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Diamante Medaglia Faini

in The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Women's Learning in Eighteenth-Century Italy

This chapter presents an oratory made by Diamante Medaglia Faini before Unanimi of Salò to champion women's education. Implicitly rejecting the example of her own intellectual trajectory in her ... More

This chapter presents an oratory made by Diamante Medaglia Faini before Unanimi of Salò to champion women's education. Implicitly rejecting the example of her own intellectual trajectory in her oration, Medaglia Faini advocated a remarkable curriculum for women virtually devoid of the conventional literary instruction with its emphasis on poetry reading and composition. Instead, she argued for a “feminine” education steeped in philosophy and the sciences, religious history, logic, and, most importantly, mathematics and physics. She cited Cicero, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and Horace to defend the primacy of philosophy and science in her curriculum. Anticipating the likely attacks on the propriety of teaching women classical philosophy, she quoted extensively from such noted theologians as Jean Mabillon, Saint Basil the Great, the French Jansenist Charles Rollin, and the Church Father Clement of Alexandria, all of whom defended the importance of the pagan philosophy in the education of Christian students.Less

Things as Historical Evidence in the Late Renaissance and Early Enlightenment

Peter N. Miller

in History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500

This chapter surveys the antiquarians of the Late Renaissance to Early Enlightenment periods. It shows how Italy in the sixteenth century saw an even deeper and broader engagement with the ... More

This chapter surveys the antiquarians of the Late Renaissance to Early Enlightenment periods. It shows how Italy in the sixteenth century saw an even deeper and broader engagement with the antiquities, and the identification of a group of people devoted to the study of its material remains. Through objects, Renaissance scholars gained access to parts of the past that were not discussed in texts or were discussed in texts that no longer survived. By the end of the sixteenth century, antiquarianism had spread across Europe, and the chapter pinpoints these waves of progress in the history of antiquarianism through a number of key individuals: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), Jacob Spon (1647–1685), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).Less

The Perennial Quarrel: Dares between Ancients and Moderns, Truth and Falsehood

Frederic Clark

in The First Pagan Historian: The Fortunes of a Fraud from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

The Conclusion begins by bringing the story of Dares up to the decades around 1700. It considers both changes and continuities in Dares’ afterlife over the course of the preceding millennium. It then ... More

The Conclusion begins by bringing the story of Dares up to the decades around 1700. It considers both changes and continuities in Dares’ afterlife over the course of the preceding millennium. It then examines the neglected role of the Destruction of Troy in two developments long linked to the eighteenth century: namely, the origins of modern professionalized classical scholarship and the advent of a sense of “disenchantment” concerning the truth-value of ancient texts and traditions. It places Dares within the so-called “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” (querelle des anciens et des modernes) and examines the commentary on the Destruction of Troy composed by the French classical scholar Anne Dacier (a partisan of the “ancients” who later defended Homer against “modern” critiques). It also discusses invocations of Dares by figures including Jean Mabillon, Giambattista Vico, and Thomas Jefferson. The Conclusion ends with broader reflections on what Dares’ reception history can tell us about the paradoxes inherent in modern approaches to antiquity.Less

Renaissances and Reformations

Donald Bloxham

in Why History?: A History

The chapter begins with History’s place in Renaissance Italy. Then it shows how the historiographies of various states were influenced by tendencies in Italian humanism, as well as by the ... More

The chapter begins with History’s place in Renaissance Italy. Then it shows how the historiographies of various states were influenced by tendencies in Italian humanism, as well as by the Reformation. France is accorded special attention, then more briefly England and parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Then the chapter addresses the historiographical battles that corresponded to the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were battles of ecclesiastical History, centring on ancient sources. The polemical nature of some of the disagreements reinforced existing scepticism about the reliability of historical knowledge. Yet an increasingly bipartisan critical methodology developed, based on a combination of humanist philology and new palaeographical techniques, with established religious hermeneutics playing their part. Here the dictates of self-serving confessional History as Identity sometimes stood in tension with the demands of a proceduralist History as Methodology even as all sides agreed on the importance of History as Communion. The chapter concludes by addressing a ‘scientific’ seventeenth century for whose dominant intellectual figures historical enquiry supposedly had little use. Like previous chapters, this one addresses conceptual concerns of a general nature as they arise. Different sorts of contextualization are addressed, along with their implications for thinking about the past. Particular consideration is given to how a heightened attention to historical contextualization could be reconciled with ongoing demands for the relevance of History as Lesson for the present. Topical reading was one established solution, but another was resurrected with the ancient doctrine of similitudo temporum.Less

Enlightenment in the Archive: Reclaiming the Medieval Past

Kelsey Jackson Williams

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

This chapter highlights the foundational role of the French textual scholar Jean Mabillon in setting the agenda for the study of medieval Scotland in the archive during the same period. From the ... More

This chapter highlights the foundational role of the French textual scholar Jean Mabillon in setting the agenda for the study of medieval Scotland in the archive during the same period. From the first adoption of Mabillon’s methods by Scottish scholars to the triumphant 1739 publication of James Anderson’s Thesaurus—a Scottish response to Mabillon’s De re diplomatica—these methodologies went from being peripheral to axiomatic in Scottish historical studies, fundamentally transforming scholars’ engagement with the archive and its documents. Key figures discussed include, as well as Anderson, the historians Patrick Abercromby and Robert Keith and the forger and archival scholar Marianus Brockie.Less