scholarly journals Tears in Heaven: Tracing the Contours of a Pan-European Transconfessional Genre

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Anne Boemler ◽  
Bryan Brazeau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Religious Poetry ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
New Form ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Biblical Figures

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre of religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary genre combining elements of epic narrative and Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on the religious grief of biblical figures—swept across Europe in the forty years around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although this genre was instigated by the Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey of weeping poems uncovers the surprising reach of this genre across multiple languages and even into Protestant England. The range and popularity of this specific kind of weeping poetry across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines shows how this constellation of texts transmitted a new form of devotional affect founded on imaginative identification with weeping biblical narrators. In other words, these poems demonstrate how interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be the basis for new emotional communities of worship. Moreover, the relative obscurity of this genre to scholars prompts new questions around the viability of continuing to explore early modern European literary traditions from the perspective of nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks.

‘Everyone Should Be Like the People’: Elite and Popular Religion and the Counter Reformation

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the GermanVolkskundetradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

Hippologischer Fachdiskurs und dialogische Fiktion

Daphnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 416-443
Author(s):  
Stefanie Stockhorst
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Textual Strategies

Abstract This contribution analyses the textual strategies in Danup’s literary dialogue, which is enriched in many ways with literary topoi and rhetorical devices. It is, in fact, a specialised text on the art of horsemanship, which proves to be surprisingly innovative in this regard. However, it is not only relevant to the hippological, but also to the political culture of the early modern period. For the author updates a literary genre pattern, takes up literary traditions and uses aesthetic means for successful self-promotion as an expert.

Dares Printed and Philologized

2020 ◽  
pp. 211-250
Author(s):  
Frederic Clark
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe

Chapter 5 looks in closer depth at just why Dares remained a source of debate in early modern Europe, even after some critics had seemingly demolished him once and for all. The first part of the chapter examines phenomena traditionally associated with the rise of criticism and the downfall of forgeries, including print culture, the recuperation of ancient Greek texts, and scientific empiricism. It argues that these phenomena actually bolstered the reputation and credibility of Dares Phrygius. From the Elizabethan Philip Sidney’s neo-Aristotelian poetics to the proliferation of printed reference works by Conrad Gessner, Jean Bodin, and others, Dares remained a canonical first in the history of history. The second part of the chapter examines how, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both the increasingly professionalized world of classical scholarship and the confessional polemics engendered by the Reformation and Counter–Reformation responded to this perpetuation of Dares’ longevity with renewed attacks.

The Ethics of War and the Concept of War in India and Europe

Numen ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torkel Brekke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Just War ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Jus In Bello ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Jus Ad Bellum ◽  
Ethics Of War ◽  
Just War Tradition ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Ethical Systems

AbstractThe European just war tradition makes a distinction between matters of just resort to war (jus ad bellum) and matters of just means in war (jus in bello). If one compares the just war tradition with ethical systems of other cultures, one is struck by the European concern about jus ad bellum and the lack of interest in the same in other traditions. I compare the ethics of war in two important literary traditions of classical Hinduism with the European just war tradition. Our problem: Why were Europeans so interested in matters of jus ad bellum (in particular the principle of right authority) and why did Hindu writers take so little interest in the same questions? I suggest the following answer. In medieval and early modern Europe there was great interest in jus ad bellum because Europeans had a concept of war that made two important distinctions. The European concept of war distinguished, firstly, war against external enemies from violence against internal enemies and, secondly, public from private violence. Some important studies of the ethics of war have asserted that these two distinctions are universal. I argue, on the contrary, that these two distinctions are unique to Europe. Hindu writers had a fundamentally different concept of war. They did not make the same distinctions. I argue that this conceptual difference explains why Europeans were so concerned about jus ad bellum while Indians were not.

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