Early Modern Debate Research Articles

Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East: A Study of Jacob of Serugh. By Philip Michael Forness

The amazingly prolific Syriac poet Jacob of Serugh, who lived at the height of the christological controversies of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, has the distinction of being recognized as a saint in both the Maronite (Chalcedonian) Church and the Syrian Orthodox (Miaphysite) Church. Attempts to pin his allegiance down were for a long time a matter of dispute, and the course of the controversy has been described by the author of the present monograph in a separate article (‘Cultural Exchange and Scholarship on Eastern Christianity: An Early Modern Debate over Jacob of Serugh’s Christology’, Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 70 [2018]). It was only with the publication (in 1937) of his letters that Jacob’s dislike of the Chalcedonian dogmatic formulation finally became apparent. In this careful and well-documented study Forness opens by considering the complex question of the audience and readership of homilies in late antiquity in general before going on to issues specific to Jacob’s verse homilies which exhibit several features characteristic of oral poetry. Then, focusing on the debate on how to describe the relationship between the miracles and the sufferings of Christ, and the way in which this is expressed in the Henoticon (issued in 482), Forness turns to the witness of Jacob’s three most relevant writings, the collection of letters, the homily specifically on the Council of Chalcedon (whose authenticity has been disputed but is here cautiously defended), and especially the long Homily on Faith published by Bedjan in the third volume of his edition. (Here it should be noted that no fewer than six further homilies entitled ‘on Faith’ by Jacob are now available in R. Akhrass and I. Suryany’s excellent two-volume edition entitled 160 Unpublished Homilies of Jacob of Serugh, published in Damascus in 2017, obviously too late for Forness to use, though their work is included in his bibliography.)

So Many Tall Tales: Constantijn L’Empereur’s Polemical Reading of Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels

Abstract The twelfth-century Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela and his Book of Travels has attracted widespread attention since the Middle Ages. The narrative, however, has largely been read and studied in the context of what it can tell scholars about the medieval world. This article shifts the approach away from the Book of Travels’ content to its reception. Under discussion is Constantijn L’Empereur’s 1633 Latin edition. This article reveals how L’Empereur elevated the Book of Travels from a travelogue into a work of rabbinic literature to undermine the text’s authority. It argues that by attacking the veracity of the account, L’Empereur employed the narrative in anti-Jewish polemics against the cunning, and theologically blind Jews to illustrate the errors of their beliefs. By illuminating L’Empereur’s engagement with the text, the article also situates L’Empereur’s use of rabbinic literature in the wider early modern debate about the utility of Hebrew language study and rabbinic literature for Christian scholars.

The Early Modern Debate over the Age of the Hebrew Vowel Points: Biblical Criticism and Hebrew Scholarship in the Confessional Republic of Letters.

This article presents a reassessment of the seventeenth-century debate over the origin of the Hebrew vowel points. Previous accounts have treated this debate from the perspective of Protestant scholarship, with the reception of Louis Cappel's Arcanum punctationis revelatum (1624) used to measure progress or reaction according to how far scholars accepted or rejected-the latter for theological reasons-the critical advance his work has been taken to represent. The article argues this mischaracterizes the issue, showing why the question only became especially pressing in the mid-1640s in the context of broader developments in Catholic and Protestant biblical criticism.

Tullia d’Aragona

Tullia d’Aragona: Early Modern Feminist, Poet and Philosopher of Love
 This article gives an overview of the life and work of the early modern poet and philosopher Tullia d’Aragona, with specific focus on the feminist ideas that are presented in her dialogue on love, Dialogo della infinità di amore (1547). By extensively referencing classical and contemporary writers on the subjects of love and gender, like Plato, Marsilio Ficino and Sperone Speroni, Aragona places her Dialogo in the middle of the early modern debate on love and skillfully makes use of dialogical rhetoric in order to discuss and criticize existing configurations of love and gender. By considering the significance of the body, this article shows how the incorporated dismissal of women in for example Neoplatonic ideas where the (female) body is connected to base and lascivious love in opposition to the ennobling and honest love of (male) souls, is questioned, countered and re-written by d’Aragona.

New presbyter meets old priests: Conciliarism and conscience in Samuel Rutherford’s Free Disputation

ABSTRACTIn 1649 Samuel Rutherford, the leading theorist of the Covenanter revolution, published his Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience. The situation of this celebrated anti-tolerationist argument, which famously roused the ire of Milton, in the political and ecclesiological strife of mid-seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland is well known, and has been frequently discussed in scholarship. The focus of this paper is rather on Rutherford’s connection to a broader intellectual tradition, namely the vibrant Conciliarist movement of the late medieval and early modern period. It argues that Rutherford drew on Conciliarist thought in order to articulate an account of individual rights and consent within an over-arching framework of unity and uniformity. In doing so he was able to develop a nuanced understanding of conscience and the right of resistance, while always maintaining its subordination to the law of God. The paper also compares Rutherford’s covenantal vision of politics with Locke’s contractual understanding as a way of beginning to recontextualise early modern debates concerning tolerance, its character and its scope.

‘No Empty Place for Complementing Doubt’: The Spaces of Religious Toleration in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Flecknoe’

Abstract Andrew Marvell’s ‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome’ (1646) is a striking document in early modern debates over toleration and an exemplar of their rhetoric and design. Considering ‘Flecknoe’ together with Upon Appleton House (1651), I argue that Marvell uses spatial terms and satiric forms to present confessional rivalry and complementarity. Satire itself might be thought of as a practice of toleration in these poems, at once mocking the languages and gestures of opposing religious confessions and allowing the poet to draw close to—to contrive a surprising intimacy with—the convictions and practices of others. The result is a brilliant interweaving of the ideas and experiences of religious and erotic toleration: Marvell sets liberty of the spirit alongside liberty of the body in these poems’ scenes of forbearance.

New Perspectives on Agency in Early Modern Philosophy

ABSTRACTThis introductory article outlines the themes and aims of this special issue, which offers new perspectives on early modern debates about agency in two ways: First, it recovers writings on agency and liberty that have been widely neglected or that have received insufficient attention, including writings by Anne Conway, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, William King, Gabrielle Suchon, Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, Mary Astell, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Second, it reveals the richness of early modern debates about agency and liberty.

Laws of Nature by Walter Ott

Reviewed by: Laws of Nature by Walter Ott Michael J. Futch OTT, Walter and Lydia Patton, editors. Laws of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ix + 264 pp. Cloth, $65.00 This wide-ranging collection of essays examines the metaphysical underpinnings and implications of competing accounts of laws of nature. The first six essays offer interpretations of key figures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the remaining six essays providing contributions to current debates on the topic. This is not to suggest a sharp bifurcation between the exegetical and the philosophical, however, as most authors show an appreciation for the reciprocal illumination of contemporary philosophy and its history. To avoid a fragmented discussion, I will focus only on those essays of most interest to readers of this journal. One way to understand early modern debates about laws of nature is in terms of a bottom-up as opposed to a top-down approach. On the former understanding, laws are grounded in things' natures and powers, whereas the latter sees them as being externally imposed by God. Using this framework, Walter Ott argues that Bacon and Spinoza both opt for a bottom-up approach that renounces an unalloyed mechanism. Laws just are the powers of things inscribed into their natures, and yet are still lawlike insofar as they express unchanging dispositions. One [End Page 803] consequence of this is that the world is governed by a multiplicity of natures and laws that can obstruct each other. Stathos Psillos also employs these interpretive categories in his discussion of Descartes, Malebranche, Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, and Newton. For these thinkers, laws, like the powers they displace, impose either metaphysically or naturally necessary connections in nature, even if such necessities cannot be inferred from observed regularities. This necessity, however, is top-down and not bottom-up since it emanates from a law giver and not bodies' powers. In their contributions, Helen Hattab and Mary Domski examine Descartes's relation to his predecessors and successors. Hattab identifies three features of Descartes's laws—they are universal, play a causal role in nature, and determine every outcome in nature—whose provenance she seeks to trace. Hattab shows that the first two features are presaged in the works of late fifteenth-century Aristotelians, but since these same thinkers posit bottom-up active powers that determine changes, the third is not. Sebastian Basso, contrariwise, is a more direct precursor to Descartes since one finds all three characteristics of laws in his oeuvre. Domski defends Descartes against the criticisms of Newtonians that his derivation of the laws of nature from God's immutable nature compromises divine freedom and overstates the capacity of human reason to comprehend the God's essence. On her reading, Descartes's laws are certain and necessary only from the vantage point of human reason. Similarly, Newton's laws are best understood as principles that, as applied to mathematical bodies, are indubitable and rationally certain. The differences between Descartes and Newton are therefore not as sharp as might initially appear. Angela Breitenbach elucidates Kant's views on laws of nature in a way that simultaneously preserves their nomic necessity and knowability. Arguing against alternative accounts that achieve one at the expense of the other, Breitenbach maintains that our access to specific natural laws is through "empirical reflection." This means that empirical inquiry searches for laws that systematically unify nature and that take the necessary form imposed by a priori principles of reason. Several of the later essays revolve around the Best System Account, which sees laws as true generalizations that supervene on nonnomic facts and are part of the system that achieves the best balance between strength and simplicity. Especially notable here is Michela Massimi's convincing argument in favor of a perspectivalist version of the BSA that recognizes that, rather than being fixed, standards of simplicity and strength differ throughout the history of science. Natural laws are nomically necessary just in case they figure in perspectives that vary across time and scientific communities. This account both remains grounded in the actual practice of scientific communities and yields laws resilient to theory change. Of the entries not principally historically oriented, those by Stephen Mumford and by...

Diana and Juno Destroyed: Statues and Pagan Deities in twoMeisterliederby Hans Sachs

This essay analyzes two of Hans Sachs'sMeisterliederwhich treat ancient tales of a statue and its destruction. Both unpublished, these songs have not received scholarly attention, and yet their subject matter gains a particular resonance against the background of the early modern debate in German regions on images and their proper function. Drawing on a distinction made in ancient Greek between aneikōnand aneidōlon, the essay explores how the songs depict different attitudes towards statuary: what a statue is, what it claims to represent, and how its representational strategies can fail or be foiled. Through comparison with Sachs's purported source, the German mythographer Johannes Herold's work, this essay posits that both songs suggest that iconoclasm can be an appropriate response to statues.

Instrumental causes and the natural origin of souls in Antonio Ponce Santacruz's theory of animal generation

ABSTRACTThis article studies the theory of animal seeds as purely material entities in the early seventeenth-century medical writings of Antonio Ponce Santacruz, royal physician to the Spanish king Philipp IV. Santacruz adopts the theory of the eduction of substantial forms from the potentiality of matter, according to which new kinds of causal powers can arise out of material composites of a certain complexity. Santacruz stands out among the late Aristotelian defenders of eduction theory because he applies the concept of an instrument of direction developed by the medieval Avicenna commentator Gentile da Foligno and gives a novel turn to this concept by interpreting animal seeds as separate instruments. The article situates Santacruz's theory in the context of early modern debates about the concept of the eduction of forms, as well as in the context of early modern debates about the concept of separate instruments. Particular attention is paid to Santacruz's responses to the biological views of Julius Caesar Scaliger and Thomas Feyens. Santacruz's response to Scaliger turns out to be central for his explication of the eduction relation, and Santacruz's response to Feyens turns out to be central for his explication of the nature of instrumental causation.

REPRESENTATION AND THE FALL

This article makes the case that the early modern debate over political representation was deeply intertwined with a theological debate over the Fall. The “resemblance” theory of representation adopted by English Parliamentarians was first formulated by Calvinists to make the case that Adam represented humanity, despite the fact that humanity had never authorized him to act in their name. The Royalist rejoinder, which treated authorization as a necessary and sufficient condition of representation, began life instead as a Pelagian response to Calvinist orthodoxy. This theological dispute provides a crucial context for the interventions of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

“Yet not past sense”: Walter Ralegh, Mary Wroth and the pleasure princi

This discussion considers both the poetic and prose writings of Walter Ralegh and Mary Wroth with specific reference to the figuration of the body and the deployment of the senses in their narratives. Initially, late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century views are reviewed concerning the senses and the extent to which these are developments of ideas inherited from antiquity. Subsequently, attention is paid to the evocations of sensory perceptions in Ralegh’s and Wroth’s writing with reference to accounts of rapture, seduction, illness and near-death experiences, querying whether the interrogation of early modern epistemological and senseate expectations are inevitably linked to specificities of gendered experience and writing. Indeed, in the findings ranged during the course of this discussion, it becomes increasingly apparent that even in writings with marked gendered perspectives, the relation of human experience regarding the senses and knowledge acquisition may return to strikingly analogous enquiries. The final phase of discussion reflects upon how Ralegh’s and Wroth’s accounts of the senses contribute to an ongoing early modern debate on the human condition.

Jens Bircherod’s In Timaeum exercitatio historico-philologico-philosophica (1682): Platonic cosmology in seventeenth-century Denmark

ABSTRACTThis article examines a previously unstudied dissertation on Plato’s Timaeus presumably authored by the Danish bishop Jens Bircherod (1658–1708). By means of a study of Bircherod’s sources and interpretative method, it assesses the place of his In Timaeum exercitatio historico-philologico-philosophica (1682) in the history of philology and philosophy, and in the context of seventeenth-century Lutheran pedagogy. It shows how Bircherod makes use of Plato’s dialogue against the background of early modern religious debates, and how his method largely follows the historicist approach that had begun to characterise the reception history of the Timaeus since the late sixteenth century. It argues that Bircherod wrote his historical-philological-philosophical exercise on the Timaeus to demonstrate the existence of divine providence and monotheistic tendencies in antiquity, and to harness Plato’s cosmological treatise to the cause of Christian apologetics.

The image of the “Turk” in early modern debates on toleration

Cette recherche a debute a partir de sources liees au discours sur la gestion des differents types de christianisme qui apparaissent dans le sillage de la Reformation et de la confessionnalisation. Repondre a cette problematique – que ce soit sous la forme d’un plaidoyer en faveur des interactions non-violentes et de la tolerance mutuelle ou d’un impitoyable appel a la restauration de l’ideal de la christianitas – revient bien souvent, d’une maniere ou d’une autre, a faire reference aux « Turcs ». Le discours sur les « Turcs » a joue un role important dans l’incitation a la confessionnalisation et dans la lutte pour obtenir des droits politiques et religieux. Avec la systematisation et la categorisation des images utilisees pour decrire « les Turcs », paraissent quelques recits qui remplissent tous une fonction speciale dans le discours sur la tolerance de differentes denominations chretiennes. Il semble d’ailleurs que certains modeles linguistiques, et par consequent l’appreciation des « Turcs » (et avec eux de l’« Islam » et de l’« Orient » dont ils etaient les representants) furent significativement impactes par les debats internes au christianisme et dans un moindre degre par les rencontres entre chretiens et musulmans.

“Her ladyship’s foolish”: The servant’s disobedience in John Webster’s The White Devil

John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) has attracted considerable critical attention, focusing on, among others, its intervention in the early modern debate on “the nature of women” and depiction of...

The left hand of the Enlightenment: truth, error, and integrity in Bayle and Kant

ABSTRACTTaking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s comment that ‘truth gets lost in the Enlightenment’ and Lessing’s parable of God’s ‘left hand’, this paper traces a historical shift in moral and religious thought: roughly from truth to sincerity. From traditional conceptions of conscience as conditional on the objective truth of its content, the paper moves on, via the Reformation and seventeenth-century Augustinian turn, to early modern debates on toleration and the ‘erring conscience’. It is argued that Pierre Bayle’s Commentaire Philosophique of 1686 can be read as a crucial catalogue for understanding the substitution of truth with sincerity (and error): so that not truth but truthfulness is considered to be essential for moral and religious justification. Moving from Bayle to Immanuel Kant, the paper then shows how many of the same questions rise in Kant’s late essay on theodicy, which is also an essay on sincerity or integrity, via the Book of Job. Through these two thinkers, various themes are connected: from conscience and sincerity to the problem of the conscientious persecutor. Finally, these themes of truth, error and integrity are linked to the modern debate on authenticity, and a framework is proposed for conceptualising these various shifts.

Drones, Hobbes, and Liberal Enchantment

ABSTRACTThis article reconceptualizes military drones by drawing on early-modern debates about the sanctity of political power. Ian Shaw has claimed that the proliferation and automation of drones threatens to subject humanity to a robotic regime of control, which he describes as the ultimate instantiation of Thomas Hobbes’s artificial sovereignty. I argue instead that the United States’ drone strategy is closely informed by a liberal political theology that can be traced back to Hobbes’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opponents, Samuel Clarke and Nehemiah Grew. These physico-theologians held that constitutionally balanced polities such as Britain were important vessels for divine providence. Today, a parallel faith that the United States represents humanity’s best hope is used to justify the extralegal and secretive bombing of territories that are deemed to be profane in comparison with America. Hobbes’s demystification of politics in Leviathan provides the platform for a critique of this modern form of liberal enchantment.

Moral Theology, Culture of Counsel, and the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth Century

This paper explores the connection between the early modern debates over Probabilism and political counsel. It argues that the issue of counsel was important in the polemics against Jesuit moral theology. Theological challenges to Probabilism clearly show that many intellectuals were worried it could lead political counsellors astray and encourage them to defer to the whims of political authorities. This was not merely a theoretical issue. Three French cases evidence the fact that political counsellors could claim an obligation to put obedience to their sovereign before obedience to religious authority—the pope in particular—on religious grounds. The discussion between anti-probabilists and probabilists during the second half of the seventeenth century shows the degree of unrest among theological and ecclesiastical authorities confronted with the demands of the state on individual conscience, and on the conscience of counsellors in particular.

Allegories of Creation: Glassmaking, Forests, and Fertility in Webster’sThe Duchess of Malfi

Allegories of Creation: Glassmaking, Forests, and Fertility in Webster’s<i>The Duchess of Malfi</i>

Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster

Reviewed by: Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster Alyssa Gerhardt Craven KEYWORDS Susan Juster, Alyssa Gerhardt Craven, American religion, religious violence, American esotericism, ritual violence, witchcraft, American witchcraft susan juster. Sacred Violence in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 288. It seems too often that scholars of early America begin with the implication that Protestants, namely Puritans, coming to the Americas represented a clean break with the religious history and traditions of Europe. Susan Juster's work, Sacred Violence in Early America, dispels this continuing perception of the American colonies as religious sanctuary and reveals how ingrained patterns from early modern Europe continually colored the events that took place in the New World. By taking a long view and examining the theological conflicts and the religious violence in Europe during the medieval period and the Reformation, Juster makes it evident that Anglo-American reactions to their new environment were guided by discursive patterns of their European past. The central tenet of Juster's work is the claim that medieval and early modern scripts of religious violence were replayed in the New World by Anglo-American colonists. Particularly, the material realities that English colonists encountered revived modes of religious discourse whose origins lay within Reformation-era disputes. Juster asserts that while the physical scale of religious violence in the New World never reached that of Europe, modes of rhetoric took on surprisingly similar characteristics. Juster organizes the book around four thematic chapters. The first, "Blood [End Page 256] Sacrifice," largely centers on the changing understandings of the sacraments in the Reformation and the ways in which these concerns were translated to the New World. In particular, Juster points to how Protestant concerns about the literal flesh-and-blood controversies of the Eucharist became fears about New World cannibalism. Both the Spanish and English settlers feared the prospect of natives who engaged in either cannibalism or in ritual sacrifice. For Spaniards, the cannibal first represented the "primitive other," but as violence in the New World became more vicious, the image of the cannibal became increasingly associated with Spaniards themselves (33). Spaniards, according to the Black Legend, became the true cannibals, dismembering and sacrificing their native victims. It is this chapter that provides some of the most startling imagery of the book, and the one in which Juster clearly shows the irony of Protestant speech and action. In spite of Protestant revulsion of transubstantiation and their claims that Catholic views of the Eucharist continually re-sacrificed Christ, Puritan settlers had clear associations about the role of blood and sacrifice in the New World. English settlers encountered Native American groups where cannibalism and ritual sacrifice rarely, if ever, occurred, but the concern over bloodlust persisted. Anglo-Americans began to revert to older discourses of blood sacrifice: the spilling of blood to satisfy a debt, rather than to atone. Native Americans became the center of this rhetoric, as the spilling of their blood satisfied the debt of colonists' sins. Thus, we have figures like William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth colony, referring to the massacre of Pequot Indians at the burning of Fort Mystic, as a victory that "seemed a sweet sacrifice" (53). Native American bodies became the new sacramental elements of Anglo-America. "Holy War" expands the discussion of sacrifice, primarily focusing on how medieval and early modern debates about the nature of warfare shaped the treatment of natives in the New World. Few colonists believed that they were engaged in "holy war" because the works of humanist scholars had mostly removed the label from the Anglo-American vocabulary. However, as Juster demonstrates, various religious justifications for war continued to proliferate in the New World. While Protestants in the New World were more apt to claim their right to warfare in terms of "just war," overtly spiritual concerns were the foundation of these discussions. As the trope of Indian as devil-worshipper gained credence in the New World, the conflict between Protestants and Native Americans converged on the status of spiritual warfare. Envisioned as literal conflict between God and the devil, Native Americans were demonized for their blasphemy, heresy, and even their inability, in English eyes, to use land...