The Debate Over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance

The Debate Over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Noel L. Brann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004123625
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This study explores a prominent Italian Renaissance theme, the origin of genius, revealing how the coalescence of a Platonic theory of divine frenzy and an Aristotelian theory of melancholy genius eventually disintegrated under the force of late Renaissance events.

The Debate Over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance

The Debate Over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Noel L. Brann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004123625
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This study explores a prominent Italian Renaissance theme, the origin of genius, revealing how the coalescence of a Platonic theory of divine frenzy and an Aristotelian theory of melancholy genius eventually disintegrated under the force of late Renaissance events.

Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy PDF Author: Stephanie Shirilan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317062256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a cento - an ancient form of satire that quotes and misquotes authoritative texts in often subversive ways - and that his express intent in so doing is to offer his readers literary therapy for melancholy. This book explores the ways in which the Anatomy dispenses both direct physic and more systemic medicine by encouraging readers to think of melancholy as a privileged mental and spiritual acuity that requires cultivation and management rather than cure. Refuting the prevailing historiography of anxious early modern embodiment that cites Burton as a key witness, Shirilan submits that the Anatomy rejects contemporary Neostoic and Puritan approaches to melancholy. She reads Burton’s erraticism, opacity, and theatricality as modes of resistance against demands for constancy, transparency, and plainness in the popular literature of spiritual and moral hygiene of his day. She shows how Burton draws on rhetorical, theological, and philosophical traditions that privilege the transformative powers of the imagination in order to celebrate melancholic impressionability for its capacity to inspire and engender empathy, charity, and faith.

The Places of Early Modern Criticism

The Places of Early Modern Criticism PDF Author: Gavin Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198834683
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found in many places - in treatises, apologies, and paragoni; in prefaces, letters, and essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace books; in images, sculptures, and built spaces; within or on the thresholds of works of poetry and visual art. It is situated between different disciplines and methods. Critical ideas and methods come into England from other countries, and take root in particular locations - the court, the Inns of Court, the theatre, the great house, the printer's shop, the university. The practice of criticism is transplanted to the Americas and attempts to articulate the place of poetry in a new world. And commonplaces of classical poetics and rhetoric serve both to connect and to measure the space between different critical discourses. Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires consideration of various kinds of place - material, textual, geographical - and the practices particular to those places; it also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. This book brings together scholars working in departments of English, modern languages, and art history to look at the many different places of early modern criticism. It argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.

The Classical Heritage in France

The Classical Heritage in France PDF Author: Gerald N. Sandy
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004119161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
A study of the reception of Greek and Latin culture in France in the 16th and 17th centuries. There are surveys on topics as diverse as the role of French travellers to classical lands in transforming perceptible reality into narrative textuality, and the influence of ancient law in France.

Magical Epistemologies

Magical Epistemologies PDF Author: Anannya Dasgupta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000417530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
This book began with a simple question: when readers such as us encounter the term magic or figures of magicians in early modern texts, dramatic or otherwise, how do we read them? In the twenty-first century we have recourse to an array of genres and vocabulary from magical realism to fantasy fiction that does not, however, work to read a historical figure like John Dee or a fictional one he inspired in Shakespeare's Prospero. Between longings to transcend human limitation and the actual work of producing, translating, and organizing knowledge, figures such as Dee invite us to re-examine our ways of reading magic only as metaphor. If not metaphor then what else? As we parse the term magic, it reveals a rich context of use that connects various aspects of social, cultural, religious, economic, legal and medical lives of the early moderns. Magic makes its presence felt not only as a forms of knowledge but in methods of knowing in the Renaissance. The arc of dramatists and texts that this book draws between Doctor Faustus, The Tempest, The Alchemist and Comus: A Masque at Ludlow Castle offers a sustained examination of the epistemologies of magic in the context of early modern knowledge formation. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Robert Burton on the Melancholic Plague

Robert Burton on the Melancholic Plague PDF Author: Cláudio Alexandre S. Carvalho
Publisher: Ethics International Press
ISBN: 1804417890
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book presents an innovative perspective on the melancholic character of English divine, writer and academic Robert Burton (1577–1640) and how it shaped his confrontations with political and academic powers. Delving on his historical context, personal struggles and earlier literary pieces, this enquiry provides a new reading of The Anatomy of Melancholy, revealing its deeper purposes and how these prefigure the tensions at the heart of modern discourses—therapeutic, political, and economic. Along with Burton’s observations on melancholy, the book highlights the emergence of "melancholic observation", a new kind of reflexive and critical stance on the pressing issues of his time This is well expressed in Burton's presentation of 'melancholizing' as a creative activity, which uses the existential stance as the grounding for utopian imagination and projects performative ways to expose the limitations of political and academic powers. Beyond its analysis of Burton's melancholic character, the book provides a wealth of knowledge that enhances the study and teaching of various subjects. It illuminates the transformation of Renaissance medicine and its embeddedness within religious, academic, and literary discourses and practices, offers insights into historical figures associated with the concept of melancholy, explores shifts in philosophical readership during the era, and uncovers the precursors of psychotherapy. By connecting these diverse subjects, it provides an interdisciplinary approach that enriches our understanding of the cultural and intellectual landscape of the time. Robert Burton on the Melancholic Plague invites readers on an intellectual journey through the profound complexities of Robert Burton's masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy. By intertwining existential, socio-political, geographic, economic, and artistic dimensions of Burton’s work, it opens new avenues of exploration, gaining valuable insights into the motivation and depth of his work.

Binding the Absent Body in Medieval and Modern Art

Binding the Absent Body in Medieval and Modern Art PDF Author: Emily Kelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351573764
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This collection of essays considers artistic works that deal with the body without a visual representation. It explores a range of ways to represent this absence of the figure: from abject elements such as bodily fluids and waste to surrogate forms including reliquaries, manuscripts, and cloth. The collection focuses on two eras, medieval and modern, when images referencing the absent body have been far more prolific in the history of art. In medieval times, works of art became direct references to the absent corporal essence of a divine being, like Christ, or were used as devotional aids. By contrast, in the modern era artists often reject depictions of the physical body in order to distance themselves from the history of the idealized human form. Through these essays, it becomes apparent, even when the body is not visible in a work of art, it is often still present tangentially. Though the essays in this volume bridge two historical periods, they have coherent thematic links dealing with abjection, embodiment, and phenomenology. Whether figurative or abstract, sacred or secular, medieval or modern, the body maintains a presence in these works even when it is not at first apparent.

The Apostle of the Flesh

The Apostle of the Flesh PDF Author: Jan M.I. Klaver
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047409582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
This Life of Charles Kingsley is a detailed intellectual biography, which is at the same time a critical and contextual study. Working from the original manuscript letters, the author has placed the events of Kingsley’s life against a social-historical-religious background, paying much attention to such mid-nineteenth-century issues as geological discoveries, the Oxford Movement, biblical Higher Criticism, Chartism, sanitary reform, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, Darwinism, the American Civil War, and the anti-slavery campaigns. Analyses of Kingsley’s relationships with important contemporaries are allotted ample space, and special emphasis has been given to themes on which previous biographies have remained relatively silent. Kingsley emerges from this study as one of England’s leading nineteenth-century voices as poet, novelist, social reformer, churchman and historian.

Beda Mayr, Vertheidigung der katholischen Religion (1789)

Beda Mayr, Vertheidigung der katholischen Religion (1789) PDF Author: Ulrich Lehner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047426657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The monastic erudition of the old religious orders was a pillar of the Catholic Enlightenment within the Holy Roman Empire and many other European countries. Despite the enormous importance the monks had as champions of programmatic Enlightenment ideas, few of their original texts are available in modern editions. The present edition contributes to filling this lacuna by making available the main work of the Benedictine monk, Beda Mayr (1742–1794), who developed a modern and ecumenical Catholic theology. Diese Edition macht das Werk "Vertheidigung der katholischen Religion" (1789) des Benediktiners Beda Mayr (1742-1794) wieder zugänglich, das wegen seiner Neudefinition der kirchlichen und päpstlichen Unfehlbarkeit auf den "Index der verbotenen Bücher" gesetzt wurde. Brill's Texts and Sources in Intellectual History, vol. 5

Health

Health PDF Author: Peter Adamson
Publisher:
ISBN: 019991642X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
From antiquity to the early modern period, many philosophers also studied anatomy and medicine, or were medical doctors themselves -- yet the history of philosophy and of medicine are pursued as separate disciplines. This book departs from that practice, gathering contributions by both historians of philosophy and of medicine to trace the concept of health from ancient Greece and China, through the Islamic world and to modern thinkers such as Descartes and Freud. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Health demonstrates the synchronicity and overlapping histories of these two disciplines. From antiquity to the Renaissance, contributors explore the Chinese idea of qi or circulating "vital breath," ideas about medical methodology in antiquity and the middle ages, and the rise and long-lasting influence of Galenic medicine, with its insistence that health consists in a balance of four humors and the proper use of six "non-naturals" including diet, exercise, and sex. In the early modern period, mechanistic theories of the body made it more difficult to explain what health is and why it is more valuable than other physical states. However, philosophers and doctors maintained an interest in the interaction between the good condition of the mind and that of the body, with Descartes and his followers exploring in depth the idea of "medicine for the mind" despite their notorious mind-body dualism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientific improvements in public health emerged along with new ideas about the psychology of health, notably with the concept of "sensibility" and Freud's psychoanalytic theory. The volume concludes with a critical survey of recent philosophical attempts to define health, showing that both "descriptive," or naturalistic, and "normativist" approaches have fallen prey to objections and counterexamples. As a whole, Health: A History shows that notions of both physical and mental health have long been integral to philosophy and a powerful link between philosophy and the sciences.