Scepticism, priestcraft, and toleration

Reviewed by: The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Roger Maioli Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2016. Pp. xi + 361. $60. This book is an illuminating reappraisal of the two broad topics in its title: skepticism and Enlightenment. On the one hand, it revises a thesis made popular by Richard Popkin, rearticulating the impact of skepticism on eighteenth-century intellectual history. On the other, it opposes traditional accounts of the Enlightenment as an age of reason against faith, seeking to reintegrate religious thinkers into a progressive history of knowledge. Siding with Popkin on the historical importance of skepticism, Mr. Matytsin offers a more layered account of its reception and influence. To begin with, skepticism "was not always the cause, but often the result, of intense, mutually destructive debates among dogmatic philosophies." Between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, unending controversies in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and historiography fostered reticence regarding claims to certainty. This reticence, the book's argument goes, sets the stage for the spread of skepticism—especially in its Pyrrhonian variety, given currency through the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1562; first French translation, 1725) and the publication of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Popkin and others have shown that responses to Pyrrhonism made concessions to doubt and replaced old metaphysical certainties with more modest claims to probable knowledge. But this "mitigated skepticism," according to Mr. Matytsin, was not the single-handed achievement of antireligious philosophers; it was also fully articulated by [End Page 158] Protestant and Catholic antiskeptics such as Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Laurent-Josse Le Clerc, and Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling. In seeking to shield religion from the skeptical critique, they "were successful in promoting pragmatic solutions, such as the recourse to moral certainty and probability." Their arguments were then retooled by less pious writers, including the central figures of the French Enlightenment. The novelty of this argument resides less in its picture of skepticism than in its attention to antiskepticism, an uncoordinated international phenomenon involving less well-known figures whom Mr. Matytsin does much to revitalize. The book is especially valuable in its treatment of Crousaz, a Swiss logician and devout Huguenot whom Popkin dismisses as unimportant, but whose Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et modern (1733) may have been the most extensive and sustained response to Pyrrhonism in the long eighteenth century. As Mr. Matytsin demonstrates, Crousaz's work inflected not only the historical skepticism of Gibbon but also the responses to Pyrrhonism at the Académie de Prusse, a fertile seedbed for Enlightenment materialism. In bringing the Huguenot diaspora as well as Jesuit intellectuals into the fold of the Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin is joining the postsecular turn in Enlightenment studies—represented among others by J.G.A. Pocock, Karen O'Brien, and Thomas Ahnert—while acknowledging that to make the case for a religious Enlightenment also deflates "the Enlightenment" as a historical category. For his purposes, "the Age of Enlightenment" serves mostly as a chronological framework, with boundaries in 1697 (when Bayle's Dictionnaire brought the skeptical crisis into the limelight) and 1772 (when the Encyclopédie was completed), but the framework has no philosophical program and no body of central doctrines. In treating "the Enlightenment" as essentially another name for "eighteenth-century intellectual history," this book takes to task more essentialist accounts of the movement—whether by Paul Hazard and Peter Gay or by Jonathan Israel—on the grounds that they restrict their focus to premonitions of the French Revolution or of modern secular values. "By exploring the intellectual universe of the eighteenth century on its own terms," Mr. Matytsin states, "scholars might finally abandon the intellectual crutch provided by the increasingly meaningless phrase the Enlightenment and walk unaided toward previously unexplored avenues and unexpected connections." His study is a compelling example of where those avenues may lead. In calling for a more capacious conception of Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin paradoxically also returns to a narrower view of the movement, one that scholars since Pocock have been especially invested in transcending. Here the Enlightenment means the Francophone Enlightenment, whether...

Stephen Gaukroger. <i>The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841</i>. vii + 402 pp., illus., bibl., index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. £30 (cloth).

Decadence or Crisis in the Luso-Brazilian Empire: A New Model of Colonization in the Eighteenth Century

Author's Introduction In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British philosophers began to advance the view that morality originated not in the external commands of God or sovereign nor in self‐interest but in a non‐selfish principle internal to human nature. These philosophers disagreed, however, about what that internal principle was. The rationalists (such as Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, and John Balguy) maintained that morality originated in rationality. The sentimentalists (such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume) maintained that morality originated in sentiment. In addition to many other kinds of arguments, each side of this debate deployed a central argument by analogy: the rationalists claimed that moral judgment was crucially analogous to mathematical judgment, while the sentimentalists claimed that moral judgment was crucially analogous to aesthetic judgment. Author Recommends: 1. Stephen Darwall, ‘Shaftesbury: Authority and Authorship’, in his The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This chapter provides a full‐scale interpretation of Shaftesbury's moral views and places them in their early modern context. 2. Stephen Darwall, ‘Hutcheson on Practical Reason’, Hume Studies 23 (1997): 73–89. This article articulates the central features of Hutcheson's view of practical reason and raises some penetrating worries about them. 3. Joel Feinberg, ‘Wollaston and his Critics’, Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1977): 345–52. This article explores Wollaston's moral theory and shows that while it is problematic in some ways it nonetheless is more viable than many critics have supposed. 4. Michael B. Gill, ‘Rationalism, Sentimentalism, and Ralph Cudworth’, Hume Studies 30 (2004): 149–81. This article explains the basis of early modern moral rationalism through an examination of Cudworth's theory. It attempts to elucidate the main points of disagreement and agreement between the rationalists and the sentimentalists. 5. Michael B. Gill, ‘Moral Rationalism vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality more like Math or Beauty?’, Philosophy Compass 2/1 (2007): 16–30. This article explains the main lines of debate between the rationalists and the sentimentalists and shows how the former relied on an analogy between morality and mathematics while the latter relied on an analogy between morality and beauty. 6. Christine Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 5–25. This article examines one of the most central and influential anti‐rationalist arguments developed by Hutcheson, Hume, and other sentimentalists. Korsgaard maintains that this argument – which is based on the motivational force of morality – does not succeed in showing that there is reason to favor sentimentalism over rationalism. 7. David Fate Norton, ‘Hume, Human Nature, and the Foundations of Morality’, The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 148–82. This chapter provides a useful introduction to all the major components of Hume's moral philosophy. 8. J. B. Schneewind, ‘The Austerity of Morals: Clarke and Mandeville’, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 310–29. This chapter explains the views of one of the most important British rationalists, Samuel Clarke, and shows how the British moralists argued against egoism (as exemplified by Bernard Mandeville). 9. Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes's Moral Philosophy’, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes , ed. Tom Sorrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175–207. This chapter provides a helpful overview of the main features of Hobbes's moral views. Online Materials: 1. Cambridge Platonists (Sarah Hutton): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cambridge‐platonists/ 2. Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy (Sharon A. Lloyd): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes‐moral/ 3. Hume's Moral Philosophy (Rachel Cohon): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume‐moral/ 4. Lord Shaftesbury (Michael B. Gill): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shaftesbury/ 5. Samuel Clarke (Ezio Vailati): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/clarke/ 6. Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century (Alexander Broadie): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scottish‐18th/ Sample Syllabus: Books on Syllabus Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: a Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). David Hume, Moral Philosophy , ed. Geoffrey Sayre‐McCord (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006). D. D. Raphael, ed., British Moralists 1650–1800, Vol. 1, Hobbes‐Gay (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991). Russ Shafer‐Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Week 1: Egoist and Command Theories the British Moralists would Oppose Thomas Hobbes, selections from ‘Human Nature’ and ‘Leviathan’, pp. 3–60 in Raphael's British Moralists . Recommended secondary reading: Tuck, ‘Hobbes's Moral Philosophy’. Bernard Mandeville, selections from ‘Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, pp. 229–36 in Raphael's British Moralists . Weeks 2 and 3: Early Mo

The search for Truth necessarily takes the form of a depiction of error. Vincent Descombes, Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, 4 Theophrastus’ Characters, a series of 30 short sketches of vice written around 319 bc is, as Jeffrey Rusten puts it: ‘a pleasant little book for the casual reader, but an enormously difficult one for the scholar’.1 Its pleasantness lies in how it chooses to depict vices as ordinary as ‘bad timing’, ‘idle chatter’, and ‘superstition’, by providing a brief example of the daily habits of a man who embodies the quality in question.2 ‘The man with bad timing’ for example, is ‘the sort who goes up to someone who is busy and asks his advice. He sings love songs to his girlfriend when she has a fever. (…) If he’s a guest at a wedding, he launches into a tirade against women’.3 Its difficulty, on the other hand, lies in part in what Robin Lane Fox calls the ‘misreadings’ of its reception-history: in how it has not always been read as a pleasant book for entertainment, but for a range of other purposes instead.4 One of these ‘misreadings’ was the notion that the Characters offered a kind of moral instruction, an understanding inspired by a moralizing Proem that was appended to the sketches in the late Roman empire, or early Byzantine period, promising a comparison between vice and virtue, absent in Theophrastus’ own text.5 As the medieval manuscript tradition preserved this spurious Proem, this was how a series of Latin editors approached Theophrastus’ work, a reading instrumental in explaining why, across sixteenth-century Europe, it became so extraordinarily popular to edit or translate. ‘The printing presses’, so declares the preface to the sixteenth edition of the Characters that had been published that century, ‘became feverishly interested in this little work by Theophrastus’, designed as it was ‘for the correction of bad behaviour’ and ‘the removal of malice’.6 These early editors had a difficult task on their hands: how to make sense of the Proem’s moralizing claims, given that the Characters only contained a set of vices without corresponding virtues? And how to give these ordinary vices, each outlined in what seem like figures from observational comedy, the solemn dignity the Proem conferred on them? Turning to the prefaces, dedication letters and other paratexts of the editions of the Characters published in the sixteenth century, we find a number of surprising solutions to these problems. When taken together, they present us with three arguments for why bad examples might be instrumental in the instruction of good behaviour: an interpretive tradition that begins in 1517 and that ends with Isaac Casaubon’s celebrated editions of 1592 and 1599. The first argument is made by Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger, for whom the Characters shows us how to discern other people’s natures, in order to better manipulate them. Willibald Pirckheimer makes the second, positioning the Characters as a novel means of social control and a vehicle for corrective self-reflection. The third is elaborated by both Leonhard Lycius and Frédéric Morel, who frame Theophrastus' text as a pedagogical device used to prevent children adopting bad habits. This tradition has not before been studied in detail, with both literary historians and classicists preferring to focus on Casaubon’s later editions, rather than on those that preceded them.7 From these early editors’ ‘misreading’, or this error, we then gain a curious aesthetic justifying how bad examples of ordinary vices could teach readers how to behave. While the Characters has recently emerged in discussions about the cognitive value of literature – with arguments being made that its descriptions of types offer moral or practical knowledge – these claims have hinged on Casaubon’s later editions.8 By recovering this earlier approach, this article points to an alternative way in which Theophrastus’ sketches can shed light on the relationship between ethics and literature: one which would not contribute to current debates about literature and knowledge, but to discussions about the literary representation of bad behaviour. The Proem introduces the Characters as providing the answer to a problem. It opens with Theophrastus telling his interlocutor Polycles that he has long wondered why ‘even though Greece lies under the same sky, and all Greeks are educated in the same way, it happens that we do not have the same composition of character’.9 After long observation, the answer that Theophrastus has found to this question, it continues, is that there are men who are ‘good and bad’, two ‘classes of character’ that separate and distinguish individuals who share the same education and climate.10 Having come to this conclusion, Theophrastus states that he feels he ‘ought to write’ about how these two categories of men ‘normally behave in their lives’.11 The Proem’s explanation of the Characters’ ambition does not however end on this note. Rather it proposes that these sketches have a further moralizing purpose: that they will make Theophrastus and Polycles’ sons ‘better’.12 Theophrastus outlines two ways in which this will work. Their sons should first use this text, as ‘a guide’ to navigate which kind of people they should solicit and which they should avoid, so that they can learn ‘to associate with and become close to the finest men’.13 By mixing with these people, their sons will secondly develop an understanding of how ‘not to fall short’ of their standards: they will learn from others how to be excellent themselves.14 With this, the Proem introduces a morally instructive as well as an empirically clarifying purpose: Theophrastus will not only reveal the two distinct classes of men he has observed but will do so in order to teach readers how to better navigate the social world, and in doing so, how to give themselves a chance to become good. Both of these announced purposes, however, rely on the text of the Characters containing its missing virtues. This leaves the reader with the problem of trying to make sense both of how people can be separated into two classes of character, when only one class is depicted; and of how to use this text to learn to associate with ‘the finest men’ from portraits of their opposites. This disjunction between text and paratext did not, however, deter the Latin translators from attempting to show how the Characters could in some way fulfil the Proem’s moral pledge. If the Proem ignited its readers to approach the Characters with these particular moralizing intentions in mind – to encourage them to mine portraits of men with bad timing for signs of instruction and revelation – several other factors helped fan the flames. These readers were aware that Theophrastus was Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum – ‘prince after Aristotle of the Peripatetics’ as one title proudly claims – and, in several cases, that he was an important botanist, metaphysician and philosopher of the senses in his own right.15 They were often further familiar with the study of character as a crucial part of ancient philosophy, with Aristotle’s Ethics having made its way into Latin translation long before.16 Armed with these elements of context, these Latin editors and translators retained additional grounds on which to base a reading of the Characters as providing moral guidance, despite the striking absence of the promised virtues. This did mean, however, that they needed to justify how exactly these bad examples might serve the end of helping to transform a reader’s actions for the better, and it is as a result of this obligation that we find our aesthetic. The first Latin translator to rise to this challenge was the fifteenth-century humanist, Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger, whose c.1434/5 manuscript translation of the Characters was printed in Vienna in July 1517, edited by the humanist Johannes Gremper.17 This Vienna edition is the text’s editio princeps – whether we argue it in terms of primacy or influence18 – not Willibald Pirckheimer’s 1527 edition, as has often been claimed.19 Lapo’s translation of 15 sketches is prefaced by a detailed dedication letter in which we find the first argument for how these examples of vice were thought to hold the potential to change their reader’s behaviour. Lapo’s dedication seems to be addressed to Francesco dal Legname, a fifteenth-century Papal chamberlain.20 In it Lapo sets up the Characters as having a number of fundamental qualities. He declares it to be a text which collects only ‘vices’, he associates it with moral philosophy through a methodological connection with Aristotle, and he indicates that it is a work from which ‘much utility’ can be derived.21 Its utility lies in how it exposes ‘certain images and characteristics’ through which its reader can learn to ‘judge’ others, understand their natures and thus ‘master them with intelligence and wisdom’. Lapo clarifies that this will have particular interest for those who, in his elusive phrase, are ‘in charge of very various cases’, those who, presumably like dal Legname, encounter people of all different types, whose qualities they are entrusted to discern. The Characters, Lapo hopes, is then a text that will not only help its readers to recognize the vices of others, but on the basis of this recognition, learn how to better engage with them. In this way, Lapo’s reading extends an aspect of the moralizing purpose of the Characters that we found in the Proem, where the Characters serves as a guide to the social world.22 Rather than suggesting that by using this guide, the reader will be able to get close to men of the finest sort – a reading that would depend on the representation of virtue – Lapo here inverts the power dynamic, positioning the Characters as advice to a man of the finest sort about how to best deal with those around him who are not good. If in both readings, the Characters is imagined to be a text that helps its reader to better judge others, in Lapo’s version, it only requires bad examples to be able to do so. While Lapo’s reading shares with the Proem a similar scaffold and structure, it further differs in the aim it wishes to bring about: substituting a transformation in the reader’s virtue, for a transformation in the reader’s ability to best handle other people’s vice. The second and rather different approach to the transformative effects of the Characters emerges in the succeeding translation of 1527 published by Pirckheimer in the newly Lutheran Nuremberg. Pirckheimer had received the original Greek manuscript when it was sent to him by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola in September 1515.23 Gianfrancesco wrote to Pirckheimer explaining that he hoped to use the Characters to redeem ‘the debt’ he owed him: a debt which possibly refers to advice that Pirckheimer gave Gianfrancesco the year before on a draft of his De reformandis moribus oratio, a discourse Gianfrancesco intended to address to Pope Leo X on the need for ecclesiastical reform.24 Gianfrancesco was not aware of just how apt his gift of thanks was for the action it seems to be thanking, but several years later, the connection between the Characters and the reforming of mores became very clear to Pirckheimer, when he decided to send his edition of Theophrastus’ text to Albrecht Dürer, explaining how it could help to improve people’s corrupt customs. While the exchange of goods was common between these two friends – with Pirckheimer asking Dürer to pick him up precious stones, Greek manuscripts and birds’ feathers while the artist was in Venice – this seems to have been the only occasion on which Pirckheimer gave Dürer a book.25 Why it was this Greek text that he decided to dedicate to Dürer, what purpose he wanted his new Latin translation to serve and why he chose to do so at this moment in time – so many years after he had received the Characters as a gift from Gianfrancesco – are all questions that remain unanswered.26 Tentative responses, however, are not hard to find, and lie embedded within the text of the dedication. It is by recovering them that we find an alternative orientation to how Theophrastus’ sketches of vice might have moral import. Pirckheimer’s dedication begins by describing Theophrastus as having depicted ‘human feelings’.27 Despite the fact that the ‘feelings’ that Theophrastus represents do not correspond, as we know, to the more glamorous capital vices – the vices that make tragedies, and which present clear problems like Envy or Lust – Pirckheimer insists on taking them very seriously. These feelings, according to Pickheimer, are held in ‘the deepest recesses of the heart’, and are kept there, ‘most of the time’, through law and education.28 They only ‘erupt’ from their concealment if they have ‘occasion to do so’, and this occasion is when ‘the fear of lawgivers and pedagogues, by which they have long been constrained and suppressed has been removed’. At this point, vices burst out into the light of day, ‘and show themselves openly’. If this sentence contains within it an argument of political philosophy – that the fear of the law and educators is needed to keep vices at bay – it is also a contemporary political comment, as for Pirckheimer, ‘the age we live in makes clear beyond all others’ that this principle is ‘wholly true’.29 The problem of ‘the age we live in’, Pirckheimer clarifies, is that ‘an excess of freedom’ has produced ‘an excess of contempt’, that people are no longer afraid of ‘lawgivers and pedagogues’ and are now therefore contemptuously showing their vices ‘openly’.30 This new lack of submission to authority means, as Pirckheimer’s dedication continues, that when lawgivers and pedagogues preach the truth, they are ignored rather than obeyed. The result is that ‘everywhere the truth is preached, yet (…) least performed, just as if the kingdom of God were better brought about by mere words than by works’.31 The preference that this comparison betrays for salvation by ‘works’ rather than by ‘mere words’ exposes Pirckheimer’s ‘disillusionment’, as Jeffrey Ashcroft describes, ‘with the failure (…) of the Lutheran reformation to improve personal and social morality’.32 Pirckheimer had hosted Luther at his house in 1518, and had even been included in the excommunication bull against Luther in 1521, but by the time he wrote this, he had begun to disavow the Reform.33 While for Luther, salvation is ‘instilled in us without our works by grace alone’, Pirckheimer reveals in this phrase that he thought that ‘works’ were still needed to achieve salvation; and that preaching was not enough to bring it about.34 Pirckheimer’s dissatisfaction with Reform meant that he was looking for an alternative approach to moral education to those on offer, and one which would transform people’s actions, not only their beliefs. His options for what this alternative could be were, however, limited. He did not think that the swarm of vices which concerned him could be stopped by lawgivers preaching ‘the truth’, as these lawgivers no longer commanded any authority or inspired any fear. Nor did he think that these vices could be tempered by personal criticism of particular behaviour, as ‘we are all now so sensitive that no one can bear to hear his vices reproved’.35 This is where Theophrastus’ Characters comes in. ‘Nothing’, Pirckheimer says, would be ‘more useful’ for a person who is too sensitive to criticism than reading the kinds of book of which the Characters is the ‘most excellent’ example.36 The Characters, he thought, could get round the problem of being able to reform morals where preaching and critique could not, by virtue of two of its qualities. Firstly, how it delights rather than admonishes its reader, overcoming the need to rely on the now absent political emotion of fear. Secondly, how it encourages a process of corrective self-reflection that indirectly takes place while reading, avoiding any pointed reproach or critique. The Characters is a book, as Pirckheimer continues, ‘in which each of us can contemplate the condition of his own soul as if in a mirror, and by contemplating improve These sketches of vice depict who in our contemporary in’, readers to with the vices, and then by a process of to themselves of the vices that they they as of when contemplating in a mirror, Pirckheimer that the reader will of their soul when reading and contemplating a text that is like a This introduces an aesthetic process for what happens when a reader images of vice. Pirckheimer, it is not that a reader the of these vices as them to them as someone like It is rather a process of moral instruction by a written text that works by a of what we might where a reader with a character and then to the very that made them similar to this character in the first This an aesthetic that was across the newly Lutheran as the of good moral examples to As puts in the newly moral by good example was not only common but a of If Luther did not think that ‘works’ would achieve he did think that man was to to the of the and moral and it was often to these that this of all were published with that qualities in moral and Pirckheimer’s approach to the Characters then seems to have emerged from this Lutheran even if it its by the moral use of of ordinary vice rather than If this goes some way to what Pirckheimer in printing an edition of this Greek text in we are still with why he thought to send it to sense of Pirckheimer’s here can be found in two of the where he at how the sketches in the Characters are like written and where he that Dürer will be to of them by telling Dürer that are not able to it with own then at least it in This for Dürer to make images of this text – to Pirckheimer’s translation – a explanation of the between the argument about the value of the Characters with its If Dürer were to these they would not only hold the same potential as the text by to a who had been by but given the in they could have This was a power that having all images of Luther in in the knowledge that political on a as in printed as it did in Having received the Characters before he Dürer has not any of an at a Pirckheimer from this It is in part this failure to his alternative approach to moral reform that why, by Pirckheimer decided to to a of fear. to in the he that when with ‘the common who has been by now will but fear and If Pirckheimer does not achieve his own intentions for his translation of this text, he does us with a of a particular reading of the Characters that introduces a new way of in these sketches of vice. He also a connection between a moral reading of the Characters and the of which will and across the sixteenth century, with all but three of the editions being published in or by editors with the This only the connection between and the of as by figures as and with this connection a it is that a part of the Characters’ in close to Pirckheimer’s sense that this text a of the Lutheran aesthetic of moral While the of these editions are often too brief to a reading of the Characters that is similar to what we can is how these editors also the Characters to have moral by virtue of the of with which they chose to In these editions, the Characters is often with of moral philosophy or within that are designed to this find the in the edition by the published in where the Characters is between Aristotle’s Ethics and of under the title edition the Ethics and the Characters close together, by the works De and This connection with Aristotle is that the edition by the Characters in a Greek of Aristotle’s find an example of the approach in an edition published in in in which the Characters one of works in the and the In this the reader was to search for a moral quality and then the to find it elaborated or through the means of a This is a that the editors might have from the of and 4 of which the Characters as examples of vices for the reader to up in the in order to learn how to according to While this a sense of the and of this moral reading of the Characters as a text of practical philosophy, as well as a sense that it have had a particular to a it two editions which a third approach to explaining how this set of vices might and a behaviour. These are the editions of Leonhard Lycius and Frédéric Morel, published in in and in These two editions, in time and are by virtue of their on a taken from to their understanding of the Theophrastus’ a very example of the who, for the that they used to to the education of that one part of this would be as they used to their children to who were by their to get on so that – on the brought on by their – children would be educated to this vice and live with more and The notion here is that if are to through the of the behaviour’ to which it can they will being by in the this vice with and rather than and The given to the representation of this is of crucial as if the seem to be themselves when they are the moral instruction that the of them is to would be this process to work, it does not only seem crucial that the is but that the it are that they this without in any aspect of the vice by which it has been The moral instruction of the Characters is imagined by both Lycius and to work in a similar like will vices through their in Theophrastus’ They will then that if they these vices they would be for and so will to adopting them in the In the words of Morel, Theophrastus’ of vice can help the same way that was for the children to the often on on the Characters’ to the the in the Proem that the Characters is designed for Theophrastus and Polycles’ and here with of to whom to dedicate his This is one of several new that Lycius and in their approach to understanding the moral instruction of the only do they newly the way in which the Characters is designed to the but the of the vices seem or and a sense that this is a text designed to vices that might have in the rather than those which Morel, all this printing a book of vices that some might think will more than it to It is he by showing these vices in his readers will learn ‘to It is with Casaubon’s translation published in in 1592 that we to a fundamental with several of the we have been in the Latin the first time in the century, we find an two moral to the text that newly rely on the representation of both vice and just like the earlier Latin that the Characters is a work that is interested in behaviour. he begins in his dedication to and of is the third and ‘most way that the had of with philosophy and is about as a of moral instruction is how it proposes to teach ethics through ‘a of the way men as they (…) to this or that virtue or By providing these descriptions of behaviour, in the wanted to us (…) to a and a which could not be ‘more of a This in its sense means, ‘to a to someone who providing a striking as for how the Characters works on its If Theophrastus is providing the reader with in the same way a a to be he is in some way the reader to what they these sketches of makes clear how this of is to work when he the relationship between the Characters and the of philosophy and is about the Characters, in Casaubon’s is how it as an between the of and the philosopher between virtue and us to one and the The approach, on the other – similar to the – does not and vices in the but us the of to be and those to be ‘to the of other men and to from for our own an ‘an between philosophy and is therefore being between one concerned with virtue and and concerned with good and bad moral for readers to or If the for the Characters’ and the its they work to to a text with a of good and bad examples which through or to a reader’s This is the first moralizing approach to the Characters that He then continues, through a of to a second way in which the Characters is with moral that it is the text’s relationship with that for why the Characters is a between philosophy and rather than philosophy and The and between the and the he of is that ‘the the as they the can that have taken The relationship here with is that the from the with it one new by virtue of

Reviewed by: The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St. Matthew: Translated with Introduction and Brief Annotations trans. by Ronald E. Heine John Solheid Raphael A. Cadenhead, trans. The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St. Matthew: Translated with Introduction and Brief Annotations (2 Volumes) Oxford Early Christian Texts Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 Pp. ix + 773. (2 Volume Set) US $255.00. Origen of Alexandria was one of the most prolific biblical scholars of his era, not to mention one of the most studied of the church fathers. Given those facts, it is remarkable that English readers have not had access to one of his most important works, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew, since Rev. John Patrick translated five of the eight books in the late nineteenth century. Ronald Heine has, therefore, performed a monumental service to English-reading scholars of early Christianity by translating the work in both its Greek and Latin versions. Thanks to Heine, early Christian scholars, and scholars of Origen in particular, can now more easily engage with and benefit from one of the most significant works of the Alexandrian. Moreover, this translation nicely coincides with the publication of the critical edition of Origen's recently discovered Psalm Homilies, which were delivered at nearly the same time as he composed his Matthew Commentary. The first volume contains the extant Greek text beginning with Book 10 and ending with Book 17 (Matt 13.36–22.33), as well as an appendix with selected passages of the Commentary preserved by later writers and the catena fragments, covering Matt 1.1–13.33 and 28.1–18. Heine also included in Volume One a bibliography of modern sources. Volume Two is divided into two parts. The first part contains the Latin translation from the Vetus Interpretatio, which covers Books 12–17 (Matt 16.13–22.33). The second part contains the Latin translation [End Page 671] of the Series Commentariorum, which begins where the Vetus Interpretatio ended; that is, it covers Origen's comments on Matt 22.34 to Matt 27. For the translation, Heine relied on the critical edition of Erich Klostermann and Ernst Benz in the GCS series. Heine does not describe his method of translation, but it appears to be a literal rendering of both the Greek text and Latin translations. Where there are ambiguities, stemming from issues such as syntax or vocabulary, Heine helpfully places explanations in the footnotes (e.g., 1:102n85 and 1:103n86). There are also instances in which Heine had to supply a word in order to make sense of the thought (e.g., 1:56n158). Heine's brief Introduction begins by placing the Commentary in the context of Origen's life. He then highlights significant themes in the Commentary, focusing especially on the frequent use Origen made throughout the Commentary on the distinction between Jesus teaching the crowds in parables and his disciples in secret. Other themes include the unity of the scriptures, comparing scripture with scripture, narrative sequence, and the role of figurative interpretation. Heine also compared Origen's understanding of Jesus's teachings in the Commentary with Origen's First Homily on Psalm 77 in the recently discovered Psalm Homilies. He then sets the composition of the Commentary in its historical relation to the Psalm Homilies and the Contra Celsum, two works of the same time period. The Introduction concludes with remarks on the preservation of Origen's Commentary in both Greek and the Latin translations. Perhaps Heine's most significant accomplishment in the Introduction is his treatment of how Origen develops a hermeneutical tool for the interpretation of scripture based on the evangelist's distinction of Jesus teaching the crowds in parables, but instructing his disciples in secret (11). Heine rightly points out that Origen was not an elitist snubbing his nose at the masses, but rather wanted to inspire his students not to rest content with the simple meaning of the text. Like the disciples who were persuaded to ask Jesus for explanations, Origen's students had a choice to investigate the scriptures rather than being satisfied with the simple meaning. The distinction between the crowds and the disciples, then, was...

Café Space, Communication, Creativity, and Materialism

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the

MS. Sloane 1411, held by the British Library in London, includes among other Postelliana, the autograph of Postel's Latin translation of the Proteuangelion Jacobi, dated 1551 as well as the autograph copy of the Greek text, copied by Postel in 1553. The Greek text, on closer inspection, turns out to be the text Fa, considered by Tischendorf, and later by Strycker, as completely independent of Postel's Greek prototype. The Latin translation in MS. Sloane represents the primitive stage of the translation published later (1552) by Bibliander who amended it considerably, although not having a Greek text at his disposal. It is the Latin translation of 1551 which we edit here with Bibliander's amendments in the form of variants. Modern editors of the Proteuangelion should henceforth work from Postel's primitive Latin translation, not from Bibliander's published version. Moreover; it is obvious that the Greek text Fa constituted one of the two originals used by Postel for his Latin translation. His other original (which we have called provisionally Pos.lat.) is no longer extant. Finally, it appears that Postel's discovery of the Proteuangelion as well as its publication by Bibliander constitute an important contribution to 16th century discussions on the Biblical canon, which, it would seem, remained uninfluenced by confessional differences.

David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) presents the most important account of skepticism in the history of modern philosophy. In this lucid and thorough introduction to the work, John P. Wright examines the development of Hume's ideas in the Treatise, their relation to eighteenth-century theories of the imagination and passions, and the reception they received when Hume published the Treatise. He explains Hume's arguments concerning the inability of reason to establish the basic beliefs which underlie science and morals, as well as his arguments showing why we are nevertheless psychologically compelled to accept such beliefs. The book will be a valuable guide for those seeking to understand the nature of modern skepticism and its connection with the founding of the human sciences during the Enlightenment.

Ontwerpen en bouwen in de Hollandse stad

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

MLRy 98.1, 2003 199 impressive array of erudition, but likely to be of more interest to the specialist in psychoanalytical and structural criticism than to the general student of Moliere. University of Leeds David Shaw Pour une histoire critique de la philosophie: choix d'articles philosophiques du 'Dictionnaire historique et critique'. By Pierre Bayle. Ed. by Jean-Michel Gros with the collaboration of Jacques Chomarat. (Vie des Huguenots, ed. by Antony McKenna, 16) Paris: Champion. 2001. 824 pp. 160 SwF; 760 F; ?115.86. ISBN 2-7453-0422-4. In volume 13 of this series Antony McKenna presented a general selection of ar? ticles from the Dictionnaire historique et critique, and here Jean-Michel Gros (well known forhis critical edition ofthe Commentaire philosophique (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992)) concentrates specifically on the philosophical articles, estimated by Elisabeth Labrousse toconstitute 5 per cent ofthe Dictionnaire. In his introduction Gros revisits Bayle's biography, stressing three aspects: heterodoxy, the teaching ofphilosophy, and journalism. He reminds us of the impact the Dictionnaire had when it firstappeared in 1696 and remarks that, when reading it, one in a sense has to 'reapprendre a lire', such are the complexities of the interplay between the main text and the footnotes. Although not reproduced here for practical reasons, this very particular typography, where footnotes and subfootnotes often dominated the page and indeed forlater read? ers sometimes became more interesting than the main body of the article, is shown to be integral to Bayle's approach, making any purely linear reading impossible. The articles chosen are those considered to be the most significant (Manicheens, Pyrrhon, Rorarius, and Spinoza, for example), and cover issues such as scepticism, the virtuous atheist, and evil; each is preceded by a very useful introduction which explains points which may now be obscure, and very helpfully all quotations in Latin and Greek have been translated. The articles are complemented by the inclusion of Bayle's Preface to the firstedition and his 'Eclaircissements', which the Rotterdam Consistory required him to add to the second edition of 1702. Gros acknowledges that a selection of articles is necessarily unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons, not least because one of the strengths and interests of Bayle's writing is that philosophy permeated even those articles which appeared far removed from philosophical topics. His skill was precisely in being capable of slipping philosophical considerations into the most unlikely places, an approach which was to be much pursued by his successors, and this aspect is necessarily lost here. While a selection can therefore never really give a precise idea of what Bayle himself called 'cette mer orageuse et sans fond', Gros's edition does provide a very clear presentation of some of the articles which proved es? pecially important when the Dictionnaire firstappeared and whose impact continued on into the eighteenth century. The background information provided assists under? standing and appreciation immensely and this new edition thus constitutes another extremely useful contribution to the task of partially re-editing the writings of Bayle. University of Strathclyde Joy Charnley Correspondance de Pierre Bayle. Ed. by Elisabeth Labrousse and others. Vol. n: Novembre i6j4-novembre i6yy: lettres 66-146. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2001. xx + 529 pp. ISBN 0-7294-0731-4. This, the second of twelve volumes of correspondence planned (see MLR 98 (2001), 500-01, forVolume 1), is dedicated to Elisabeth Labrousse, who continued to work on 200 Reviews it up until a month before her death in February 2000. This volume contains eighty letters, written during the years which Bayle spent in Rouen, Paris, and then Sedan, where he had found a teaching post at the Academie. As in Volume 1,the vast majority of the letters are to members of his family (his parents, brothers, and cousins), with a slightly smaller number addressed to friends he had made during his years in Geneva (Basnage, Minutoli, Tronchin). Very personal letters (e.g. letter 87 to his mother) sit alongside discussions of his recent reading (letter 105 to his brother Jacob) and long exchanges of ideas (letter 89 to Minutoli). However, as Antony McKenna points out in the introduction, it is clear from references in the remaining letters that many others...