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Author: Kevin Killeen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503635864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.
Author: Kevin Killeen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503635864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Get Book
Book Description
Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.
Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192604732
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 897
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.
Author: Michael Witmore
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804779910
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Collapsing buildings, unexpected meetings in the marketplace, monstrous births, encounters with pirates at sea—these and other unforeseen “accidents” at the turn of the seventeenth century in England acquired unprecedented significance in the early modern philosophical and cultural imagination. Drawing on intellectual history, cultural criticism, and rhetorical theory, this book chronicles the narrative transformation of “accident” from a philosophical dead end to an astonishing occasion for revelation and wonder in early modern religious life, dramatic practice, and experimental philosophy. Embracing the notion that accident was a concept with both learned and popular appeal, the book traces its evolution through Aristotelian, Scholastic, and Calvinist thought into a range of early modern texts. It suggests that for many English writers, accidental events raised fundamental questions about the nature of order in the world and the way that order should be apprehended. Alongside texts by such canonical figures as Shakespeare and Bacon, this study draws on several lesser-known authors of sensational news accounts about accidents that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century. The result is a cultural anatomy of accidents as philosophical problem, theatrical conceit, spiritual landmark, and even a prototype for Baconian “experiment,” one that provides a fresh interpretation of the early modern engagement with contingency in intellectual and cultural terms.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004694269
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Much of the most recent research on Jewish scepticism was inspired by the work of the early modern Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, the first thinker in the history of Jewish thought to declare himself a sceptic and a follower of the New Academy. This collected volume shines new light on the intimate relationship between Luzzatto’s sceptical thinking and an era marked by paradoxes and contrasts between religious devotion and scientific rationalism, as well as between the rabbinic-biblical Jewish tradition and the open tendency towards engagement with non-Jewish philosophical, literary, scientific, and theological cultures. It plots out an original path along which to understand Luzzatto’s scepticism by pointing to the various facets of being a Jewish sceptic in seventeenth-century Italy.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047419871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
This volume contains essays by twenty-two eminent scholars from across North America and Europe, examining various aspects of the Hebraic, Hellenic, patristic, medieval, and early modern understandings of God and creation.
Author: Klaas van Berkel
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042917521
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
From 22-25 May, 2002, the University of Groningen hosted an international conference on 'The Book of Nature. Continuity and change in European and American attitudes towards the natural world'. From Antiquity down to our own time, theologians, philosophers and scientists have often compared nature to a book, which might, under the right circumstances, be read and interpreted in order to come closer to the 'Author' of nature, God. The 'reading' of this book was not regarded as mere idle curiosity, but it was seen as leading to a deeper understanding of God's wisdom and power, and it culturally legitimated and promoted a positive attitude towards nature and its study. A selection of the papers which were delivered at the conference has been edited in two volumes. The first book was published as The Book of Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages; this second volume is devoted to the history of that concept after the Middle Ages.
Author: Timothy J. Reiss
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804745659
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 652
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Book Description
Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a personto experience who-nessin other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.
Author: Alistair Cameron Crombie
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780907628798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508
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Book Description
A.C. Crombie is one of the best known writers on the history of Science. Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought brings together a coherent body of essays that complement his books and are of independent value. A.C. Crombie traces general themes in the development of Science: the Aristotelian inheritance and the importance of the search for logical explanation in the middle ages; the ambitions and limitations of experiment and quantification; changing attitudes to scientific progress; the relations between Science and the Arts, and between Mathematics, Music and Medical Science; and the study of the senses. In particular he shows how the mechanistic hypothesis stimulated the experimental and philosophical study of vision.
Author: Kristen Poole
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251520
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Early Modern Histories of Time examines how a range of chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and explores how these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. This innovative approach thus moves beyond debates about where we should divide linear time (and what to call the ensuing segments) to reconsider the very concept of "period." Bringing together an eminent cast of literary scholars and historians, the volume develops productive historical models by drawing on the very texts and cultural contexts that are their objects of study. What happens to the idea of "period" when English literature is properly placed within the dynamic currents of pan-European literary phenomena? How might we think of historical period through the palimpsested nature of buildings, through the religious concept of the secular, through the demographic model of the life cycle, even through the repetitive labor of laundering? From theology to material culture to the temporal constructions of Shakespeare, and from the politics of space to the poetics of typology, the essays in this volume take up diverse, complex models of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century temporality and contemplate their current relevance for our own ideas of history. The volume thus embraces the ambiguity inherent in the word "contemporary," moving between our subjects' sense of self-emplacement and the historiographical need to address the questions and concerns that affect us today. Contributors: Douglas Bruster, Euan Cameron, Heather Dubrow, Kate Giles, Tim Harris, Natasha Korda, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Kristen Poole, Ethan H. Shagan, James Simpson, Nigel Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, Gordon Teskey, Julianne Werlin, Owen Williams, Steven N. Zwicker.
Author: Emily C. Nacol
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883016
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
In An Age of Risk, Emily Nacol shows that risk, now treated as a permanent feature of our lives, did not always govern understandings of the future. Focusing on the epistemological, political, and economic writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Nacol explains that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, political and economic thinkers reimagined the future as a terrain of risk, characterized by probabilistic calculation, prediction, and control. In these early modern sources, Nacol contends, we see three crucial developments in thought on risk and politics. While early modern thinkers differentiated uncertainty about the future from probabilistic calculations of risk, they remained attentive to the ways uncertainty and risk remained in a conceptual tangle, a problem that constrained good decision making. They developed sophisticated theories of trust and credit as crucial background conditions for prudent risk-taking, and offered complex depictions of the relationships and behaviors that would make risk-taking more palatable. They also developed two narratives that persist in subsequent accounts of risk—risk as a threat to security, and risk as an opportunity for profit. Looking at how these narratives are entwined in early modern thought, Nacol locates the origins of our own ambivalence about risk-taking. By the end of the eighteenth century, she argues, a new type of political actor would emerge from this ambivalence, one who approached risk with fear rather than hope. By placing a fresh lens on early modern writing, An Age of Risk demonstrates how new and evolving orientations toward risk influenced approaches to politics and commerce that continue to this day.
