‘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.

Theatre and Memory: The Body-as-Statue in Early Modern Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta Perletti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Past

This chapter relates the statue-like bodies of some Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays to the theories about memory and forgetting that were circulating in late sixteenth-century philosophical and medical discourse. In particular, the chapter shows how memory images, which in antiquity played a pivotal role in the art of memory, were represented as inducing a paralysing, statue-like state in living bodies. Shakespeare’s work partakes in this re-assessment of memory images, as words are more powerful memory triggers and carriers than monuments and statues. Moreover, while Shakespeare’s tragedies stage bodies turning into stone because of the destructive fixedness of the past, his late plays manage to set in motion the images produced by memory and by so doing resist death-like paralysis.

The Animal Face of Early Modern England

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 177-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Fudge
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Archival Study

This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure from humanism. Taking a journey through ways of thinking that will, perhaps, be unfamiliar, the revised vision of human-animal relations outlined here emerges not from a history of philosophy but from an archival study of people’s relationships with and understandings of their livestock in early modern England. At stake are conceptions of who we are and who we might have been, and the relation between those two, and the livestock on 17th-century smallholdings are our guides.

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.

Sweet and Clean?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan North
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Accurate Picture ◽  
Old Bailey

Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over 30 years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient’s linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practised. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases—plague, smallpox, and typhus—that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?

Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter argues that the sixteenth-century novella collection and chivalric romance have much in common. However, their length, status as translations, and multiple authorships have rendered their comparison difficult and have limited their role in studies of pre-novelistic fiction until relatively recently. The chapter characterizes their relationship as ‘rhetorical’, because consideration of the two genres has long been dictated by their staged opposition in the traditional, dualistic narrative of the novel's origin. This narrative imagines a struggle between the past-ness and absurdities of romance and the present-ness and realism of the novel as anticipated in the early modern novella and the closely related picaresque tale. Hence, they possess an interlocking yet uncomfortable — even antagonistic — rhetorical relationship in the literary history of the novel in English.

John Calvin’s Vision of Reform, Historical Thinking, and the Modern World

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
Complex Relationships

Distinctly modern forms of historical consciousness emerged first after the Enlightenment but were anticipated by early modern developments in attitudes towards and strategies for recovering the past. Scholarship has only recently focused on how religious perspectives of the sixteenth century and the demand for alternative visions of religious history contributed to broader developments in early modern historiography. This chapter investigates the role of the past in Calvin’s vision of reform through the lens of his 1543 treatise, Supplex Exhortatio, to show how an early modern version of historical thinking is reflected in and shapes his reforming agenda. Though much of his programme is in continuity with Western reforming traditions, Calvin’s vision involves more conscious and critical engagement with and re-evaluation of the past. Attention to the contours of Calvin’s historical thinking illuminates the highly complex relationships among religious orientations, religious conflicts, and engagements with history in the sixteenth century.

scholarly journals The Pastoral Use of the Book of Revelation in Late Tudor England

2006 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICK J. O'BANION
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Common

Over the past forty years historians have demonstrated continued interest in tracing the development of radical early modern English apocalypticism. The Tudor and Stuart eschatological scene, however, encompassed more than just millenarian activism. This article emphasises the pastoral ends to which Revelation was used by a group of late sixteenth-century writers as they sought to make it accessible to the ‘common sort’ of Christian. Viewing interest in the Last Days through this pastoral lens highlights both the tense complexities present in the Elizabethan Church and the usefulness of eschatological themes in studying ordinary and normative aspects of religious experience.

scholarly journals Wheresoever the Body Is: Image, Matter, and Corporeality on Shakespeare's Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Matthew Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emblem Books

What does the visual culture of early modern England, and the ways in which that culture articulated specific notions of corporeality, tell us about the actor’s body on Shakespeare’s stage?  This article locates one answer to that question in the popular emblem books and the somewhat more rarefied cosmographical treatises of the day.  Digging in these sources reveals an understanding of the body that is grounded first and foremost in corporeality – the body, before it was anything else, was matter.  As such, I argue that the actor’s body on the early modern stage served as an instance of irrefutable and irreducible materiality, ‘lending’ its materiality to the abstractions and absences that Shakespeare’s theatre so readily ‘bodied forth.’However, as a wealth of scholarship on the body has suggested over the past few decades, things are not this simple.  The body appears in these arenas as a very specific kind of matter, and matter itself is shown to have a complex relationship to ‘form’, or the immaterial realities of life.  I argue here that the nature of the body-as-matter, and indeed of matter itself, is fruitfully understood in terms of two related early modern concepts: prima materia, and man as microcosm.  These ideas were most in circulation in the distinct but kindred fields of alchemy and cosmography, and their visual manifestations offer a perspective on the theatrical body that does not reduce the body to simplematter, but still acknowledges its profound materiality, and the effect that the body-as-matter has on stage-work as a whole.

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.

scholarly journals Wearing images. Introduction = Imágenes portadas. Introducción

2018 ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Diane H. Bodart
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modes Of Interaction

In the past decades, studies on the materiality and the efficacy of images, as well as the artistic and social practices related to them, have allowed scholars to explore how much images’ making, use, handling and display contributed to the activation of their powers of presence through their interaction with the viewer. Further, the growing interest in the articulation between the history of art and the anthropology of images has brought to light the close links between the art object and the body: in fact, if the body can be the medium of the animate art object, the art object can potentially act as a substitute of the animate body. But what happens when the body is the support of a distinctive image, when it inscribes an image on its own surface, whether directly on the skin or through intermediary props such as clothing or corporeal parure? Wearing Images investigates the different modes of interaction between the image and the body that wears it in the Early-Modern period, when devotional, political, dynastic or familial images could be worn as medals, jewels, badges, embroidered garments or tattoos.En las últimas décadas, los estudios sobre la materialidad y la eficacia de las imágenes, así como de las prácticas artísticas y sociales asociadas a ellas, han permitido a los historiadores explorar hasta qué punto la fabricación de las imágenes, su uso, manejo y exhibición contribuyó a activar sus capacidades de presentarse a través de su interacción con el espectador. Además, el creciente diálogo entre la historia del arte y la antropología de las imágenes ha puesto de relieve las estrechas conexiones entre el objeto artístico y el cuerpo: en efecto, si el cuerpo puede ser el medio para el objeto artístico animado, el objeto artístico puede actuar potencialmente como sustituto del cuerpo animado. Pero ¿qué ocurre cuando el cuerpo es el soporte de una imagen distintiva, cuando inscribe una imagen en su propia superficie, ya sea directamente en la piel o a través de intermediarios como el vestido o un adorno? Wearin Images investiga las diferentes modalidades de interacción entre la imagen y el cuerpo que se viste con ella en la Edad moderna, en una época en la que imágenes devocionales, políticas, dinásticas o familiares podían vestirse como medallas, joyas, placas, prendas bordadas o tatuajes.

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