Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Suparna Roychoudhury
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Scientific Fields

This chapter offers a reading of the most famous Shakespearean lines on imagination, a speech by Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, arguing that this speech presents not a unified but a pluralistic idea of what imagination is—a story; a section of the brain; a shape; a substance. To account for this variegation, the chapter summarizes the long intellectual history of imagination, emphasizing the cognitive or psychological tradition founded by Aristotle. The chapter then examines the complex and often confused early modern discourse of imagination, arguing that these confusions indicate the ways in which proto-scientific fields were destabilizing faculty psychology. To understand Theseus’ polysemic idea of imagination, and Shakespeare’s more generally, we must explore the various contexts in which imagination’s earlier philosophy was tested or recast by the early modern history of science; these contexts will be explored in subsequent chapters.

Phantasmatic Shakespeare

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suparna Roychoudhury
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Scientific Fields

The book argues that Shakespeare’s representations of imagination—the many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams in his works—draw their complexity from the interdiscursive confrontations between early modern faculty psychology and the history of science. During the Renaissance, imagination (also called the fantasy or fancy) was understood as a faculty of the soul, that which creates the phantasms or images needed by the mind to perceive, reason, and recall. The book explores how this psychology of imagination, developed by ancient and medieval philosophers, was disrupted in the sixteenth century by developments in proto-scientific fields such as anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history. Guided by Shakespeare’s plays and poems, different chapters consider different aspects of imagination destabilized during this time—its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature. In giving aesthetic expression to the epistemological problems surrounding the idea of imagination, Shakespeare made this element of cognitive theory the property of literary art.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

Early Modern History of Ottoman Bilād al-Šām

Arabica ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 399
Author(s):  
Thomas Philipp
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of

Sixteenth-Century Reception of Aquinas by Cajetan

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Cajetan Cuddy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Concrete Application

Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534) was a uniquely gifted Thomistic philosopher, theologian, biblical exegete, and churchman. His reception of Aquinas holds a meridian place in intellectual history because of the profundity his Thomistic commentaries manifest in their pages and the influence his writings exercised in Catholic life and thought. Cajetan’s was an intensive reception of Aquinas’ universal and necessary first principles. And this intensive reception proceeded according to two movements of concrete application: a defensive movement that responds to the objections of Aquinas’ critics, and an extensive movement that applies Aquinas’ principles to the questions and controversies of his own fifteenth- and sixteenth-century period. Cajetan’s philosophical, theological, and exegetical work received their shape from the fundamental first principles that governed Aquinas’ own thought. Finally, Cajetan’s reception of Aquinas accounts for both the manner and the significance of his ecclesial service in early modern history.

The Geographies and Methodologies of Religion in the Journal of Early Modern History

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 545-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Clossey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Invasive Approach ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of

Looking at historiography and methodology for the risks of Eurocentrism and presentism, this essay reflects on the study of the history of religion in the two decades of the Journal of Early Modern History’s life to date. It first counts the locations of the subjects of the Journal’s articles, both generally and specifically on religion, to measure patterns in geographical focus. Considering the language these articles use to describe religion, the essay then draws a contrast between treating religion on its own terms and adapting a more analytical, though invasive, approach. Andrew Gow’s emphasis on continuity between the medieval and the early-modern inspires a late-traditional perspective that avoids both eurocentrism and presentism.

The Vienna stela of Meryre

1987 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-216
Author(s):  
David Berg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Eighteenth Dynasty ◽  
History Of

The fragmentary stela of Meryre, presently in Vienna (no. 5814), is one of very few objects known from this Eighteenth Dynasty individual. This article presents two partial sketches of the stela found in a collection of the sketches and rubbings of the nineteenth-century traveller Paul Durand which is presently in Montreal. One allows us partially to reconstruct the missing fragment of the stela, and records of dates in the collection permit some educated guesses about the early modern history of the stela.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document