Gentle Labour: Jesuit Georgic in the Age of Louis XIV

Loyola's Bees ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Annabel Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Classical Style

René Rapin, the father of Jesuit georgic poetry, manoeuvred his intellectual life between the ancients and the moderns with an instinct for conciliation and compromise that made him an effective apostle to the world. He is best remembered for his Horti, a classical-style didactic poem in four books that celebrated the victory of the moderns over the ancients in horticultural art. His poem, which is secular in appearance, is motivated by (mildly concealed) religion and Jesuito-political impulses, and cultural and literary impulses, particularly those of Virgil. This chapter discusses some of the developments in the Italian Renaissance georgic poetry to better understand Rapin's contribution to the early modern Latin georgic. It considers the latter Latin poems on horticulture and sericulture, which bear resemblance to the ancient model yet are considerably shorter than Virgil's. These latter georgic poems predicated on a Nature that is mild and marvellous, and centred on the artistic manipulation of Nature. In the Italian Renaissance, the ‘recreational georgics’ were dominated by pastoral ease, which is ironic, given the prominent thematic of labour in the original georgics. While the georgics were poems that celebrated nature and labour in gardens, by the turn of the eighteenth century, French Jesuits had identified the didactic genre of georgics as a flexible medium for exhibiting their modern Latinity and advertising their honnêteté.

scholarly journals “None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others”: Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2024
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories

The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

scholarly journals THE SOCIAL, PERSONAL, AND SPIRITUAL DYNAMICS OF GHOST STORIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-359
Author(s):  
LAURA SANGHA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn early modern England, spectral figures were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes. Yet whilst historians have established the importance of ghosts as cultural resources that were used to articulate a range of contemporary concerns about worldly life, we know less about the social and personal dynamics that underpinned the telling, recording, and circulation of ghost stories at the time. This article therefore focuses on a unique set of manuscript sources relating to apparitions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England to uncover a different vantage point. Drawing on the life-writing and correspondence of the antiquarian who collected the narratives, it lays bare concerns about familial relations and gender that ghost stories were bound up with. Tracing the way that belief in ghosts functioned at an individual level also allows the recovery of the personal religious sensibilities and spiritual imperatives that sustained and nourished continuing belief in ghosts. This subjective angle demonstrates that ghost stories were closely intertwined with processes of grieving and remembering the dead, and they continued to be associated with theological understandings of the afterlife and the fate of the soul.

Slave economies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Harrigan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Difference

Early modern French commentators saw slavery as a practice that was ubiquitous throughout the world, even threatening in its Islamic forms, and that was intimately associated with captivity. A further strand in creating the condition of the slave was made up of discourses of human difference. The site of the difference was very mobile; while there are hints of early proto-racial thinking at the turn of the eighteenth century, religion was one of various strands through which belonging and difference was conceptualised. Contrary to recent criticism, this chapter shows that representations of African slavery were based on ambiguous legal, commercial and societal foundations. Slavery was also justified by early capitalist rationale testifying to European confidence in production. Amerindian slavery was thought non-commercial and honour-based, and fascinated in depictions of the consumption of human beings. French accounts of the Caribbean slave economy illustrate the key strands of what the proprietorship of African slaves meant. The enslavement of baptised Africans was viewed with some diversity by ecclesiastics, with some questioning the principle of slavery, and some actively condoning it. Baptism was a powerful sacrament which implied levels of temporal belonging, but the coexistence of secular and spiritual planes could be complex or uneasy.

Goods at Pawn

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-238
Author(s):  
Anne E. C. McCants
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Behavior ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
High Price ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Consumer Loans ◽  
The World ◽  
Widespread Access

The pawnshop was a critical component of urban credit networks in early modern Europe, serving as a source of ready cash in an era before there was widespread access to deposit banking and formal consumer loans. This article examines the use of the pawnshop, among other financial strategies, such as shop credit and loans between kin and neighbors, by a sample of poor to middling citizen households in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. It also evaluates the multiple links between consumer behavior and the acquisition of either savings or debt. Petty credit from the pawnshop came at a high price, and its use presumed prior access to consumer goods suitable for pawning. Thus we find that the poorest households did not rely on the pawnshop as often or as extensively as their better-situated peers for whom collateral was more easily obtained. Better-situated households also enjoyed easier access to shop credit, the terms of which were more favorable for the consumer. None of these households, however, were in positions to save to the extent necessary for participation in the larger capital markets of Amsterdam and the world.

scholarly journals A Vietnamese Reading of the Master’s Classic: Pha .m Nguyê ˜n Du’s Humble Comments on the Analects as an Example of Transformative Learning

Asian Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-199
Author(s):  
Nam NGUYEN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Analects ◽  
Contemporary Education ◽  
Original Reading

Phạm Nguyễn Du’s influential text Humble Comments on the Analects (Luận Ngữ Ngu Án 論語愚按) is an outstanding example of a Vietnamese adaptation and reworking of an East Asian intellectual tradition. In organizing his work, Phạm departed from convention by rearranging the extant chapters of the Analects into four “books”: “Sage” (Thánh 聖), “Learning” (Học 學), “Official” (Sĩ 仕), and “Politics” (Chính 政). Moreover, Phạm placed particular emphasis on the “Learning” book, and thus underscored his contention that the classic text was especially relevant and meaningful to eighteenth-century Vietnam. This paper attempts to read Phạm’s work in the contexts of both Confucian tradition and contemporary education. First, it examines Phạm’s composition of the Humble Comments based on Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning. Phạm’s writing process in this work presents a fascinating case of transformative learning, in which the author questions received assumptions about the world and himself, puts forward new propositions, and elaborates these via an original reading of a classic. Through the analysis of Phạm Nguyễn Du’s life and his preface to the Humble Comments, one can also gain a better view of the Vietnamese reception of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, and more particularly, of Zhu’s dictum of “learning for the sake of one’s self” (weiji zhi xue 為己 之學). Lastly, this dictum will be reappraised to show its validity in contemporary educational contexts.

Jansenism and politics in the eighteenth century

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 253-273
Author(s):  
John McManners
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Port Royal ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Church ◽  
A Share

‘All the gold in the world and all the promises of heaven’ could not persuade Sainte-Beuve to carry on his study of jansenism into the eighteenth century. The spirit of Port-Royal was not there, ‘or at least it was only found in traces, dried up like a branch of a river that has turned aside into the sands and lost itself among the rocks...It is found even less in the entirely political Jansenism which was, or which appeared so considerable for a moment in the eighteenth century, and which allowed many to be of the party, without being of the dogma, or indeed, of religion at all’. The story of Jansenism after the death of Louis XIV is indeed a story of the war of the parlements against the crown – remonstrances, exiles. writs, denunciations, pamphlets; of the rising discontent of the lower clergy, demanding economic justice and a share in the government of the church; of the convulsionist movement, a strange spiritual underworld of masochism and miracles. Upon this barbarous scene of political and social strife and crude illiterate spirituality Sainte-Beuve turned his back, and those who have walked with him through the magic world of Port-Royal will understand his bitterness. The journée du guichet when Angélique Arnauld renounced human affections, the night of fire of 23 November when Pascal wept tears of joy, the cold ethereal beauty of the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne, the intellectual adventure of the alliance with cartesianism, the grammar, the logic, the translation of the new testament, the plays of Racine and the Pensées of Pascal – the eighteenth century can offer nothing like this.

Surat

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-238
Author(s):  
Martha Chaiklin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Port City ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The City

In the eighteenth century, Surat was perhaps the single most important port city of the Moghul empire, if not the world. Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese ships were called from Africa and Brazil to obtain Gujarati textiles, side by side with dhows from the throughout the Indian Ocean. This textile trade was underpinned by ivory, large amounts of which poured in the city both by caravan and by sea. Even though Surat, or even Gujarat, was not elephant habitat in the early modern period, Surat became a significant port for the import of ivory into India. The need for tusks of an appropriate size for bangles created symbiosis of trade between Gujarati textiles and ivory that directly affected the prosperity of Surat. The chapter thus links Surat to the Indian Ocean World through ivory and demonstrate the interconnected nature of ivory and textiles in the Gujarat region.

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate: Early Modern Frontiers and the Renaissance of an Ancient Islamic Institution

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 485-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Casale
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wide Gap

This article revisits the question of the “Ottoman caliphate,” the doctrine defining the Ottoman sultan as the universal sovereign and protector of Muslims throughout the world in addition to the territorial ruler of the Ottoman Empire itself. In existing scholarship, a wide gap divides those who describe this doctrine as a construct of modernity, with a history that goes back no farther than the late eighteenth century, and those who maintain a direct line of transmission from the earlier Abbasid caliphate to the Ottoman dynasty. This article proposes an “early modern alternative” to these two opposing narratives, which acknowledges a dynamic history of reinvention for the caliphate but locates its rebirth not in the period of colonial modernity but rather in the sweeping reconfiguration of space, time, and sovereignty ushered in by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

A Commerce of Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of

A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760 tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Aleppo, Syria, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book reconstructs the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, and brings to light the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge draws attention to connections between the seemingly aloof world of the early modern university and spheres of commercial and diplomatic life, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs whom they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, the book shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. It then argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.

India and the Reshaping of the French Colonial Policy (1759-1789)

Itinerario ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
François-Joseph Ruggiu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
French India

It is well-known that in 1763 the French presence in India was reduced by the treaty of Paris to five trading posts, or comptoirs, whose names—Pondichéry, Yanaon, Karikal, Mahé and Chandernagor—were erstwhile learned by heart by the French schoolchildren. French India lasted until 1954 and sparked a wide scientific interest in France at least until the beginning of the 1970s. Since that time, along with the history of French colonial policy during the early modern period as a whole, the study of French India has largely gone out of fashion. The last decades of the Ancien Regime have especially been concerned by this disaffection. The best current French specialists of these parts of the world, like Philippe Haudrère, have focused on the activities of the Compagnie françaises des Indes, which was suspended in 1769, or, like Jacques Weber, devoted themselves to the history of the French presence in India during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Even if the period of Dupleix is more studied, the history of French India during the eighteenth century does not seem to tempt many researchers nowadays.

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