Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Secular Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oppositional Discourse

The introduction traces the intellectual history of resurrection from the Hellenistic era through the Reformation and up to the advent of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. To make the idea of resurrection more compatible with an emerging secular modernity it is gradually modified in the direction of dualism by positing a detachable soul that lives on after death. But the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh lives on as an oppositional discourse that challenges key institutions of an emerging secular modernity including the models of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency it assumes and privileges. The critical potential of the residual idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh is most evident in the most experimental poetry of the century, which I argue anticipates the avant-garde poetry of the early twentieth century theorized by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. The formally experimental poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson is a tool for bringing to light a deranging experience of being vibrant matter at the heart of the socialized self.

Wanting to Be Another Person: Resurrection and Avant-Garde Poetics in George Herbert

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-100
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Body ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
Social Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Voice

George Herbert’s poetry frames the body in the light of an eventual resurrection as a way of deranging any conventional sense of self or identity. Herbert is interested in the hypothesis that beneath the ambitions, emotions, and personal history of his socially conditioned self, there is another self that inheres in the body and that is in some sense “truer” than his social self. Herbert thus uses his poetry to seek a self (and a voice) that is different than the highly acculturated social person “George Herbert.” For Herbert, formally experimental poetry is a way of articulating the voice of this other self. Herbert drives his poetry to the point where his “own” voice is drowned out by a voice that is associated with the body. The chapter also examines what Herbert’s poetic theory of identity implies about an understanding of the emotions which are a key focus of many of Herbert’s poems. The chapter ends by examining the impact Herbert had on readers. By moving from a vision of poetry as representation or as beautiful object to a vision of poetry as social praxis that creates communities, Herbert anticipates avant-gardist movements of the early twentieth century

Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation*

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 1265-1297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.

Das Corpus Doctrinae Philippicum und seine Nachwirkung

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Irene Dingel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Intensive Investigation

Abstract Hardly any corpus doctrinae had as intensive a reception and as wide a dissemination as the Corpus Doctrinae Philippicum (1560). Situating it in the history of the concept of a corpus doctrinae and briefly sketching its origin and goal elucidate the function and significance of this collection of Melanchthon’s writings. An intensive investigation reveals however any connection of this work with the development of the Reformation in Siebenbürgen (ung. Erdély, rum. Transilvania) in the later 16th century. The records of the Siebenbürgen synods mention the Corpus Doctrinae Philippicum occasionally, revealing the extent to which it served as a norm for public teaching. Unique and characteristic for Siebenbürgen is that the Formula of Concord (1577) did not replace this Corpus Doctrinae; it remained influential long into the seventeenth century. It was however interpreted within the horizon of a Wittenberg theology that was marked by the pre-confessional harmony and doctrinal agreement between Luther and Melanchthon while seeking to ignore Philippist interpretations and focusing on the common teachings of both reformers.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517-1625)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

The period 1517–1625 was crucial for the development of political thought. During this time of expanding empires, religious upheaval, and social change, new ideas about the organization and purpose of human communities began to be debated. In particular, there was a concern to understand the political or civil community as bounded, limited in geographical terms and with its own particular structures, characteristics, and history. There was also a growing focus, in the wake of the Reformation, on civil or political authority as distinct from the church or religious authority. To explain these new ideas about political power, the concept of sovereignty began to be used, alongside a new language of reason of state. Yet political theories based upon religion still maintained significant traction, particularly claims for the divine right of kings. In the midst of these developments, the language of natural law became increasingly important as a means of legitimizing political power; natural law provided a rationale for earthly authority that was separate from Christianity and its use enabled new arguments for religious toleration. This book offers a new reading of early modern political thought, drawing on a wide range of sources from Europe and beyond. It makes connections between Christian Europe and the Muslim societies that lay to its south and east, showing the extent to which concerns about the legitimacy of political power were shared. It demonstrates that the history of political thought can both benefit from, and remain distinctive within, the wider field of intellectual history.

Philisophy in Italy

Philosophy ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 10 (38) ◽  
pp. 219-222
Author(s):  
Guido De Ruggiero
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Doctrine

In a posthumous book by F. Meli1 there are joined two interesting studies in the history of philosophy. The first discusses the religious and political doctrines of Fausto Socino and their developments in the thought of the seventeenth century, and the second the rationalistic mentality of Spinoza. The two themes are essentially related, for in the religious rationalism of Socino the author recognizes one of the currents of thought that were to meet later in Spinoza’s philosophy. The first essay has the merit of greater novelty, because Socinian studies have been neglected up to the present and only touched on indirectly, in their repercussions rather than in their origins. For Meli the historical importance of Fausto Socino lies in the fact that he draws from the religious experience of the Reformation a new conception of religion, clearly affirming the principle that Holy Scripture does not aim at conveying abstract knowledge, a scientific doctrine, but on the contrary, as Galileo confirmed, it aims at increasing in us justice, charity, and the moral sense.

Bulghaith al-Darawi and Barthélemy d'Herbelot: Readers of the Qur'an in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-120
Author(s):  
Pier Mattia Tommasino
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Scholars

This paper is an exercise in the history of reading and textual production in seventeeth-century Florence. Through the analysis of a very short and fascinating miscellaneous manuscript (BNCF, MS Magliabechi XXXIV.31), this article aims to disentangle the complex and intertwined relations between European orientalism, Italian intellectual history, and Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an in the seventeenth century. Despite its fragmentary nature, the material, linguistic, and doctrinal features of this miscellaneous manuscript shed new light on the study of Oriental languages in seventeenth-century Florence and, especially, on Barthélemy d'Herbelot's (1625–1695) stay in Tuscany between 1666 and 1671, and the Muslim scholars he worked with and learned from during this time.

Korean Anatomical Charts in the Context of the East Asian Medical Tradition

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 186-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuseok Kim ◽  
Shin Dongwon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Traditional Korean Medicine ◽  
Medical Tradition ◽  
Anatomical Images ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Book ◽  
Pictorial Representations

Abstract This paper examines the characteristics of the illustrations in Heo Jun’s Dong’ui’bo’gam (Treasured Collections of an Eastern Physician), which are the sole distinctively Korean pictorial representations in the history of Korean medical texts. Those anatomical images differ from earlier East Asian anatomical charts in three important ways. First, they embody the view that Daoist practices for preserving health and vitality (yangsheng) are closer to the essence of life than is medicine. Second, unlike existing medical texts, which mainly focused on the organs inside the body and the channels on the surface of the body, they emphasise building up systematic outer ‘bodily form’. Third, they reflect Heo Jun’s regard for the anatomical content of the earlier Inner Canon and the Classic of Difficulties rather than the contributions of positivistic anatomy from and after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and the diagrams of the five zang- organs are devised in accord with such a view. In my view, these three points in Treasured Collections of an Eastern Physician (hereafter Treasured Collection), the most influential medical book since its publication, provides clues to understanding the very conservative character of traditional Korean medicine in the seventeenth century and thereafter.

The Debate about methodus medendi during the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century in England

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 339-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Crignon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ancient Medicine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Ancient Philosopher ◽  
Active Investigation

Following a recent trend in the field of the history of philosophy and medicine, this paper stresses the necessity of recognizing empiricism’s patent indebtedness to the sciences of the body. While the tribute paid to the Hippocratic method of observation in the work of Thomas Sydenham is well known, it seems necessary to take into account a trend more critical of ancient medicine developed by followers of chemical medicine who considered the doctrine of elements and humours to be a typical example of the idols that hinder the improvement of medical knowledge and defend the necessity of experimentation (comparative anatomy, dissection, autopsy, chemical analysis of bodies). In light of the fact that modern discoveries (blood circulation, the lymphatic system, theory of fevers) resulted in a “new frame of human nature,” they developed a critical reading of ancient empiricism. As a consequence, we can distinguish between two distinct anti-speculative traditions in the genesis of philosophical empiricism. The first (which includes Bacon, Boyle and Willis) recommends an active investigation into nature and refers to the figure of Democritus, the ancient philosopher who devoted himself to the dissection of beasts. Defenders of this first tradition refuse point-blank to be called ‘empiricists’, a label which had a very negative meaning during the seventeenth century, when it was used to dismiss charlatans and quacks. The other tradition (including Sydenham and Locke), stressing as it does the role of description and observation, is more sceptical of the ability of dissection or anatomy to give us access to causes of diseases. This later tradition comes closer to the definition of ancient empiricism and to the figure of Hippocrates.


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