Science and the Theological Imagination in the Seventeenth Century: Baptism and the Origins of the Individual

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 012
Author(s):  
Fernando Rodríguez Mediano ◽  
Carlos Cañete

The study of the process of construction of modern subjectivity offers an image of constant tensions between universality and particularity, which could be considered a manifestation of the conflictual nature of Modernity itself. As a way to solve the problems derived of the separation between universal and particular dimensions of this process -that has resulted in opposing interpretations regarding its confesional nature- a close study of the particular experience of the seventeenth-century thinker António Lopes da Veiga is presented here. This study is intended to provide some insight of the way in which similar intelectual concerns -of an international scale- over interiority and exteriority in epistemology, political thought, philology, theology and history, resulted in the constitution of a particular perspective regarding the individual.


1925 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 79-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asta Moller

The history of coal-mining in the seventeenth century covers what may be termed the first chapter in the great story of English coal. In less than a century a seemingly insignificant and experimental industry developed into one of considerable importance. Coal had been used locally before this period; but an industry, as such, did not arise till a decline in the country's supply of wood stimulated new activities. It is possible that the introduction of coal might have been indefinitely postponed, had not years of ruthless felling of timber and neglect of forest lands, coincident with an increasing demand for wood for other than domestic purposes, caused a shortage of fuel. To the Elizabethan the decay of woods had an even wider significance. The demands of the Navy, the extension of the Empire and the discovery of new countries all laid a claim on timber. Its preservation became a matter of national concern. That the individual consumer should have possessed this degree of circumspection, and acted accordingly, was hardly to be expected; but the national needs were brought home to him through an increase in the price of wood. The use of coal became a matter of necessity rather than of choice.


Author(s):  
Paul Seaward

Parliament in the course of a century after 1547 became almost certainly the best-recorded institution in Britain. This essay considers the nature of institutional memory in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century House of Commons. It concerns firstly the nature and quality of institutional memory, and how, while it relied considerably on non-inscribed memory, it changed with the growth of the written record. It discusses the importance of precedent to parliamentarians, and how precedents were identified and selectively used. But more broadly it considers how written records, both of a formal and official nature and a private and unofficial kind, were developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to generate a narrative about parliament that helps to consolidate its landmark status. As a result, parliament came to be recognised and revered as the key institution in the relationship between the state and the individual.


2020 ◽  
pp. 105-130
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein

This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphorical body—the medieval corporation—to being rooted instead in the individual body across a range of practices in seventeenth century Europe. It analyses the early modern forms of toleration that developed from the ground-up in Protestant Europe (Holland and Germany in particular), including the practices of ‘walking out’ (auslauf) to worship one’s God, and the house church (schuilkerk). These practices were key to delinking liberty from place, and thus to paving the way to attaching it instead to territory and the state. The chapter also considers the first common law of naturalisation, known as Calvin’s Case (1608), which wrote into the law the process of becoming an English subject—of subjection. This law decisively rooted the state-subject relation in the bodies of monarch and subject coextensively. Both of these bodies were deeply implicated in the process of territorialisation that begat the modern state in seventeenth-century England, and in shifting the political bond from local authorities to the sovereign. The chapter then examines the corporeal processes underwriting the centralisation of authority, and shows how the subject’s body also became—via an increasingly important habeas corpus—the centre point of the legal revolution that yielded the natural rights of the modern political subject. Edward Coke plays a central role in the chapter.


Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher

The ‘Introduction’ describes how in Volume 2 we switch focus from the patron-author to the reader-writers of the Essais, as they circulated around Europe. These are seventeenth-century descendants of the free literate of the late medieval period, as described by Armando Petrucci. The Essais become a context for their works, instead of vice versa. The primary objects of study are less, now, contexts involving Montaigne and his collaborators than those involving various commentators, imitators, promoters, translators, and their networks of friends and family. We are concerned less with Montaigne’s book than with their books—whether printed, manuscript, or a hybrid of both, whether literary works, or personal records. There follow summaries of the individual chapters.


PMLA ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 1130-1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Chew

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” and says that he enthusiastically preached the “Neo-Stoic brand of theology” to which Sir Thomas Browne objected. This theology maintained that “to follow ‘right reason’ was to follow nature, which was the same thing as following God.” Smith goes on to say that “what most attracted seventeenth-century Christian humanists like Bishop Hall was the fact that Stoicism attempted to frame a theory of the universe and of the individual man which would approximate a rule of life in conformity with an ‘immanent cosmic reason‘”—though in the same paragraph he also mentions the point “that Neo-Stoic divines of the seventeenth century were interested in Stoicism almost exclusively from the ethical point of view.” He cites Lipsius to show how a Christian might reach an approximation between the Stoic Fate and Christian Providence, leaving the reader to assume that Hall might also have made this approximation. He says that “the natural light of reason, as expounded by the Stoic philosophers, became, for seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics, the accepted guide to conduct” and that “religious and moral writers endeavored to trace a relationship between moral and natural law which in effect resulted in the practical code of ethical behavior commonly associated with Neo-Stoicism.”


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Janis Rowan Blayney

<p>The central topic of this thesis is the concept of wind impregnation (Motif T524 Conception from wind) as found in Greek and Roman thought and life. It is suggested that the concept exists in a variety of forms, distinguished by the six different animate beings with which the wind is linked, namely, mares, hens, tigers, vultures, sheep, and (mythical or legendary) women. The nature, development and transmission of these six traditions are discussed : it is demonstrated that all six traditions concerned persist beyond the fall of the Roman empire, with three continuing in existence until the seventeenth century; and that four out of the six traditions provide evidence of a concurrent oral tradition. In an effort to counteract the suggestion that the Graeco-Roman concept of wind impregnation is to be attributed to a lack of understanding of the prerequisites for procreation on the part of the ancients, the various theories of conception proposed by Greek and Roman scholars in the period from the early fifth century BC to the late second century AD are examined. This survey demonstrates that the ancients in fact took a considerable interest in, and had a detailed knowledge of the process of conception. The thesis concludes that there is no one explanation for the existence of the ancient concept, of wind impregnation; rather, it is to be attributed to the combination of a number of factors, most notably, the nature of the individual winds, and ancient attitudes towards them; the ancient connection of wind and soul; the nature of the animals with which the wind is linked, and the associations of those winds for the ancients.</p>


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