Pluralisierung & Autorität

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, objects, texts and people travelled around the world on board Dutch ships. The essays in this book explore how these circulations transformed knowledge in Asian and European societies. They concentrate on epistemic consequences in the fields of historiography, geography, natural history, religion and philosophy, as well as in everyday life. Emphasizing transformations, the volume reconstructs small semantic shifts of knowledge and tentative adjustments to new cultural contexts. It unfolds the often conflict-ridden, complex and largely global history of specific pieces of knowledge as well as of generally-shared contemporary understandings regarding what could or could not be considered true. The book contributes to current debates about how to conceptualize the unsettled epistemologies of the early modern world.

Assumendo come campo operativo lo spazio comunicativo siciliano nei secoli XV–XVII, il presente lavoro offre un contributo assai innovativo alla storiografia delle lingue romanze.

Attraverso una capillare analisi di dieci Ricettari di segreti, una tradizione discorsiva scientifico-religiosa tanto contenutisticamente, quanto linguisticamente composita ed eterogenea, si analizzano in maniera esemplare le dinamiche di contatto tra gli idiomi presenti nel Regno di Sicilia (latino, siciliano, toscano, castigliano, ecc.) sia sul piano dell’organizzazione testuale, sia sui livelli fonografematico, morfosintattico e semantico-lessicale. Quanto osservato sul piano dell’analisi testuale in merito al generarsi di varietà di contatto è messo efficacemente in relazione, sul metalivello, alle principali epistemi medioevali e della prima età moderna, a partire dalla concezione scolastico-aristotelica della variazione linguistica per giungere al dibattito rinascimentale sulla Questione della lingua. Dalla connessione dei due piani si traggono lucide conclusioni per una storia della lingua immune a ogni linea di pensiero teleologica.

Il presente lavoro offre nuovi spunti per ricostruire la storia della lingua in Italia tra medioevo e prima età moderna. Il focus è posto sui ricettari di segreti, una tradizione discorsiva linguisticamente tanto multiforme quanto i contenuti in campo medico, scientifico e magico-religioso che traspone. Tramite di essi vengono esaminate le dinamiche di contatto tra gli idiomi del Regno di Sicilia e il generarsi di varietà linguistiche eterogenee.

This study examines the phenomenon of Italian-Spanish multilingualism during the Regno di Napoli in the 16th century. This period is investigated as an example of multilingualism using a range of documentation from bureaucratic communications. Departing from an analysis of multilingual texts and communication processes in the central administrative bodies, the study focuses particularly on the multilingualism of the persons involved.

The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582, but at first, this papal reform was only implemented in Catholic areas. Until the 18^th century, Catholics and Protestants fought over the correct time and dated events by different calendars. This study examines reactions to the reform and efforts to unify the calendar, offering insights into inter-confessional relations in Germany during the early modern era.

The essays reflect the work of a broad spectrum of disciplines in humanities and cultural studies. They present a new vision of the early modern era, which attempts to register the diverse and contradictory nature of early modern culture, transcending unambiguous notions of development such as “modernization” or “secularization.”

Cardinal Bessarion is renowned for having bridged the frontier that existed between the Western world of Latin and the Eastern world of Greek. As an integrative intermediary and humanistic patron of culture, he served as a witness to the epoch’s diverse and momentous processes of inclusion and exclusion. The articles attempt to reconstruct the mechanisms of cultural integration and disintegration that marked the Early Modern Era.

This volume sheds light on plurilingualism in Spanish-occupied Italy during the early modern period from a variety of perspectives. Topics include written language in pragmatic contexts (such as administrative documents), plurilingual literature and theater, and early modern thought on plurilingualism.

I contributi riuniti negli Atti del Convegno Reperti di plurilinguismo nell’Italia spagnola (sec. XVI–XVII) (Monaco di Baviera, 2011) indagano da angolature diverse il plurilinguismo dell’Italia spagnola nella prima età moderna quale problema della storiografia delle lingue romanze. Una parte dei contributi è dedicata al contatto linguistico e alla produzione discorsiva-testuale italo-spagnola. Un’altra parte dei contributi si occupa di questioni più strettamente italianistiche, come il rapporto tra tradizioni scrittorie regionali e il toscano.

This volume examines the symbolic systems that governed America’s integration into the European weltanschauung, including Amerindian myths and religious beliefs, and concepts of Christian belief, as introduced and taught by the Europeans. This collection of essays presents a detailed examination of political, legal, theological, and historiographic problems associated with this process.

El volumen se ocupa de la operatividad de los órdenes semióticos tanto autóctonos como traídos de Europa en la construcción de América en el imaginario occidental. La conversión de los indígenas fue clave en el proyecto de asimilar a los pueblos nativos. Paralelamente, la empresa colonial fue descrita y legitimada mediante la narración histórica. El volumen ilumina algunas parcelas de ese vasto entramado semiótico, textual y argumentativo.

Reversing F. O. Matthiessen's famous description of translation as “an Elizabethan art”, Elizabethan literature may well be considered “an art of translation‎”. Amidst a climate of intense intercultural and intertextual exchange, the cultural figure of translatio studii had become a formative concept in most European vernacular writing of the period. However, due to the comparatively marginal status of English in European literary culture, it was above all translation in the literal sense that became the dominant mode of applying this concept in late 16th-century England. Translations into English were not only produced on an unprecedented scale, they also became a key site for critical debate where contemporary discussions about authorship, style, and the development of a specifically English literary identity converged. The essays in this volume set out to explore Elizabethan translation as a literary practice and as a crucial influence on English literature. They analyse the competitive balancing of voices and authorities found in these texts and examine the ways in which both translated models and English literary culture were creatively transformed in the process of appropriation.

Diogenes Laertios’s collection of biographical sketches of the great philosophers is an important document for the history of ancient philosophy. During the Renaissance, the “rediscovery” of this text led to literary creations, which substantially contributed to shaping the idea of the “modern” in the Early Modern Period. This study illustrates the multidimensional impact of the Lives on Byzantine traditions and the Italian Quattrocento.

This study explores the pathways of commerce by which Italian loanwords made their way into German and French in the Middle Ages and the early modern period (15th-18th cent.). It links culture-historical and linguistic criteria by analyzing the various textual genres associated with the occupational setting of international trade. The pathways of borrowing are georeferenced and presented on 130 maps based upon nearly 4,000 references drawn from over 150 different textual sources.

This volume focuses on a key example of early modern Castilian colonial historiography, the Décadas. Providing a detailed analysis of linguistic discourse, it fills a research gap in Spanish language studies: for the first time the Décadas, a widely read and received text of great prestige, are the object of a systematic, historically informed analysis of their linguistic and discursive characteristics.

To metaphorize the world as a theatre has been a common procedure since antiquity, but the use of this trope became particularly prominent and pregnant in early modern times, especially in England. Old and new applications of the “theatrum mundi” topos pervaded discourses, often allegorizing the deceitfulness and impermanence of this world as well as the futility of earthly strife. It was frequently woven into arguments against worldly amusements such as the stage: Commercial theatre was declared an undesirable competitor of God’s well-ordered world drama.

Early modern dramatists often reacted to this development by appropriating the metaphor, and in an ingenious twist, some playwrights even appropriated its anti-theatrical impetus: Early modern theatre seemed to discover a denial of its own theatricality at its very core. Drama was found to succeed best when it staged itself as a great unmasking.

To investigate the reasons and effects of these developments, the anthology examines the metaphorical uses of theatre in plays, pamphlets, epics, treatises, legal proclamations and other sources.

This book describes the relationship between Northern Europeans and the regencies of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa (what were known as the Barbary States) during the early modern period. For the Northern Europeans, who saw their profitable foreign trade routes to Southern Europe threatened by Moslem corsairs, the problem manifested itself as a challenge at both a humanitarian and an economic level. For centuries, Europeans instituted measures directed at both levels in an attempt to provide security for the ships as well as their crews. The history of these attempts is presented with a focus on their objectives and their effects.

For the last decade, early modern studies have significantly been reshaped by raising new and different questions on the uses of religion. This ‛religious turn’ has generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and their cultural effects ‑ from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices. The issue of religious pluralisation has been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation. But confessional controversy did not always erupt into hostilities over how to symbolize and perform the sacred nor lead to a paralysis of social agency. The order of the day may often have been to suspend confessional allegiances rather than enforce religious conflict, suggesting a pragmatic rather than polemic handling of religious plurality. This raises the urgent question of how 'normal' transconfessional and even transreligious interaction was produced in a context of highly sharpened and always present reflexivity on religious differences. Our volume takes up this question and explores it from an interdisciplinary and interconfessional perspective. The title “Forgetting Faith?” raises the question whether it was necessary or indeed possible to sidestep religious issues in specific contexts and for specific purposes. This does not mean, however, to describe early modern culture as a process of secularization. Rather, the collection invites discussion of the specific ways available to deal with confessional conflict in an oblivional mode, precisely because faith still mattered more than many other social paradigms emerging at that time, such as nationhood, ethnic origin or class defined through property.

Petrarch’s Rimes are frequently edited and commented upon. 16th-century commentators do not only provide explanations of words, verses, or sections, but also present their own observations as well as related texts, e.g., Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Graphology and editorial guidelines are combined with exegetic and interpretative processes, so that the end result presents both an interpretation of the Rimes and fundamental ways of dealing with vernacular poetry in general.

The articles in this anthology examine cultures of competition in visual-art and literary depictions and in socio-cultural practices in the period from 1450 to 1620. The main focus is on aspects that transcend the humanistic ‘core area’ of Latin text production and the paragon discussions in the visual arts. By taking this perspective, it is possible to give an account of the central function occupied by the processes of emulating, of surpassing and of overcoming cultural models for the differentiation of humanistic and vernacular cultures in the Early Modern Age.

The Early Modern Period is increasingly perceived as a time of antagonism and conflict in different discursive fields. In the context of this topic the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 573 organized an international conference in March 2010 on “Para/Textual Negotiations between Poetry and Philosophy in the Early Modern Period”. The results of this conference are presented in this volume. The specific question of the book results from combining two key topics: the agonal relationship between poetry and philosophy, and the specificity through which this agon not only occurs in the text itself but even at the fringe between text and framework texts (paratexts and epitexts).

Anthropology is a notoriously polysemous term. Within a continental European academic context, it is usually employed in the sense of philosophical anthropology, and mainly concerned with exploring concepts of a universal human nature. By contrast, Anglo-American scholarship almost exclusively associates anthropology with the investigation of cultural and ethnic differences (cultural anthropology). How these two main traditions (and their ‘derivations’ such as literary anthropology, historical anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, intercultural studies) relate to each other is a matter of debate. Both, however, have their roots in the path-breaking changes that occurred within sixteenth and early seventeenth-century culture and scientific discourse. It was in fact during this period that the term anthropology first acquired the meanings on which its current usage is based. The Renaissance did not ‘invent’ the human. But the period that gave rise to ‘humanism’ witnessed an unprecedented diversification of the concept that was at its very core. The question of what defines the human became increasingly contested as new developments like the emergence of the natural sciences, religious pluralisation, as well as colonial expansion, were undermining old certainties. The proliferation of doctrines of the human in the early modern age bears out the assumption that anthropology is a discipline of crisis, seeking to establish sets of common values and discursive norms in situations when authority finds itself under pressure.

The aim of this study is a revision of the hitherto prevailing conceptions of the relationship between the Puritans and the theater in England during the Early Modern Age in several fields of research. The study focuses on representations of the Puritans in drama and correlates them to other text evidence (such as sermons, pamphlets, petitions, letters and autobiographical documents). Instead of the still current reductive, dichotomous picture of the opposition of players and Puritans, a dynamic process of reciprocal dependencies and exchange becomes visible. The study reveals a historically variable mesh of relationships between two groups which laid claim to rivaling authority in an urban cultural space characterized by increasingly pluralistic tendencies. One main hypothesis of the study is that the direct coexistence of the Puritans and theater people in London was constitutive for the development of the new entertainment medium as well as for the contouring and even the formation of a special Puritan identity.

This book explores the disputes between Catholics and Protestants in the 18th century, a period which is often described as “enlightened” and in which such conflicts would therefore not seem typical. In particular, the book investigates to what extent the visibility of the conflicts in the media of the Early Modern Period played a role for the participants. Looking at different levels of the disputes at the same time, the study investigates a wide spectrum of conflicts - ranging from those that took place in small villages and in the larger territorial units of the so-called Old German Empire as well as those that took place in the arenas of Empire politics.

This book deals with the evangelization of Spanish-speaking America between the European conquest and independence. The study investigates the concepts and strategies of catechesis, the general conditions of Church law and national politics as well as the prerequisites and conditions on the part of the Indians. New and specific forms of mutual understanding, of mediation and resistance developed through the transfer of European knowledge to a second geographical area and through the contact of cultures and religions. These new forms evolved beyond the sphere of religion and determine cultural traditions, literary forms, handling of law and language research.

The contributions of this volume discuss the usability of the concept of “pluralization” as the guiding concept for analyzing the early modern era. The first meaning of pluralization is the increase of the representations of reality which are relevant in an area of life and culture; furthermore this term expresses the emergence of “new” and/or alternative knowledge and the development of competitive partial realities. These have to be coordinated or mediated with each other. The contributions and case studies of this volume analyze this process and give important impulses for fundamental research on the early modern era.

While philosophy even up until Newton described scientific effort, in the Early Modern Age philology was understood in very different ways: as universal knowledge of all that is conveyed by language, but also as technical analysis of written documents or as collection of knowledge in the form of an encyclopedia. This book attempts to illuminate the different aspects in more detail. In order to understand the significance and consequences of the “philologization” of our cultural history, one should first focus on the intellectual gesture of which philology bears witness, such as the development of “critical activity”.