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"Language and languages Philosophy History 17th century."
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Authorizing Words
Martin Elsky here illuminates the complex interplay of linguistic theory and textual representation in English Renaissance writing. Drawing on a wide range of materials, both literary and nonliterary, Elsky focuses on the impact of speech-oriented and writing-dominated theories of language on textual practice. Among the texts Elsky discusses are Herbert'sThe Temple, Bacon'sMagna Instauratio, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Jonson 's lyrics, and works by Lily, Colet, Ascham, and Elyot.
In showing how speech, writing, and print suggest contrasting foundations for the authority of language, Elsky considers such topics as the competing concepts of textuality in humanist literature and in hieroglyphic poetry; the authenticity of writing and the distortions of speech in scientific prose works; the social context of printing scientific prose; and the use of print to create the infinitely expandable text of philosophical skepticism.
A provocative application of contemporary literary theory to the historical analysis of texts,Authorizing Words will interest readers in such disciplines as Renaissance studies, theory of language, historical linguistics, history of science, and the history of communication.
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The mirror of information in early modern England : John Wilkins and the universal character
\"This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a \"real\" or \"universal\" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language, but as an illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code, supposedly amounting to a script of things, the character was to support scientific discourse through a universal database, in alignment with cosmic truths. In all these ways, J.D. Fleming argues, the world of the character bears phenomenological comparison to the world of modern digital information- what has been called the infosphere.\"--Back cover.
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Language and Experience in 17th-Century British Philosophy
The focus of this volume is the crisis of the traditional view of the relationship between words and things and the emergence of linguistic arbitrarism in 17th-century British philosophy. Different groups of sources are explored: philological and antiquarian writings, pedagogical treatises, debates on the respective merits of the liberal and mechanical arts, essays on cryptography and the art of gestures, polemical pamphlets on university reform, universal language scheme, and philosophical analyses of the conduct of the understanding. In the late 17th-century the philosophy of mind discards both the correspondence of predicamental series to reality and the archetypal metaphysics underpinning it. This is a turning point in semantic theory: language is conceived as the social construction of historical-conventional objects through signs and the study of strategies we use to bridge the gap between the privacy of experience and the publicness of speech emerges as one of the main topics in the philosophy of language.
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Signs of Light
InSigns of Light, Matthew Lauzon traces the development of very different French and British ideas about language over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and demonstrates how important these ideas were to emerging notions of national character. Drawing examples from a variety of French and English language works in a wide range of areas, including language theory, philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, missionary tracts, and literary texts, Lauzon explores how French and British thinkers of the day developed arguments that certain kinds of languages are superior to others.
The nature of animal language and British and French understandings of the languages of North American Indians were vigorously debated. Theories of animal language juxtaposed the apparent virtues of transparency and wit; considerations of savage language resulted in eloquence being regarded as an even higher accomplishment. Eventually, the French language came to be prized for its wit and sociability and English for its simple clarity and vigor. Lauzon shows that, besides concerns about establishing the clarity of introspective representations, questions about the energetic communication of sincere emotion and about the sociable communication of wit were crucial to language theories during this period. A richly interdisciplinary work,Signs of Lightis a compelling account of a formative period in language theory.
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Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultureexamines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More'sUtopia, Shakespeare'sHamletandRomeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call \"culture,\" she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the \"question of the animal.\"
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The Mind Is a Collection
John Locke described the mind as a cabinet; Robert Hooke called it a repository; Joseph Addison imagined a drawer of medals. Each of these philosophers was an avid collector and curator of books, coins, and cultural artifacts. It is therefore no coincidence that when they wrote about the mental work of reason and imagination, they modeled their powers of intellect in terms of collecting, cataloging, and classification.
The Mind Is a Collectionapproaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind from a material point of view. Each of the book's six chapters is organized as a series of linked exhibits that speak to a single aspect of Enlightenment philosophies of mind. From his first chapter, on metaphor, to the last one, on dispossession, Sean Silver looks at ways that abstract theories referred to cognitive ecologies-systems crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, such as libraries, workshops, notebooks, collections, and gardens. In doing so, he demonstrates the crossings-over of material into ideal, ideal into material, and the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or a range of objects might repeatedly stand for an idea. A brief conclusion examines the afterlife of the metaphor of mind as collection, as it turns up in present-day cognitive studies. Modern cognitive theory has been applied to the microcomputer, and while the object is new, the habit is as old as the Enlightenment.
By examining lived environments and embodied habits from 1660 to 1800, Silver demonstrates that the philosophical dualism that separated mind from body and idea from thing was inextricably established through active engagement with crafted ecologies.
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Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe
\"Larvatus prodeo,\" announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: \"I come forward, masked.\" Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many early modern Europeans besides Descartes-princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike-chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two centuries around the powers and limits of dissimulation, whether in affairs of state or affairs of the heart. This beautifully written work crisscrosses Europe, with a special focus on Italy, to explore attitudes toward the art of dissimulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discussing many canonical and lesser-known works, Jon R. Snyder examines the treatment of dissimulation in early modern treatises and writings on the court, civility, moral philosophy, political theory, and in the visual arts.
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Sociable Knowledge
Working with the technologies of pen and paper, scissors and glue, naturalists in early modern England, Scotland, and Wales wrote, revised, and recombined their words, sometimes over a period of many years, before fixing them in printed form. They built up their stocks of papers by sharing these materials through postal and less formal carrier services. They exchanged letters, loose notes, drawings and plans, commonplace books, as well as lengthy treatises, ever-expanding repositories for new knowledge about nature and history as it accumulated through reading, observation, correspondence, and conversation. These textual collections grew alongside cabinets of natural specimens, antiquarian objects, and other curiosities-insects pinned in boxes, leaves and flowers pressed in books, rocks and fossils, ancient coins and amulets, and drafts of stone monuments and inscriptions. The goal of all this collecting and sharing, Elizabeth Yale claims, was to create channels through which naturalists and antiquaries could pool their fragmented knowledge of the hyperlocal and curious into an understanding and representation of Britain as a unified historical and geographical space.
Sociable Knowledgepays careful attention to the concrete and the particular: the manuscript almost lost off the back of the mail carrier's cart, the proper ways to package live plants for transport, the kin relationships through which research questionnaires were distributed. The book shows how naturalists used print instruments to garner financing and content from correspondents and how they relied upon research travel-going out into the field-to make and refresh social connections. By moving beyond an easy distinction between print and scribal cultures, Yale reconstructs not just the collaborations of seventeenth-century practitioners who were dispersed across city and country, but also the ways in which the totality of their exchange practices structured early modern scientific knowledge.
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Disknowledge
\"Disknowledge\": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. InDisknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded.
Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change.Disknowledgedescribes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction.Disknowledgefurther shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction.
Covering a wide range of authors and topics,Disknowledgeis the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge-willfully adhering to something we know is wrong-resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.
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