Author: Lionel Gossman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421430843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Originally published in 1968. The contribution of eighteenth-century Englishmen to the study of medieval life and literature is fairly well known, but it is commonly assumed that in France, the center of Enlightenment, no one—with the exception of a few obscure antiquarians—was seriously interested in the Middle Ages. Gossman argues that the Enlightenment gave great impetus to medieval studies in France and altered their orientation, removing them from the realm of legal and ecclesiastical dispute and bringing them into a new framework of general history. Concentrating his investigation of Enlightenment medievalists on the most influential of them, La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Gossman describes Sainte-Palaye's social and intellectual milieu and follows him in his relations with scholars and philosophes in France and abroad. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, Walpole, Muratori, and Herder are some of the figures whose paths crossed that of Sainte-Palaye. Far from being opposed to philosophie, the medievalists were, Gossman argues, nourished at the same intellectual sources and shared many of the values of the philosophes. The existence of a close connection between medievalism and the Enlightenment is substantiated by the author's detailed analyses of Sainte-Palaye's work in the history, literature, and language of the French Middle Ages. Although Sainte-Palaye had a surprising influence on the literature and historiography of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—in France, England, and Germany—eighteenth-century medievalism, Gossman argues, is best understood not as anticipation of things to come but as part of a complex of ideas and feelings peculiar to the Enlightenment itself.
Author: Sarah Collins
Publisher:
ISBN: 1843843420
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Author: Richard B. Sher
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226752542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 842
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Book Description
The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.
Author: Paschalis M. Kitromilides
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674726413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
Greece sits at the center of a geopolitical storm that threatens the stability of the European Union. To comprehend how this small country precipitated such an outsized crisis, it is necessary to understand how Greece developed into a nation in the first place. Enlightenment and Revolution identifies the ideological traditions that shaped a religious community of Greek-speaking people into a modern nation-state--albeit one in which antiliberal forces have exacted a high price. Paschalis Kitromilides takes in the vast sweep of the Greek Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assessing developments such as the translation of modern authors into Greek; the scientific revolution; the rediscovery of the civilization of classical Greece; and a powerful countermovement. He shows how Greek thinkers such as Voulgaris and Korais converged with currents of the European Enlightenment, and demonstrates how the Enlightenment's confrontation with Church-sanctioned ideologies shaped present-day Greece. When the nation-state emerged from a decade-long revolutionary struggle against the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, the dream of a free Greek polity was soon overshadowed by a romanticized nationalist and authoritarian vision. The failure to create a modern liberal state at that decisive moment is at the root of Greece's recent troubles.
Author: William J. Bulman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190267097
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.
Author: William Chester Jordan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040246761
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Ideology and Royal Power is a collection of essays describing and assessing the ways in which royal publicists in medieval France conceived the authority of the crown, especially with regard to protecting and defending its Christian subjects from their alleged enemies at home and abroad--corrupt officials, Jews (particularly moneylenders), heretics, and Muslims. A number of the essays also describe the execution of royal policies with respect to these groups and evaluate their impact, both in terms of the groups affected and their influence on further developments in royal ideology. A key figure is that of Louis IX, Saint Louis (r. 1226-1270).
Author: Helen Moore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192568566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
This is a book about readers: readers reading, and readers writing. They are readers of all ages and from all ages: young and old, male and female, from Europe and the Americas. The book they are reading is the Spanish chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula, known in English as Amadis de Gaule. Famous throughout the sixteenth century as the pinnacle of its fictional genre, the cultural functions of Amadis were further elaborated by the publication of Cervantes's Don Quixote in 1605, in which Amadis features as Quixote's favourite book. Amadis thereby becomes, as the philosopher Ortega y Gasset terms it, 'enclosed' within the modern novel and part of the imaginative landscape of British reader-authors such Mary Shelley, Smollett, Keats, Southey, Scott, and Thackeray. Amadis in English ranges from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, demonstrating through this 'biography' of a book the deep cultural, intellectual, and political connections of English, French, and Spanish literature across five centuries. Simultaneously an ambitious work of transnational literary history and a new intervention in the history of reading, this study argues that romance is historically located, culturally responsive, and uniquely flexible in the re-creative possibilities it offers readers. By revealing this hitherto unexamined reading experience connecting readers of all backgrounds, Amadis in English also offers many new insights into the politicisation of literary history; the construction and misconstruction of literary relations between England, France, and Spain; the practice and pleasures of reading fiction; and the enduring power of imagination.
Author: Peter H. Reill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520377826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism traces the thought of a large and neglected group of German thinkers and their encounter with the ideas and ideal of the Enlightenment from 1740 to 1790. Concentrating on the nature of their historical consciousness, Peter Hanns Reill addresses two basic issues in the interpretation of the Enlightenment: to what degree can one speak of the unity of the Enlightenment and to what extent can the Enlightenment be characterized as “modern”? Reill attempts to revise the traditional interpretation of the Enlightenment as an age insensitive to the postulates of modern historical thought and to dissolve the alleged opposition of the Enlightenment to later intellectual developments such as Idealism. He argues that German Enlightened thinkers generated the general presuppositions upon which modern historical thought is founded. Asserting that the Enlightenment was not a unitary movement, Reill shows how each phase of it had unique elements and made contributions to Enlightenment thought as a whole. Exploring the forms of thought, the mental climate, and the different intellectual milieus in which the German thinkers operated, Reill demonstrates that they were confronted by two opposing intellectual traditions: German Pietism and rationalism. In attempting to reconcile both without submerging one into the other, these Enlightenment thinkers turned to historical speculation and learning. They discussed the relation between religious and rationalistic assumptions, the transformation of the concepts of religion and law, the interaction between aesthetic and historical thought, the creation of a theory of understanding to support the new idea of history, the use of causation in historical analysis, and the rediscovery of the Middle Ages. Reill reveals how they anticipated the work of more famous thinkers of the nineteenth century and establishes the conceptual similarities between thinkers generally thought to be more different than alike. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.
Author: David Matthews
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
An accessibly-written survey of the origins and growth of the discipline of medievalism studies. The field known as "medievalism studies" concerns the life of the Middle Ages after the Middle Ages. Originating some thirty years ago, it examines reinventions and reworkings of the medieval from the Reformation to postmodernity, from Bale and Leland to HBO's Game of Thrones. But what exactly is it? An offshoot of medieval studies? A version of reception studies? Or a new form of cultural studies? Can such a diverse field claim coherence? Should it be housed in departments of English, or History, or should it always be interdisciplinary? In responding to such questions, the author traces the history of medievalism from its earliest appearances in the sixteenth century to the present day, across a range of examples drawn from the spheres of literature, art, architecture, music and more. He identifies two major modes, the grotesque and the romantic, and focuses on key phases of the development of medievalism in Europe: the Reformation, the late eighteenth century, and above all the period between 1815 and 1850, which, he argues, represents the zenith of medievalist cultural production. He also contends that the 1840s were medievalism's one moment of canonicity in several European cultures at once. After that, medievalism became a minority form, rarely marked with cultural prestige, though always pervasive and influential. Medievalism: a Critical History scrutinises several key categories - space, time, and selfhood - and traces the impact of medievalism on each. It will be the essential guide to a complex and still evolving field of inquiry. David Matthews is Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies at the University of Manchester.
Author: Bettina Bildhauer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780197266144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
The Middle Ages continue to provide an important touchstone for the way the modern West presents itself and its relationship with the rest of the globe. This volume brings together leading scholars of literature and history, together with musicians, novelists, librarians, and museum curators in order to present exciting, up-to-date perspectives on how and why the Middle Ages continue to matter in the 20th and 21st centuries. Presented here, their essays represent a unique dialogue between scholars and practitioners of 'medievalism'. Framed by an introductory essay on the broad history of the continuing evolution of the idea of 'The Middle Ages' from the 14th century to the present day, chapters deal with subjects as diverse as: the use of Old Norse sagas by Republican deniers of climate change; the way figures like the Irish hero Cu Chulainn and St Patrick were used to give legitimacy to political affiliations during the Ulster 'Troubles'; the use of the Middle Ages in films by Pasolini and Tarantino; the adoption of the 'Green Man' motif in popular culture; Lady Gaga's manipulation of medieval iconography in her music videos; the translation of medieval poetry from manuscript to digital media; and the problem of writing national history free from the 'toxic medievalism' of the 19th and 20th centuries. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the Middle Ages and its impact on recent political and cultural history. It is dedicated to the memory of Seamus Heaney, who gave his last overseas lecture in St. Andrews in 2013, the year this book was conceived, and whose late poetry this book also discusses.
