Dionysius Andreas Freher, Boehme’s Apostle to the English

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-159
Author(s):  
Mike A. Zuber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Important Link ◽  
Jacob Boehme

This chapter details how Dionysius Andreas Freher brought the spiritual alchemy of rebirth from the Low Countries to England and thus served as the most important link for transmitting it to the nineteenth century. Freher arrived in Amsterdam in late 1685 and soon joined a religious commune near Leiden, led by Johann Georg Gichtel’s disciple Johann Wilhelm Überfeld. In this context, Freher immersed himself into the writings of Jacob Boehme for almost ten years. Eventually, his conflicts with Überfeld and news of Jane Leade’s Philadelphian Society in London prompted him to go to England. Not much is known about Freher’s life there, yet he seems to have acted as a Boehme expert who explained the theosopher’s opaque writings to an English audience. Freher’s main work on Boehme, Fundamenta mystica, also described the spiritual alchemy of rebirth. In shortened form, one of Freher’s treatises found inclusion in an influential nineteenth-century volume on alchemy.

Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Botany ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Botanical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

Historical Fiction, Cultural Transfer and the Recycling of the Black Legend between the Low Countries and Britain: A Nineteenth-Century Case Study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaël Ingelbien
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Cultural Transfer ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Dutch Revolt ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Black Legend

This chapter compares Henri Moke’s Le Gueux de Mer (1827) and Thomas Colley Grattan’s The Heiress of Bruges (1830), two historical novels set at the time of the Dutch Revolt and written in the final years of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The comparison provides insights into the respective priorities of British and ‘Netherlandic’ writers who dealt in images of Spain in the early nineteenth century. Beyond some clear differences in the ideological urgency of their work, the authors’ liberal politics, their sympathy towards Catholicism and the influence of Romantic Orientalism create important nuances in their versions of the Black Legend, which are ultimately denunciations of bigotry and tyranny rather than expressions of wholesale Hispanophobia.

scholarly journals Magie en wetenschap in de spektakelcultuur van de negentiende eeuw

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Kurt Vanhoutte ◽  
Nele Wynants
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
International Mobility ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
World’S Fairs ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Scientific Learning

Magic and Science in the Nineteenth-century Culture of Spectacle: Henri Robin in the Low Countries. The theatre of modernity served to illuminate scientific insight and discovery in a spectacular way. Astronomy, physics, and experiments with electricity were at the heart of a popular genre that became known as ‘physiques amusantes’ (amusing physics). These shows occupied a middle ground between entertainment and science, between showing and doing. They were often staged by magicians, who presented themselves as ‘professors’ and awed audiences at local fairgrounds, world’s fairs, and popular theatres. One such figure was Henri Robin (1811–1974). Reviews and images dating from Robin’s time in Belgium and the Netherlands and his own memoirs of his time in Paris reveal that he found himself at the crossroads of a number of key developments. In particular, Robin’s theatre practices shed light on the changing nature of spectacle in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His shows succeeded in maintaining a precarious balance between spectacle-driven entertainment and scientific learning, between visually-oriented fairground amusement for the masses and educational fare for the new bourgeoisie. This article will discuss the complex relationship between aesthetic and didactic concerns in Henri Robin’s theatre shows, their remarkable blend of science and magic, and their effect on audiences. At the same time, we will demonstrate that the spectacle of modernity in the Low Countries resulted in part from the international mobility of showmen such as Robin.

The Low Countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 680-696
Author(s):  
Arie L. Molendijk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Final Note ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The 1960S

Notwithstanding certain similarities, Belgium and the Netherlands have different national histories. Keeping this in mind, this chapter is divided into four sections: early history, pillarization, secularization, and Islam and new developments. From its foundation in 1830, Belgium has been predominantly Catholic, whereas the Netherlands claimed to be a Protestant nation, despite a large minority of Catholics. In the late nineteenth century, self-contained worlds (‘pillars’) emerged in both countries. Catholics, and in the Netherlands orthodox Protestants as well, used their many-branched pillars of societal organizations to emancipate and mobilize their constituencies. In the 1960s, the pillars started to crumble and the number of non-affiliated rose to 42 per cent in Belgium, and 68 per cent in the Netherlands. Notwithstanding the immigration of significant groups of Christians and Muslims and a flourishing market in spirituality, both countries have become very secularized. A final note summarizes the situation in Luxembourg.

The Laws that Govern Chaos

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-74
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Social Physics ◽  
Statistical Laws ◽  
Social Improvement

This chapter focuses on Adolphe Quetelet, who was among the few nineteenth-century statisticians who pursued a numerical social science of laws, not just of facts. Quetelet's contribution to statistical thought and to the mathematics of statistical analysis was a characteristic if not unsurprising product of his syncretic approach. Social physics was an elaborate metaphor that integrated his genuine concern for the advancement of scientific knowledge with his desire to turn science to the promotion of sound government and social improvement. Quetelet's fascination with the possibility of subjecting ostensibly uncontrolled social phenomena to scientific order was at the heart of his dedication to the concept of statistical laws. Characteristically, he gave this idea its fullest development in reference to such events as crime and suicide, the immoral materials for that “moral statistics” which was central to the early statistical movements in Britain and France as well as the Low Countries. The notion of statistical law achieved its fullest expression in Great Britain during the 1850s, the decade when laissez-faire liberalism reached its intellectual apogee.

Music and ceremonial in the Low Countries: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece

1985 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 113-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Prizer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Polyphonic Music

The Order of the Golden Fleece, a chivalric order that flourished in Burgundy and the Low Countries from 1431 to 1559, has attracted the attention of historians of politics, culture and art since the nineteenth century, but it has been little explored by music historians, who have contented themselves with a mention of the order's existence and with descriptions of one of its more famous, but less characteristic, events: the Feast of the Oath of the Pheasant. Nevertheless, the order had a strong influence on sacred music during the period of its greatest activity, requiring polyphonic music for many of its functions and perhaps commissioning works by such composers as Josquin Desprez and Alexander Agricola. This influence is intimately tied to the structure of the Order of the Golden Fleece and to the desire of the successive sovereigns for ostentatious display when the group met.

scholarly journals Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Germany, ca. 1300 – 1850

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Alfani ◽  
Victoria Gierok ◽  
Felix Schaff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Working Paper ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
New Material

This article provides an overview of economic inequality in Germany from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. It builds upon data produced by the German Historical School, which from the late nineteenth century pioneered inequality studies, and adds new archival information for selected areas. Inequality tended to grow during the early modern period, with an exception: the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), together with the 1627-29 plague, seem to have caused a temporary but significant phase of inequality reduction. This is in contrast to other European areas, from Italy to the Low Countries, where during 1500-1800 inequality growth was monotonic. Some evidence of a drop in inequality is also found after the Black Death of 1348-49. Our findings contribute to deepen and nuance our knowledge of long-term inequality trends in preindustrial Europe, and offer new material to current debates on the determinants of inequality change in western societies, past and present. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document