The Early Modern Cardinal

Author(s):  
Miles Pattenden

This chapter sets out the historical context to the cardinal as a subject of portraiture. It engages recent historiography to explain how the cardinal’s function and role in the Roman Curia, including his relationship to the pope, developed from the fifteenth century onwards, and how this was reflected in the range of men who occupied the cardinal’s office. The Sacred College changed substantially over these centuries, with its proud ‘princes of the Church’ giving way to an altogether humbler breed of Counter-Reformation cleric. Naturally, this affected both how cardinals depicted themselves and how they and others used their depictions.

1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCavitt

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.


Author(s):  
Marina A. Kurysheva ◽  

This article puts forward a new later dating of the Greek manuscript BnF, Paris. gr. 1783 kept in the National Library of France and containing portraits of emperors of the Palaiologoi dynasty. The manuscript contains important texts related to the Constantinople period of court history and culture. Historiographers used to date the manuscript to the fifteenth century according to the portrait of Patriarch Joseph II (†1439), a famous participant of the Ferraro-Florence Council, which can be seen in the Italian fresco paintings of the fifteenth century. Meanwhile, the study of the manuscript’s palaeographical features shows that it was written by an anonymous scribe from Crete who worked in Venice and Rome for Italian humanists in the middle — third quarter of the sixteenth century. The handwriting of the famous Cretan calligrapher, employee of Francis I’s library in Fontainebleau Angelus Vergecius, as well as some other scribes associated with him was typologically close to the handwriting of the main scribe of the manuscript. Analogies to this handwriting can also be seen in the handwriting of Manuel Provataris, another famous scribe of the epoch, a Cretan Greek from Rethymno, employee and copyist of the Vatican Library. The new palaeographic dating of the Paris. gr. 1783 manuscript changes the date of creation of portrait drawings of the Byzantine emperors of the Palaiologoi dynasty and Patriarch Joseph II. Also, it is important to change the dating of all texts contained in the manuscript including such important texts as one of the three lists of imperial tombs of the Church of Sts. Apostles in Constantinople, as well the list of the offices of the Byzantine court. The Paris. gr. 1783 manuscript should be excluded from the circle of Late Byzantine booklore and attributed to post-Byzantine book heritage.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza

Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano developed innovative ways to read texts closely, paying attention to historical context, developing methods to determine a text's authenticity, and taking the humanities seriously as a means of bettering human life. Alongside such novel reading practices, technology – the invention of printing with moveable type – fundamentally changed perceptions of truth. Celenza also reveals how luminaries like Descartes, Diderot, and D'Alembert – as well as many lesser-known scholars – challenged traditional ways of thinking. Celenza's authoritative narrative demonstrates above all how the work of the early modern humanist philosophers had a profound impact on the general quest for human wisdom. His magisterial volume will be essential reading for all those who value the humanities and their fascinating history.


1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 355-365
Author(s):  
Keith Robbins

The modern ecclesiastical historian is an uncertain and hesitant creature; an acute case, it may be thought, of status deprivation. He looks with envy at his august and serene colleagues who have the history of the medieval church as their field of study. He knows that they are in process of uncovering the different layers of belief in medieval or early modern society. It is, no doubt, an illusion to suppose that an ‘age of faith’ ever existed. Nevertheless, at all levels of society, the church seems to be central to the life of the time. If we consider the reformation or counter-reformation periods, church questions seem to be in the forefront. The ‘Wars of Religion’ may not be at bottom about religion, but we cannot avoid some consideration of religious issues.


Zograf ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Marko Suica ◽  
Branka Knezevic

This paper explores the contents and historical context of the Cyrillic inscription written in old Serbian language with some Turkish words on the fresco ?St. Nicholas takes Basil from the house of Emir? from the Church of St. Nicholas in Ramaca. Based on an analysis of the historical circumstances and events that took place at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century on the Balkan Peninsula and especially in the Lazarevic Principality, it is assumed that the presence of Turkish words in the mentioned inscription implies the influences of Islamic heterodox dervishes in the Christian milieu. The dating of the fresco painting from the Church in Ramaca can be narrowed down to the time of the reign of Stefan Lazarevic.


Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.


2019 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 327-334
Author(s):  
Inga V. Zheltikova ◽  
Elena I. Khokhlova

The article considers the dependence of the images of future on the socio-cultural context of their formation. Comparison of the images of the future found in A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s works of various years reveals his generally pessimistic attitude to the future in the situation of social stability and moderate optimism in times of society destabilization. At the same time, the author's images of the future both in the seventies and the nineties of the last century demonstrate the mismatch of social expectations and reality that was generally typical for the images of the future. According to the authors of the present article, Solzhenitsyn’s ideas that the revival of spirituality could serve as the basis for the development of economy, that the influence of the Church on the process of socio-economic development would grow, and that the political situation strongly depends on the personal qualities of the leader, are unjustified. Nevertheless, such ideas are still present in many images of the future of Russia, including contemporary ones.


Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller

Grace and Freedom addresses the issue of divine grace in relation to the freedom of the will in Reformed or “Calvinist” theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with a focus on the work of the English Reformed theologian William Perkins, and his role as an apologist of the Church of England, defending its theology against Roman Catholic polemic, and specifically against the charge that Reformed theology denies human free choice. Perkins and his contemporaries affirmed that salvation occurs by grace alone and that God is the ultimate cause of all things, but they also insisted on the freedom of the human will and specifically the freedom of choice in a way that does not conform to modern notions of libertarian freedom or compatibilism. In developing this position, Perkins drew on the thought of various Reformers such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Zacharias Ursinus, on the nuanced positions of medieval scholastics, and on several contemporary Roman Catholic representatives of the so-called second scholasticism. His work was a major contribution to early modern Reformed thought both in England and on the continent. His influence in England extended both to the Reformed heritage of the Church of England and to English Puritanism. On the Continent, his work contributed to the main lines of Reformed orthodoxy and to the piety of the Dutch Second Reformation.


Author(s):  
Cristiano Casalini ◽  
Christoph Sander

This chapter discusses the philosophical pedagogy of Benet Perera (1535–1610) through an analysis and transcription of his treatise on the useful, error-free study of Christian philosophy, the Documenta quaedam perutilia iis qui in studiis philosophiae cum fructu et sine ullo errore versari student. It places Perera’s treatise within its historical context—that of the Jesuit Roman college of the 1560s—in order to elucidate how his promotion of his own idea of a Christian philosophy for schools provoked criticism among his fellow Romans Diego de Ledesma and Achille Gagliardi. It shows the position of Perera’s project within the multiple forms of Aristotelianism in the early modern period and how Perera was able to justify his own position as ‘sufficiently pious’ through his emphasis on philology as an approach to philosophy. Perera came up with a strictly Christian philosophy curriculum by integrating different trends of Aristotle’s philosophy into his own, even including approaches that were considered impious by some of his fellow Jesuits.


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