Early Modern Spaces in Motion

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
New World ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Earth ◽  
German Speaking

Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in Motion examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of motion in early modern Europe.

Die globale Dichtung des Orlando Furioso

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Federico Italiano
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Hybrid Vehicle ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
As If

AbstractThe epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), one of the most influential texts of Renaissance writing, shows not only a precise cognition of early modern cartographic knowledge, as Alexandre Doroszlaï has illustrated it in Ptolemée et l’hippogriffe (1998), but also performs a complex transmedial translation of cartographic depictions. The journeys around the globe of the Christian paladins Ruggiero and Astolfo narrated by Ariosto are, in fact, performative negotiations between literary and cartographic processes. Riding the Hippograph, the hybrid vehicle par excellence, Ruggiero and Astolfo fly over the Earth as if they were flying over a map. Their journeys do not merely transmedially translate the course to the West pursued by Early Modern Europe. Rather, by translating the map Ariosto performs a new geopoetics that turns away from the symbolic dominance of the East (or “Ent-Ostung”, as Peter Sloterdijk has usefully called it) and offers us one of the first poetic versions of modern globalization.

scholarly journals Exotic origins: the emblematic biogeographies of early modern scaly mammals

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Old World ◽  
East Indian ◽  
Natural Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Reciprocal Process

Exotic natural objects brought to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mutable and malleable things. They were constructed and assimilated into European world-views in a reciprocal process of change as they moved around early modern Europe. In particular, the provenance of natural objects and the associated rich symbolic resonances were central to their natural histories. The distinctions between Orient and Occident had divided the world since antiquity and were given a range of new senses in this period. The location of these two ‘Indies’, and their relationship to one another, were neither static nor always geographically defined. This article focuses on two rich examples of this natural historical construction in relation to images of the Indies: the Old World pangolin, or scaly anteater, and its New World counterpart, the armadillo. Initially, pangolins were understood as East Indian ‘scaly lizards’, armadillos as West Indian. But from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their geographical identities and symbolic associations were entangled as these creatures came to embody colonial anxieties and resonances. The ‘India’ of the scaly lizard became the ‘Indies’ of the scaled mammals, both East and West. Examining the reception and treatment of examples such as these in European cabinets and natural histories, offers new insights into European relationships with regions of the world seen as distant and wonderfully bountiful.

Feminine Evil and Witchcraft

Evil ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 264-272
Author(s):  
Sarah K. Pinnock
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Crop Failure ◽  
The World ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe

The brief Reflection looks at the history of witches in both early modern Europe and the New World. Thousands of women were condemned as witting or unwitting sources of physical and metaphysical evil. Witches were blamed for a variety of misfortunes including illness, crop failure, and the deaths of babies or mothers during childbirth. Evils committed by witches were objects of lurid fascination attributed to demonic forces, documented by monks, priests, and church authorities. Eroticized accusations reflected profound misogyny and suspicion toward those who did not conform to the patriarchal norms of church and society. Many of these witches were put to death in horrible ways, thereby adding rather than subtracting from the evils in the world.

Mapping Knowledge Exchange in Early Modern Europe: Intellectual and Technological Geographies and Network Representations

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Van Den Heuvel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Spatial Distributions ◽  
Virtual Networks ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic

This paper discusses the development of digital intellectual and technological geographies showing spatial distributions of information and proposes to combine these with network representations of actors and documents relevant for the history knowledge exchange in Early Modern Europe. The amount of technical and fortification drawings that were copied throughout Europe and the New World and the different nature of networks in which they were exchanged raises the question whether they belonged to the Republic of Letters, as some authors claim. We argue that instead of trying to explain knowledge exchange in Early Modern Europe by focusing on The Republic of Letters as one entity consisting of scholars , it might be more useful to reconstruct the spatial distribution of actors and of (non-)textual documents in virtual networks of knowledge. Inspired by the term “deep maps” coined by David Bodenhamer, we will introduce the concept of “deep networks” and explore the requirements for their future development. Hereto, we focus on the representation of historical evidence and of uncertainties in analyses of intellectual and technological letters and drawings and hybrid combinations of these.

scholarly journals ‘Un fiume piccolissimo di quel mare immenso’. Universalism, Navigation and the Rethinking of the Mediterranean in Campanella

2017 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Jean-Paul DE LUCCA
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Transfer Of Knowledge ◽  
Old World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The City ◽  
Radical Shift

This contribution offers an intertextual reading of Tommaso Campanella’s early political writings and his utopia, The City of the Sun, with a view of bringing to the fore his stance on the radical shift in early modern maritime geopolitics. Campanella’s proposals for the establishment of world governance were informed by his enthusiasm for inventions such as the navigational compass, and by his emphasis on maritime prowess as a necessary condition for creating a universal monarchy. The dialogical and poetic character of The City of the Sun, and the choice of its imaginary interlocutors, may suggest an interpretation of Campanella’s utopia as a distinctively Mediterranean encounter between the ‘Old World’ and the ‘New World’. The transfer of knowledge and communication thus emerge as crucial lynchpins in Campanella’s project for universal reform and unity.

Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay J. Starkey
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Southern Hemisphere ◽  
Spatial Relationships ◽  
Water Crisis ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Dry Land ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Current Water ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

Both the Christian Bible and Aristotle’s works suggest that water should entirely flood the earth. Though many ancient, medieval, and early modern Europeans relied on these works to understand and explore the relationships between water and earth, sixteenth-century Europeans particularly were especially concerned with why dry land existed. This book investigates why they were so interested in water’s failure to submerge the earth when their predecessors had not been. Analyzing biblical commentaries as well as natural philosophical, geographical, and cosmographical texts from these periods, Lindsay Starkey shows that European sea voyages to the southern hemisphere combined with the traditional methods of European scholarship and religious reformations led sixteenth-century Europeans to reinterpret water and earth’s ontological and spatial relationships. The manner in which they did so also sheds light on how we can respond to our current water crisis before it is too late.

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