Download or read book Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France written by Sanja Perovic and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the master narrative of secularization, an exploration of the persistent influence of religious categories in the cultural landscape of Europe's first secular state.
Download or read book Colonization Piracy and Trade in Early Modern Europe written by Estelle Paranque and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together essays examining the international influence of queens, other female rulers, and their representatives from 1450 through 1700, an era of expanding colonial activity and sea trade. As Europe rose in prominence geopolitically, a number of important women—such as Queen Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de Medici, Caterina Cornaro of Cyprus, and Isabel Clara Eugenia of Austria—exerted influence over foreign affairs. Traditionally male-dominated spheres such as trade, colonization, warfare, and espionage were, sometimes for the first time, under the control of powerful women. This interdisciplinary volume examines how they navigated these activities, and how they are represented in literature. By highlighting the links between female power and foreign affairs, Colonization, Piracy, and Trade in Early Modern Europe contributes to a fuller understanding of early modern queenship.
Download or read book Unexpected Heirs in Early Modern Europe written by Valerie Schutte and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There were many surprising accessions in the early modern period, including Mary I of England, Henry III of France, Anne Stuart, and others, but this is the first book dedicated solely to evaluating their lives and the repercussions of their reigns. By comparing a variety of such unexpected heirs, this engaging history offers a richer portrait of early modern monarchy. It shows that the need for heirs and the acquisition and preparation of heirs had a critical impact on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and politics, from the appropriation of culture to the influence of language, to trade and political alliances. It also shows that securing a dynasty relied on more than just political agreements and giving birth to legitimate sons, examining how relationships between women could and did forge alliances and dynastic continuities.
Download or read book Queenship and Counsel in Early Modern Europe written by Helen Matheson-Pollock and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discourse of political counsel in early modern Europe depended on the participation of men, as both counsellors and counselled. Women were often thought too irrational or imprudent to give or receive political advice—but they did in unprecedented numbers, as this volume shows. These essays trace the relationship between queenship and counsel through over three hundred years of history. Case studies span Europe, from Sweden and Poland-Lithuania via the Habsburg territories to England and France, and feature queens regnant, consort and regent, including Elizabeth I of England, Catherine Jagiellon of Sweden, Catherine de’ Medici and Anna of Denmark. They draw on a variety of innovative sources to recover evidence of queenly counsel, from treatises and letters to poetry, masques and architecture. For scholars of history, politics and literature in early modern Europe, this book enriches our understanding of royal women as political actors.
Download or read book Early Modern Visions of Space written by Dorothea Heitsch and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How writers respond to a cosmology in evolution in the sixteenth century and how literature and space implicate each other are the guiding issues of this volume in which sixteen authors explore the topic of space in its multiform incarnations and representations. The volume's first section features the early modern exploration and codification of urban and rural spaces as well as maritime and industrial expanses: "Space and Territory: Geographies in Texts" thus contributes to a history of spatial consciousness. The construction of local, national, political, public, and private places is highlighted in "Space and Politics: Literary Geographies"; the contributors in this segment show how built forms as architectural or literary constructions and spatial orientation are intertwined. "Space and Gender: Geopoetical Approaches" traces the experience of gender as political, territorial, and communicative exploration; the essays in this division deal with social organization and its symbolic analysis, resulting in literary texts featuring what could be called psychological production theories. The development of ethical approaches adapted to or critical of colonial expansion is analyzed in "Space and Ethics: Geocritical Ventures"; here we encounter early modern globalization where locals, explorers, immigrants, adventurers, and intellectuals remake themselves in new places, engage in or meet with resistance, or attempt to rework local sociopolitical systems while reassessing those they are familiar with. "The Space of the Book, the Book as Space: Printing, Reading, Publishing" analyzes the tactile object of the book as an arena for commerce, politics, and authorial experimentation.
Download or read book Confronting Evil written by Scott M. Powers and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature holds that the concept of evil is central to the psychology of secularism. Drawing on notions of secularization as a phenomenon of ambivalence or dualism in which religion continues to exist alongside secularity in exerting influence on modern French thought, author Scott M. Powers enlists psychoanalytic theory on mourning and sublimation, the philosophical concept of the sublime, Charles Taylor's theory of religious and secular "cross-pressures," and William James's psychology of conversion to account for the survival of religious themes in Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans, and Céline. For Powers, Baudelaire's prose poems, Zola's experimental novels, and Huysmans's and Céline's early narratives attempt to account for evil by redefining the traditionally religious concept along secular lines. However, when unmitigated by the mechanisms of irony and sublimation, secular confrontation with the dark and seemingly absurd dimension of man leads modern writers such as Huysmans and Céline, paradoxically, to embrace a religious or quasi-religious understanding of good and evil. In the end, Powers finds that how authors cope with the reality of suffering and human wickedness has a direct bearing on the ability to sustain a secular vision.
Download or read book Modes of Play in Eighteenth Century France written by Fayçal Falaky and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.
Download or read book The Secular Enlightenment written by Margaret C. Jacob and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Jacob demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. --Adapted from publisher description.
Download or read book The Identities of Catherine de Medici written by Susan Broomhall and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative analysis of the representational strategies that constructed Catherine de’ Medici and sought to explain her behaviour and motivations.
Download or read book The Virtues of Abandon written by Charly Coleman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France in the eighteenth century glittered, but also seethed, with new goods and new ideas. In the halls of Versailles, the streets of Paris, and the soul of the Enlightenment itself, a vitriolic struggle was being waged over the question of ownership—of property, of position, even of personhood. Those who championed man's possession of material, spiritual, and existential goods faced the successive assaults of radical Christian mystics, philosophical materialists, and political revolutionaries. The Virtues of Abandon traces the aims and activities of these three seemingly disparate groups, and the current of anti-individualism that permeated theology, philosophy, and politics throughout the period. Fired by the desire to abandon the self, men and women sought new ways to relate to God, nature, and nation. They joined illicit mystic cults that engaged in rituals of physical mortification and sexual license, committed suicides in the throes of materialist fatalism, drank potions to induce consciousness-altering dreams, railed against the degrading effects of unfettered consumption, and ultimately renounced the feudal privileges that had for centuries defined their social existence. The explosive denouement was the French Revolution, during which God and king were toppled from their thrones.
Download or read book Confronting Secularism in Europe and India written by Brian Black and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can secularism continue to provide a foundation for political legitimacy? It is often claimed that one of the cultural achievements of the West has been its establishment of secular democracy, wherein religious belief is respected but confined to the sphere of private belief. In more recent times, however, political secularism has been increasingly called into question. Religious believers, in numerous traditions, have protested against the distortion and confinement that secularism imposes on their faith. Others have become uneasily aware of the way in which secularism no longer commands universal assent in the way it once did. Confronting Secularism in Europe and India adds to this debate by staging a creative encounter between European and Indian conceptions of secularism with a view to continuing new and distinctive trajectories of thought about the place and role of secularism in contemporary times. Looking at political secularism, the relationship between secularism and religion, and religious and secular violence, this book considers whether there are viable alternatives to secularism in Europe and in India.
Download or read book The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint written by Mita Choudhury and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-01-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. Mita Choudhury’s examination of the trial sheds light on two important phenomena with broad historical implications: the questioning of traditional authority and the growing disquiet about the role of the sacred and divine in French society. Both contributed to the French people’s ever-increasing disenchantment with the church and the king. Choudhury builds her story through an extensive examination of archival material, including trial records, pamphlets, periodicals, and unpublished correspondence from witnesses. The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint offers new insights into how the eighteenth-century public interpreted the accusations and why the case consumed the public for years, developing from a local sex scandal to a referendum on religious authority and its place in French society and politics.
Download or read book Letters Between Mothers and Daughters written by Barbara Caine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are now many studies of family letters in Europe, but most of them focus on marital letters and letters between parents, especially mothers, and their sons. Little attention has been paid to the letters to and from daughters. This volume seeks to begin filling that gap by exploring the continuities and changes evident in the letters written between mothers and daughters over several centuries. Some of these changes reflect the history of letters and the ways that they were written and delivered, especially the move from the use of scribes and couriers in the medieval and early modern period, which made both the writing and reading of letters a public affair, to the use of pens and the situation in which letters were able to be written in private and read only by the person to whom they were addressed. But the letters also reveal the changing nature of the mother and daughter relationship, as the formal and more distant ties evident in the early period, in which dynastic and other matters were often more important to a mother than her daughter’s personal happiness, were replaced by closer and more intimate ties and a concern with particular personalities and individual needs. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.
Download or read book Religion as Critique written by Irfan Ahmad and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam--indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to "others," including Muslims. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women's equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.
Download or read book Let There Be Enlightenment written by Anton M. Matytsin and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matytsin, Darrin M. McMahon, James Schmidt, Céline Spector, Jo Van Cauter
Download or read book Exploring Jesuit Distinctiveness written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume theme is the distinctiveness of Jesuits and their ministries that was discussed at the first International Symposium on Jesuit Studies held at Boston College’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies in June 2015. It explores the quidditas Jesuitica, or the specifically Jesuit way(s) of proceeding in which Jesuits and their colleagues operated from historical, geographical, social, and cultural perspectives. The collection poses a question whether there was an essential core of distinctive elements that characterized the way in which Jesuits lived their religious vocation and conducted their various works and how these ways of proceeding were lived out in the various epochs and cultures in which Jesuits worked over four and a half centuries; what changed and adapted itself to different times and situations, and what remained constant, transcending time and place, infusing the apostolic works and lives of Jesuits with the charism at the source of the Society of Jesus’s foundation and development. Thanks to generous support of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, this volume is available in Open Access.
Download or read book Sovereignty in Action written by Bas Leijssenaar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sovereignty, originally the figure of 'sovereign', then the state, today meets new challenges of globalization and privatization of power.
