single Source ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Integral Feature

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection of essays to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare and dance. Despite recent academic interest in movement, materiality, and the body—and the growth of dance studies as a disciplinary field—Shakespeare’s employment of dance as both a theatrical device and thematic reference point remains under-studied. The reimagining of his writing as dance works is also neglected as a subject for research. Alan Brissenden’s 1981 Shakespeare and the Dance remains the seminal text for those interested in early modern dancing and its appearances within Shakespearean drama, but this new volume provides a single source of reference for dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement.

Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Legal History in Calvin’s Mosaic Harmony

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-195
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter examines John Calvin’s commentary on Exodus through Deuteronomy (1563) through the lens of sixteenth-century historical jurisprudence, exemplified in the works of Calvin’s contemporaries François de Connan and François Baudouin. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how Calvin’s historicizing exegesis is in continuity with broader contemporary trends in premodern Christian biblical interpretation; this chapter explores another essential context for Calvin’s approach to the Bible. The intermingling of narrative and legal material in these four biblical books inspired Calvin to break with his customary practice of lectio continua and apply his historical hermeneutic more broadly and creatively to explain the Mosaic histories and legislation. Calvin’s unusual and unprecedented arrangement of the material in this commentary and his attention to the relationship between law and history reveal his engagement with his generation’s quest for historical method.

Lexical and Conceptual Arguments and Historical Reading: on the History of SELF

Paragraph ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-142
Author(s):  
James Helgeson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Conceptual Schemes ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cognitive Study ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The terms ‘self’ and ‘moi’ appeared within the lexica of French and English at the end of the sixteenth century, for example in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. This paper takes a sceptical approach to lexical arguments about the history of the self and SELF-concepts. Initially, the relationship of SELF to the question of ‘paradigms’ and ‘conceptual schemes’ is discussed via recent work in developmental psychology (Susan Carey) and classic discussions within analytic philosophy (Donald Davidson). The questions raised in the theoretical discussion are then re-examined through short readings of texts that do not contain lexicalized SELF-vocabulary, by the sixteenth-century French writers Maurice Scève and Michel de Montaigne. It is suggested that the importance of lexical arguments to the history of selves and SELF-concepts has been exaggerated, and that cognitive study has the potential to transform the study of the first-person stance and its history.

Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Lynneth J. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Divine Judgment ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Using writings from observers of the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague, this article explores the various understandings of dancing mania, disease, and divine judgment applied to the dancing plague's interpretation and treatment. It argues that the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague reflects new currents of thought, but remains closely linked to medieval philosophies; it was an event trapped between medieval and modern ideologies and treated according to two very different systems of belief. Understanding the ways in which observers comprehended the dancing plague provides insight into the ways in which, during the early modern period, new perceptions of the relationship between humanity and the divine developed and older conceptions of the body and disease began to change, while at the same time, ideologies surrounding dance and its relationship to sinful behavior remained consistent.

Body and Soul

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
The Relationship

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the soul, its nature, and its relationship with the body became focal points for religious, medical, political, and ethical debates, and the choice of vocabulary itself had profound implications in how human and divine nature were represented in early modern English writings. The perceived complexities of the relationship between the body and the soul as delineated in competing schools of classical philosophy provided English writers a fertile ground for analysing the human experience in general and the nature of individual identity. Debates over what happens to the body and the soul at death and at resurrection permeate the writings of the period. During the English Civil War years they were markers of both political and religious affiliations, and this chapter demonstrates how the medical turn in the late seventeenth century focused increasing attention on the separation of soul and mind.

scholarly journals Truth and the Transunto: a copy of the Holy Shroud in Sixteenth-Century Bologna

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (18 N.S.) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Samantha L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

'Truth and the transunto' investigates the use of a hand-painted copy of the Holy Shroud which found its way to Bologna in the late sixteenth century. Used by the archbishop of Bologna, Alfonso Paleotti (1531-1610), this copy was the source of observations of the body of Christ, in the manner of an autopsy and is presented in Paleotti's book Esplicatione del Lenzuolo [...]. Early modern copies of the Holy Shroud are not however accurate copies, but present seemingly simplified replicas of the original. This article explores how such information, and indeed, level of trust, can come from these copies, which, to the modern eye, seem fallible. Previous studies have excused the strange appearance of these Shroud copies by considering them solely devotional instruments yet as the article shows, Paleotti's use of such an object shows that the copies might be better understood in the context of early modern natural historical studies and illustrations. The article draws on scholarship which discusses the emerging interest for visual evidence in early scientific practice and shows how certain types of images and image-making practices were able to evoke the idea of presence and clarify the indecipherable. Demonstrating that Paleotti's copy of the Holy Shroud was not just a religious tool, but also an epistemic image, this article shows how Paleotti's use of the term 'transunto' could be used as a valuable tool in gaining a more nuanced understanding of the concept 'copy' in Early Modern Europe.   On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585.Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

scholarly journals To Sing Upon the Book: Oral and Written Counterpoint in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-105
Author(s):  
Ronald Broude
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Music Printing ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Textual Form ◽  
The Relationship

During the fifteenth century, many musici thought of counterpoint as an improvisational practice in which certain procedures were employed to produce a musical texture in which interest lay in the interplay of two or more melodic lines. The improvisational practice was called singing upon the book (cantare super librum): it required one singer to realize a pre-existing melody (called a cantus firmus) inscribed in a text while one or more other singers (called concentors), reading from that same text, devised, ex tempore, a countermelody or melodies that obeyed the rules of counterpoint with respect to the cantus firmus. Similar procedures, applied in writing, produced res facta, contrapuntal texture in textual form. Counterpoint and res facta were alternative means of providing music for occasions both sacred and secular. During the sixteenth century, several factors combined to alter the relationship between improvised and written counterpoint, and by the end of the century the importance of the former was greatly diminished. The growth of music printing provided an abundance of music for a growing community of amateurs who could read music but were not interested singing upon the book. The composers responsible for this new music embraced emerging ideas that stressed the advantages of written music, which enjoyed permanence that improvised counterpoint lacked, which was usually more observant of the rules than improvised counterpoint could be, and which enhanced the reputations of the composers who created it. As a result of these developments, emphasis shifted from improvised to written counterpoint, from the procedures that produced a contrapuntal texture to the texture itself, and singing upon the book came to be seen by many not as an end in itself but as a way to sharpen composers’ skills. Marginalized by print, improvised counterpoint survived in a much reduced community, largely in Catholic France and Iberia, and eventually, for want of a musical community large enough to sustain it, ceased to be a living musical tradition.

“Communis Hostis Omnium”: The Smerwick Massacre (1580) and the Law of Nations

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Alan Orr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present State ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Common Enemy ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologetic, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1596). On this view, the papal troops at Smerwick were considered brigands, pirates, or, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's words, “communis hostis omnium”—a common enemy to all—and enjoyed no standing as lawful enemies under the law of nations. In the sixteenth century, the established law of nations was hardly a seamless web but manifested significant cleavages and fissures allowing for the construction of localized spheres of legal exception in which the ordinary rules of warfare did not apply, thus providing a convenient juridical rationale for atrocity.

‘A Fine Pate Full of Fine Dirt’: Hamlet Among the Atomists

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-190
Author(s):  
Christopher Crosbie
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter situates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a late sixteenth century atomism increasingly shorn of its atheist metaphysics and Epicurean ethics. Making available new ways of thinking about matter as theoretically compatible with theistic ideas, early modern atomism provides a set of ontological assumptions that governs the playworld and shapes the course of Hamlet’s revenge. Paying special attention to two strands of atomist thought – namely, the body as particularized and the functions of perception, memory, and time as material imprints – this chapter reads Hamlet’s understanding of the dissolvable body and his attempt to remold the court's collective memory, the most proximate record of historical time, as of a piece. Hamlet's revenge, consonant with his prior ways of conceptualizing embodied existence, functions as a kind of material accretion to the past. In his brooding and revenge, Hamlet seeks comfort, then, in the prospect of a reassuringly enduring materiality but a comfort that remains theoretical and contingent. The most intense poignancy of his tragic demise emerges from Hamlet’s surprisingly persistent refusal to abandon the tantalizing, if elusive, consolations proffered by the material world itself.

scholarly journals Active Leisure

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 400-418
Author(s):  
Cristiano Casalini
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Jesuit Education ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Waking And Sleep ◽  
Education Theory ◽  
Intellectual Activities ◽  
Active Leisure ◽  
The Relationship

The philosophy of education of the first Jesuits—as delineated in the Ratio studiorum (1599) and embodied in the colleges’ practices—has become one of the preferred topics among historians of sixteenth-century education and philosophy. This paper seeks to present a heretofore rather neglected aspect of Jesuit education theory: the treatment of the body in the network of colleges during the first fifty years of the Society of Jesus. Among the key features of this treatment one finds leisure and rest, which Jesuits conceived as a means of measuring and punctuating the school timetable. While most medieval colleges did not usually leave much free time to their students, the Jesuits viewed leisure and rest as crucial for fostering spiritual and intellectual activities. Leisure and rest, however, ought not be understood as a cessation of action. This paper shows that the educational practices addressed to the body in the Jesuit colleges (such as the alternation of exercise and rest, the alternation of waking and sleep, the relationship between hygiene and the care of the body, and physical education) were deeply rooted in the Ignatian culture of the Spiritual Exercises. This experience stands out as one of most ingenious attempts to transform religious mystical practices from the medieval tradition in a manner that would make them resonate with the early modern way of life.

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