Early Modern Debate Research Articles

Prelingual Deafness and the Manualist/Oralist Controversy in the Dutch Republic

This essay discusses the life and career of the prelingually deaf painter Jan Jansz. de Stomme (1615-1658) in the context of early modern debates on deafness, oral speech, and gestural communication. A son of a Franeker burgomaster, Jan moved to Groningen in 1643, where he became known for his portraits of Frisian aristocracy, got married twice, and lived in wealth in a prestigious neighbourhood. The theologian Samuel Maresius and scholar Anton Deusing described Jan’s devout attendance of services in the Reformed Church, which defended his right to participate in Holy Communion. A similar account was given in a family chronicle written by Jan’s grandnephew, who further specified that Jan joined the church as a communicant member expressing his understanding of the doctrine through gestures. By examining these various sources, I argue that church membership played an important role in bolstering Jan’s social status and undermining the alleged intellectual and mental inferiority of prelingually deaf people. I further show that despite the belief that oral speech was a sign of intelligence necessary to perform functions deemed normative, Jan established a successful career communicating only through gestures.

Berkeley on true motion

Studies of the Early Modern debate concerning absolute and relative space and motion often ignore the significance of the concept of true motion in this debate. Even philosophers who denied the existence of absolute space maintained that true motions could be distinguished from merely apparent ones. In this paper, I examine Berkeley's endorsement of this distinction and the problems it raises. First, Berkeley's endorsement raises a problem of consistency with his other philosophical commitments, namely his idealism. Second, Berkeley's endorsement raises a problem of adequacy, namely whether Berkeley can provide an adequate account of what grounds the distinction between true and merely apparent motion. In this paper, I argue that sensitivity to Berkeley's distinction between what is true in the metaphysical, scientific, and vulgar domains can address both the consistency and the adequacy problems. I argue that Berkeley only accepts true motion in the scientific and vulgar domains, and not the metaphysical. There is thus no inconsistency between his endorsement of true motion in science and ordinary language, and his metaphysical idealism. Further, I suggest that sensitivity to these three domains shows that Berkeley possesses resources to give an adequate account of how true motions are discovered in natural science.

“A Conscience Rightly Informed”: Puritan Casuistry and the Theological Justifications for Religious Establishment

Abstract In the early modern debates over religious liberty and toleration, religious dissenters often raised the issue of an individual’s conscience as a primary support for disestablishment. Dissenters like Roger Williams contended that establishmentarian policies persecuted tender consciences. God, according to dissenters, had not granted authority over the conscience to civil rulers; thus, religious establishment was both theologically specious as well as politically perilous. Much attention has been given to how religious dissenters discussed the human conscience and its place within the civil society. This essay, however, focuses on how magisterial Protestants developed their theological system of religious establishment in concert with their own understanding of the human conscience. Proponents of establishment utilized their own theology of the conscience as grounds for religious establishment, and this essay seeks to understand how they reconciled their soteriological convictions and their conception of the human conscience with their belief in the magistrate’s authority in matters of doctrine and religion.

Islamic Multiplicities in Kashmir: Debates about the Food Practices of a XVIth-Century Sufi Saint and the Modern Cult

Abstract The spread of Islam to the South Asian region of Kashmir and its role in shaping the socio-religious and political contours in the region is a highly charged debate in academic as well as popular circles. This article examines the early modern debates about the vegetarian food practices of a sixteenth-century Sufi saint of Kashmir, Baba Hyder Rishi (b. 1504) and contemporary debates around the modern cult mainly centered around his shrine in the Anantnag (locally known as Islamabad) town of south Kashmir. It is divided into two parts; the first focuses on debates during the saint’s own lifetime and the second analyses modern debates about what has by now emerged as a cult around the saint’s shrine. We begin with a critical re-evaluation of the wide-spread notion that the saint’s practice of vegetarianism was, much like his predecessors in the local Rīshī Sufi order, grounded in local Buddhist-Hindu customs and thus exemplifies the syncretic nature of Islam in Kashmir. Instead, we argue that both the defence and contestation of the saint’s practice as well its modern cult was and continues to be located within the Islamic tradition itself. We use this discussion for a critical reflection on the widely prevalent idea of religious syncretism in Kashmir and the over-simplified and ahistorical view of Islam as a monolith, and then explore the possibility of using Islamic ‘multiplicity’ as an alternate analytical category.

Trans Visual Narratives: Representing Gender and Nature in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: This article studies the portraits of two gender-ambiguous individuals, the seventeenth-century Spanish soldier Antonio (née Catalina) de Erauso and the eighteenth-century French diplomat the Chevalier (Chevalière) d’Eon, as they offer a window into early modern debates on the representation of nature through its wonders. Making sense of the representations of Erauso and d’Eon requires viewing them as depictions of nature that belonged to the genre of the cabinet of curiosities. When seen as part of the cabinet of curiosities, their paintings appear as part of the artistic and scientific explorations that negotiated changing concepts of nature in early modern Europe. While Erauso’s portrait belonged to a tradition that embraced the sitter’s gender ambiguities, d’Eon’s portrait appears instead as a transitional object between two ways of organizing knowledge of nature. D’Eon’s portrait reflected a grown interest in the eighteenth century of representing nature in an objective way with a clear separation between the genders.

Human Interest: Usury from Luther to Bentham

This article revisits a set of classic political, theological and economic scenes in the (early) modern debate on usury from Luther to Bentham. To summarize, I argue that this theory of usury – which polemically mobilizes counter-Aristotelian tropes of the breeding, reproduction and husbandry of money – might also be read as a theory of what Foucault famously calls pastoral power. If this debate nominally concerns the ‘repeal’ of the ancient prohibition against money-lending at interest, I argue that what is really at stake here is the pastoral production of a new theory of the subject as ‘human interest’: a self whose allegedly intrinsic self-interest expresses itself paradigmatically through financial interest. In conclusion, I situate this genealogy of human interest within the larger history of the self-interested, capitalist and indebted subject from Hirschman, through Foucault, to Lazzarato.

Harvesting Underground: (re)generative theories and vegetal analogies in the early modern debate on mineral ores (I)

The early modern use of vegetal terms to explain the origin and growth of ores was widespread in mining industry, alchemy, and natural philosophy. In the writings of authors from many different backgrounds, mineral veins were often described as ‘trees’ which moved upwards, bore fruits, and underwent a life cycle. Accordingly, the existence in ores of ‘seeds’ (and, therefore, of a (re)generative power) was frequently invoked to explain the apparent similarities between minerals and plants. This method of describing mineral processes—called here the botanical model —also had a lasting terminological influence, as is attested by various expressions that are still common among miners and scientists. The notions underlying these terms are part of a larger body of ‘organic interpretations’ of mineral resources that endured into the eighteenth century and contributed to the development of the Earth sciences, mining industry, and the human–environment relationship. In focusing mainly on the rise of the botanical model in Renaissance Europe, this essay is the first part of a more extensive study (to be completed in a forthcoming paper) on the evolution of this important concept and its interaction with the new science throughout the early modern period.

Trees, Ballads, Iconoclasm and the Garden in Shakespeare’s Richard II

ABSTRACT This article reads Richard II’s garden scene in the context of early modern debates about sacramentalism and the created world. The garden scene reveals its awareness of these debates and the ways in which they occurred in genres both high (learned tracts, printed books) and low (oral cultures, cheap print). The gardener demonstrates his political and theological sophistication through his hands-on knowledge of gardening. In the same way, ordinary people off-stage participated in their culture’s most urgent controversies through popular genre that were frequently dismissed by their social betters.

Rethinking Early Modern Philosophy

ABSTRACT This introductory article outlines how this special issue contributes to existing scholarship that calls for a rethinking and re-evaluation of common assumptions about early modern philosophy. One way of challenging existing narratives is by questioning what role systems or systematicity play during this period. Another way of rethinking early modern philosophy is by considering assumptions about the role of philosophy itself and how philosophy can effect change in those who form philosophical beliefs or engage in philosophical argumentation. A further way of advancing early modern scholarship is by examining the tight links between early modern views on metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and moral, social, and political philosophy, on the other hand. Moreover, there are ongoing debates whether and how the traditional distinction between rationalism and empiricism, which has been questioned for several reasons, should be replaced. It has been proposed to replace it with a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy, but this distinction cannot easily accommodate early modern debates concerning moral, social, and political philosophy. In addition to highlighting several ways how early modern philosophy has and can be rethought, we summarize how the papers in this special issue contribute to these ongoing efforts.

Who Owns the Hebrew Doctors? Oriental Scholarship, Historical Proportionality, and the Puritan “Invention” of Avant-Garde Conformity

Puritan and conformist divines both sought to “own the Hebrew doctors” just as they had appealed to patristic sources in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The puritan Walter Travers drew upon the rabbinic commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra to argue for the refashioning of the church in the 1570s. Elizabethan ecclesiastical controversy in turn helped “invent” central features of avant-garde conformity by prompting Richard Hooker's use of Jewish precedent to stabilize the church from the 1580s onward. Mutual claims to the Hebrew doctors exposed disagreement over how to proportion the New Testament church in relation to layered Jewish tradition. Yet, by the early seventeenth century, the separatist Henry Ainsworth began to make more extensive, even promiscuous, use of Maimonides. This signaled movement away from simply attempting to “own the Hebrew doctors” to conscripting Jewish authorities as more active, and less mediated, participants in early modern debate.

Volatile concepts

Abstract This paper demonstrates the value of studying co-occurrence ‘quads’ – constellations of four non-adjacent lemmas that consistently co-occur across spans of up to 100 tokens – for understanding discursive change. We map meaning onto quads as ‘discursive concepts’, which encompass encyclopaedic semantics, pragmatics, and context. We investigate a high-frequency quad with high co-occurrence strength in EEBO-TCP: world-heaven-earth-power. We conduct semantic and pragmatic analysis to generate hypotheses regarding discursive change. The quad’s components are semantically underspecified; thus, although the quad indicates a discursive concept, each instantiation of the quad is variable, contingent, and dependent upon context and pragmatic processes for interpretation. We observe how the vague lexemes that constitute building blocks of religious discourse are employed to generate new, timely secular discourses; and we argue that semantic underspecification is the site and source of discursive change. Indeed, the volatile, unstable nature of the component lexical meanings renders them indispensable to early modern debate.

VOLUME 52 (2022)

VOLUME 52 (2022)

Divine Thoughts and the Corruption of the Will in Doctor Faustus

In act 2 scene 1 of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the title character professes that ‘hell is a fable’. But how could Faustus not believe in hell, standing in the presence of a devil that he himself only recently conjured? What is the philosophical difference in the play between ‘experience’, as Mephistopheles describes it, and Faustus’s lack of understanding on the state of his soul? This article discusses the controversy between Ockhamist and Thomist epistemology, and places Faustus within early modern debates concerning the status of knowledge and its effect on the soul’s search for God.

Ridiculous Subjects:Coriolanus, Popular Representation, and the Roman Tribunes in Early Modern Drama

This essay argues that the famously ambivalent treatment of popular representation in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608) is rooted in the play’s examination of a specific class of political representative: the plebeian tribunes of ancient Rome. It begins by tracing the extensive and deeply polarized reception of these officers in English prose before discussing their role in several earlier plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In both print and performance, the imagined figure of the tribune lent historical specificity and human weight to early modern debates about the abstract idea of popular representation, increasingly understood during the period as a political structure through which the material needs of the common people—and perhaps even their distinctive habits or ways of living—might be integrated into government without plunging it into the chaos of direct popular rule. Guided by these contemporary engagements with the tribunate, the essay demonstrates that the tribunes of Coriolanus neither straightforwardly defend nor subvert the political agency of the play’s Roman citizens. Instead, the play advances a more self-reflexive, theatricalized vision of popular representation that opened up new intellectual and aesthetic avenues for exploring this topic in the following decades. [A.B.]

Cessation and Contingency in Meillassoux’s Speculative Materialism

This article analyzes Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of cessation. First, the article argues that this concept plays a decisive role in Meillassouxian philosophy. Second, by taking into consideration medieval and early modern debates on annihilation, it critically examines the conclusions elaborated in After Finitude. After that, it conceptualizes the relation between absolute time and absolute contingency, keeping in mind the critical reception of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Finally, the article turns to his insights into death and resurrection, and it confronts them with phenomenological theories of mortality. The conclusion is that Meillassoux faces several essential difficulties with regard to the concept of cessation that seem to be unsalvageable.

Solus Verus Deus: Francis Cheynell and the Johannine Trinity

ABSTRACT Scholars have identified the crucial importance of Johannine theology in the early modern anti-Trinitarian and Trinitarian debates. This article investigates Francis Cheynell’s defence of a Trinitarian reading of John 17:3, a highly controversial text in these debates. Modern scholarship has left implicit the significance of John 17:3. Consequently, this article argues that, from Cheynell’s perspective, John 17:3 was the key text upon which Socinian rationalism found its compelling exegetical foothold and necessitated a Trinitarian response. This article demonstrates that Cheynell, in his exegesis of John 17:3, pursued a Nicene-Augustinian metaphysical line of literal exegesis to counter the unipersonal humanist thrust of Socinian exegesis. Indeed, this article advances the thesis that Johannine theology was at the forefront of the early modern polemics surrounding the Trinity. It also highlights the importance of the influence of Nicene-Augustinian thought upon the early modern Trinitarian reception of John’s Gospel.

Enlightenment and Education, Then and Now

Ideas about education and its power to transform people’s intellectual, social, political, and personal lives were central to Enlightenment thought. They were also central to the Enlightenment belief that new ways of thinking engendered new ways of living (and vice versa). Taken together, these points placed education at the heart of early modern debates over the constitution of society, the organization and administration of the polity, the nature and purpose of civil society, and the relations that govern everyday life. To understand this view of education and the Enlightenment debates to which it gave rise, this essay highlights the role of skepticism and uncertainty in Enlightenment thought, the philosophes’ interest in education as an instrument of moral and social improvement, and their commitment to the idea that both individual and collective progress stemmed from critical forms of social intercourse. As a result, we see that the Enlightenment’s educational legacy is not a particular platform or pedagogy, but an ongoing experiment in how the critical and collective pursuit of useful knowledge might reform or remake human society.

Erasmian Didacticism and Political Advice in Luis Zapata’s Carlo famoso

The presence of Erasmian discourse in Luis Zapata’s Carlo famoso (1566) has been both neglected and misinterpreted in literary scholarship. Previously understood as an expression of insubordination against the reign of Philip II, the poet’s intertextual use of Erasmus is reconsidered in this article as political advice imbued with a didactic purpose. Through an exploration of Zapata’s contributions to early modern debates on the formation of the Christian prince, imperial expansion and war, this study seeks to determine the intellectual and ideological profile of the poet and establish a more accurate link between his epic and the wider European political framework of the sixteenth century. In doing so, it aims to broaden the lens through which Carlo famoso has traditionally been read and shed new light on the politico-ethics of its author.

Dido Meets Aeneas: Anachronism, Alternative History, Counterfactual Thinking and the Idea of Fiction

AbstractThe anachronistic character of the loving relationship between Dido and Aeneas was widely and commonly discussed among commentators, critics, and writers in the early modern period. From the 16th century onwards, when the word »anachronism« appeared in vernacular languages, its definition was even inseparable from the example borrowed from theAeneid. The purpose of this article is to interrelate early modern debates on anachronism, reflections on the status of fiction and the history of fiction.Starting with the hypothesis that anachronism is a form of counterfactual, the questions posed in this article are: did forms of counterfactuals exist before the 19th century, to what extent did they differ from contemporary alternative histories and, if so, why? The story of Dido and Aeneas in theAeneidcan be considered »counterfactual«, because this version of the narrative about the queen of Carthage was opposed to another, which was considered to be historical and which made Dido a privileged embodiment of female virtue and value.Several important shifts are highlighted in this article. With the exception of St. Augustine (who saw in Vergil’s anachronism confirmation of the inanity of fiction), before the 16th century indifference towards anachronism prevailed: the two versions of Dido’s story were often juxtaposed or combined. If Vergil’s version of Dido’s story was condemned, it was for moral reasons: the exemplary version, considered more historically accurate, was favored throughout the Middle Ages, notably by Petrarch and Boccaccio.From the 16th century onwards, however, increased acquaintance with Aristotle’s Poetics promoted greater demand for rationality and plausibility in fables. This coincided with the appearance of the word »chronology« and its development, which led to a new understanding of historical time. Anachronism then appeared to be a fault against verisimilitude, and as such was strongly condemned, for example by the commentator on Aristotle, Lodovico Castelvetro. At the same time, the argument of poetic license was also often invoked: it actually became the most common position on this issue. Vergil’s literary canonization, moreover, meant that the version of Dido’s life in theAeneidwas the only story that was known and cited, and from the 17th century onwards it totally supplanted the exemplary version. Strangely enough, permissiveness towards anachronism in treatises, prefaces, or comments on literary works was not accompanied by any development of counterfactual literature in early modern period. Indeed, in both narrative and theatrical genres fiction owed its development and legitimization to the triumph of the criterion of plausibility.This article, however, discusses several examples that illustrate how the affirmation of fiction in the early modern period was expressed through minor variations on anachronism: the counterfictional form of Ronsard’s epic,La Franciade, which represents an explicit deviation from theIliad; the metaleptic meeting of Vergil and Dido in the Underworld in Fontenelle’sLe dialogue des morts; and the provocative proposal for a completely different version of Dido’s life, which was made in an early 17th century Venetian operatic work by an author who claimed to be anti-Aristotelian. This study thus intends to provide an aspect of the story of fiction. The change of perspective on anachronism marks a retreat from moral argument, with privilege given to aesthetic criteria and relative independence with regard to history – while still moderated by the criterion of verisimilitude, as underlined by the abbé d’Aubignac, as well as Corneille.

Hamletand Habit: The Renaissance Problem of Programmable Life

AbstractQuestions of “habit” and “custom” recur throughout William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as they do elsewhere in early modern culture, in theological, legal and moral philosophical debate as well a...