Plague Time: Space, Fear, and Emergency Statecraft in Early Modern Italy

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-111
Author(s):  
Nicholas A. Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Contingent Response ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Historical Examination

Michel Foucault argued famously that early modern European governors responded to plague by quarantining entire urban populations and placing citizens under minute surveillance. For Foucault, such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century policies were the first steps towards an authoritarian paradigm that would only emerge in full in the eighteenth century. The present article argues that Foucault’s model is too abstracted to function as a tool for the historical examination of specific emergencies, and it proposes an alternative analytical framework. Addressing itself to actual events in early modern Italy, the article reveals that when plague threatened, Florentine and Bolognese health officials projected themselves into a spatio-temporal dimension in which official actions and perceptions were determined solely by the spread of contagion. This dimension, “plague time,” was not a stage on the irresistible journey towards Foucault’s “utopia of the perfectly governed city.” A contingent response to a recurrent existential menace, plague time rose and fell in response to events, and may be understood as a season.

scholarly journals Sounding Silence: Inspiration And Passiveness In The Reading Of Early Modern Women

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Essig García
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Silent Reading ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Material Change ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Las Mujeres

Abstract: cultural and material change described by historians of reading intersects with literary history in different and complex ways. An example is the cultural practice of silent reading in intimacy, which came to be pivotal for the literature of sensibility. It was gendered female in the eighteenth century and looked upon with disfavour, notably by moralists and pedagogues. However, not very long before, silent reading was associated with spirituality and women’s religious experiences, and was compatible with the virtues expected of the “lady of the Renaissance”. Several texts from the seventeenth century, notably diaries by women, will be discussed. Título en español: “Resonancia del silencio: inspiración y pasividad en la lectura femenina en el siglo XVII”.Resumen:los cambios culturales y materiales que describe la historia de la lectura entran en relaciones variadas y complejas con la historia literaria. Un ejemplo de esa dialéctica es la evolución de la práctica de la lectura silenciosa en recogimiento, que alcanzó una importancia extraordinaria para la novelística del Dieciocho. Se consideraba propia de las mujeres y estaba mal vista por moralistas y pedagogos. No mucho antes, empero, la lectura en silencio había sido un componente de la experiencia espiritual y religiosa de la mujer del Renacimiento, y como tal compatible con las virtudes femeninas. El artículo incluye comentarios de varios textos del diecisiete, en particular diarios de mujeres.

Cultures of collecting

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-164
Author(s):  
David Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Material Evidence

Studies of private libraries and their owners invariably talk about ‘book collecting’—is this the right terminology? After summarizing our broadly held understanding of the evolution of bibliophile collecting from the eighteenth century onwards, this chapter considers the extent to which similar behaviours can be detected (or not) in the seventeenth, drawing on the material evidence of bookbindings, wording in wills, and other sources. Do we find subject-based collecting, of the kind we are familiar with today, as a characteristic of early modern book owners? Some distinctions are recognized in ways in which medieval manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) were brought together at this time. The relationship between libraries and museums, and contemporary attitudes to them, is explored. The concluding argument is that ‘collecting’ is a careless word to use in the seventeenth-century context; just as we should talk about users rather than readers, we should use ‘owners’ rather than ‘collectors’ as the default term, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

City of Women, City of God

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Demographic Shifts

Chapter 1 examines the hagiography of local holy woman Anna Guerra de Jesús who migrated to Guatemala’s capital in the late seventeenth century. While the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure, obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a poor abandoned wife and mother. And although Church decrees clearly required actively religious laywomen to live in cloistered communities, Anna became an independent beata (laywoman who took informal vows) and Jesuit tertiary. This chapter explores Anna’s lived religious experience as a poor migrant and abandoned wife and mother, her engagement with female mysticism and devotional networks, and her alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. It also places Anna’s story within the context of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, particularly urban demographic shifts and social tensions, as well as movements for spiritual renewal and enthusiastic lay female piety.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Research

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture provides a fresh look at the important, burgeoning field of Edwards and the Bible. For too long, Edwards scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology, but what is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Christian Scripture and had plans for major treatises on the Bible before he died. Edwards scholars need to take stock of the place of the Bible in his thought to do justice to his theology and legacy. In fact, more and more experts are recognizing how important this aspect of his life is, and this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. This volume seeks to increase our understanding of Edwards’ engagement with Scripture by setting it in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. It provides case studies of Edwards’ exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probes his use of Scripture to develop theology. It also sets his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards’ work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

Avenues for Research in Eighteenth-Century Portuguese Overseas History

Itinerario ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
William Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Lisbon Earthquake ◽  
Brazilian History

Early modern Luso-Brazilian history is in a rut; and nowhere is that rut more evident than for the period between the late seventeenth century and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the period of the Brazilian gold rush. The mineral strikes made a profound impact on Portugal's society and economy: in both what changed and what remained the same. Yet surprisingly, this era remains one of the least studied periods in Portuguese history. There is not, for example, even a modern biography of Dom Joao V, whose forty-five-year reign encompassed the gold rush's most glittering moments. In what follows I will argue that several widespread perceptions of the lack of sources for early modern Luso-Brazilian history are incorrect and in need of substantial revision; and further that some traditional explanations of eighteenth-century economic history have been based on inadequate research more dependent upon ideology than sound scholarship.

Early Modern Jansenism

2015 ◽  
pp. 435-450
Author(s):  
Ephraim Radner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Reformation Movement

This chapter presents Jansenism as an originally seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation movement with a key commitment to a certain theology of grace. This had several pastoral consequences that were broadly influential among both Catholics and Protestants, especially in the areas of scriptural study and devotion. Jansenist interest in the Augustinian tradition, however, proved a losing cause within the evolving modern church. Three papal bulls condemned certain Jansenist ideas and provided the impetus for the conflict with Rome, the French monarchy, and other institutions. The major political aspects associated with the movement in the eighteenth century eventually overwhelmed its theology and hopes. By the nineteenth century, the movement’s final political phase was seen as an amalgam of anti-papalism, anti-Jesuitism, conciliarism, republicanism, and nationalism.

The Hermeneutical Rehabilitation of Supposition Theory in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Logic

Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 464-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Meier-Oeser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Semantic Function ◽  
The Third ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Supposition Theory

Abstract The paper focuses on some aspects of the early modern aftermath of supposition theory within the framework of the protestant logical tradition. Due to the growing influence of Humanism, supposition theory from the third decade of the sixteenth century was the object of general neglect and contempt. While in the late sixteenth-century a number of standard textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic logic reintegrated this doctrine, although in a bowdlerized version, it remained for a century out of the scope of Protestant logic. The situation changed when the Strasburg Lutheran theologian J.C. Dannhauer, who in 1630 developed and propagated the program of a new discipline which he called ‘general hermeneutics’ (hermeneutica generalis), accentuating the importance of supposition theory as an indispensable device for the purpose of textual interpretation. Due to Dannhauer’s influence on later developments of hermeneutics, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was regarded as a logical discipline, supposition theory is still present in several logical treatises of the eighteenth century. The explication of the underlying views on the notion of supposition and its logico-semantic function may give at least some clues as to how to answer the question of what supposition theory was all about.

AN OPEN ELITE: THE PECULIARITIES OF CONNOISSEURSHIP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN COWAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.

The Inquisition, Professing Jews, and Christian Images in Seventeenth-Century Modena

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Aron-Beller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Active Period ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Religious Paintings ◽  
The City

In seventeenth-century Italy, Christian relics and images were scattered through urban spaces, not only because the faithful were expected to acknowledge and touch them, but because their moving through city streets in processions celebratedcommunitas, the sense of belonging that was so much part of early modern civic existence.The Inquisitorial archive in Modena holds at least twelveprocessiagainst professing Jews (who lived for the most part in the city capital or in smaller Jewish communities scattered through the duchy) for the offence of desecrating Christian images during its most active period of prosecution between 1598 and 1640. Denunciations accused Jews of removing crucifixes from walls, stoning or tampering Christian statues and religious paintings, and failing to show the necessary respect to images carried through the streets. This paper explores the frequency of the image desecration charges against Jews in early modern Italy and in particular the duchy of Modena, the pivotal impact of internal Christian processes about their own images and whether these objects did in fact have inherent or stable meanings for Jews at this time.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document