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Articles 1 - 25 of 25
Full-Text Articles in History
Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly
Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
The first five articles in this volume represent a special section devoted to Eastern and Middle Eastern religions during the Enlightenment. These articles do not so much explore these religions on their own terms as consider how Western thinkers and writers responded to Buddhism, Islam, and other non-European religions; they examine how the religious and philosophical thought of the Far and Middle East, or at least the ways Western writers represented this thought, informed Enlightenment ideas and European religious, cultural, and textual practices. As they point out, non-Western religions often served as a lens through which individuals during the long …
Madonella's Other Convent: "Platonick" Ladies, Randy Rakes, And The "Mahometan" Paradise, Samara Anne Cahill
Madonella's Other Convent: "Platonick" Ladies, Randy Rakes, And The "Mahometan" Paradise, Samara Anne Cahill
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In eighteenth-century England both the Roman Catholic convent andthe Muslim harem were stereotyped as feminine spaces of religious alterity and sexual subversion. As a result, those who wished to defend women's learning often resorted to complex xenophobic representational strategies as a way of disassociating learned women from these spaces. I argue that the stereotypical "Platonick lady:' as a satirical figure that negotiated both these sites of supposed sexual hypocrisy and foreign dominion, ought to be considered a complex but key trope in the history of feminist orientalism. This is because, in her hypocritical obsession with the disembodied "soul;' the …
Buddhism As Caricature: China And The Legitimation Of Natural Religion In The Enlightenment, Jeffery D. Burson
Buddhism As Caricature: China And The Legitimation Of Natural Religion In The Enlightenment, Jeffery D. Burson
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Europe was unusually familiar with the ancient civilizations of East Asia, but however familiar China may have seemed, European missionaries and those who utilized and subverted their accounts in the literature of the eighteenth century made sense of China through their own hermeneutical lenses. David Porter's work Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europeargues that Jesuit missionaries and Enlightenment philosophers imposed upon China their Eurocentric quest for "representational legitimacy;' which Porter defines as "the presence of an originary wellspring of meaning that gives rise to a succession of grounded signifiers in which the living image of the origin …
The Empty Link: Zen Meditative Harmonics And Intimations Of Enlightenment In Pope1s Essay On Man And Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice, John G. Rudy
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Commenting on its status as "unmistakably a poem of its period;' Frank Brady complains that Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man . has not fared as well among readers as have other representative epics, specifically The Prelude and Paradise Lost: "While we still retain enough of the Romantic attitude toward life to understand Wordsworth, and enough knowledge, at least, of Christianity to understand Milton, the philosophical basis of Pope's viewpoint has disappeared todaf' The problem, according to Brady, lies in the relationship between reason, the quality which lends the period one of its names, and philosophical optimism, the basis …
Global And Local Perspectives In Spanish And New World Performances Of Calderon's Four Parts Of The World, Beth K. Aracena
Global And Local Perspectives In Spanish And New World Performances Of Calderon's Four Parts Of The World, Beth K. Aracena
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
The first published collection of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's autos sacramentales(sacred dramas) dates from 1677, during Calderon's lifetime (1600-1681), and includes an explanation of the works penned by this great Spanish dramaturge. In his preface, recognizing that readers may be annoyed at similarities in the printed repertoire of more than seventy autos, Calderon justifies the collection: "The autos were performed but once [sic] a year, and this volume contains works which were produced at intervals over a period of more than twenty years. They were not written to be printed together and read one after another:" Calderon also …
Under The Cape Of Religion: Herder And Shamanism In The Eighteenth Century, Vera Jakoby
Under The Cape Of Religion: Herder And Shamanism In The Eighteenth Century, Vera Jakoby
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
I f one were to undertake a genealogy of how Western Europe established a concept of otherness, the eighteenth century would be one of the most rewarding "information hubs" for such a study. Ethnography, ethnology, anthropology, and other new knowledge fields exploring global populations and environs were founded in this century, analyzing and systematizing the waves of travel reports that had been flooding Europe since the time of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Stories and images of paradisiacal and terrorizing spaces, peculiar humans, and wondrous animals and plants had taken root in the Western imagination beginning in the sixteenth century. …
"Oppressed With My Own Sensations": The Histories Of Some Of The Penitents And Principled Piety, Robin Runia
"Oppressed With My Own Sensations": The Histories Of Some Of The Penitents And Principled Piety, Robin Runia
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Many scholars have observed the sentimentalization of the prostitute throughout the eighteenth century, and while this sentimentalization and its connection to the culture of sensibility have been compellingly theorized, the penitent prostitute's relationship to emotion, sensation, and piety has not been fully developed. The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) constructs an anxious equivalency between emotion and sensation, reflecting the vexed nature of sentimental discourse-the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between sensibility and sensuality. Examining this slippage reveals anxieties about women's abilities to accurately interpret and act upon the sensations of their bodies and their corresponding …
"Conversing With Animal Forms Of Wisdom'': Blake's Visions Of Eternity In Context, Judith C. Mueller
"Conversing With Animal Forms Of Wisdom'': Blake's Visions Of Eternity In Context, Judith C. Mueller
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Had anyone been paying attention, the endings of Blake's major prophecies-Milton, The Four Zoas, and Jerusalem-might have either puzzled or appalled Blake's Christian contemporaries. Each ends in a movement out of the fractured, fallen state and, in the case of The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, into the promised, eternal paradise, if only for a brief glimpse. Blake's visions of the restored or "heavenly" state respond to common eighteenth-century Christian depictions of the afterlife, most of which he treats with suspicion, even disdain. Scholars have shown how conceptions of heaven shift during the period; theocentric eternities of …
Of Broomsticks, The "Moderns;' And Self-Expression, Nathalie Zimpfer
Of Broomsticks, The "Moderns;' And Self-Expression, Nathalie Zimpfer
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Broomsticks have a history of making their way into Jonathan Swift's works. One might recall that such is the object of Peter's theologico-interpretive rantings in A Tale of a Tub, in which "after some pause the Brother so often mentioned for his Erudition, who was very skill'd in Criticisms, had found in a certain Author, which he said should be nameless, that the same Word which in the Will is called Fringe, does also signify Broom-stick." More conspicuously, said object is also at the heart of A Meditation upon a Broomstick, an amusing opuscule whose full title, A …
Basnage De Beauval's "Reformation" Of The Dictionnaire Universel, David Eick
Basnage De Beauval's "Reformation" Of The Dictionnaire Universel, David Eick
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Henri IV's Edict of Nantes (1598) granted official tolerance to French Protestants and ended the Wars of Religion that had raged throughout France during the second half of the sixteenth century. On October 22, 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Some two hundred thousand French Protestants sought exile in neighboring countries and in North America. The economic effects of the Protestant diaspora were disastrous for France; its cultural effects, unexpected and far-reaching. Much of the French publishing industry set up shop outside of France's national borders, in London, Geneva, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, where publishers circumvented French regulations and …
Sentimentality In The Service Of Methodism: John Wesley's Abridgment Of Henry Brooke's The Fool Of Quality ( 17 65-1770), Mary Peace
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
This article examines the relationship between Methodist and sentimental discourses in the second half of the eighteenth century through the lens of John Wesley's abridgment of Henry Brooke's sentimental novel The Fool of Quality (1765-70). John Wesley's abridgment was published in 1781 under the title the History of Henry Earl of Moreland. My article is driven by the question of how a worldly Enlightenment text such as Brooke's Fool might have seemed ripe for the propagation of a Methodist theology that had abandoned the possibility of any true virtue existing in the world. In considering the relationship between Brooke's …
Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians, J. V. B. M. V. St.
Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians, J. V. B. M. V. St.
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
I t is a tragedy for the investigating intellect to have both its own resilience and the power to lift itself to something higher chained when it attempts to track the progress of human knowledge in the annals of the world, the shaping of the intellect, and the refinement of morals. The scholar is fettered in his desire to collect data, which contributed to the enlightenment of nations and which, so to speak, fermented the human mind so that it was able to lift itself up into higher regions and throw off prejudices. He is hindered in his work when …
Melancholy, Medicine, And Religion In Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy Of Melancholy: Book Review, Samara Anne Cahill
Melancholy, Medicine, And Religion In Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy Of Melancholy: Book Review, Samara Anne Cahill
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
In Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (2010), Mary Ann Lund challenges what she sees as the excesses, on one hand, of attempting to shoehorn Robert Burton's idiosyncratic text into a single genre and, on the other, of reader-response interpretations of the Anatomy. Lund tackles the Anatomy's notorious unwieldiness by treating the text as a guidebook intended to combat all types of melancholy for any type of reader. In other words, the excessiveness of the Anatomy's form suggests the generosity of an author and pastor who sought to help everyone, …
Milton In Context: Book Review, Angela Eward-Mangione
Milton In Context: Book Review, Angela Eward-Mangione
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
John Milton evades literary categorization more than any of his early modern contemporaries. William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe primarily elicited fame through their contributions to English drama and poetry. John Donne is recognized as a master of both the sonnet and the sermon, though his love poetry remains a significant object of study as well. Milton, however, who wrote primarily as a poet and a pamphleteer, also worked as a government employee, actively engaging his social and political circumstances perhaps more than any other literary writer in early modern England. Milton's activism later led T. S. Eliot, when repenting his …
Theatre Of Crisis: The Performance Of Power In The Kingdom ·Of Ireland, 1662-1692: Book Review, Dave Mcginnis
Theatre Of Crisis: The Performance Of Power In The Kingdom ·Of Ireland, 1662-1692: Book Review, Dave Mcginnis
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Patrick Tuite's book Theatre of Crisis ostensibly details the political and social underpinnings of play development and performative aesthetics in Ireland between 1662 and 1692. From a purely historical point of view, this alone would merit the writing of the text as a point of serious study since Irish drama has traditionally lagged behind its English counterpart, even during the very years on which Tuite focuses. In pursuing this subject, Tuite has crafted a text that not only encapsulates the aesthetic preferences of the relevant era on Ireland's dominant stage at the time, the Smock Alley Theatre, but he has …
The Eighteenth-Century Novel And The Secularization Of Ethics: Book Review, Mary Ann Rooks
The Eighteenth-Century Novel And The Secularization Of Ethics: Book Review, Mary Ann Rooks
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
For many reasons-including religious reforms and controversies, doubts about the effectiveness of the clergy, the development of scientific advancements and Enlightenment ideologies, and disruptions of class and gender expectations coinciding with the emergence of a consumer economy-it is easy to imagine writers and readers in the eighteenth century searching for a locus of moral authority. The frequency of claims to "entertain and instruct;' a mantra of eighteenth-century prose fiction, indicates a need felt by many authors to address the suspected dangers of novel reading and defend the legitimacy-in part_icular the moral efficacy-of this emergent genre. In The Eighteenth-Century Novel and …
Religion And The Politics Of Time: Holidays In France From Louis Xiv Through Napoleon: Book Review, Muriel Schmid
Religion And The Politics Of Time: Holidays In France From Louis Xiv Through Napoleon: Book Review, Muriel Schmid
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
As the full title indicates, Religion and the Politics of Time is organized chronologically and presents the evolution of the organization of time in France from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. The style of this historical inquiry is very much reminiscent of Michel Vovelle's or Bernard Plongeron's publications on eighteenth-century revolutionary France, both of which are similarly based on extensive archival research. One of the stated goals of the book is "to reexamine the republican calendar in a long-term framework'' (5). Looking at the history that immediately precedes and follows the creation of the republican calendar …
Living With Religious Diversity In Early Modern Europe: Book Review, Michael Mclaughlin
Living With Religious Diversity In Early Modern Europe: Book Review, Michael Mclaughlin
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
This volume, consisting of many different approaches to religious diversity and religious coexistence, is part of the extensive series St. Andrews' Studies in Reformation History and is the successful product of a conference on religious diversity held at Carl von Ossietzky Universitat (Oldenberg, Germany) in September 2007. An introduction by C. Scott Dixon and a concluding attempt to theorize religious diversity by Mark Greengrass frame the volume.
Wesley And Methodist Studies: Book Review, Kathryn Stasio
Wesley And Methodist Studies: Book Review, Kathryn Stasio
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Wesley and Methodist Studies once again provides carefully researched, worthwhile material demonstrating the important niche that the annual occupies. The word niche seems more applicable to volume 3 than to volume 2. This is certainly not a complaint or a criticism, but the primary articles of volume 3 are highly specialized and less likely to attract a wide audience. Clearly, the title of the annual alerts readers to its specialization, but some of the authors could have framed their arguments to show the reader the bigger picture instead of, for example, offering conclusions that summarize.
An Introduction To Ignaz Edler Von Born And His Article "Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians", Hans-Wilhelm Kelling
An Introduction To Ignaz Edler Von Born And His Article "Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians", Hans-Wilhelm Kelling
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Although well known during his own lifetime as a scientist, author, and promoter of Enlightenment ideals, Ignaz Edler von Born also made a significant impact in his less public life as a Freemason. In 1784 he was both Meister vom Stuhl of the Masonic Lodge "Zur wahren Eintracht" and editor in chief of the Journal fur Freymaurer, published quarterly for just three years by Christian Friedrich Wappler in Vienna. In its very first issue, Born, under the initials I.v.B.M.v.St., Ignaz von Born, Meister vom Stuhl, contributed an article important to the Freemasons titled "Ueber die Mysterien der Aegyptier:" In …
''A Dreadful Phenomenon At The Birches": Grace, Nature, And Industry In The Ministry And Writings Of John Fletcher Of Madeley, Peter S. Forsaith
''A Dreadful Phenomenon At The Birches": Grace, Nature, And Industry In The Ministry And Writings Of John Fletcher Of Madeley, Peter S. Forsaith
Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
n the morning of Thursday, May 27, 1773, the evangelical Vicar of Madeley, Shropshire, the Reverend John Fletcher, went with throngs of other curious onlookers to view the dramatic scene of a landslip that had occurred in the early hours on the edge of his parish, at a location known locally as "the Birches." Meeting several of his parishioners there, he announced that he would return the following evening to preach a sermon on this "Dreadful Phenomenon:' He took for his text "If the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up ... …