From Enquiry to Improvement: David Ure (1749–1798)

2008 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES H. BURNS

David Ure (1749–98) contributed, in his History of Rutherglen and East-Kilbride (1793) not only to local history but, especially, to the development in Scotland of natural history, in some aspects of which he played a pioneering part. His studies at Glasgow University (with John Anderson as one of his teachers) were followed by ordination to the ministry of the Church of Scotland. A ‘stickit minister’ for most of his life, he played a significant part in Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland and contributed also to the surveys prepared for Sinclair's Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement. Had he lived, he would have been Anderson's choice as professor of natural history in what became the Andersonian Institute. His writings reflect a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of knowledge with a view to improvement: he is thus a notable example of what the Enlightenment in late 18th-century Scotland was meant to exemplify and uphold.

2012 ◽  
Vol 200 (5) ◽  
pp. 431-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Beveridge

In recent decades ideological battles have raged over how the history of psychiatry should be interpreted. Should the emergence of psychiatry in the late 18th century be seen as the triumph of the Enlightenment, ushering in a rational approach to mental illness and overturning the primitive and often barbaric ideas of previous eras? Or should the rise of psychiatry be seen in a more sinister light? Does it represent the extension of the state into the lives of its citizens, controlling and policing the disaffected and discontented? Are psychiatrists benign humanitarians or agents of oppression? Should the historical narrative be one of progress, as psychiatry steadily extends its knowledge of mental illness and develops more and more effective therapy? Or is the reverse true: has the advent of psychiatry been a calamity for the mad?


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-122
Author(s):  
Björn Moll

Abstract This article focusses on the discourse surrounding ›projectors‹, autoentrepeneurs, who made plans for innovations of any kind and tried to have potential financiers promote them, from the Baroque to German Romanticism. While the role of projectors in the history of science has been the object of historical study, there is a lack of research regarding the concept’s trajectory and its semantic variation. In the early modern period, the necessity of innovation was emphasized, but also the contingency of project proposals. During the Enlightenment, the tradition of the approval of project-making continued, but projects became detached from projectors. In the late 18th century, the idea of speculation and the fantastic transformed within the area of creativity, due to the primacy of imagination and genius. What happened to the talk about projectors and their ways of self-fashioning after the disappearance of the social figure? What enabled authors to refer to projectors and how was their role historically discussed? Projectors served as a topos of insanity or deception or a sign of unprofessionalism (as shown in examples by Goethe and Schiller). Romanticism carried with it the positive connotations of the project, but also reinterpreted its negative aspects, such as the value of incompletion, insanity and alternative ways of work.


Author(s):  
Darikha Dyusibaeva ◽  

The origins and characteristics of the rare book collection of L. Tolstoy Scientific Library are discussed. The focus is made of the unique publications in the local history of the late 19-th – eary 20-th century. The publications cover the history of the region and comprising vast document array. Several publications are described in detail, e. g. «Migrant small-holders in Turgay Oblast», «Essays in the Natural History of the 1- st and 2-тв Maurzum volost of Turgay Oblast», statistical reports, land management instructions, «The Proceedings of Kustanay Society of Local Lore and History», etc. The problem of the collection preservation and digitization is discussed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
Iryna Tsiborovska-Rymarovych

The article has as its object the elucidation of the history of the Vyshnivetsky Castle Library, definition of the content of its fund, its historical and cultural significance, correlation of the founder of the Library Mychailo Servaty Vyshnivetsky with the Book.The Vyshnivetsky Castle Library was formed in the Ukrainian historical region of Volyn’, in the Vyshnivets town – “family nest” of the old Ukrainian noble family of the Vyshnivetskies under the “Korybut” coat of arm. The founder of the Library was Prince Mychailo Servaty Vyshnivetsky (1680–1744) – Grand Hetman and Grand Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Vilno Voievoda. He was a politician, an erudite and great bibliophile. In the 30th–40th of the 18th century the main Prince’s residence Vyshnivets became an important centre of magnate’s culture in Rich Pospolyta. M. S. Vyshnivetsky’s contemporaries from the noble class and clergy knew quite well about his library and really appreciated it. According to historical documents 5 periods are defined in the Library’s history. In the historical sources the first place is occupied by old-printed books of Library collection and 7 Library manuscript catalogues dating from 1745 up to the 1835 which give information about quantity and topical structures of Library collection.The Library is a historical and cultural symbol of the Enlightenment epoch. The Enlightenment and those particular concepts and cultural images pertaining to that epoch had their effect on the formation of Library’s fund. Its main features are as follow: comprehensive nature of the stock, predominance of French eighteenth century editions, presence of academic books and editions on orientalistics as well as works of the ideologues of the Enlightenment and new kinds of literature, which generated as a result of this movement – encyclopaedias, encyclopaedian dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Besides the universal nature of its stock books on history, social and political thought, fiction were dominating.The reconstruction of the history of Vyshnivetsky’s Library, the historical analysis of the provenances in its editions give us better understanding of the personality of its owners and in some cases their philanthropic activities, and a better ability to identify the role of this Library in the culture life of society in a certain epoch.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-328
Author(s):  
Salahudeen Yusuf

The history of Islam in part of what is known today as Nigeria datesto about the loth Century. Christianity dates to the late 18th Century. Bythe middle of the 19th Century, when Nigerian newspapers began to appearon the streets of Nigeria, both religions had won so many followers and extendedto so many places in Nigeria that very few areas were untouched bytheir influence. The impact of both religions on their adherents not only determinedtheir spiritual life, but influenced their social and political lives aswell. It therefore became inevitable that both religions receive coverage frommost of the newspapers of the time. How the newspapers as media of informationand communication reported issues about the two religions is thetheme of this paper.Rationale for the StudyThe purpose of this study is to highlight the context in which such earlynewspapers operated and the factors that dictated their performance. Thisis because it is assumed that when a society faces external threat to its territory,culture, and independence, all hands (the press inclusive) ought tobe on deck to resist the threat with all might. Were newspapers used as verbalartillery and how did they present each religion? It is also assumed thatin a multireligious society a true press should be objective and serve as avanguard in the promotion of the interest of the people in general and notcreate or foster an atmosphere of religious conflict. The study also aims atfinding out whether the papers promoted intellectual honesty and fosteredthe spirit of unity particularly when the society was faced with the encroachmentof the British who posed a threat to their freedom, culture, economy ...


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5 (103)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Oleg Rodionov

The article deals with one of the oldest manuscripts containing a significant part of the theological chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes, one of the most important hesychast authors of the late Byzantine period. Codex Vatopedinus gr. 610 was written in the late 14th c. It contains a great amount of quotations excerpted from Patristic literature. In the second part of the codex, one can find the chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes; these 92 chapters were retrieved from a greater collection containing now about 200 chapters. The article discusses the content of the Vatopedi manuscript, pointing out to the use of many Patristic fragments included there in different works by Kallistos Angelikoudes. This may shed light on the origin and purpose of the manuscript. A further study of the history of the text of these chapters allows us to assess the place of the Vatopedi codex in the manuscript tradition of Kallistos Angelikoudes’ literary legacy. The Church Slavonic translation of this collection of Angelikoudes’ chapters made by Paisius Velichkovsky in the 1770—1790s reproduces many peculiarities of the Greek text contained in the Vatopedi manuscript and was presumably based on a copy of that codex.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Dag Herbjørnsrud ◽  

The Age of Enlightenment is more global and complex than the standard Eurocentric Colonial Canon narrative presents. For example, before the advent of unscientific racism and the systematic negligence of the contributions of Others outside of “White Europe,” Raphael centered Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his Vatican fresco “Causarum Cognitio” (1511); the astronomer Edmund Halley taught himself Arabic to be more enlightened; The Royal Society of London acknowledged the scientific method developed by Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen). In addition, if we study the Transatlantic texts of the late 18th century, it is not Kant, but instead enlightened thinkers like Anton Wilhelm Amo (born in present-day’s Ghana), Phillis Wheatley (Senegal region), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti), who mostly live up to the ideals of reason, humanism, universalism, and human rights. One obstacle to developing a more balanced presentation of the Age of the Enlightenment is the influence of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and methodological nationalism. Consequently, this paper, part II of two, will also deal with the European Enlightenment’s unscientific heritage of scholarly racism from the 1750s. It will be demonstrated how Linnaeus, Hume, Kant, and Hegel were among the Founding Fathers of intellectual white supremacy within the Academy. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment is not what we are taught to believe. This paper will demonstrate how the lights from different “Global Enlightenments” can illuminate paths forward to more dialogue and universalism in the 21st century.


Slovene ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-447
Author(s):  
Petr S. Stefanovich

The article analyzes the history of the concept of a “Slavic-Russian nation”. The concept was first used by Zacharia Kopystenskij in 1624, but its wide occurrence starts in 1674, when Synopsis, the first printed history of Russia, was published in Kiev. In the book, “Slavic-Russian nation” refers to an ancient Slavic people, which preceded the “Russian nation” (“rossiyskiy narod”) of the time in which the book was written. Uniting “Slavs” and “Russians” (“rossy”) into one “Slavic-Russian nation”, the author of Synopsis followed the idea which was proposed but not specifically defined by M. Stryjkovskij in his Chronicle (1582) and, later, by the Kievan intellectuals of the 1620s–30s. The construction of Synopsis was to prove that “Russians” (“rossy”) were united by both the common Slavic origin and the Church Slavonic language used by the Orthodox Slavic peoples. According to Synopsis, they were also supposed to be united by the Muscovite tsar’s authority and the Orthodox religion. The whole conception made Synopsis very popular in Russia in the late 17th century and later. Earlier in the 17th-century literature of the Muscovite State, some authors also proposed ethno-genetic constructions based on Stryjkovskij’s Chronicle and other Renaissance historiography. Independently from the Kievan literature, the word “Slavic-Russian” was invented (first appearance in the Legend about Sloven and Rus, 1630s). Both the Kievan and Muscovite constructions of a mythical “Slavic-Russian nation” aimed at making an “imagined” ethno-cultural nation. They contributed to forming a new Russian imperial identity in the Petrine epoch. However, the concept of a “Slavic-Russian nation” was not in demand in the political discourse of the Petrine Empire. It was sporadically used in the historical works of the 18th century (largely due to the influence of Synopsis), but played no significant role in the proposed interpretations of Russian history.


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihály Balázs

Although in recent years there has been an upsurge in the research of the history of early modern spirituality, this research has paid hardly any attention to the Unitarian denomination. The reasons for this lie beyond the scope of the present study: between the late 16th century and the late 18th century the denomination had to refrain from the use of printing, and thus, the manuscript versions of prayer texts were threatened by loss and destruction. It is a unique paradox, however, that the first edited protestant Hungarian prayer book of considerable length was published precisely by this denomination in 1570/1571. The first part of the paper explores the concept of the prayer book based on Johann Habermann’s famous Gebetbüchlein, and compares it to the greatest achievements of the same sort within this period, the Catholic Péter Pázmány’s and the Calvinist Albert Szenci Molnár’s works. This section is followed by a survey of the vivid reception of Heltai’s work, with particular focus on the way the Unitarian author’s work was used in the Lutheran community of Lőcse. The concluding part argues that building on the foundations of this tradition, as well as on the heritage of Calvinist prayer culture, an unparalleled Unitarian prayer literature developed in the 17th-18th centuries, which deserves the attention of comparative research.


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