scholarly journals Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Walker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Ars Moriendi ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Doctor Faustus

“Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” argues that demonic beings and their temporal experiences serve as useful ways to conceptualize human beings existing in multiple timelines in Marlowe’s play. Plotting Satan’s histories in the Bible, demonology, and the ars moriendi tradition, the essay trace how early modern authors attempted to outline precisely how demonic temporality differed from humanity’s own constricted timescapes. Marlowe’s play, however, undercuts any confidence that early modern readers might have gained from these traditions, and I show how Mephistopheles furthers Faustus’s flawed conception of time as strictly earthly. Mephistopheles, too, is bound by certain temporal demands, particularly when he is forced to arrive upon the clowns Robin and Rafe’s ludic conjurations. Ultimately, Mephistopheles manipulates Faustus’s sense of temporality altogether, and the magus only learns at the very end of the play the true import of “everlasting” and Mephistopheles’s role, his experiences, within that sense of infinitude. In staging an aborted death scene that echoes the first half of ars moriendi texts, Marlowe’s disengagement from the genre rests on differences in understanding demonic temporality.

“The Body of This Death”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Physical Constitution

In Romans 7:24, Paul utters a cry that has echoed down the centuries: “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Paul’s moving outcry attracted the sustained attention of poets in early modern England, among them Spenser, Donne, and Milton, not only because of Paul’s anguish but also because of his unusual phrasing and figuration. The Bible carefully specifies “this death,” which suggests that the death at issue is spiritual and that it results from sin, not simply from the physical constitution of humankind. Yet physical death is implicit in the Adamic sin that human beings inherit and is thus embedded in their fallen nature. Donne’s sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, and Milton’s figures of Sin and Death explore the inextricability of spirit and flesh in the body that is this death.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Relationship

The recent upturn in biblically based films in Anglophone cinema is the departure point for this Afterword reflecting on the Bible’s impact on popular entertainment and literature in early modern England. Providing a survey of the book’s themes, and drawing together the central arguments, the discussion reminds that literary writers not only read and used the Bible in different ways to different ends, but also imbibed and scrutinized dominant interpretative principles and practices in their work. With this in mind, the Afterword outlines the need for further research into the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

Women, Unfree Labor, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa J. Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Marginalized Women ◽  
Different Populations ◽  
Free Women

This chapter focuses on various and comparative experiences of different populations of women in unfree labor systems in the early modern Atlantic world, beginning with indigenous women in the Americas who suffered the violent consequences of Spanish conquest. It discusses gendered contexts shaping slavery in West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America; the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade; and the consequences for unfree and free women in different communities of North America during the period of international trade in human beings. It centers the experience of sexual exploitation inherent in labor systems in which women brokered no power over their bodies and reproductive lives, elucidating the limitations of archives in which women’s perspectives are largely silenced. Efforts at evacuating the lives of marginalized women from the silences in the archives have offered new insights into women’s lives and changed understandings about everyday experience in the early modern Atlantic world.

Reviews: History and the Media, Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with ‘The Arcades Project’, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books, Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance, Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage, Secret Shakespeare, Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, the Bible in English: Its History and Influence, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, William Blake's Comic Vision, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century, Victorian Shakespeare, 2 Vols, Vol. 1, Theatre, Drama and Performance; Vol. 2, Literature and Culture, Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860–1940, Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature, Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee, Shakespeare and the American NationCannadineDavid (ed.), History and the Media , Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. vii + 175, £19.99.AmbrosiusLloyd E. (ed.), Writing Biography: Historians and their craft , University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. xiii + 166, £34.50.BenjaminWalter, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940 , trans. JephcottEdmund, ed. EilandHoward and JenningsMichael W., Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. vi + 477, £26.50McLaughlinKevin and RosenPhilip (eds), Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with ‘The Arcades Project‘ , Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 219, £10.50.KnappJames A., Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books , Ashgate Publishing, 2003, pp. xvi + 274, £35.JonesMaria, Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xii + 213, £45.Goy-BlanquetDominque, Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage , Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. viii + 312, £63.WilsonRichard, Secret Shakespeare , Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. viii + 26, £15.99 pbDuttonRichard, FindlayAlison and WilsonRichard (eds), Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare , Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. xii + 267, £16.99 pb.CavanaghDermot, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play , Early Modern Literature in History, Palgrave, 2003, pp. x + 197, £45.DaniellDavid, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence , Yale University Press, 2003, pp. xx + 900. £29.95.BarbourReid, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England , University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. x + 417, £42.MakdisiSaree, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s , University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. xviii + 394, $22 pbRawlinsonNick, William Blake's Comic Vision , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xiv + 292, £42.50.ReayBarry, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century , Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 25 illustrations, 7 figs., pp. x + 274, £16.99 pb.MarshallGail and PooleAdrian (eds), Victorian Shakespeare , 2 vols, Vol. 1, Theatre, Drama and Performance; Vol. 2, Literature and Culture , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xv + 213 and pp. xiv + 228, £90.StoneleyPeter, Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860–1940 , Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. x +167, £40.KirkJohn, Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class , University of Wales Press, 2003, pp. 224, £35.ValentineKylie, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature , Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 224, £45.NymanJopi, Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee , New Delhi, Atlantic Publishers and Distributor, 2003, pp. vi + 176, Rupees 375.00SturgessKim C., Shakespeare and the American Nation , Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. x + 234, £45.

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-96
Author(s):  
R.C. Richardson ◽  
David Watson ◽  
Gary Farnell ◽  
John N. King ◽  
M. J. Jardine ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
William Blake ◽  
History Plays ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
The Media ◽  
John Selden ◽  
And Performance ◽  
History Play

Reformation: a Two-edged Sword in the Cause of the Ministry of Women

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-33
Author(s):  
Fleur Houston
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Women's Ministry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Social Challenge ◽  
Normative Expectations ◽  
God's Grace

When Martin Luther mounted an attack on the industry of Indulgences, he affirmed key Reformation principles: human beings are saved by God’s grace alone and the priesthood of all the baptised gives all followers of Christ equal status. This was in conformity with an earlier generation of reformers who saw the Bible as ultimate authority and witnessed to biblical truth against corruption. The logical consequence of this should have been the enabling of women who were so disposed to exercise a theological vocation. In practice, the resulting rupture in religious and social life often affected women for the worse. Educational formation and leadership opportunities were restricted by the closure of convents. While the trade guilds, with their tightly regulated social systems, did not allow scope for women who transgressed normative expectations, their suppression was not necessarily liberating for women. The new social model of the home replaced that of convent and guild and marriage was exalted in place of celibacy. Changes in devotional practice involved loss and gain. Women who did not conform to the domestic norm were treated at best with misogyny and female prophets of the radical Reformation paid for their convictions with their lives. In education, leadership, piety and radical social challenge, women’s options were restricted. However, the key Reformation principles ultimately enabled the development of women’s ministry which was marked by the ordination of Constance Todd 400 years later.

scholarly journals The “sanctity” of marriage – an archaeology of a socio-religious construct: Mythological origins, forms and models

2008 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human Sexuality ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biological Reality ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

The aim of the article is to argue that the sexual difference between female and male should be regarded as soteriologically indifferent. Though a biological reality of being human, sexuality is profoundly influenced by social constructs and the institution of marriage itself is a social construct. In this article the biological and social aspects are taken into account in a theological approach which on the one hand is interested in the relationship between God and human beings, and on the other in the way in which the Bible elucidates sexuality and marriage. The article indicates that the idea of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman as being equal to Godgiven “holy matrimony” has mythological origins. It focuses on these origins and on the multifarious forms of marital arrangements and models.

scholarly journals Autonomia świata a podmiotowość człowieka w ekoteologii

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Jarosław Horowski
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Ecological Problem ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Inherent Value ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World

One of the most difficult problems, which is to be solved by contemporary culture, is the ecological problem. It concerns the culture because the hedonistic and consumerist mentality of man plays an important part in it. Biocentrism states that the ecological problem results from traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world based on the belief that humans are the central and most significant entities in the universe. Biocentrism puts forward a teleological argument for the protection of the environment. It indicates that non-human species have inherent value as well and each organism has a purpose and a reason for being, which should be respected. Biocentrism states that the anthropocentric attitude to the non-human world results from the Christian worldview based on the Bible where it is written that God gives man dominion over all creatures. The author analyses the main issues of the Catholic concept of the relationship between human beings and other creatures. He indicates that ecotheology respects the inherent value of non-human creatures because, as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the modern world Gaudium et spes says: “all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order”, but maintains that the purpose of the world is connected with its relationship to God. The author considers also what is the human subjectivity in behaving towards the environment and what is the dependence between the autonomy of the world and the subjectivity of man in ecotheology. In the end, the author comes to the conclusion that according to ecotheology the ecological problem results from the broken relationship between the human and God and in consequence it the broken relationship between the world and God.

scholarly journals The Impossible Spaces: A Commentary on Gen. 2:8–15

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 656
Author(s):  
Santiago García-Jalón
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Text ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Structural Differences

A close analysis of the text of Gen. 2:8–15, pertaining to the Garden of Eden, shows the structural differences between said text and others from ancient mythologies that mention or describe a paradise. Likewise, that analysis suggests that the data provided by the Bible to locate paradise are merely a narrative device meant to dissipate all doubts as to the existence of a garden where God put human beings. Similar to other spaces that appear in the Bible, the Garden of Eden is, in fact, an impossible place. Throughout the centuries, however, recurring proposals have been made to locate paradise. As time went by, those proposals were progressively modified by the intellectual ideas dominant in any given era, thus leading the representations of the location of Paradise to be further and further away from the information provided by the biblical text.

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