scholarly journals Between Nature and Culture : The Integrated Ecology of Renaissance Climate Theories

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Miglietti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Relationship

‘Climate theories’ are often explained away in scholarship as pseudosciences irrelevant to the modern world, or as morally problematic forms of geographic determinism. This chapter instead argues that such theories still offer a valuable lens not only for understanding how early modern people conceptualized the relationship between human culture and nonhuman nature, but also for resituating ourselves with respect to this very same issue. Are we humans above and outside nature, or are we an integral part of it, caught in its dynamics and affected by its internal changes—including those resulting from our own agency? Three sixteenth-century authors (Le Roy, Bodin, La Framboisière) are here brought into dialogue with contemporary thinkers (Descola, Latour) to reappraise the ‘integrated ecology’ of nature and culture proposed by early modern climate theorists.

scholarly journals On Women and Beasts: Human-Animal Relationships in Sixteenth-Century Thought

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 262-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Becker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Thought

We are used to the view that historically “what counted as fully human always depended … on a sharp contrast with ‘the animal’.” As a consequence, “[w]omen and slaves, in being denied full humanity, were therefore necessarily partaking in animal nature.” Questioning this view, this essay traces how some early modern thinkers defined the relationship of human beings to animals generally, and, more particularly, how they saw the relationship of women, slaves, and animals in the human household. The picture presented, while being far from complete, aims to show that Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century thinkers had nuanced arguments to offer when they discussed the relationship of human animals to nonhuman animals, and the relationship of nature and culture, neither of which were presented as clear cut opposites. At the same time, the equation of women with animals and slaves was not something that was commonly found in Sixteenth Century philosophical treatises, which might lead us to rethink our own ideas about equating one disenfranchised group with the other.

Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Legal History in Calvin’s Mosaic Harmony

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-195
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter examines John Calvin’s commentary on Exodus through Deuteronomy (1563) through the lens of sixteenth-century historical jurisprudence, exemplified in the works of Calvin’s contemporaries François de Connan and François Baudouin. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how Calvin’s historicizing exegesis is in continuity with broader contemporary trends in premodern Christian biblical interpretation; this chapter explores another essential context for Calvin’s approach to the Bible. The intermingling of narrative and legal material in these four biblical books inspired Calvin to break with his customary practice of lectio continua and apply his historical hermeneutic more broadly and creatively to explain the Mosaic histories and legislation. Calvin’s unusual and unprecedented arrangement of the material in this commentary and his attention to the relationship between law and history reveal his engagement with his generation’s quest for historical method.

scholarly journals To Sing Upon the Book: Oral and Written Counterpoint in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-105
Author(s):  
Ronald Broude
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Music Printing ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Textual Form ◽  
The Relationship

During the fifteenth century, many musici thought of counterpoint as an improvisational practice in which certain procedures were employed to produce a musical texture in which interest lay in the interplay of two or more melodic lines. The improvisational practice was called singing upon the book (cantare super librum): it required one singer to realize a pre-existing melody (called a cantus firmus) inscribed in a text while one or more other singers (called concentors), reading from that same text, devised, ex tempore, a countermelody or melodies that obeyed the rules of counterpoint with respect to the cantus firmus. Similar procedures, applied in writing, produced res facta, contrapuntal texture in textual form. Counterpoint and res facta were alternative means of providing music for occasions both sacred and secular. During the sixteenth century, several factors combined to alter the relationship between improvised and written counterpoint, and by the end of the century the importance of the former was greatly diminished. The growth of music printing provided an abundance of music for a growing community of amateurs who could read music but were not interested singing upon the book. The composers responsible for this new music embraced emerging ideas that stressed the advantages of written music, which enjoyed permanence that improvised counterpoint lacked, which was usually more observant of the rules than improvised counterpoint could be, and which enhanced the reputations of the composers who created it. As a result of these developments, emphasis shifted from improvised to written counterpoint, from the procedures that produced a contrapuntal texture to the texture itself, and singing upon the book came to be seen by many not as an end in itself but as a way to sharpen composers’ skills. Marginalized by print, improvised counterpoint survived in a much reduced community, largely in Catholic France and Iberia, and eventually, for want of a musical community large enough to sustain it, ceased to be a living musical tradition.

“Communis Hostis Omnium”: The Smerwick Massacre (1580) and the Law of Nations

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Alan Orr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present State ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Common Enemy ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologetic, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1596). On this view, the papal troops at Smerwick were considered brigands, pirates, or, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's words, “communis hostis omnium”—a common enemy to all—and enjoyed no standing as lawful enemies under the law of nations. In the sixteenth century, the established law of nations was hardly a seamless web but manifested significant cleavages and fissures allowing for the construction of localized spheres of legal exception in which the ordinary rules of warfare did not apply, thus providing a convenient juridical rationale for atrocity.

The Scandal of Kabbalah

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaacob Dweck
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Culture War ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholars have long studied the revolutionary impact of Kabbalah, but, as this book argues, they have misunderstood the character and timing of opposition to it. Drawing on a range of previously unexamined sources, this book tells the story of the first criticism of Kabbalah, Ari Nohem, written by Leon Modena in Venice in 1639. In this scathing indictment of Venetian Jews who had embraced Kabbalah as an authentic form of ancient esotericism, Modena proved the recent origins of Kabbalah and sought to convince his readers to return to the spiritualized rationalism of Maimonides. This book examines the hallmarks of Jewish modernity displayed by Modena's attack—a critical analysis of sacred texts, skepticism about religious truths, and self-consciousness about the past—and shows how these qualities and the later history of his polemic challenge conventional understandings of the relationship between Kabbalah and modernity. The book argues that Kabbalah was the subject of critical inquiry in the very period it came to dominate Jewish life rather than centuries later as most scholars have thought.

The Sixteenth-Century World War and the Roots of the Modern World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Northwest Africa ◽  
Military Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Military

This essay examines several world historical events from an unfamiliar perspective, that of sixteenth-century Morocco. It seeks to provide a new way of conceptualizing empires, one that builds upon recent work, while imagining them differently. As a key player in the struggle over the western Mediterranean, Morocco’s neglected history has much to tell us about both the power and the limits of the military revolution of early modern times. Moreover, Morocco’s success in withstanding Iberian efforts to extend the reconquista to Northwest Africa served to deflect the expansionary energies across the Atlantic and around Africa. More generally, Morocco provides a useful vantage point for thinking about the emergence of the international structures of power that define the early modern world.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
New Science ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
Medieval Islam

This chapter describes the fate of the Oneirocritica after antiquity, with a focus on its reception in Medieval Islam, Byzantium, and early modern Europe. The transmission of the text (in Greek and Arabic) is discussed, with particular attention to the enormous influence exercised on later Islamic dream-interpretation by the ninth-century Arabic translation of the Oneirocritica by Ḥunayn b. Isḥâq. An account of the rediscovery of the Oneirocritica in sixteenth-century Europe is followed by a short coda on the influence of Artemidorus in the modern world, with a discussion of the role played by the Oneirocritica in Freud’s ‘new science’ of dream-analysis.

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.

Empires and protection: making interpolity law in the early modern world

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Benton ◽  
Adam Clulow
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
Dual Character ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractReferences to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about the dual character of protection that differentiate between ‘inside’ protection of subjects and ‘outside’ protection of allies and other external groups. Rather than a clear division, we find a blurring of lines, with many protection claims creatively combining ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ protection. We argue that the juxtaposition of these ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection underpinned the formation of irregular, interpenetrating zones of imperial suzerainty in crowded maritime arenas and conflict-ridden borderlands across the early modern world.

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