The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany
The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany

Author: Neil Kenny

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2004-07-08

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780191556586

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Why did people argue about curiosity in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, so much more than today? Why was curiosity a fashionable topic in early modern conduct manuals, university dissertations, scientific treatises, sermons, newspapers, novellas, plays, operas, ballets, poems, from Corneille to Diderot, from Johann Valentin Andreae to Gottlieb Spizel? Universities, churches, and other institutions invoked curiosity in order to regulate knowledge or behaviour, to establish who should try to know or do what, and under what circumstances. As well as investigating a crucial episode in the history of knowledge, this study makes a distinctive contribution to historiographical debates about the nature of 'concepts'. Curiosity was constantly reshaped by the uses of it. And yet, strangely, however much people contested what curiosity was, they often agreed that what they were disagreeing about was one and the same thing.

Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Author: Robert John Weston Evans

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780754641025

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'Curiosity' and 'wonder' are topics of increasing interest and importance to Renaissance and Enlightenment historians. Conspicuous in a host of disciplines from history of science and technology to history of art, literature, and society, both have assumed a prominent place in studies of the Early Modern period. This volume brings together an international group of scholars to investigate the various manifestations of, and relationships between, 'curiosity' and 'wonder' from the 16th to the 18th century. Focused case studies on texts, objects and individuals explore the multifaceted natures of these themes, highlighting the intense fascination and continuing scrutiny to which each has been subjected over three centuries.

Before Orientalism
Before Orientalism

Author: Kim M. Phillips

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-11-14

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0812208943

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A distinct European perspective on Asia emerged in the late Middle Ages. Early reports of a homogeneous "India" of marvels and monsters gave way to accounts written by medieval travelers that indulged readers' curiosity about far-flung landscapes and cultures without exhibiting the attitudes evident in the later writings of aspiring imperialists. Mining the accounts of more than twenty Europeans who made—or claimed to have made—journeys to Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Kim Phillips reconstructs a medieval European vision of Asia that was by turns critical, neutral, and admiring. In offering a cultural history of the encounter between medieval Latin Christians and the distant East, Before Orientalism reveals how Europeans' prevailing preoccupations with food and eating habits, gender roles, sexualities, civility, and the foreign body helped shape their perceptions of Asian peoples and societies. Phillips gives particular attention to the texts' known or likely audiences, the cultural settings within which they found a foothold, and the broader impact of their descriptions, while also considering the motivations of their writers. She reveals in rich detail responses from European travelers that ranged from pragmatism to wonder. Fear of military might, admiration for high standards of civic life and court culture, and even delight in foreign magnificence rarely assumed the kind of secular Eurocentric superiority that would later characterize Orientalism. Placing medieval writing on the East in the context of an emergent "Europe" whose explorers sought to learn more than to rule, Before Orientalism complicates our understanding of medieval attitudes toward the foreign.

Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages
Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages

Author: Mary Boyle

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1843845806

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What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the western horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of western Christians who undertook the arduous journey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group: those who left written accounts of their travels, for the journey to Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages took place not only in the physical world, but also in the mind and on the page. Pilgrim authors contended in different ways with the collision between fifteenth-century reality and the static textual Jerusalem, as they encountered the genuinely multi-religious Middle East. This book examines the international literary phenomenon of the Jerusalem pilgrimage through the prism of these four writers. It explores the process of collective and individual identity construction, as pilgrims came into contact with members of other religious traditions in the course of the expression of their own; engages with the uneasy relationship between curiosity and pilgrimage; and investigates both the relevance of genre and the advent of print to the development of pilgrimage writing. Ultimately pilgrimage is revealed as a conceptual space with a near-liturgical status, unrestricted by geographical boundaries and accessible both literally and virtually.

Disknowledge
Disknowledge

Author: Katherine Eggert

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-10-02

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0812291883

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"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded. Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction. Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.

Pierre de L'Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion
Pierre de L'Estoile and his World in the Wars of Religion

Author: Tom Hamilton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-04-14

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 0192520482

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The Wars of Religion embroiled France in decades of faction, violence, and peacemaking in the late sixteenth century. This study offers a new history of these Wars of Religion from the perspective of the period's great diarist and collector, Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611), telling the story of his life and times. When historians interpret these events they inevitably depend on sources of information gathered by contemporaries, none more valuable than the diaries and collection of Pierre de L'Estoile (1546-1611), who lived through the civil wars in Paris and shaped how they have been remembered ever since. Taking him out of the footnotes, and demonstrating his significance in the culture of the late Renaissance, this is the first life of L'Estoile in any language. It examines how he negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France as he assembled an extraordinary collection of the relics of the troubles, a collection that he called 'the storehouse of my curiosities'. The story of his life and times is the history of the civil wars in the making. Focusing on a crucial individual for understanding Reformation Europe, this study challenges historians' assumptions about the widespread impact of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century. L'Estoile's prudent, non-confessional responses to the events he lived through and recorded were common among his milieu of Gallican Catholics. His life-writing and engagement with contemporary news, books, and pictures reveals how individuals used different genres and media to destabilise rather than fix confessional identities. Bringing together the great variety of topics in society and culture that attracted L'Estoile's curiosity, this volume rethinks his world in the Wars of Religion.

Politics and ‘Politiques' in Sixteenth-Century France
Politics and ‘Politiques' in Sixteenth-Century France

Author: Emma Claussen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-17

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 110894521X

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During the French Wars of Religion, the nature and identity of politics was the subject of passionate debate and controversy. Exploring early modern French uses of the word 'politique' and the statesman who practised this art, this book investigates questions of language and of power over the course of a tumultuous century.

Reading Beyond the Code
Reading Beyond the Code

Author: Terence Cave

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-05-10

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0192513788

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This book explores the value for literary studies of the model of communication known as relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of examples—lyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton—nine of the ten essays are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as a broad framing perspective and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final essay, by Deirdre Wilson, co-founder (with Dan Sperber) of relevance theory, takes a retrospective view of the issues addressed by the volume and considers the implications of literary studies for cognitive approaches to communication. Relevance theory, described by Alastair Fowler as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's', offers a comprehensive pragmatics of language and communication grounded in evidence about the ways humans think and behave. While designed to capture the everyday murmur of conversation, gossip, peace-making, hate speech, love speech, 'body-language', and the chatter of the internet, it covers the whole spectrum of human modes of communication, including literature in the broadest sense as a characteristically human activity. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime resource for literary study, and it is also the first to claim that the model works best for literature when understood in the light of a broader cognitive approach, focusing on a range of phenomena that support an 'embodied' conception of cognition and language. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory, that the 'code model' is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes of communication that are proper to literature.

Curiosity
Curiosity

Author: Philip Ball

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-09-17

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 022621169X

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"Looking closely at the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Ball vividly brings to life the age when modern science began, a time that spans the lives of Galileo and Isaac Newton. In this entertaining and illuminating account of the rise of science as we know it, Ball tells of scientists both legendary and lesser known, from Copernicus and Kepler to Robert Boyle, as well as the inventions and technologies that were inspired by curiosity itself, such as the telescope and the microscope. The so-called Scientific Revolution is often told as a story of great geniuses illuminating the world with flashes of inspiration. But Curiosity reveals a more complex story, in which the liberation--and subsequent taming--of curiosity was linked to magic, religion, literature, travel, trade, and empire. Ball also asks what has become of curiosity today: how it functions in science, how it is spun and packaged for consumption, how well it is being sustained, and how the changing shape of science influences the kinds of questions it may continue to ask"--OCLC