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More Light? Biblical Criticism And Enlightenment Attitudes, Norman Vance

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Goethe's dying words-his request for Mehr Licht, more light in the darkened sickroom-were meant literally, but they were immediately given metaphorical significance. What did they signify? Did they imply Olympian confidence that more intellectual light would keep flooding in-or frustration and despair at the lack of it? A similar ambiguity is reflected in the history of biblical criticism, an archetypal Enlightenment enterprise that somehow failed to obey the rules and deliver as hoped and failed to obey the rules, despite all the dry light shed upon it. When Jurgen Habermas responded to the award of the Adorno Prize in …

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Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Hostis Antiquus Resurgent: A Reconfigured Jerusalem In Twelfth-Century Latin Sermons About Islam, Todd P. Upton

Quidditas

This paper investigates how Christian writers from late antiquity through the twelfth century transformed explanations of encounters with Middle Eastern peoples and lands into a complex theological discourse. Examinations of sermons and narrative sources from antiquity through the first century of Crusades (1096-1192) serve as evidentiary bases because of the polemical way in which Pope Urban II’s 1095 sermon at Clermont defined Muslims. In that sermon, chroniclers recorded that the pope rallied Frankish support for an armed pilgrimage by disparaging Muslims who had overrun Jerusalem and the Holy Sites – calling them a “race utterly alienated from God” (gens …

Banishing Ganymede At Whitehall: Jove’S “Loathsome Staines” And Fictions Of Britain In Thomas Carew’S Coelum Britannicum, Jessica Tvordi

Quidditas

Thomas Carew’s masque Coelum Britannicum, performed at Whitehall on Shrove Tuesday of 1634, deploys an image of conjugal perfection in order to codify a fiction of national union. Not only are Charles I and Henrietta Maria models of moral and political comportment powerful enough to reform the profligate court of Jove, their harmonious marriage also provides the inspiration for reconciliation between England, Scotland, and Ireland. In order to assert this fiction of unification, the masque invokes images of sexual transgression, symbolically enacts their removal, and equates the strength of Britain with the absence of the deviant monarch, James I. …

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Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Three Short Stories By Carl Hansen, J. R. Christianson

The Bridge

Translator's Note. The Danish-American author, Carl Hansen, was born in Jonstrup near Holbcek in 1860, emigrated to America in 1885, taught for a number of years at Danebod Folk School in Tyler, Minnesota, and died in Seattle in 1916. Enok Mortensen once described him as follows:

"[He] had attended university classes in Denmark and studied at the state agricultural school. He knew something about pharmacology, a lot about veterinary medicine, and much about literature and philosophy ... He was a popular teacher. Each Saturday he gave a lecture-often on classics of Danish literature, and the students sat spellbound as he …

Book Review: James Joyce: The Last Journey, Robert Means

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Although, James Joyce once had to make a large deposit in a Swiss bank to ensure that he and his family would not become welfare cases of the Swiss government (Edel 33) - this was in 1940 when Joyce and his family fled Paris for Zurich - it's not the city's financial reputation that is the most important connection that Zurich has to the life and work of the author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Zurich, with its deserved reputation as a cosmopolitan haven for exiles, as a center of medicine, and as the birthplace of psychoanalysis, provided Joyce with …

Reviews

The Bridge

The Nordic Sagas provide the background and basis for this novel about three women-Katla, a "thrall" (slave) who is the daughter of an Irish Christian woman captured by Viking Raiders along the Irish Coast before Katla was born, Bibrau, Katla's daughter, who is conceived after a brutal sexual assault, and Thorbjorg, who is a seeress and healer to the Viking settlement in Greenland and a faithful servant to the Nordic God, Odin. Fate brings these three women together and the story is told through their thoughts and feelings about each other, the events which bring them together, life in the …

Fame And The Making Of Marriage In Northwest England, 1560-1640, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

Because England did not enact a comprehensive reform of its medieval marital law until Lord Hardwicke’s Act in 1753, it was possible to construct a binding marriage outside the authority of the Church of England during the Tudor and Stuart periods. Marriages created by the exchange of present-tense consent, even if they failed to follow the church’s suggested rules concerning time and place, its emphasis on clerical presence, and its stress on publicity (through three readings of the banns or the procurement of a marriage license), were considered spiritually legitimate throughout the eight decades prior to the civil wars. An …

Romancing The Chronicles: 1 Henry Iv And The Rewriting Of Medieval History, Bradley Greenburg

Quidditas

This essay explores the ways Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV deploys Welshness as a counterforce to English national stability. I argue that the critical habit of equating the genre of romance with untruthfulness or silliness does not pay close enough attention to what Shakespeare does in his history plays. The Hal he gives us, whose youth and military training in Wales he suppresses, is, generically, a romance character. But, instead of a knight in his father’s service (where his adventures would be securely in the service of the realm), or knight errant, he is an errant haunter of bad company, an …

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Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Adelrich Steinach's Portrait Of The Ohio Swiss, Adelrich Steinach, Leo Schelbert

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The writer Raumer 1 calls Ohio "queen, wonder of the West" because its fertility surpasses that of the Nile delta and also because of its beauty .... Germans were the first settlers of Ohio and Swiss liked to live among them ....

Immigration: Is It What It Used To Be?, Leland E. Molgaard

The Bridge

I became interested in this topic as I traveled around the country teaching. My wife and I work with teachers and social workers, training them to conduct a "strengthening families program" for parents and young adolescents. Many of these teachers and social workers serve recent immigrant families and, as I heard them tell of their work, they often told me that these families were unique because they were new immigrants. Yet as I listened, I was struck by how similar these immigrant families were to the families in the community where I grew up in northwest Iowa. The scripts were …

Delno C. West Award Winner: Using And Abusing Delegated Power In Elizabethan England, James H. Forse

Quidditas

Queen Elizabeth's government, like most early modern European governments, was one that sought to extend its influence and power throughout the realm. But at the same time it possessed minimal financial resources and coercive machinery of power, and therefore, while it issued mandates, it had to depend upon local officials and individuals to whom it delegated power. Nor did Elizabeth’s government have any machinery of oversight to “watch-dog” those delegated powers. Only when issues came to the attention of the Privy Council after-the-fact did the government, occasionally, intervene to redress abuses of those delegated powers. Two areas in which these …

Special Feature: The Swiss In Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: Response To Kristina Marcy's "Review Essay", Carol Williams

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Like most white South Carolinians of my generation, I have various strands of European ancestry: Scots-Irish, English, German, Swiss, and since my name is "Williams," probably Welsh by way of England, then Ulster. However, it was the Swiss strand that I was most conscious of when growing up because I knew a little more about it. A grandmother often talked to us children about "our people," about "dear old Grandfather," whose own grandfather had come from Switzerland in the mid-eighteenth century: George Sightler (Seitler, Siteler, Sitler); and we had a written history of his family in South Carolina.

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Theology His Profession, Botany His Passion: Thomas A. Bruhin, 1835-1895, Herbert Bruhin

Swiss American Historical Society Review

In the little town of Schwyz, in the heart of the Swiss Confederation, on April 20, 1642, the joyous strains of Easter Mass had scarcely died away when a cry of "Fire!" was raised. Less than two hours later, the greater part of the town, which lies at the foot of the twin Mythen peaks about an hour's journey from Lake Lucerne, was a smoking ruin. Among the 47 houses destroyed were the presbytery, dating from 1594, the school, two inns, the mill with the mint, and the church with its tower and bells. Fortunately, it had been possible to …

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Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Gertrude Hofmann Langer. The Story Of A Life, Edward G. Langer

Swiss American Historical Society Review

I was born on May 1, 1911 in Kttsnacht, Canton Zttrich, Switzerland. That day is a national holiday in Switzerland which is their equivalent of our Labor Day. It certainly was Labor Day for my mother, Marie Walder Hofmann. (December 22, 1890 - August 23, 1959). The name Kttsnacht means a kiss in the night. My name was a very common name in Switzerland at the time. I had no middle name. The Swiss spelling of my name is Gertrud.

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Reports, Karl Niederer, Sabine Jessner, Carla Crosby, Erdmann Schmocker, Fred Moser, Ernest Thurston, Leo Schelbert

Swiss American Historical Society Review

At 10:00 A.M., President Karl I. Niederer called the business meeting to order. He expressed the Society's thanks to His Excellency, Ambassador Alfred Defago for hosting this meeting and to staff Member Ms. Florence Nicole for having so efficiently taken care of all the local arrangements. The Society has traditionally met here in Washington every third year. Our Washington meetings also mark the conclusion of outgoing officers' three-year terms and the election of new officers, so meeting in this place has a special significance. Mr. Niederer also expressed his deep appreciation to Ambassador and Mrs. Defago for welcoming us to …

"Goodly Woods": Irish Forests, Georgic Trees In Books 1 And 4 Of Edmund Spenser's Færie Queene, Thomas Herron

Quidditas

Whilst vitall sapp did make me spring,

And leafe and bough did flourish brave,

I then was dumbe and could not sing,

Ne had the voice which now I have:

But when the axe my life did end,

The Muses nine this voice did send.

—Verses upon the earl of Cork's lute, attributed (ca. 1633) to Edmund Spenser

James Shirley's The Politician And The Demand For Responsible Government In The Court Of Charles I, James R. Keller

Quidditas

On 13 June 1629, Dr. Lamb, a person physician and astrologer to the duke of Buckingham, while strolling down a London street was attacked by an angry mob and beaten to death. When he first noticed the crowd gathering, he summoned a group of sailors to guard him. However, incensed by years of arbitrary government, economic hardship, and war, the mob pursued Lamb with the intention of making his death an example for the duke; they called him "the Duke's Devil." As Lamb made his way toward a local tavern, the ever-increasing pack began to pummel him with stones, and …

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Quidditas

No abstract provided.

A Place Called Dana The Centennial History Of Trinity Seminary And Dana College 1884-1984, Gail Q. Unruh, Reviewer, Peter L. Petersen

The Bridge

Blair, Nebraska, located some twenty miles north of Omaha, is the home of Dana College and Trinity Seminary. Together, these companion institutions formed one of the focal points of Danish immigrant efforts to establish themselves in their new homeland and to preserve elements of their cultural heritage. In the opening pages of his A Place Called Dana, Peter L. Petersen declares his desire to accomplish four interrelated goals: to write a history of the two associated institutions of Dana College and Trinity Seminary; to illuminate some of the accomplishments of Danish-Americans; to highlight the significant contribution to higher education of …

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The Bridge

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Egon Bodtker

The Bridge

This short book tells the reader what life was like for one young man in a small village in Denmark in the first two decades of this century. As the author writes in the Foreword: " it is a collection of reminiscences, a mosaic of people and places seen from a long distance, both geographically and chronologically." This sensitive sketch of a childhood and adolescence in the first two decades of the twentieth century will make all readers aware of the monumental changes in the world from then until now. While many of the individual behaviors can be related to …

The Feilberg Letters: A Danish Family's Reflections On Canadian Prairie Life, Jorgen Dahlie

The Bridge

So wrote Aksel Sandemose, noted Danish-Norwegian writer and himself an immigrant to Canada in 1927. When he spoke of iron determination and perseverance, he might well have been describing the Ditlev and Julie Feilberg family, a small part of whose experiences in Canada are recounted in the excerpts which follow. Without making too extravagant a claim for the uniqueness of any one immigrant encounter with a new land, one is nonetheless forced to acknowledge that each individual or family brought with them their own special cultural and intellectual resources. A reading of the Feilberg letters reveals that this family had …