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Faber Stapulensis (1455–1536): The Letter and the Spirit

David C. Steinmetz

in Reformers in the Wings: From Geiler von Kaysersberg to Theodore Beza

The French Humanist, Faber Stapulensis (Lefèvre d’Étaples), identified with circles of reform in France, most notably the circle of reform associated with Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of King ... More

The French Humanist, Faber Stapulensis (Lefèvre d’Étaples), identified with circles of reform in France, most notably the circle of reform associated with Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of King Francis I. He was best known for his work on the Hebrew text of the Bible and his hermeneutical theories, which stressed the importance of the literal–prophetic sense of the Bible over any possible literal–historical meanings.Less

The Humanist Scholar

Tom McInally

in George Strachan of the Mearns: Seventeenth-century Orientalist

Using the entries in the album amicorum and references to Strachan’s published works, this chapter illustrates the recognition he received as a humanist scholar of note while pursuing a career at the ... More

Using the entries in the album amicorum and references to Strachan’s published works, this chapter illustrates the recognition he received as a humanist scholar of note while pursuing a career at the University of Paris. His persistence in seeking patronage gained him financial and academic support from Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (later Pope UrbanVIII) who was papal nuncio in Paris. Strachan acted as informer on British matters to Barberini after the cardinal’s return to Rome. Their relationship soured and financial support was withdrawn. Strachan could not remedy the change in material circumstances that this caused. His attempts to gain patronage from James VI and I in England (in which he was aided by his friend Thomas Dempster of Muiresk) and Henri IV of France failed and, at the age of forty, and almost on impulse after a conversation with the eastern traveller, William Lithgow of Lanark, he decided to travel to the Holy Land to learn eastern languages.Less

Badius’s Commentary Editions: The Classical Poets

Paul White

in Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce and Print in the Renaissance

This chapter traces the evolution of Badius’s commentary practice by studying the grammatical commentaries he composed on the classical authors central to his pedagogical programme: Terence, Virgil, ... More

This chapter traces the evolution of Badius’s commentary practice by studying the grammatical commentaries he composed on the classical authors central to his pedagogical programme: Terence, Virgil, Horace, Persius and Juvenal. Placing these in the wider context of humanist education, the chapter considers aspects of presentation and mise-en-page, and analyses Badius’s changing commentary methods and the audiences for which he was writing. It pays particular attention to the methods used to orient and guide the reader through the text: introductory sections, rules, illustrations, etc.Less

Conclusions

Marta Celati

in Conspiracy Literature in Early Renaissance Italy: Historiography and Princely Ideology

The final section sums up the main innovative findings of this whole study. It points out how starting from the second half of the fifteenth century the development of a ‘thematic genre’ of ... More

The final section sums up the main innovative findings of this whole study. It points out how starting from the second half of the fifteenth century the development of a ‘thematic genre’ of literature on conspiracies was influenced by, but at the same time contributed to, the phenomenon of the literary fashioning of the profile of the ideal ruler, who now corresponded to the figure of a princeps. This literature also contributed to the creation of a new language and symbology of power through the multifunctional reworking of the classical legacy. This evolution culminated in Machiavelli’s attention to the issue of political plots in this work, with an approach that proves to be partly inspired by the previous cultural horizon, but already prominently projected towards an utterly new conceptual world. This analysis, besides providing a missing chapter on the background of Machiavelli’s work, more generally, underlines the significant contribution made by the humanist tradition, through its various literary expressions, to the development of modern political theories and to the history of our culture.Less

The Swallow Flies Swiftly Through: An Analysis of Humanist (First Interlude)

Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair

in Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities

What can you actually do with text analysis? Chapter 4 is the first Interlude or example of text analysis in action with Voyant. This Interlude asks about computing in the humanities and shows how ... More

What can you actually do with text analysis? Chapter 4 is the first Interlude or example of text analysis in action with Voyant. This Interlude asks about computing in the humanities and shows how one can study the evolution of discourse about a discipline like the digital humanities though the Humanist discussion list that has been a central place for discussion and announcements since 1987. Studying 21 years of discourse shows how the emergence of the web as a platform for electronic resources was a turning point. Attention shifted from hardware and software to services and social media.Less

Conclusion: Making the Case for a Humanist Study of the Law

Paul W. Kahn

in Making the Case: The Art of the Judicial Opinion

Conclusion: Making the Case for a Humanist Study of the Law

Paul W. Kahn

in Making the Case: The Art of the Judicial Opinion

A Third Way

Lawrence J. Friedman and Anke M. Schreiber

in The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet

This chapter examines Erich Fromm’s so-called third way as a democratic socialist alternative to Western capitalism and what he called Soviet “managerialism.” Fromm equated democratic socialism with ... More

This chapter examines Erich Fromm’s so-called third way as a democratic socialist alternative to Western capitalism and what he called Soviet “managerialism.” Fromm equated democratic socialism with “humanism”: the freedom of each individual, when sustained by society, to pursue a life of creative labor and happiness. Fromm thought that nonaligned “third force” countries had the greatest potential to travel down this path. Fromm was swayed by a plan proposed in 1960 by Karl Polanyi for enlisting the support of a coalition of politically concerned intellectuals who would reinforce one another’s resources and ideas. With this group in mind, Fromm collaborated with Clara Urquhart to publish a new international journal, Humanist Studies, that would feature critical essays from scholars who believed that “the alternative between Western capitalism and Communist Khrushchevism is humanist socialism.” This chapter also considers Fromm’s 1965 book, Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium, dedicated to his second cousin, Heinz Brandt.Less

In Search of Identities in the Digital Humanities: The Early History of Humanist

Julianne Nyhan

in Social Media Archeology and Poetics

Humanist is an online, international seminar on digital humanities that was set up in 1987 by Willard McCarty. Since its inception, it has taken the form of an electronic mailing list and, within the ... More

Humanist is an online, international seminar on digital humanities that was set up in 1987 by Willard McCarty. Since its inception, it has taken the form of an electronic mailing list and, within the context of the history of computing in the humanities, can be viewed as a proto-social media platform. Newer and slicker social media and crowd-driven platforms may have come (and, in some cases, gone) but Humanist has endured. Indeed, it arguably remains digital humanities’ most vital locus of questioning, imagining and reflecting on and about itself and its many interdisciplinary intersections. In this paper, the author discusses conversations conducted via Humanist in its inaugural year in order to identify and analyze references to disciplinary identity. After focusing on the contradictions that emerge, she reflects on what they might reveal about longer-term dynamics of Digital Humanities’ disciplinary formation and emphasizes the value of Humanist archives in such research.Less

A multi-ethnic metropolis: representations of Marseille

Joseph McGonagle

in Representing Ethnicity in Contemporary French Visual Culture

By considering a range of different works from across contemporary visual culture, this chapter explores in detail how Marseille – and the ethnicities of its inhabitants – has been represented since ... More

By considering a range of different works from across contemporary visual culture, this chapter explores in detail how Marseille – and the ethnicities of its inhabitants – has been represented since the 1980s. It assesses the extent to which case studies taken from auteur and popular cinema, photography and television soap opera both conform with – and deviate from – traditional visions of this Mediterranean metropolis. It argues that Marseille has increasingly been deployed as a means by which to showcase ethnic diversity in contemporary France and French visual culture.Less

For the Humanities

Julie A. Carlson and Elisabeth Weber

in Speaking about Torture

The introduction specifies why humanistic inquiry is vital to social policy legislation and what it contributes to anti-torture advocacy. It highlights the significance of Poems from Guantánamo and ... More

The introduction specifies why humanistic inquiry is vital to social policy legislation and what it contributes to anti-torture advocacy. It highlights the significance of Poems from Guantánamo and the admission by Pentagon officials that poems by detainees presented a special risk to national security in their content and form as an occasion to illustrate the capacity of poetic discourse to witness to experiences of torture and to the limits that they foreground. More broadly, it argues that policy discussions on torture need to incorporate the reconceptualizations of subjectivity, opposition, law, and representation that humanist discourse, especially post-1945, has pursued. Otherwise, the representation and litigation of torture are impossible because of the threats to language, community, memory, and consciousness that experiences of torture entail. Selections from Poems from Guantánamo are read as exemplifying these claims.Less

“Catholicisme ondoyant”:: Catholic Intellectual Engagement and the Crisis of Civilization in the 1930s

Michael Kelly

in God's Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Kelly’s chapter provides an account of the development of a new humanist concept of engagement forged by French Catholic intellectuals in the crucible of debates and experiments of the 1930s. For an ... More

Kelly’s chapter provides an account of the development of a new humanist concept of engagement forged by French Catholic intellectuals in the crucible of debates and experiments of the 1930s. For an innovatory group of French Catholic intellectuals, the decade before the Second World War appeared as a crisis of civilization, the events of which shaped their search for a new relationship with ‘la Cité’ and attempts to found their socio-political involvement in new forms of citizenship. Often perceived as inconstant and ambiguous in their affiliations by contemporary politicians, these Catholic intellectuals were seeking to articulate underlying norms and values in secular terms. Kelly explores the development of a humanist concept of engagement through the work of Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, and Emmanuel Mounier, and shows how their efforts in the 1930s brought into being a broader, inclusive and flexible means of engagement that is arguably still as fresh and effective today.Less

Conclusion: Literary Unbelief from 1945 to the Present

Suzanne Hobson

in Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns

The conclusion describes the development of secularist publishing since the Second World War, noting significant points of intersection with debates over literature and free speech. It looks at the ... More

The conclusion describes the development of secularist publishing since the Second World War, noting significant points of intersection with debates over literature and free speech. It looks at the afterlife of the modernist secular-sacred compromise and shows how for some post-war writers and intellectuals faith found renewed purpose in fiction while unbelief did not. The conclusion revisits some of the rich fictional experiments seen in previous chapters to challenge the modernist idea still active in these contexts—that unbelief is necessarily monologic, unironic, and thereby fundamentally unliterary.Less

The Fall of the Ancient Monarchy: Demolishing Humanist History

Kelsey Jackson Williams

in The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priests, and History

This chapter recovers the first major assault on Scotland’s humanist history, its myth of an Ancient Monarchy in the 1680s and the subsequent, increasingly probing challenges which were directed ... More

This chapter recovers the first major assault on Scotland’s humanist history, its myth of an Ancient Monarchy in the 1680s and the subsequent, increasingly probing challenges which were directed against it in the wake of revolution. The authority of historians such as Hector Boece and George Buchanan was no longer sufficient to protect them from challenges based upon new and more sophisticated interpretations of medieval texts. In particular, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s high-profile dispute with English and Irish scholars such as William Lloyd, Edward Stillingfleet, and Roderick O’Flaherty is identified as a turning point in the development of Scottish historiographical practice.Less

Writing the truth: Agostino Mascardi and Post-Reformation Historiography by Way of Paul Ricoeur

Stefania Tutino

in Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture

This chapter examines the relationship between truth and language in early modern history writing, especially in that genre of post-Humanist historiography known as ars historiae. Traditional ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between truth and language in early modern history writing, especially in that genre of post-Humanist historiography known as ars historiae. Traditional scholarship has judged the artes historiae mainly trite collections of equally trite tropes and precepts. This chapter challenges that view. It focuses on Agostino Mascardi, an ex-Jesuit historian, literary critic, and theorist of history, who in 1636 published what was arguably the last and one of the most influential examples of ars historiae, a five-volume treatise entitled Dell’arte historica. The analysis of Mascardi’s work in its intellectual context and with Paul Ricoeur’s theoretical framework as a background reveals that Mascardi offered fundamental insight into crucial questions for the development of historiography, such as the relationship between narrative and fact, the truth-value of history, and the tension between documents, explanation, and interpretation.Less