Muscovy

2020 ◽  
pp. 319-357
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland

This chapter reviews the nature of the Russian polity in the early modern period and the nature and function of political thought within that polity. It looks at interpretations of the early modern period that became the subject of government supervision following the 1917 Revolution, which had the effect of imposing a crude Marxist framework on interpretations of Muscovite history and Muscovite political thought. It also cites texts on political subjects that were seen as products of a class war, chiefly between proponents of the centralizing government and supporters of a conservative boyar opposition. The chapter talks about historians in the West that oppose the formerly dominant image of an all-powerful government commanding a powerless, supine society. It analyses the cultural context for political thinking in Muscovy that was neglected by political necessity in the Soviet Union.

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Bradshaw

J. H. Hexter's brilliant analysis of More's Utopia in the Introduction to the Yale edition of the text in 1965 was favoured by a resounding endorsement from Quentin Skinner in a no-less-brilliant analysis of the Yale edition in Past and Present in 1967. Given the status of both scholars as interpreters of the political thought of the early modern period, Skinner's prediction that Hexter's analysis would ‘cause a reorientation of [the] entire historiography’ of the subject was bound to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Skinner, in any case, clearly considers the claim to have been justified in the event. In his recent masterly study of the history of political thought in the early modern period his treatment of Utopia is especially-and avowedly-indebted to Hexter's work. Meanwhile, the most stimulating challenge presented to Hexter's thesis-by Dermot Fenlon in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society in 1975-serves in its way to vindicate Skinner's prediction. Fenlon is concerned not to contradict Hexter's basic hypothesis but to stand it on its head. Fenlon's thesis in turn was assimilated into the survey literature when it was adapted by G. R. Elton to hammer Christian humanism in his Reform and Reformation in 1977.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Marieke Meelen ◽  
Silva Nurmio

This paper investigates adjectival agreement in a group of Middle Welsh native prose texts and a sample of translations from around the end of the Middle Welsh period and the beginning of the Early Modern period. It presents a new methodology, employing tagged historical corpora allowing for consistent linguistic comparison. The adjectival agreement case study tests a hypothesis regarding position and function of adjectives in Middle Welsh, as well as specific semantic groups of adjectives, such as colours or related modifiers. The systematic analysis using an annotated corpus reveals that there are interesting differences between native and translated texts, as well as between individual texts. However, zooming in on our adjectival agreement case study, we conclude that these differences do not correspond to many of our hypotheses or assumptions about how certain texts group together. In particular, no clear split into native and translated texts emerged between the texts in our corpus. This paper thus shows interesting results for both (historical) linguists, especially those working on agreement, and scholars of medieval Celtic philology and translation texts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 371-397
Author(s):  
Sanja Zubčić

The Glagolitic space refers to the area where in the Middle Ages or the Early Modern Period the Glagolitic script was used in texts of different genres and on different surfaces, and/or where the liturgy was held in Croatian Church Slavonic, adopting a positive and affirmative attitude towards Glagolitism. In line with known historical and social circumstances, Glagolitism developed on Croatian soil, more intensely on its southern, especially south-western part (Istria, Northern Croatian Littoral, Lika, northern Dalmatia and adjacent islands). Glagolitism was also thriving in the western periphery of that space, in today’s Slovenia and Italy, leading to the discovery and description of different Glagolitic works. It is the latter, their structure and language, that will be the subject of this paper. Starting from the thesis that innovations in language develop radially, i.e. starting from the center and spreading towards the periphery, it is possible to assume that in the western Glagolitic periphery some more archaic dialectal features will be confirmed among the elements of the vernacular. It is important that these monuments were created and used in an area where the majority language is not Croatian, so the influence of foreign language elements or other ways of expressing multilingualism can be expected. The paper will outline the Glagolitic activity in the abovementioned space and the works preserved therein. In order to determine the differences between Glagolitic works originating from the peripheral and central Glagolitic space, the type and structure of Glagolitic inscriptions and manuscripts from Slovenia and Italy will also be analysed, especially with respect to potential periphery-specific linguistic features. Special attention is paid to the analysis of selected isoglosses in the Notebook or Register of the Brotherhood of St. Anthony the Abbot from San Dorligo della Valle.


Author(s):  
H. C. Hillier

This chapter looks at the reconstruction of the divine nexus in political thought in Muhammad Iqbal and Henri Bergson. Articulated in Mark Lilla's book Stillborn God (2007), the divine nexus — that is, the intersection of God, man, and the world — in Western political thought was abandoned in the early modern period and no thinker has effectively re-conceptualised it since. The chapter argues that through their shared metaphysical and epistemological ideas, Iqbal and Bergson form a new philosophical foundation that puts God at the centre of the cosmos. In this, both identify the centrality of prophecy/mysticism in the collective life of society and show the indispensable role that religion plays in challenging those political realities in the world that threaten human dignity, freedom, and well-being.


Author(s):  
K.J. Kesselring

Homicide can seem timeless, somehow, determined by unchanging human failings. But a moment’s reflection shows this is not true: homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death for the latter in most cases, and two, a significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other. This book explores connections between these two changes. It demonstrates the value in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter, or at least in seeing how that distinction came to matter in a period which also witnessed dramatic drops in the occurrence of homicidal violence. Focused on the ‘politics of murder’, the book examines how homicide became more effectively criminalized from c. 1480 to 1680, with chapters devoted to coroners’ inquests, appeals and private compensation, duels and private vengeance, and print and public punishment. The English had begun moving away from treating homicide as an offence subject to private settlements or vengeance long before other Europeans, at least from the twelfth century. What happened in the early modern period was, in some ways, a continuation of processes long underway, but intensified and refocused by developments from the late fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries. Exploring the links between law, crime, and politics, bringing together both the legal and social histories of the subject of homicide, the book argues that homicide became more fully ‘public’ in these years, with killings seen to violate a ‘king’s peace’ that people increasingly conflated with or subordinated to the ‘public peace’ or ‘public justice’.


Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 10 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Thomas White, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume.


2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Kisby

There is general agreement now that the court of Henry VIII and his father wasthecenter of politics, patronage, and power in England. It is also well understood how access to the king—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch “either his ear or his eye” headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. Patronage is a theme that has accordingly dominated the historiography of the Tudor royal household, and indeed this is one of the two major concerns of court historians of the early modern period in general. Ceremony is the second, and the Tudor court has been the focus of study in this respect too, as the work of Jennifer Loach and Sidney Anglo attests. Yet while the occasional ceremonies of state (funerals, coronations, royal entries) and of “spectacles” (revels, pageants, and plays) have been the subject of detailed investigation, those that took place on a regular basis exclusively within the physical confines of the royal houses have received very little attention. Consequently historians have failed to notice a fundamental fact of which all courtiers were aware: that, by the early Tudor period and quite probably well before, the weekly routine of ceremony at the English court was structured by the liturgical calendar and thus dominated by religious culture.It is possible that this historiographical lacuna has arisen because the history of the chief organ of religious ceremonial in the royal household—the chapel royal—has largely been neglected.


Author(s):  
Susanna Berger

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to introduce visual counterparts to the textual strategies of selection, encapsulation, and recombination employed by Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian scholars and students in the early modern period. Many early modern philosophical images were the products of a particular moment in European history, when a method of transmitting knowledge aimed at optimizing efficiency through the clear presentation of information began to flourish. This study demonstrates that these images, rather than merely simplifying preexisting philosophical concepts, enrich theoretical knowledge by bringing it into visual form both in combination with words and independently of texts. The remainder of the chapter describes documents that are the subject of this study followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.


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