Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race

Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race PDF Author: Ian Campbell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152610265X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The modern ideology of race, so important in twentieth-century Europe, incorporates both a theory of human societies and a theory of human bodies. Ian Campbell’s new study examines how the elite in early modern Ireland spoke about human societies and human bodies, and demonstrates that this elite discourse was grounded in a commitment to the languages and sciences of Renaissance Humanism. Emphasising the education of all of early modern Ireland’s antagonistic ethnic groups in common European university and grammar school traditions, Campbell explains both the workings of the learned English critique of Irish society, and the no less learned Irish response. Then he turns to Irish debates on nobility, medicine and theology in order to illuminate the problem of human heredity. He concludes by demonstrating how the Enlightenment swept away these humanist theories of body and society, prior to the development of modern racial ideology in the late eighteenth century.

Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race

Renaissance humanism and ethnicity before race PDF Author: Ian Campbell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152610265X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
The modern ideology of race, so important in twentieth-century Europe, incorporates both a theory of human societies and a theory of human bodies. Ian Campbell’s new study examines how the elite in early modern Ireland spoke about human societies and human bodies, and demonstrates that this elite discourse was grounded in a commitment to the languages and sciences of Renaissance Humanism. Emphasising the education of all of early modern Ireland’s antagonistic ethnic groups in common European university and grammar school traditions, Campbell explains both the workings of the learned English critique of Irish society, and the no less learned Irish response. Then he turns to Irish debates on nobility, medicine and theology in order to illuminate the problem of human heredity. He concludes by demonstrating how the Enlightenment swept away these humanist theories of body and society, prior to the development of modern racial ideology in the late eighteenth century.

Imagining the Nation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Imagining the Nation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature PDF Author: Daniel Cattell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000080609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
This volume brings together new work on the image of the nation and the construction of national identity in English literature of the seventeenth century. The chapters in the collection explore visions of British nationhood in literary works including Michael Drayton and John Selden’s Poly-Olbion and Andrew Marvell’s Horatian Ode, shedding new light on topics ranging from debates over territorial waters and the free seas, to the emergence of hyphenated identities, and the perennial problem of the Picts. Concluding with a survey of recent work in British studies and the history of early modern nationalism, this collection highlights issues of British national identity, cohesion, and disintegration that remain undeniably relevant and topical in the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, The Seventeenth Century.

Generations

Generations PDF Author: Alexandra Walsham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019885403X
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
Generations injects fresh energy into tired debates about England's plural and protracted Reformations by adopting the fertile concept of generation as its analytical framework. It demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations that experienced them, but were also forged and created by them. The book investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these, in turn, reconfigured the relationship between memory, history, and time. It explores the manifold ways in which the Reformations shaped the horizontal relationships that early modern people formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs. Generations highlights the vital part that families bound by blood and by faith played in shaping these events, as well as in mediating our knowledge of the religious past and in the making of its archive. Drawing on a rich array of evidence, it provides poignant glimpses into how people navigated the profound challenges that the English Reformations posed in everyday life.

Imagining Ireland's Pasts

Imagining Ireland's Pasts PDF Author: Nicholas Canny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198808968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Imagining Ireland's Pasts describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. Imagining Ireland's Past: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries details how authors extolled the merits of their progenitors, offered hope and guidance to the particular audience they addressed, and disputed opposing narratives. The author shows how competing scholars, whether contributing to vernacular histories or empirical studies, became transfixed by the traumatic events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they sought to explain either how stability had finally been achieved, or how the descendants of those who had been wronged might secure redress.

Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History

Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History PDF Author: Matthew Rowley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000473821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This volume examines how historical beliefs about the supernatural were used to justify violence, secure political authority or extend toleration in both the medieval and early modern periods. Contributors explore miracles, political authority and violence in Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, various Protestant groups, Judaism, Islam and the local religious beliefs of Pacific Islanders who interacted with Christians. The chapters are geographically expansive, with contributions ranging from confessional conflict in Poland-Lithuania to the conquest of Oceania. They examine various types of conflict such as confessional struggles, conversion attempts, assassination and war, as well as themes including diplomacy, miraculous iconography, toleration, theology and rhetoric. Together, the chapters explore the appropriation of accounts of miraculous violence that are recorded in sacred texts to reveal what partisans claimed God did in conflict, and how they claimed to know. The volume investigates theories of justified warfare, changing beliefs about the supernatural with the advent of modernity and the perceived relationship between human and divine agency. Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History is of interest to scholars and students in several fields including religion and violence, political and military history, and theology and the reception of sacred texts in the medieval and early modern world.

In Pursuit of Civility

In Pursuit of Civility PDF Author: Keith Thomas
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1512602825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Keith Thomas's earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, were all attempts to explore beliefs, values, and social practices in the centuries from 1500 to 1800. In Pursuit of Civility continues this quest by examining what English people thought it meant to be "civilized" and how that condition differed from being "barbarous" or "savage." Thomas shows that the upper ranks of society sought to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors by distinctive ways of moving, speaking, and comporting themselves, and that the common people developed their own form of civility. The belief of the English in their superior civility shaped their relations with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, and was fundamental to their dealings with the native peoples of North America, India, and Australia. Yet not everyone shared this belief in the superiority of Western civilization; the book sheds light on the origins of both anticolonialism and cultural relativism. Thomas has written an accessible history based on wide reading, abounding in fresh insights, and illustrated by many striking quotations and anecdotes from contemporary sources.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare PDF Author: Robert Malcolm Smuts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199660840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 849

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Book Description
Rather than seeking to survey the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, the essays in the collection display a variety of perspectives, insights and methodologies found in current historical work that may also inform literary studies. In addition to Elizabethan and early seventeenth century polities, they examine such topics as the characteristics of the early modern political imagination; the growth of public controversy over religion and other issues duringthe period and ways in which this can be related to drama; attitudes about honour and shame and their relation to concepts of gender; histories of crime and murder; and ways in which changing attitudeswere expressed through architecture, printed images and the layout of Tudor gardens.

The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume 2, 1550–1730

The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume 2, 1550–1730 PDF Author: Jane Ohlmeyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108592279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 810

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Book Description
This volume offers fresh perspectives on the political, military, religious, social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and environmental history of early modern Ireland and situates these discussions in global and comparative contexts. The opening chapters focus on 'Politics' and 'Religion and War' and offer a chronological narrative, informed by the re-interpretation of new archives. The remaining chapters are more thematic, with chapters on 'Society', 'Culture', and 'Economy and Environment', and often respond to wider methodologies and historiographical debates. Interdisciplinary cross-pollination - between, on the one hand, history and, on the other, disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, geography, computer science, literature and gender and environmental studies - informs many of the chapters. The volume offers a range of new departures by a generation of scholars who explain in a refreshing and accessible manner how and why people acted as they did in the transformative and tumultuous years between 1550 and 1730.

Making Empire

Making Empire PDF Author: Jane Ohlmeyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192867687
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Ireland was England's oldest colony. Making Empire revisits the history of empire in IrelandEDin a time of Brexit, 'the culture wars', and the campaigns around 'Black Lives Matter' and 'Statues must fall'EDto better understand how it has formed the present, and how it might shape the future. Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history ofthe world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire re-examines empire as processEDand Ireland's role in itEDthrough the lens of early modernity. It covers the two hundred years, between themid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, that equate roughly to the timespan of the First English Empire (c.1550-c.1770s). Ireland was England's oldest colony. How then did the English empire actually function in early modern Ireland and how did this change over time? What did access to European empires mean for people living in Ireland? This book answers these questions by interrogating four interconnected themes. First, that Ireland formed an integral partof the English imperial system, Second, that the Irish operated as agents of empire(s). Third, Ireland served as laboratory in and for the English empire. Finally, it examines the impact that empire(s)had on people living in early modern Ireland. Even though the book's focus will be on Ireland and the English empire, the Irish were trans-imperial and engaged with all of the early modern imperial powers. It is therefore critical, where possible and appropriate, to look to other European and global empires for meaningful comparisons and connections in this era of expansionism. What becomes clear is that colonisation was not a single occurrence but an iterative anddurable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion and expropriation. Strategies about howbest to turn conquest into profit, to mobilise and control Ireland's natural resources, especially land and labour, varied but the reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance and assimilation to resistance. This book, based on the 2021 James Ford Lectures, Oxford University, suggests that the moment has come revisit the history of empire, if only to better understand how it has formed the present, and how thismight shape the future.

Bodies complexioned

Bodies complexioned PDF Author: Mark S. Dawson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526134500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Bodily contrasts – from the colour of hair, eyes and skin to the shape of faces and skeletons – allowed the English of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to discriminate systematically among themselves and against non-Anglophone groups. Making use of an array of sources, this book examines how early modern English people understood bodily difference. It demonstrates that individuals’ distinctive features were considered innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have characteristics in common, and challenges the idea that the humoral theory of bodily composition was incompatible with visceral inequality or racism. While ‘race’ had not assumed its modern valence, and ‘racial’ ideologies were still to come, such typecasting nonetheless had mundane, lasting consequences. Grounded in humoral physiology, and Christian universalism notwithstanding, bodily prejudices inflected social stratification, domestic politics, sectarian division and international relations.