Living in the tenth century. Mentalities and social orders

In his series of lectures, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Michel Foucault employs concepts from the military field of knowledge in order to analyse the founding scenes of psychiatry. I focus on three issues connected to Foucault's use of these military terms. Firstly, I examine why Foucault was reluctant to use concepts from sociology and psychology in Le pouvoir psychiatrique and how this affects the notions that he had formulated in his earlier work, Histoire de la folie. Secondly, I show how he challenges traditional understandings of the founding scenes of psychiatry by using concepts from a different field of knowledge. In doing this, he creates metaphors, and this is something that he himself had previously been critical of doing. Thirdly, I reflect upon the fact that Foucault's creative use of concepts from different disciplines and examples from different historical times can be related to episodes in his own life; I argue why it is important to supplement a structural analysis with linguistic, phenomenological and hermeneutical ones.     

Illustrations of the History of Knitting Selected from the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum

Abstract

Based on new archival findings, this essay maps the life and business strategies of Brussels tapissiers Albert Auwercx and Judocus de Vos. It shows that categorising Auwerxc as a minor tapissier — a label he was assigned in the past — ignores the underlying structure and dynamics of the industry. Brussels tapissiers created an intricate web of social networks that generated trust, which paved the way for semi-structured and flexible cooperation between small firms. Judocus de Vos also belonged to the Brussels social and production networks but made his name as a commercial link and broker between Brussels, the Antwerp-Oudenarde production and trading complex, and the European élite — particularly after 1719 when he handed over the reins and assets of the De Vos workshop to his brother Jan-Frans.     

The “Travesty” of Aeschines in Demosthenes' De Corona

From 1914 to 1920, Pérez de Ayala produced his most serious and political writings. In his Novelas poemáticas de la vida española (1916) and Política y toros (1920), Ayala criticizes what he perceives as the backward state of the Spanish nation, focusing on the idiosyncrasies of the Spanish man through his depiction of three weak male characters. Nevertheless, wary of falling into the pointlessly excessive criticism of the nation that could be called domperiquitismo after Larra's memorable character Don Periquito, in the early 1920s Ayala subverted the organicistic language of his own criticism and that of many of his contemporaries by playfully concluding that Spain's real illness was orchitis. Although reading Ayala's earnest and contentious writings from this brief period is indispensable to fully appreciate the richness of his oeuvre, the works differ from the rest of his production, which is characterized by a more humorous yet critical slant.     

Montesquieu's anti-Machiavellian Machiavellianism

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, mentions Niccolò Machiavelli by name in his extant works just a handful of times. That, however, he read him carefully and thoroughly time and again there can be no doubt, and it is also clear that he couches his argument both in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and in his Spirit of Laws as an appropriation and critique of the work of the predecessor whom he termed ‘this great man’. In this paper I explore the manner in which the Frenchman redeployed the arguments advanced by the Florentine for the purpose of refuting the latter's conclusions.     

Review articles/Besprekingsartikels

Abstract

Swiss missionary Henri Alexandre Junod has been widely recognised for his extensive entomological, botanical, linguistic and anthropological contributions regarding southern Africa. However, shortly after publishing his most acclaimed work, The Life of a South African Tribe, Junod wrote a little-studied novel, Zidji: étude de m?urs sud-africaines, in which he endeavoured to give a detailed portrayal of South African Society. Interestingly, he chose fiction as the best vehicle for conveying what he saw as the 'truth' of the situation. As the only novel written by Junod this is a unique piece of writing in relation to his other work and its study shows that it is essential to an understanding of Junod. In Zidji he attempts to give a complete picture of South African society at the beginning of the twentieth century by recounting a black convert's experiences of what Junod considered to be the three main influences acting upon black society of the time, that is, tribal life (paganism), the mission station (Christianity) and white society (civilisation). By considering his depiction of South Africa, in particular his presentation of 'civilisation', further light is shed on his sentiments and perspective of the missionary encounter, social change and race relations in South Africa.     

Challenging the Quimera (Sirena) Negra: Unamuno Reads Pardo Bazán

This article examines the literary relationship of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Miguel de Unamuno by analyzing Unamuno's 1905 review of La Quimera, as well as his tribute to Pardo Bazán on the occasion of her death in 1921. These two critical pieces, together with Unamuno's Dos madres and La tía Tula, reveal that while Unamuno dismisses Pardo Bazán's realism in his discussion of her works, he develops in his own fiction alter egos who struggle with dominant female figures, just as he competes with Pardo Bazán's model of authorship.     

Mapping Spain in the Sixteenth Century: The Escorial Atlas and Pedro de Esquivel’s Notebook

ABSTRACT

The twenty-one maps of Spain that comprise the Escorial atlas (El atlas de El Escorial) and the later notebook compiled by Pedro de Esquivel for another map of Spain have long been confused. Recently identified documents in the Royal Library, Stockholm, have allowed us to recognize the two works as completely separate and to shed new light on each. In this article we describe their respective histories, starting with the Escorial atlas, now known to have been commissioned by Emperor Charles V from the Sevillian cosmographer Alonso de Santa Cruz, who between c.1538 and 1545 produced an index map and 20 regional sheets drawn to the scale of 1:400 000. We then go on to show how, later in the century (between c.1552 and 1565), Pedro de Esquivel was using a version of the topographical methods described in Peter Apian’s Cosmographia to assemble data for the map of Spain commissioned by Philip II before and just after he became king in 1556. Esquivel died in 1565 before all the data had been collected, his map was never drawn, and his notebooks, with all his astronomical measurements and calculations of angles and distances, took a curious journey that ended in Stockholm in the archives of the Royal Library of Sweden.     

En tiempos del condestable Dávalos: Enrique de Aragón,poeta quejoso en Crónica. Año de 1420, de Jerónimo de la Escosura

Infants of Aragon are very important figures in the history and literature of the nineteenth century, but it is rare that one of them, Don Enrique, is the protagonist. This work analyzes the romantic story Cronica. Año de 1420, published by Jerónimo de la Escosura in 1839. In it, Enrique de Aragón is a cunning courtier and a poet in love, and he manages to change history because he changes the story with his verses.     

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot,Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

This article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature (1800), but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention.     

Francesco Patrizi’s concept of “nature”: presence and refutation of Stoicism

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the ways in which, in his Nova de Universis Philosophia, Francesco Patrizi uses, adopts, and, in some cases, rejects the Stoic philosophical tradition. Although, at first glance, most of Patrizi’s remarks on Stoicism and Stoic understanding of nature are critical – as this article demonstrates – he widely relied on Stoic teaching that he sought to combine with Neoplatonism and the prisca theologia doctrine.     

The Merton tradition and kinematics in late sixteenth nd early seventeenth-century Italy

Isaac de Pinto was an active financier, economist and homme de lettres. Descending from a Jewish family of Portuguese origin, he lived in Amsterdam, Paris and London. Throughout his life, he enjoyed close relationships and made regular contact with important figures of the European Enlightenment.

The main purpose of this article is to show that the concern with the Jewish problems, namely those relating to the difficult economic situation of the Portuguese nation in Amsterdam in the second half of the eighteenth century, is a key factor in explaining the ongoing moral and apologetic dialogues that Isaac de Pinto maintained separately with Voltaire and Diderot.     

Civil Power and the Deconstruction of Scholasticism in the Thought of Marc'antonio de Dominis

Summary

Marc'antonio de Dominis is well known to historians as a figure in the political and religious culture of early modern Britain and Europe. This article contends that he was also a major theorist of civil power: his critique of Catholic scholastic political thought is compelling and his account of divine right kingship sheds light on conceptual problems that troubled a range of early modern thinkers. De Dominis dismantled the scholastic theory of political power on its own terms, insisting that Almain, Bellarmine, Suárez and others could not distinguish, as they sought to, between the potestas politica in general and the rule of particular princes. By this insight de Dominis could vindicate royal authority against the deposing pretensions of the Pope, the main objective of James I's supporters during the Allegiance Controversy, but his own positive account of how to think about power ran into theoretical trouble which he evidently perceived himself. If the potestas politica cannot be abstracted from a specific regime, and if the prince's absolute sovereignty depends on this fact, can politics be understood only at the level of the particular and contingent? The article closes by setting Thomas Hobbes—well versed in Jacobean polemic—in the context of this question.     

Schweretheorie und Weltbild des Nikolaus von Kues: Zu ihrer vermeintlichen Modernität

Regarding his world view and his heaviness theory Nicolaus Cusanus is imputed to having used (at least to some extent) forebodings and anticipations of modern conceptions. In the dialog Idiota de staticis experimentis he imputed the quantitative points of view of modern physics programmatically. In contrast with this, this article will show that the quantitative point of view is proposed for an inapt object at least. Cusanus based his reflections on one hand on the Aristotelic theories of elements and their heaviness with ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ weight (only thus, assumed inconsistencies can be explained), on the other hand he wants to determine the essential, qualitative properties of the forma, while only their complete abstraction by reduction on the mass without properties should result in an object for comparative weighings — lately in different ways by René Descartes and Isaac Newton. The putative modernness of cusanian conceptions compared with Aristotle are based on the tradition of platonian and stoic modifications which sooner were compatible with christian ideas.     

Baudelaire's “Teacher”: Joseph de Maistre and Le Spleen de Paris

For a total of twenty years (1856–76), Gustave Flaubert corresponded with a woman whom he would never meet and who had first written to him to express her admiration for his novel, Madame Bovary. These forty-five letters are among the most fascinating and important that he was to write, reflecting on his life, on art and esthetics, and on his determined dedication to the practice of writing. The letters to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie occupy a central role in Flaubert's Correspondence, between the long series of letters he wrote to two other women, Louise Colet and George Sand. They are all dominated by the idea of the centrality of art, literature, and the activity of writing, and of the subordinate status of all other experiences and interests.     

Isaac de Pinto (1717–1787) and the Jewish problems: Apologetic letters to Voltaire and Diderot

Isaac de Pinto was an active financier, economist and homme de lettres. Descending from a Jewish family of Portuguese origin, he lived in Amsterdam, Paris and London. Throughout his life, he enjoyed close relationships and made regular contact with important figures of the European Enlightenment.The main purpose of this article is to show that the concern with the Jewish problems, namely those relating to the difficult economic situation of the Portuguese nation in Amsterdam in the second half of the eighteenth century, is a key factor in explaining the ongoing moral and apologetic dialogues that Isaac de Pinto maintained separately with Voltaire and Diderot.     

Le Texte et le corps: la pensée dialectique de Diderot dans Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville

By using a dialogical method in Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772), Diderot contrasts two places: the civilized European world and the primitive island of Tahiti. The dialogical structure of his work entails a questioning of the concept of libertinage through the theme of the corporeal. Indeed, the dialectical method he employs in the text unifies his vision on what the body represents. This work will demonstrate that for Diderot the body can be defined as three entities: the text, the physical, and the social. All these three categories are intertwined for him. Using them as a leitmotiv enables him to call into question the moral and social conventions of his own country.     

The ideals and origins of the Franco-German,sister cities movement, 1945–70

Vattel's Mélanges de littérature, de morale et de politique (Thoughts on literature, morals and politics) was published at Neuchâtel by the Editeurs du Journal Helvétique in 1760 and this is the first English translation. It was republished under the title, Amusemens de littérature, de morale et de politique in 1765. Vattel's text provides evidence of his response to the issues facing Europe's states in the 1750s, and in doing so provides another perspective on his best known work, Le droit des gens (Law of Nations) of 1757. Vattel emerges as a reformer steeped in debates about the future of the European state system, and particularly Europe's small states and republics like Switzerland.     

John Banville’s “monstrous child”: freedom and inheritance in Shroud

ABSTRACT

John Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) – a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death – as his “monstrous child” that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida’s thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity – that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past – into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a “monstrous child”.