Towards a New Architecture of Cosmic Experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Cosmic Space ◽  
Meteorite Fall ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
Rhetorical Structures

The article unfolds an account of several overlapping fields of inquiry contributing to the early modern experience of the cosmos. Traversing scale, scope, and media, from the first recorded meteorite fall to scholastic debates over the materiality of heaven and the practice of architecture as cosmic analogue, I argue in favour of bringing together a broad range of interdisciplinary source material in order to explore the spatiality of the cosmos and how it was encountered and reproduced as a place or cosmic space or non-place on earth. The accompanying examples gesture towards an open-ended model defined not solely by the built environment as much as by the ephemeral and rhetorical structures framing the cosmos for human consumption.

Seeking the historical listener

Early Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Plank
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Focus Questions ◽  
Robert Herrick

Abstract This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness, affective response and analogical understanding. The source material also interestingly raises the possibility of occasionally understanding the act of listening within a frame of erotic relationship modelled on Laura Mulvey’s well-known concept of the ‘male gaze’.

Friendship, temperance and the probable: Erasmus, sermo rhetoric, and the early modern English civic state

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynette Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Civic Agency ◽  
Rhetorical Structures ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Training

The essay explores Erasmus' development of a fourth category of rhetoric, the familiar, in its work as a rhetoric of the absent audience in both personal and sociopolitical contexts, and as a rhetoric resonant with early modern theories of friendship and temperance. The discussion is set against a background of Caxton's printing of the translation of Cicero's De Amicitia, because Erasmus casts friendship as the context for appropriate communication between people from quite different education and training, along with the probable rhetoric that enables appropriate persuasion. The probable rhetorical stance of temperate friendship proposes a foundation for a common weal1 based on a co-extensive sense of selfhood. This focus suggests that the familiar rhetoric set out in Erasmus' De Conscribendis epistolis draws on Cicero's rhetoric of sermo2 at the heart of friendship.3 It explores the effects of the rhetorical stance of probable rhetoric, both for personal and social writing, and for political action, and looks at the impact of sermo rhetoric on ideas of identity and civic politics in an age of burgeoning circulation of books (both script and print). The essay concludes with three post-Erasmian case studies in English rhetoric [Elyot, Wilson, Lever] that use probable rhetoric to document approaches to individual and civic agency and which offer insights into the Western neoliberal state rhetorical structures of today.

Spiritualité, Spirituality, and Espiritualidad

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-525
Author(s):  
Rady Roldán-Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Academic Study

Abstract This article offers a corrective to the widely held idea that the modern concept of spirituality is traceable to the seventeenth century French notion of spiritualité. Instead, the argument is made that the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish terms spiritual and spiritualidad are earlier expressions of the modern concept of spirituality. The article opens with an examination of the place of spirituality in the academic study of religion and proceeds to a discussion of the premises of conceptual history and modern lexicography. In the closing section, the author analyses a plethora of lexicographical and other primary source material from the medieval to the early modern periods that demonstrate the usage of the terms spirital and espiritualidad in Spain as well as in colonial Latin America. Among the sources examined are Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611); Fernando de Valverde, Vida de Jesu Christo nuestro señor (Lima: Luis de Lyra, 1657); and Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: En la imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1726–1739).

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Colin Burrow
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Learning Practices ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Rhetorical Structures ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction sets out the argument of the book. It suggests that the imitation of authors (imitatio) is not primarily a matter of verbal appropriation but of learning practices from earlier texts. That process is intrinsically hard to describe, and as a result discussions of the topic in the rhetorical tradition relied on a rich store of metaphors. These were themselves to become part of the practice of imitation. The introduction describes the various kinds of imitatio which developed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries: ‘adaptive’ imitation, in which an earlier text is made ‘apt’ to new times, and ‘formal imitation’, in which an author imitates not the exact words, but the favoured rhetorical structures of an earlier writer. It explains how the word ‘model’ came to be used of an imitated text, and explores the relationship between imitation, plagiarism, and ideas about intellectual property. It explains how regarding an ‘author’ as a potentially open-ended series of texts distinguished by their style and form connects early modern theories of imitation with contemporary interests in artificial intelligence. It briefly suggests some implications of the subject for writing outside Europe, and explains how this book departs from earlier studies of the topic in its scope and argument.

Foreigners in Pre-Modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-135
Author(s):  
Peter Strohschneider ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Meaning Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
Heating Up

The essay draws on the concept of ‘asymmetric counter-concepts’ as developed by Reinhart Koselleck starting with twin-formulas such as ‘the familiar and the unfamiliar’ which are generally used to establish collective des­ignations of the self and others and which institutionalize the axiological and the epistemological. These counter-concepts can have different semantic temperatures. The focus is on the underlying meaning-production schemes which produce value-asymmetries. The essay tries to show that a process of heating up these value-asymmetries is only one side of the history of such asymmetric counter-concepts from medieval to modern times. Simultaneously a cooling down can be observed in written texts from different periods; examples include the 12th century Rolandslied and the 16th century Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Full negation eliminates uncertainties and value insecurities. But the complexities and contingencies that emerge since Early Modern times then lead to losses of negatability (Negierbarkeitsverluste), which in turn render gains in unfamiliarity. The modern experience of the foreign is indeterminate otherness instead of determined negation that characterized pre-modern alterity. Modern societies therefore need to mediate between validity and contingency under the circumstances of plurality. Interpretational demands and uncertainty about the relevant interpretive frames increase. Foreignness is then experienced as unfamiliarity. This presupposes intellectual attitudes like irritability, curiosity, and willingness to learn. The modern concept of ‘culture’ then is proposed as a comparative pattern where only unavoidable structural asymmetry remains. It explains cultural differences and the experience of foreignness through heterogeneity. Using this specifically modern pattern, there is no longer a legitimate value slope between one’s own position and its negation. The distinction is then between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

November, 1494: Politics in Motion in the Streets of Florence

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-95
Author(s):  
Niall S. Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Reliable Information ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Abstract The spectacular entry of Charles VIII into Florence in 1494 initiated a series of political negotiations and maneuvers in which the French monarch, the local government, and the embattled Medici family vied for control over the city. With the threat of violence so present and reliable information so scarce, Florentines had to perform subtle interpretations of the movements of these actors in order to determine what was happening to their city. These eye-witness accounts reveal that the most elaborately staged ritual and the most improvised single gesture were part of a moving tableau whose meaning was contingent on understanding the relationship between the paths taken, the places visited, and the manner in which the protagonists moved through the city. As a result, we can learn how early modern cities were constituted by the ceaseless exchanges between the ephemeral movements of communities and the solidity of the built environment.

Introduction

Caritas ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Lower Order ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Performance Theory ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Emotional Norms

An ‘emotional ethic’ is a system of feelings and embodied actions informed by a set of moral principles. This chapter introduces this concept and explains why caritas, a form of grace that ensured that neighbourly love was moral and ethical, operated as an emotional ethic in early modern Europe. This Introduction to the monograph introduces the concept of caritas and how it underpinned several significant ideas of the period, and explores why we might think of it as an embodied ethic. It details the methodological underpinnings of an emotional ethic, noting its foundation in performance theory and association with other emotional norms, such as ‘emotional communities’ and ‘emotional regimes’. The remainder of the chapter introduces the case study of the lower-order Scottish community in the eighteenth century, the source material through which they are accessed (mainly legal records), and the broader historical context for the book.

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