Onstage Overviews: Metadrama and the Information Market

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Angus
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Information Market ◽  
Artistic Freedom ◽  
Modern Sense

This chapter argues that Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News presents a dystopic fantasy of control over information-gathering in which the news produced, though authorised by the eponymous Staple’s monopoly, is only as reliable as street gossip. The Staple’s sources are not ‘journalists’ in the modern sense; rather they are common informers, entirely lacking the ambivalence of Shakespeare’s magical agents. In this case, their information is publicly marketable, and thus, the play’s metadrama explores how Jonson negotiates not only the price of information, and artistic legitimacy, but ultimately authority itself. With its concealed observers, its predatory imagery, and the augmentative nature of its gathered information, this play describes the familiar conditions of both early modern informing practice and contemporary dramatic authorship, and, as ever, the deficiency of an audience’s interpretation is of prevailing concern. The chapter also suggests that Jonson’s metadrama functions as a tool of self-fashioning which only works in a market where the price of information, artistic freedom, and the legitimacy of authority, are negotiable.

Cervantes, Anti-Romance, and the Novella

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brean Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Novelas Ejemplares ◽  
Don Quijote ◽  
English Novel ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Modern Sense

This chapter looks at how Miguel de Cervantes' writing influenced the genesis and development of the English novel. His most influential writings, Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares of 1613, were published at a time of exceptional English interest in Spanish culture — a country reopened to diplomatic relations in 1604 after nearly half a century of continuous rivalry and warfare. In destroying the enchantment of romance, Cervantes Saavedra's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605–15) fatally undermined those values upon which the glory of the Spanish Golden Age rested, and ushered in an era of decadence and decline. However, he was not the first writer to parody knight-errantry. Nevertheless, a persuasive case can be made that the publication of Don Quijote was one crucial factor in the creation of an early modern sense of what medievalism was.

scholarly journals Toleration, Tolerance, or Intolerance in the Works of the Young Martin Luther

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. p9
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Early Attempt ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
The Middle Ages

Martin Luther=s hateful and anti-Judaic sentiments have attracted much attention especially because they have often been identified as highly influential on modern anti-Semitism. But in his early years, Luther could harbor quite different attitudes. A critical reading of his treatise ADaß Jesus Christus ein geborner Jude sei@ from 1523 will allow us to gain important insights into the delicate and yet impactful approach to toleration as it had developed throughout the Middle Ages. While Luther espoused a specific form of toleration, he cannot be identified as a defender of tolerance in the modern sense of the word. Tragically, however, despite his early attempt at reaching out to people of Jewish faith, the famous reformer quickly changed his mind and embraced a most aggressive strategy against Jews at large. This article will highlight the intricate and fragile nature of toleration as it was pursued by many medieval and early modern intellectuals and writers, and demonstrate that this ideal was highly appealing, but also subject to quick changes to the opposite.

Germany, Nationhood, and the Holocaust, 1500–2000

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-621
Author(s):  
Alon Confino
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Over Time

A proper understanding of a nation’s identity over time requires tracing how a modern sense of belonging can derive from the symbolic reservoir of society and how cultural symbols can change their meaning in history. This research agenda becomes significantly more challenging when it involves a national group’s experience across hundreds of years from the early modern period to the present. Such is the task of Smith’s Germany: A Nation and Its Time in its attempt to tell the story of nation and nationalism in Germany from 1500 to 2000.

Early Dances and Ballets

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Anna Pakes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Sense

Chapter 1 explores the historical development of dance in Europe, from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century, focusing particularly on the themes of dance structures, authorship, and autonomy. It considers early modern and secondary sources on social dance, the ballet de cour, and baroque dance, developing the argument that none of these practices produces dance works in the modern sense. Nonetheless, early dance sources to concepts of dance-as-object and dance as “performable” operating well before the idea of a work of dance art develops. This first chapter, then, explores what might be termed the early prehistory of the dance work, through analysis of different ways in which dances are conceived, composed, notated, performed, and linked to developing artistic traditions.

The early days of hemostasis in neurosurgery

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. E5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Srinivas Chivukula ◽  
Gregory M. Weiner ◽  
Johnathan A. Engh
Keyword(s):  
Infection Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
General Anesthesia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Modern Sense

Two key discoveries in the 19th century—infection control and the development of general anesthesia—provided an impetus for the rapid advancement of surgery, especially within the field of neurosurgery. Yet the field of neurosurgery would not have existed in the modern sense without the development and advancement of techniques in hemostasis. Improvement in intraoperative hemostasis came more gradually but was no less important to enhancing neurosurgical outcomes. The history of hemostasis in neurosurgery is often overlooked. Herein, the authors briefly review the historical progression of hemostatic techniques since the beginning of the early modern era of neurosurgery.

The “Sheep” and the “Lion”: Charles V, Barbarossa, and Habsburg Diplomatic Practice in the Muslim Mediterranean (1534-1542)

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 392-421
Author(s):  
Francesco Caprioli
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Religious Dialogue ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract Between the 1530s and the 1540s, the Emperor Charles V tried to win over the Ottoman Grand Admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, leading him to defect from the Ottoman cause and turn him into a faithful Habsburg warlord. In exchange for this, the former would have given the latter the opportunity to rule over the Central Maghreb as a new Habsburg ally. Obviously, both sides managed this negotiation in strict secrecy to prevent the plan from being discovered by the Ottoman sultan. Although it might seem surprising, this kind of diplomatic operation was a common tool to address political rivalries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. While efforts to recruit the best warlords were a well-established practice in Renaissance warfare, inter-religious dialogue was certainly nothing new at the beginning of the sixteenth century, given the long-lasting relations established between Christian and Muslim polities in the Middle Ages. Therefore, by analyzing the three main dimensions of diplomacy—communication, negotiation, and information gathering—this article aims to emphasize that the negotiation between Charles V and Barbarossa was not an exception, but a well rooted diplomatic practice in Habsburg Mediterranean policy.

Contract and Conjugality in Early Modern England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Stretton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Financial Contracts ◽  
Status Hierarchy ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
City Comedies

Literary scholars have long been aware of the near saturation of English Renaissance plays with marriage plots. Many Jacobean City Comedies, for example, use marriages to contrast traditional visions of society, formed around reciprocal obligations within a status hierarchy, with a more self-interested and contractual view of social relations. This chapter highlights links between marital contracts and financial contracts and considers changes in contractual thinking in the context of unprecedented litigation over conditional bonds; the displacement of dower by jointure in marital negotiations; and the increasingly contractual nature of private marital separations (in a society where divorce in the modern sense was unavailable).

(Dis)connecting Empires

2018 ◽  
pp. 12-36
Author(s):  
Zoltán Biedermann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Sense

Chapter 1 drafts a roadmap for a critical connected history of empires in the early modern world. It asks where exactly ‘connections’ sit with regard to the global and the local. For an understanding of global connections, local contexts remain key. There, we can seek out the ‘cultural history of the political’ and examine the role played by communication and translation. The notion that unfolding European-Asia dialogues can be sliced up into rigid ‘phases’ (e.g. ‘commerce’ to ‘conquest’) is reductive. At the heart of all interactions is the possibility of violence. Violence is not a monopoly of states in the modern sense of the word, but of polities that entertain a complex relationship with space, through layered suzerainties translatable across Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. The ‘Imperial Theme’ identified by Frances Yates calls to be made to work across the globe. It could foment the formulation of a general theory of the imperial in the early modern world.

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