Eine handgreifliche Geschichtslüge. Wie Martin Luther zum Gegner des copernicanischen Weltsystems gemacht wurde.

Martin Luther has been severely criticized for an offhand remark about Copernicus. In the most frequently cited version of this statement, Luther is alledged to have branded Copernicus as a fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down. This disparaging judgment on Luther prevails in many publications by respected historians of science of the 20th century, although since the early thirties, it has been convincingly demonstrated that the famous citation from Luther's table talk is next to worthless as an historical source, that Luther never referred to Copernicus or to the heliocentric world system in all of his voluminous writings, and that there is no indication that Luther ever suppressed the Copernican viewpoint. His attitude towards Copernicus was indifference or ignorance, but not hostility. In this paper, it is shown that the story of Luther's anti‐Copernicanism emerged in the second half of the 19th century. It was invented by Franz Beckmann and Franz Hipler, two Prussian Catholic historians who were engaged in the conflict between the German government under Bismarck and the Catholic Church (Kulturkampf), and it was disseminated by influential German and American historians like Leopold Prowe, Ernst Zinner, and Andrew D. White. In the second half of the 20th century, many historians of science relied on the authority of these authors, rather than studying the sources or the secondary literature in which it has been proved that Luther's anti‐Copernicanism is an outright falsification of history.     

Huguenot Belief and Practice in Eighteenth‐Century Paris

Protestantism was illegal in eighteenth‐century France, yet many French Reformed Protestants, better known as Huguenots, managed to maintain their religion and identity until the French Revolution granted religious freedom. Several thousand of them lived in Paris, but remained a tiny minority in a very Catholic city. Given this context, and little access to pastors or collective worship, what kind of Protestantism did they observe? This article suggests that, like other minority groups, their religious practice and thinking were influenced both by the Catholic environment in which they lived and by the culture of the late eighteenth‐century city. By 1789 they had moved away from certain Calvinist traditions, and some of them had adopted a surprising ecumenism.     

Catholic resistance theory: William Barclay versus Jean Boucher

ABSTRACT

This article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600). His De Potestate Papae (1609) is treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory.     

Cultural Hybridity,Magical Realism,and the Language of Magic in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist

Sister Francisca de la Concepción (Mother Castillo), a Neogranadine nun, articulated multiple, powerful discourses in her works Mi vida and Afectos espirituales. In what I call a "hegemonic confessional discourse," visible throughout her mystical works, the Spanish-American colonial nun affirmed the Iberian colonization and Catholic evangelization of the New Kingdom of Granada by accepting and supporting the Spanish's violent and discriminatory hegemony.

I will defend the aforementioned thesis by analyzing Mi vida and Afectos espirituales, using the construction of Otherness and an explanation of various mystical processes, and by scrutinizing Mother Castillo's social, economic, political, and religious views, as well as her Catholic orthodox, white, traditional perspective.     

Four Decades of “Discreet” Charismata: The Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia 1863–1900

For some years, the historiography of Australian Pentecostalism has been dominated by the belief that Pentecostalism came to Australia in 1909 through the agency of Sarah Jane Lancaster who had, in turn, been influenced by news of overseas events. There had, apparently, been little or no influence in the Australian context by such groups as the Catholic Apostolic Church, which formed in Britain in 1835, in the wake of Edward Irving's proto‐Pentecostal theology. Although members of the Catholic Apostolic Church arrived in Melbourne in the 1850s, the general view was that they had by then abandoned their earlier pursuit of the charismata. In 2012, I argued (based on a limited sample of evidence) that the adherents of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia both taught and practised the charismata throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. This evidence is contained in the Angels’ Report Books, located in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Since then, the Bradford collection has been fully digitised, thereby allowing a comprehensive review of the Catholic Apostolic Church's charismatic activity and further evaluation of the Lancaster hypothesis. The significance of this research is that it allows a considerable re‐framing of the pre‐history of Australian Pentecostalism, demonstrating that the Catholic Apostolic Church taught and practised glossolalia, prophecy and divine healing through the last four decades of the nineteenth century.     

‘Realpoetik’: Revolution by Other Means in European Romantic Restoration Thought

Summary

This essay speculates about the degree to which a counter-image of Europe imagined by Romantic period writers showed them to be transforming an inherited idea of the republic of letters for political purposes. While Anglophone romanticists recognise that the French Revolution is an indisputable agent in shaping the contemporary English literary imagination, they then usually ignore the role played by the Restoration which followed. Romantic criticism can perhaps learn an appropriate sensitivity here from the work of critics of English Restoration writing of the seventeenth century. That epochal uncertainty, when the regicides beheaded the King and then wondered what to do politically, was succeeded in the Restoration by a kind of Dissenting determination to continue under or memorialise that uncertainty, not as a dilemma but as the experience of political opportunity. A similar pattern of pursuing revolution by other means is visible in the political revisionism and literary experimentation of post-Revolutionary Romantic radicals. In my picture, then, the Romantic transformation of the republic of letters recovers an older literary republicanism. In what is here dubbed Realpoetik the battle for what is to be political reality is fought on a rhetorical field whose free speech is exemplary of what politics should be like.     

The So‐called Venetian Enamelled Copper Artworks of the Italian Renaissance: the Technology and Provenance of the Enamels—an Analytical Approach

The so‐called Venetian enamelled coppers are a group of objects produced in Italy during the 15th century. Up to now, about 300 objects have been recognized in private collections and in European and US museums. At the end of 19th century, a Venetian origin was suggested, but their provenance is still debated. In this study, the enamel compositions from 22 enamelled copper products from Italian and French collections have been analysed by invasive and non‐invasive techniques. A comparison of the results with Tuscan and Venetian glass databases reinforces the suggestion of a Tuscan (most probably Florentine) origin for these works of art.     

Territorializing Armenians: geo‐texts,and political imaginaries in French‐occupied Cilicia, 1919–1922

This article examines the petitions, letters, opinion pieces and scholarly works that Armenian intellectuals generated to convince French decision‐makers to carve an Armenian nation‐state out of Cilicia (present‐day southern Turkey). This colonial encounter took place within the process by which European powers dismembered the defeated Ottoman state following the First World War. These “geo‐texts”—textual representations of territory and population—were strategic attempts at adjusting the parameters of French imperialism, and thus tapped into French notions of history and ethnology to make a case for an Armenian state. First, I show how Armenians adopted and inflected French epistemologies to depict their ancient homeland. Then, I trace the shift from a representation based on historical commonalities between the Armenians and French to one that stressed the ethnological specificities of Armenian nation and territory. Finally, I argue that the static notions of territory, text and population that lobbyists produced continue to fuel scholarly debate over the confessional and ethnic make‐up of Cilicia. This study on “geo‐texts” provides insights into how, at a certain historical moment, differences and similarities among people, both within a society and between societies, are established in text.     

Picturing Confessional Politics at the Stuart Court: Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza†

The deep confessional tensions in Stuart Britain were embodied in its Catholic queens. Queens, in their portraits and in the artworks in their palaces and chapels, were positioned within this dialectic, with the competing expectations of their husbands, their families, their religious retinues, the papacy, their own personal devotions, and the public against a changing political situation. This article examines how the visual arts provided a powerful tool for Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza in this dynamic, both in claiming and facilitating piety and in advancing the Catholic cause. The themes of Catholic devotion and saintly embodiment are discussed through two important aspects of their engagement with the visual arts: palace display in which devotional works were hung prominently and portraits in which the queens embody saintly guises. Artworks from their chapels, too, will be considered; these spaces were dominated by Marian imagery, which suited both theological and dynastic interests. Although operating within different political contexts and personal agendas, they marshalled such imagery to promote the Catholic cause and perform their piety.     

The South China coast in French and Dutch literature

The article examines a number of pieces of early French and Dutch writing about the South China coast. The first is the journal of a Swiss mercenary named Ripon, who was employed by the Dutch East India Company and ventured in the East from 1617 to 1627; the second is a group of journals by Isaac Titsingh, Andreas Everard van Braam and Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes, describing their embassy to Emperor Qianlong in 1794–95; and finally there are a series reports by Dutch Protestant and French Catholic missionaries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Such Western sources can be an important supplement to the often scant Chinese sources for certain periods. Sources recording the same event but written by different authors and in different languages can provide an informative range of perspectives and serve to complement each other. And a range of different sources in different languages may combine to produce a fairly full historical picture of a given topic.     

In Praise of Heresy: Hus,Luther, and the Ethos of Reformation

Reformation is confined neither chronologically nor geographically but is best understood as a series of efforts to recover particular visions of Christian faith and practice. These endeavours always have potential for religious and social change. The martyred Bohemian priest Jan Hus (1372–1415) has often been characterised as a forerunner of the European Reformations and Martin Luther frequently referred to him. Past scholarship has evaluated the relation between Hussite history and the Reformation, Hus and Luther, in a variety of ways arguing either for organic connections or dismissing the possibility of causal connections. I argue that what Hus and Luther shared was not theology, common principles of reform, or visions of religious practice as much as a particular ethos. That ethos can best be understood within the idea of heresy. This article examines what Hus and Luther were striving to achieve, assesses the assumptions about Hus current in the sixteenth century, evaluates the Hus myth, and argues for a reconsideration and rehabilitation of heresy, a concept that epitomises the shared ethos that made Hus relevant to sixteenth‐century reformers.     

Commentary Animal Domestication: Toward a Definition

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pioneering French aviator who helped to open airmail routes in North Africa and South America during the interwar years of the early twentieth century. He was also a celebrated author who described his piloting experiences and the relations between aviation, society and human development in several popular books. Saint-Exupéry's writings contain vivid representations of landscapes, places and people from the novel perspective of the airborne observer. Based on analysis of the revised editions of most of the English-language translations of Saint-Exupéry's published works, this article reveals that his writings contain a distinctive ‘geography from above’ in which landscapes and places are culturally constructed and myths about various ‘others’ are reproduced. Such a view was important: it allowed powerful visualisations to be created and communicated, and its expressions accompanied and legitimated the imperial expropriation of land.     

The Meeting-Places of Parliament in the Ancient Palace of Westminster

Abstract

The importation into England of church furnishings of most kinds has been going on since the early Middle Ages. The focus of this study is on wooden furnishings and the early 19th century, when a specific group of patrons scoured mainly France and the Low Countries for the furniture that had been prised from churches, as a direct and indirect result of the French Revolution. The taste for such material was fuelled by a Romantic enthusiasm, although ironically much of it was in the Baroque style. The historical setting for this nostalgic explosion in interest is briefly sketched, as well as an account of its development into the early 20th century.     

WRITING THE HISTORY OF SPINOZISM

In this essay I reflect on Knox Peden's Spinoza contra Phenomenology, a history of French rationalist Spinozism in the mid‐twentieth century. The book marks an important intervention in modern French and European intellectual history, depicting the importance of Baruch Spinoza's thought in the negotiation of and resistance to the phenomenology that captivated much of twentieth‐century French intellectual life. With philosophical and historical sophistication, Peden tells the story of several relatively overlooked thinkers while also providing substantially new contexts and interpretations of the well‐known Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze. While accounting for Peden's major accomplishment, my aim is also to situate his work among a number of recent works in the history of Spinozism in order to reflect on the specific methodological questions that pertain to the widely varying appropriations of Spinoza's thought since the seventeenth century. In particular, I reflect on Peden's claim that Spinoza's thought cannot provide an actionable politics, a claim that runs counter to nearly two centuries of leftist forms of Spinozism. I offer a short account of some of the ways that theorists have mobilized Spinoza's thought for political purposes, redefining “action” itself in Spinozist terms. I then conclude by reflecting on the dimensions of Spinoza's thought (and recent interpretations of it) that make it possible for such significantly different claims about its political potential to be credible.     

Evolution from molecules to men

Early modern philosophers discussed the question of time in a variety of contexts; an enduring theme is the connection between time and the rational powers of the human soul. However, authors from a variety of confessional and philosophical perspectives also considered how the passions of the soul engage both humans and animals with the temporal world. This article considers a debate about the connections between time and the passions between two French physicians, Marin Cureau de la Chambre (1594–1669) and Pierre Chanet (c.1603–c.1660). The article explores the extent to which their background in late Aristotelian philosophy shaped this project, and its place within the broader transformation of the philosophy of time in the seventeenth century. Cureau and Chanet belong within a well-known early modern tradition of debates about animal reasoning, but their discussion of time and the passions is a significant yet neglected episode in the vernacularisation of scholastic and Aristotelian natural philosophy.     

German First World War Memorials in Transylvania

Abstract

In 1784 King Stanis?aw August Poniatowski undertook a splendid progress across the south-western parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The official account of the journey prompts the reflection that even in this linguistically and confessionally mixed part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the precedence over other confessions of the Catholic Church of both rites, Latin and Ruthenian, was axiomatic. By the mid-eighteenth century, about five-sixths of the Commonwealth’s population, the vast majority of the noble citizenry, and the entire legislature were Catholic. However, Catholics of the Latin rite constituted only about half of the population. Most Catholics of the Ruthenian rite (Uniates) were in only nominal obedience to Rome; they were the object of a struggle for the allegiance and salvation of souls, conducted between an advancing Catholic Church and a retreating Orthodox Church. The fault line between Eastern and Western Christendom ran through both the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Orthodoxy retained strongholds in both parts of the Commonwealth. However, the position of the ‘Latin’ Church was, in most ways, significantly weaker in the Grand Duchy, where the majority of the inhabitants were Uniates. Adapting recent mutations in ‘confessionalization theory’, this paper first reviews the confessional balance, and the privileges, structures, educational institutions, and missionary work of the Catholic Church (of both rites) in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the second half of the eighteenth century. It then asks how the dramatic events of Stanis?aw August’s reign (1764–95) affected Catholic supremacy. These changes included the enforced removal of the Catholic monopoly of the legislature in 1768, the impact of the first partition of the Commonwealth in 1772, the Orthodox revivals under Bishops Georgii Konisskii and Viktor Sadkovskii, as well as the formulation of new policies intended to promote loyalty to the Commonwealth and social cohesion during the Four Years’ Sejm (1788–92). It concludes that the partial ‘deconfessionalization’ of the polity had (or might have had) a proportionately greater impact on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania than on the Polish Crown.     

La position de la France dans l'industrie européenne des machines à vapeur durant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle∗

At least from the standpoint of the steam‐engine industry, the nature of industrial relations between France and other countries underwent a significant change during the half century which elapsed between 1860 and 1910. Towards 1860, the major characteristics are dispersion and nationalism; on the other hand, at the beginning of the twentieth century, while there is a new concentration on the national level, it confronts a distinct cosmopolitanism on the international level. To give an idea of this evolution, we will refer to two French works on steam‐engines, dated 1861–62 and 1913 respectively. They are of an essential practical nature and describe a large number of engines which were actually available on the market. Below, we will successively examine the early manufacturers existing through 1861–62, then those dating from 1913 only, and finally the establishments which have endured throughout the whole period under consideration. This study aims at pointing out the clear decadence of the French industry which became increasingly dependent upon foreign sources in the areas of technical creativeness as well as production.     

The Greekness of Modern Greek Surrealism

Abstract

Surrealism as a full-blown artistic movement, or, as many of its exponents preferred to see it, a full-blown way of life, was very much a French product. The line of descent from larry's Ubu (1896), via the self-conscious modernism of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to the Dadaist activities of 1916 represents the continuation of that semi-official anti-culture which had existed throughout nineteenth-century France. With the destruction of the officially sanctioned culture of Nationalism and Catholic conformism in the debacle of the First World War, there was a sudden vacuum in French intellectual circles which the anti-culture was quite ready to fill. In the words of an early member of she movement, Roger Vailland: ‘Surrealism was not a literary school. It was above all a common ground and meeting-place for young petit-bourgeois intellectuals particularly aware of the futility of every activity expected of them by their background and their era’.     

明清传教士对《山海经》的解读

晚明前清时期在华耶稣会士作品中有关《山海经》的零星内容反映出这些欧洲传教士与时代变局相关的心态变化。从16世纪到18世纪,欧洲的地理类作品随着其世界观念的更新而从传说与实证并存向实证性内容居主导转变,礼仪之争使在华传教士对中国文化的态度从针对中国人的迎合向针对欧洲人的特别宣传转变。受这两种变化驱使,传教士看待《山海经》时从认可和吸收变为轻蔑与排斥。