Fortune, long life, Montaigne

Montaigne’s Essais end with a plea on behalf of old age - “Or la vieillesse a un peu besoin d’estre traictée plus tendrement.” - and the placing of old age under the protection of Apollo, god of the lyre, but also god of health, and the god whose oracle at Delphi pronounced the recommendation to “Know thyself.” This prayer of the 56-year-old Montaigne, for all of its beautiful fusion of interior and exterior, and its profound linking of the essay’s ending to the question of time, is nevertheless typical of a certain early modern attitude towards old age, illness, and death: People are in decline from the moment of birth, cure is the responsibility not of the physician but of the individual sufferer, and, to quote a health manual from 1630, “la guerison des maladies appartient à la fortune, & non pas à l’Art.” This chapter looks into a group of health manuals from the early seventeenth century in France which contest this notion. Chief among them will be Jacquelot’s L’art de vivre longuement, sous le nom de Medee, laquelle enseigne les facultez des choses qui sont continellement en nostre usage, & d’où naissent les maladies. Ensemble la methode de se comporter en icelles, & le moyen de pourvoir à leurs offences (Lyon: Louis Teste-Fort, 1630). Jacquelot declares that “la vie peut estre conservée, & la mort retardée par Art,” thus placing art, long life, and, curiously, the great antique witch Medea, on one side of a line, on the other side of which are ranged ill health, death, and chance. On the one hand, Montaigne’s “De l’expérience” reads right along with the genre of the health manual. Jacquelot too treats questions of diet, heating one’s house, sexual practices, clothing, when and when not to eat fruit, how long to sleep, when to wake up, and so on. To Montaigne’s stance, however, - Whether it is a question of law, the medicine of the social body, or of medicine as such, there is no cure. - Jacquelot opposes "art" and insists that there is. The health manual of the early seventeenth century thus begins to construct a resistance to the power of chance that Montaigne had considered not only futile but, in itself, unhealthy. The chapter concludes with a consideration of this advice in the context of the time, when an audience for tragedy was first emerging in France

Fire, sacrifice, <i>Iphigénie</i>

Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), his first opera written for the French stage, never settled on an ending. In order to analyse the historical conditions of this musical reluctance, this argument reads the opera's literary source, Jean Racine's Iphigénie, developing a three-fold link: to the fireworks that followed the first performance of Racine's tragedy in 1674 in the garden of Versailles, to the discovery in 1774 by Joseph Priestley of oxygen and related developments in the poetics of fire, and to changes in the political culture of sacrifice and so necessarily in the ends of tragedy. Racine's cosmic storm around a sacrificial pyre that auto-ignites, the self-immolation of the monarch created by the garden festival, and this opera which now ends with a chorus of soldier-workers crowned as kings all point to music's fabled ability to predict and determine the political, a danger recognized by governments from the Greek city-state to the present. In the course of a revolution that had been precisely figured in Gluck's music, Iphigénie the victim becomes the young queen who had been Gluck's singing pupil in Vienna, Marie-Antoinette

Construct Validity of the MMPI-2-RF Triarchic Psychopathy Scales in Correctional and Collegiate Samples

This study examined the MMPI–2–RF (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008/2011) Triarchic Psychopathy scales recently developed by Sellbom et al. (2016) in 3 separate groups of male correctional inmates and 2 college samples. Participants were administered a diverse battery of psychopathy specific measures (e.g., Psychopathy Checklist–Revised [Hare, 2003], Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised [Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005], Triarchic Psychopathy Measure [Patrick, 2010]), omnibus personality and psychopathology measures such as the Personality Assessment Inventory (Morey, 2007) and Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, & Skodol, 2012), and narrow-band measures that capture conceptually relevant constructs. Our results generally evidenced strong support for the convergent and discriminant validity for the MMPI–2–RF Triarchic scales. Boldness was largely associated with measures of fearless dominance, social potency, and stress immunity. Meanness showed strong relationships with measures of callousness, aggression, externalizing tendencies, and poor interpersonal functioning. Disinhibition exhibited strong associations with poor impulse control, stimulus seeking, and general externalizing proclivities. Our results provide additional construct validation to both the triarchic model and MMPI–2–RF Triarchic scales. Given the widespread use of the MMPI–2–RF in correctional and forensic settings, our results have important implications for clinical assessment in these 2 areas, where psychopathy is a highly relevant construct

Construct Validity of the MMPI–2–RF Triarchic Psychopathy Scales in Correctional and Collegiate Samples

This study examined the MMPI–2–RF (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008/2011) Triarchic Psychopathy scales recently developed by Sellbom et al. (2016 Sellbom, M., Drislane, L. E., Johnson, A. K., Goodwin, B. E., Phillips, T. R., & Patrick, C. J. (2016). Development and validation of MMPI–2–RF scales for indexing triarchic psychopathy constructs. Assessment, 23, 527–543.[Web of Science ®]) in 3 separate groups of male correctional inmates and 2 college samples. Participants were administered a diverse battery of psychopathy specific measures (e.g., Psychopathy Checklist–Revised [Hare, 2003 Hare, R. D. (2003). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (2nd ed.). Toronto, Canada: Multi-Health Systems.], Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised [Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005 Lilienfeld, S. O., & Widows, M. R. (2005). Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised: Professional manual. Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.], Triarchic Psychopathy Measure [Patrick, 2010 Patrick, C. J. (2010). Operationalizing the triarchic conceptualization of psychopathy: Preliminary description of brief scales for assessment of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Unpublished test manual, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL.]), omnibus personality and psychopathology measures such as the Personality Assessment Inventory (Morey, 2007 Morey, L. C. (2007). Personality Assessment Inventory professional manual (2nd ed.). Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.) and Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, & Skodol, 2012 Krueger, R. F., Derringer, J., Markon, K. E., Watson, D., & Skodol, A. E. (2012). Initial construction of a maladaptive personality trait model and inventory for DSM–5. Psychological Medicine, 42, 1879–1890.[CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®]), and narrow-band measures that capture conceptually relevant constructs. Our results generally evidenced strong support for the convergent and discriminant validity for the MMPI–2–RF Triarchic scales. Boldness was largely associated with measures of fearless dominance, social potency, and stress immunity. Meanness showed strong relationships with measures of callousness, aggression, externalizing tendencies, and poor interpersonal functioning. Disinhibition exhibited strong associations with poor impulse control, stimulus seeking, and general externalizing proclivities. Our results provide additional construct validation to both the triarchic model and MMPI–2–RF Triarchic scales. Given the widespread use of the MMPI–2–RF in correctional and forensic settings, our results have important implications for clinical assessment in these 2 areas, where psychopathy is a highly relevant construct