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Long neglected in the history of Renaissance and early modern Europe, in recent years scholars have revised received understanding of the political and economic significance of the city of Naples and its rich artistic, musical and political culture. Its importance in the history of science, however, has remained relatively unknown. The Science of Naples provides the first dedicated study of Neapolitan scientific culture in the English language. Drawing on contributions from leading experts in the field, this volume presents a series of studies that demonstrate Neapolitans’ manifold contributions to European scientific culture in the early modern period and considers the importance of the c...
This volume ranges widely across the social, religious and political history of revolution in seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland, from contemporary responses to the outbreak of war to the critique of the post-regicidal regimes; from royalist counsels to Lilburne's politics; and across the three Stuart kingdoms. However, all the essays engage with a central issue - the ways in which individuals experienced the crises of mid seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland and what that tells us about the nature of the Revolution as a whole. Responding in particular to three influential lines of interpretation - local, religious and British - the contributors, all leading specialists in the field, demonstrate that to comprehend the causes, trajectory and consequences of the Revolution we must understand it as a human and dynamic experience, as a process. This volume reveals how an understanding of these personal experiences can provide the basis on which to build up larger frameworks of interpretation.
In the spring of 1757, the Augustinian friar Leopoldo di San Pasquale was tried in Naples by the hierarchies of his own religious order on charges of financial fraud, heresy, and sexual immorality. He responded by accusing the heads of the convent of subjecting him to a series of inhuman cruelties, claiming to have been "buried alive". While waiting for a final judgment (it was pronounced seven years later, in 1764), the trial of Leopoldo di San Pasquale became a cultural phenomenon unlike any witnessed before in Naples. Cumulatively, reactions to the trial, both during and after it, broke the boundaries separating chronicle and literary fiction, engaged people’s faculties of reason and em...
International tragedies, national disgraces, and local dangers: reporting can magnify trauma. But how can we gain a deeper analytical understanding of episodes seemingly too immediate for detached observation by our sources or even, perhaps, by ourselves? This volume brings together a broad range of current research in Europe and abroad, regarding an issue of crucial importance for understanding past cultures and our own. Papers discuss the ramifications of media-induced anxiety and anxiety-induced mediality, engaging the humanities, including history, film studies, literature, folklore, creative writing and adjacent fields intersected by sociology, politology, psychology, & anthropology. News media here include all means of mass communication impinging on daily experience, from books to music, from the social web to films, on multiple platforms and in multiple languages across municipal, state, and regional boundaries.
This edited collection explores what trauma—seen through an analytical lens—can reveal about the early modern period and, conversely, what conceptualizations of psychological trauma from the period can tell us about trauma theory itself.
The Bible is the single most influential text in Western culture, yet the history of biblical scholarship in early modern England has yet to be written. There have been many publications in the last quarter of a century on heterodoxy, particularly concentrating on the emergence of new sects in the mid-seventeenth century and the perceived onslaught on the clerical establishment by freethinkers and Deists in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century. However, the study of orthodoxy has languished far behind. This volume of complementary essays will be the first to embrace orthodox and heterodox treatments of scripture, and in the process question, challenge and redefine what historian...
Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the d...
Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters (1564) is one of the first treatises on art published in the post-Tridentine period. It remains a key primary source for the discussion of the reform of art as it unfolded at the time of the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation. Relatively little is known about Gilio himself, a cleric from Fabriano, Italy. He was evidently familiar with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese’s lively court circle in Rome and dedicated his book to the cardinal. His text—available here in English in full for the first time—takes the form of a spirited dialogue among six protagonists, using the voices of each to present different points...
Volcanoes around the world have their own legends, and many have wrought terrible devastation, but none has caught the imagination like Vesuvius. We now know that immense eruptions destroyed Bronze Age settlements around Vesuvius, but the Romans knew nothing of those disasters and were lulled into complacencyÑmuch as we are todayÑby its long period of inactivity. None of the nearly thirty eruptions since AD 79 has matched the infamous cataclysm that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum within hours. Nearly two thousand years later, the allure of the volcano remainsÑas evidenced by its popularity as a tourist attraction, from Shelley and the Romantics to modern-day visitors. Vesuvius has loom...
The books of Enoch are famed for having been “lost” in the Middle Ages but “rediscovered” by modern scholars. But was this really the case? This volume is the first to explore the reception of Enochic texts and traditions between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bringing specialists in antiquity into conversation with specialists in early modernity, it reveals a much richer story with a more global scope. Contributors show how Enoch and the era before the Flood were newly reimagined, not just by scholars, but also by European artists and adventurers, Kabbalists, Sufis, Mormons, and Ethiopian and Slavonic Christians.