The Tudors Viewed by French Romantic Artists

Author(s):  
STEPHEN BANN

This chapter singles out two features of the cult of British historical themes in French Romantic painting, and focuses on the most prominent of the artists who cultivated such scenes involving Tudors and Stuarts: Paul Delaroche. It argues that the pronounced nineteenth-century French interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history was a form of displacement, so that Delaroche's painting of the execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834), for example, opened up for the French viewer a space in which to negotiate memories of the Terror within the relative comfort of a more distant and foreign historical moment.

1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann P. Sommerville

The central argument of this article is that English political thinking in the early seventeenth century was not distinctively English. More particularly, we shall see that a number of English writers put forward political doctrines that were precisely the same as those of Continental theorists who are usually described as absolutists. If the Continental thinkers were absolutists, then so were the English writers. The theory of absolutism vested sovereign power in the ruler alone and forbade disobedience to the sovereign's commands unless they contradicted the injunctions of God Himself. It is with the theory of absolutism and not with its practice that this article is concerned.To claim that English and Continental ideas closely resembled each other, and that absolutism flourished on both sides of the Channel, is to challenge not only the old Whig interpretation of English history but also the newer views of so-called revisionists. True, the revisionists often say that they reject Whig ideas. But in fact they adopt some of the central contentions of the Whigs. In order to set what follows into a broad historiographical context, it may be worthwhile to elaborate a little on this theme.Whig historians of the nineteenth century were keen to emphasize the distinctiveness of England's political development. The Anglo-Saxons, they argued, brought free and democratic institutions into England from their Teutonic forests. Elsewhere in Europe, liberty succumbed to the authoritarianism of popes, kings, and Roman lawyers, but the sea kept foreigners and their unpleasant ways out of England, and there freedom lived on. When the Conqueror came, the old English liberties were for a while in jeopardy.


Author(s):  
George E. Dutton

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.


Author(s):  
Erin Webster

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy

AbstractA reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.


1945 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-140
Author(s):  
Maurice W. Armstrong

Thomas Underhill, a citizen of London during the Commonwealth, described that period of English history as “Hell Broke Loose.” Partly as a result of Anabaptist influence, and partly as a continuation of the indigenous Lollard movement, large numbers of persons in every part of England separated themselves from the Established Church and formed themselves into independent religious societies. Some of these groups were very eccentric in their beliefs and practices. Thomas Edwards, their bitter opponent, made a Catalogue of “the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices … vented and acted in England” between the years 1642 and 1646, which he called, Gangraena. In it he distinguishes no less than two hundred and ten errors which were held by one or other of the sixteen groups into which he divides the sectaries. The sixteen were, “Independents, Brownists, Chiliasts or Millenaries, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Manifestarians or Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers and Waiters, Perfectists, Socinians, Arians, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturalists, Sceptics and Quietists.” The Parliamentary army especially abounded with men whose “great religion” was “liberty of conscience and liberty of preaching.” G. P. Gooch and others have shown how deeply the roots of modern democracy are embedded in the religious struggles of these seventeenth century sects. Most of them disappeared with the Commonwealth, or were absorbed in the rising Quaker movement, but certain fundamental principles for which they stood continued to exist and to mold public opinion.


2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson

This essay explores a particular moment in the history of commodity fetishism by means of an examination of Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814). The novel, which is explicitly concerned with the social changes facing early-nineteenth-century England, reveals that at this historical moment the commodity inspired emotions of a particular kind: it was idealized and perceived as attractively individualized, aloof, exotic, and changeable, and it elicited a passionate and sometimes even painful form of desire. In The Wanderer Burney explores the human repercussions of this new way of engaging with objects in the marketplace. She reveals, moreover, the extent to which the fetishism of the commodity reflected not just developments within the economy but also political change: under the influence of the French Revolution the charisma once generated by social status was transferred to the economic realm, where, embodied in the commodity, it gave rise to a pleasurable but masochistic reverence. Burney'sargument for the usefulness of economic independence necessarily leads her to appreciate the commodity fetishism she describes: even while she develops a labor theory of value, Burney promotes a mystification of the commodity by insisting on the aloof independence of both labor and its products. Thus, Burney uses the apparent autonomy of things——which Marx decries——as a means to argue for the autonomy of the makers of those things.


1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shula Marks ◽  
Anthony Atmore

The relationships of the peoples of southern Africa after the establishment and expansion of the white settlement in the mid-seventeenth century can be seen in terms of both conflict and interdependence, both resistance and collaboration. The conflict often split over into warfare, not only between black and white, but also within both groups. As time passed, firearms came to be used by ever-widening circles of the combatants, often as much the result of the increased collaboration and interdependence between peoples as of the increased conflict. As Inez Sutton has pointed out, ‘in contrast to most of the rest of [sub-Saharan] Africa, the presence of a settler population ensured that the supply of arms was the most modern rather than the most obsolete’, and on the whole non-whites were acutely aware of changes in the manufacture of firearms in the nineteenth century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-129
Author(s):  
KRISTAN COCKERILL

ABSTRACT Despite the long-understood variability in the Mississippi River, the upper portions of the river have historically received less attention than the lower reach and this culminated in the lower river dominating twentieth century river management efforts. Since the seventeenth century, there have been multiple tendencies in how the upper river was characterized, including relatively spare notes about basic conditions such as channel width and flow rates which shifted to an emphasis on romantic descriptions of the riparian scenery by the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, by the late nineteenth century the upper river was routinely portrayed as a flawed entity requiring human intervention to fix it. While the tone and specific language changed over time, there remained a consistent emphasis that whatever was being reported about the river was scientifically accurate.


2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

The ArgumentIn this essay I will sketch a few instances of how, and a few forms in which, the “invisible” became an epistemic category in the development of the life sciences from the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to most of the other papers in this issue, I do not so much focus on the visualization of various little entities, and the tools and contexts in which a visual representation of these things was realized. I will be more concerned with the basic problem of introducing entities or structures that cannot be seen, as elements of an explanatory strategy. I will try to review the ways in which the invisibility of such entities moved from the unproblematic status of just being too small to be accessible to the naked or even the armed eye, to the problematic status of being invisible in principle and yet being indispensable within a given explanatory framework. The epistemological concern of the paper is thus to sketch the historical process of how the “unseen” became a problem in the modern life sciences. The coming into being of the invisible as a space full of paradoxes is itself the product of a historical development that still awaits proper reconstruction.


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