Race in Early Modern Philosophy

The ethos of Justin Smith’s Nature, Human Nature, & Human Difference is expressed in the narrative of Anton Wilhelm Amo (~1703-53), an African-born​ slave who earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at a European university and went on to teach at the Universities of Jena and Halle. Smith identifies Amo as a time-marker for diverging interpretations of race: race as inherently tethered to physical difference and race as inherited essential difference. Further, these interpretations of race are fastened to the discourse of science and human diversity within modern Europe. Smith’s thesis maintains that the rise of the concept of race in philosophy begins with a divorcing of the soul from human nature and a movement to a naturalistic classification of human beings through taxonomies (e.g. botany, mineralogy and zoology), which dissolved into this dichotomy: an essential difference between people of reason and people of nature

Early Modern Guildhalls : Habitus in transition?

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Why Ganymede Faints and the Duke of York Weeps: Passion Plays in Shakespeare

This article revisits contemporary critical debates surrounding the presence of cross-dressed boys as women on the early modern stage – in particular the question of whether or to what extent boy-actors could or should be said to represent ‘women’ or ‘femininity’ – through the Shakespearian emblem of the bloody rag or handkercher. In all but one instance, these soiled napkins appear alongside what the plays call ‘passion’ of various kinds. I examine bloody rags on Shakespeare’s stage in the light of early modern anti-theatrical polemics, medical disputes about sex-difference and the conflicted cultural status of printed paper in order to argue that these besmirched tokens bring together early modern ‘passions’ in multiple senses: strong or overpowering, embodied feeling; the fluid dynamics of early modern bodies; the Passion of Christ; erotic suffering; and, crucially, the performance on stage of all of the above

Trinitarian Thought in the Early Modern Era

This article explores Catholic and Protestant Trinitarian theology from 1550 to 1770. It discusses various issues, from the mystical visions of Ignatius of Loyola to the Augustinian approach of Jonathan Edwards. It considers the growing variety of eclectic views and the influence of anti-Trinitarian thinkers, beginning with Michael Servetus and Faustus Socinus. It also highlights the rise of confessionalism and anti-Trinitarianism and the explosion of mystical theology during this period

Brewing cultures in early modern towns : an introduction

Since Antiquity, fermented drinks have played an important role in European culture. In eastern and northern areas, ale - and from the close of the Middle Ages hopped beer - formed part of people's diets, provided livelihoods for rural alewives as well as urban brewers and accompanied countless forms of social exchange. These drinks came in different varieties and strengths, were consumed in large quantities (especially during feasts and rites of passage) and the potential consequences exercised secular and ecclesiastical authorities in great measure

Sons, apprentices and successors in late medieval and early modern London: the transmission of skills and work opportunities

Book synopsis: The existence and changing of generations in family life, business and politics was a central feature of towns as well as rural societies in earlier times. Even so, it remains understudied by urban historians of the pre-modern period. This book aims to fill some of this gap, containing twelve studies of generations in late medieval and early modern European towns, ranging from the Mediterranean to the Nordic countries, with a time-span from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century. Dealing with topics like succession and inheritance, family consciousness, as well as relations and conflicts within and between generations, the articles demonstrate the importance and potential of generational studies on pre-modern towns. The book will appeal to anyone who takes an interest in urban social and cultural history, legal and family history in medieval and early modern times

Recent origin of low trabecular bone density in modern humans

Humans are unique, compared with our closest living relatives (chimpanzees) and early fossil hominins, in having an enlarged body size and lower limb joint surfaces in combination with a relatively gracile skeleton (i.e., lower bone mass for our body size). Some analyses have observed that in at least a few anatomical regions modern humans today appear to have relatively low trabecular density, but little is known about how that density varies throughout the human skeleton and across species or how and when the present trabecular patterns emerged over the course of human evolution. Here, we test the hypotheses that (i) recent modern humans have low trabecular density throughout the upper and lower limbs compared with other primate taxa and (ii) the reduction in trabecular density first occurred in early Homo erectus, consistent with the shift toward a modern human locomotor anatomy, or more recently in concert with diaphyseal gracilization in Holocene humans. We used peripheral quantitative CT and microtomography to measure trabecular bone of limb epiphyses (long bone articular ends) in modern humans and chimpanzees and in fossil hominins attributed to Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus/early Homo from Swartkrans, Homo neanderthalensis, and early Homo sapiens. Results show that only recent modern humans have low trabecular density throughout the limb joints. Extinct hominins, including pre-Holocene Homo sapiens, retain the high levels seen in nonhuman primates. Thus, the low trabecular density of the recent modern human skeleton evolved late in our evolutionary history, potentially resulting from increased sedentism and reliance on technological and cultural innovations

Universities and Professions in the Early Modern Period

This article brings together old and new ideas and information to provide a different perspective than has so far prevailed upon the relationship between the universities and the professions in the early modern period. It focuses not only upon the direct impact of the so-called educational revolution upon the learned professions but also upon the indirect and less easy to quantify implications of that phenomenon. Special attention is paid to the transference of teaching methods from the universities to the learned professions and to the importance of the patronage system in linking universities and professions. Examples are drawn from a wealth of manuscript sources