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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 …
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 …
"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 …
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 …