For God, King, and People

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander B. Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Other ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Late Arrival ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This book resituates the beginnings of English colonization in America in a Renaissance and post-Reformation context in which providential thought and conceptualizations of sovereignty were complexly entwined. Fearful that God resented the timidity with which English monarchs brandished their divinely granted power, colonizers encouraged a bold reimagining of royal duties as extending across the vast Atlantic. At the same time, they theorized colonization as a calling to which all resolute Christians were lawfully bound, thus setting into motion a Virginian colonizing enterprise in which planters, even more than monarchs themselves, determined the contours of licit conduct on the other side of the ocean. In reconstructing the evolution of the Virginia venture from the era of Elizabethan captains to the Jacobean Virginia Company to the seventeenth-century politics of forging an English commonwealth in the New World, the book recovers especially the extent to which American colonization emerged from the same late Renaissance search for an enduring basis for civil polity that would also spur Thomas Hobbes to formulate his revolutionary idea of the sovereign state. Yet, Hobbes's notion of state sovereignty was a distinctly late arrival in the history of English colonization in America. As a result, Virginia's commonwealth set a precedent for colonies that treated their own civil integrity as comparable to that of the kingdom from which they had sprung.

Apostolic Colleges of the Propagation of the Faith-Old And New World Background

1962 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-58
Author(s):  
Kieran McCarty
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spiritual Conquest

In the history of Spain's spiritual conquest of the New World, a definite cycle of enthusiasm may be observed. In the seventeenth century, for example, there was a noticeable falling off of Spanish missionary effort in the direction of the tribes yet to be converted. It is interesting to speculate on the causes of this phenomenon. An obvious cause, and certainly a contributing one, lies in the very nature of man. Human endeavor in the temporal order tends now to wax, now to wane in enthusiasm, and since the mission effort in question was human as well as divine, this cycle would tend to appear here as well. Around midcentury this problem of lessening enthusiasm became acute.

scholarly journals Making the States’ Translation (1637): Orthodox Calvinist Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

In the study of the history of biblical scholarship, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize biblical philology as a force which, together with the new philosophy and the new science of the seventeenth century, caused the erosion of universal scriptural authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. A case in point is Jonathan Israel's impressive account of how biblical criticism in the hands of Spinoza paved the way for the Enlightenment. Others who have argued for a post-Spinozist rise of biblical criticism include Frank Manuel, Adam Sutcliffe, and Travis Frampton. These scholars have built upon longer standing interpretations such as those of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Hazard. However, scholars in the past two decades such as Anthony Grafton, Scott Mandelbrote and Jean-Louis Quantin have altered the picture of an exegetical revolution inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712). These heterodox philosophers in fact relied on philological research that had been largely developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such research was carried out by scholars who had no subversive agenda. This is to say that the importance attached to a historical and philological approach to the biblical text had a cross-confessional appeal, not just a radical-political one.

The politic history of early Stuart parliaments

2018 ◽  
pp. 172-193
Author(s):  
Noah Millstone
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Human Intentionality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Church Councils

This essay traces the development of a particular way of writing the history of parliament: the politic history. A creation of the late Renaissance, politic histories preferred to explain events neither through divine intervention, nor through imperceptible forces and contingency, but rather through human intentionality. Following classical and contemporary models such as Tacitus, Commynes and Guicciardini, English politic historians wove narratives of vice, secrecy and dissimulation. The essay explores how, in the early seventeenth century, historians appropriated the modes of politic composition and applied them to new institutional settings: university elections, church councils and especially parliaments. It concludes with an analysis of the most impressive politic history of the early Stuart parliament, Sir John Eliot’s Negotium posterorum. Composed during Eliot’s imprisonment after 1629, the Negotium posterorurm is clearly the first part of a formal, politic history of Charles I’s reign, heavily modelled on Tacitus and with parliament as its central stage. Eliot’s project suggests how politic narration could be applied to the recent past, helping to produce historicised accounts of the present.

Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Sephardic Jews ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Jewish Descent

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).

The English Cassinese (1611-50)

1975 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lunn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of

The Englishmen who were members of the Italian or Cassinese Benedictine Congregation in the seventeenth century have been neglected, mainly because, unlike the Englishmen who joined Spanish monasteries, the Cassinese did not perpetuate themselves and thus did not produce historians who would keeptheir memory alive. This is a pity, since several of them are important figures: Robert Gregory Sayer (1560-1602), who gained an international reputation as a moral theologian, which, it has been claimed, remains unrivalled among Englishmen; Roland Thomas Preston (1567-1647), whose prolific literaryoutput against the papal deposing power at least assures him of a place in the history of Anglo-Gallicanism; and Robert Anselm Beech (1568-1634), who was the agent in Rome who negotiated the setting up of the Benedictine mission to England and defended it against attack.The Anglo-Italians failed to perpetuate themselves because in 1616 they refused to unite with the other English monks, mainly in order to remain loyal to Preston, whom the others condemned for his writings. This article deals, first, with their attempt to found a community of their own at Paris, and, then, with their final years as a group. These two episodes have not been noticed before, and they have to be reconstructed entirely from manuscripts in the archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, the Abbey of S. Pietro at Perugia, the Congregation ‘de Propaganda Fide’ and the Vatican Library.

Frontier Politics, Providentialism, and “Hobbism” in Bacon’s Rebellion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander B. Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Bacon's Rebellion ◽  
Measured Response

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) was an uprising in the Virginia colony that its participants experienced as both a civil breakdown and a period of intense cosmic disorder. Although Thomas Hobbes had introduced his theory of state sovereignty a quarter century earlier, the secularizing connotations of his highly naturalized conceptualization of power had yet to make major inroads on a post-Reformation culture that was only gradually shifting from Renaissance providentialism to Enlightenment rationalism. Instead, the period witnessed a complicated interplay of providential beliefs and Hobbist doctrines. In the aftermath of the English civil war (1642–1651), this mingling of ideologies had prompted the Puritans’ own experimentation with Hobbes’s ideas, often in tandem with a Platonic spiritualism that was quite at odds with Hobbes’s own philosophical skepticism. The Restoration of 1660 had given an additional boost to Hobbism as his ideas won a number of prominent adherents in Charles II’s government. The intermingling of providentialism and Hobbism gave Bacon’s Rebellion its particular aura of heightened drama and frightening uncertainty. In the months before the uprising, the outbreak of a war on the colony’s frontier with the Doeg and Susquehannock peoples elicited fears in the frontier counties of a momentous showdown between faithful planters and God’s enemies. In contrast, Governor Sir William Berkeley’s establishmentarian Protestantism encouraged him to see the frontiersmen’s vigilantism as impious, and the government’s more measured response to the conflict as inherently godlier because tied to time-tested hierarchies and institutions. Greatly complicating this already confusing scene, the colony also confronted a further destabilizing force in the form of the new Hobbist politics emerging from the other side of the ocean. In addition to a number of alarming policies emanating from Charles II’s court in the 1670s that sought to enhance the English state’s supremacy over the colonies, Hobbes’s doctrines also informed the young Nathaniel Bacon Jr.’s stated rationale for leading frontiersmen against local Indian communities without Berkeley’s authorization. Drawing on the Hobbes-influenced civil war-era writings of his relation the Presbyterian lawyer Nathaniel Bacon, the younger Bacon made the protection of the colony’s Christian brotherhood a moral priority that outweighed even the preservation of existing civil relations and public institutions. While Berkeley’s antagonism toward this Hobbesian argument led him to lash out forcibly against Bacon as a singularly great threat to Virginia’s commonwealth, it was ordinary Virginians who most consequentially resisted Bacon’s strange doctrines. Yet a division persisted. Whereas the interior counties firmly rejected Bacon’s Hobbism in favor of the colony’s more traditional bonds to God and king, the frontier counties remained more open to a Hobbesian politics that promised their protection.

Komeniáni v Karteziánském Zrcadle

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-77
Author(s):  
Petr Pavlas ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Renaissance

The article picks up the threads of especially Martin Muslow’s 1990s research and describes the distinctiveness of the “relational metaphysics of resemblance” in the middle of the seventeenth century. The late Renaissance metaphysical outlines, carried out in the Comenius circle, are characteristic for their relationality, accent on universal resemblance, providentialism, pansensism, sensualism, triadism – and also for their effort to define metaphysical terms properly. While Comenians share the last – and only the last – feature with Cartesians, they differ in the other features. Therefore, Cartesians and Comenians cannot come to terms in the issue of the proper definitions either. Quite on the contrary, they oppose each other on this issue. By means of Johann Clauberg’s criticism of Georg Ritschel and René Descartes’s only supposedly “mysterious” and “solipsist” second meditation, the article turns a Cartesian mirror to the Comenian metaphysical project. In its light, the definitions of Georg Ritschel, Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld and Jan Amos Comenius turn out to be unacceptable for Cartesians (and also for Thomists and, in part, for Baconians). Despite their superficially Aristotelian-scholastic appearance, their content is notably Paracelsian-Campanellian (with a Timplerian foundation). Even though Comenian definitions of metaphysical terms had been refused and refuted by Cartesians, they experienced a second lifespan in their robust influence on Leibniz and Newton.

The Arse Poetica of Thomas Hobbes: On the Composition and Reception of De Mirabilibus Pecci

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-357
Author(s):  
Jessica Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Geological Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Mock Epic

This article provides a two-part study of Thomas Hobbes’ De Mirabilibus Pecci, a Latin poem composed very early in his career. Part one examines the poem as a product of Hobbes’ participation in the recreational literary culture of Caroline England, in particular analysing the influence of mock-epic and burlesque traditions that would continue to shape Hobbes’ writings but also studying how the poem offers compelling evidence for his early preoccupation with the laws of motion, with geological processes such as the creation and erosion of stone formations, and with the philosophy of Lucretius. Part two recounts the extraordinary history of the poem’s reception in the last decades of the seventeenth century. The poem’s familiarity among Hobbes’ allies and adversaries alike helped to cement his reputation as a master of scoffing and drollery, as an opponent of the experimental science practiced by the Royal Society, and as a freethinker or atheist.

River and Ocean

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-184
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The One

This chapter looks at Scriptures, whose ambiguity is seen both as a difficulty to shake people out of exegetical complacency and as an inspired involution of multiple meanings on the page. These meanings are not only allegorical, mystical, or typological, but also literal, according to a widespread Catholic idea neglected by previous historians of biblical scholarship. The doctrine of multiple literal senses marked yet another battleground between the company of two armies, Protestant and Catholic—barring two or three defections—in the early seventeenth century. It encapsulated a profound distinction between two views of Scripture: the one a river to be cleansed and traced to the source, the other an ocean in which to swim, even to abandon oneself. Why, then, has this controversy been entirely ignored by scholarship? As modernity encroached, the doctrine became an embarrassment to Catholics, and in 1845 a professor of theology at Louvain, Jan-Theodor Beelen, wrote a treatise against it. But there are deeper reasons for the neglect. The history of biblical hermeneutics as written to date is more than usually Whiggish, seeking the precursors to Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the German and Lutheran backstory has therefore seemed inevitable, and from this perspective Catholic hermeneutics since Luther and Erasmus has been an irrelevance. Subsequently, the occlusion of the Catholic voice was attended by a narrowing of the possibilities of what biblical interpretation could be.

A Brief Semantic History of Securitas

Security ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Sense Of Security ◽  
Positive Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Semantic History ◽  
Cultural Connotations ◽  
Historical Usage

What does the term “security” express? What are or have been its semantic functions: its shifting cultural connotations and its divergent discursive values? This chapter examines the figures and metaphors that have been deployed to think about security across the ages. It outlines the main stations along the word's complex itinerary through historical usage. It begins with a cursory overview that marks the major turning points of this history, beginning with ancient Rome and concluding with seventeenth-century Europe. Among the topics covered is the positive sense of security that established its position as a central topic in political philosophy in the work of Thomas Hobbes. Throughout, the affirmation of security as a good is fundamentally connected with the power of sovereignty to alleviate the cares and concerns of its subjects. The state emerges as an institution that protects its citizens from all varieties of existential threats, from external aggression as well as from internal discord.

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