Sentiments of Devotion and Experimental Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century England
Historians of science have become increasingly aware of the connections between religion and science in the early modern period. Science, or more strictly "natural philosophy," is understood as having pointed to the existence of a designing deity. Conversely, religion is seen as providing a fledgling science with social legitimation. Another connection between seventeenth-century science and religion is less well known, and that is the way in which the experimental practices of the new science were then thought to promote a particular kind of moral and religious formation. As Robert Boyle put it, the study of nature would instill "sentiments of devotion and particular virtues." This feature of experimental science represents a significant link with the classical notion of philosophy (including natural philosophy), which stressed the importance of the moral formation of the philosopher. The intellectual labors of the experimentalist could thus be understood as a form of spiritual exercises.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/44/1/113?rss=1
Gender, Colonialism, and the Queerness of Dreams: Seventeenth-Century Dreamwork
This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed peoples of Catholic France and "New France"—through the lens of gender. In the case of early modern Atlantic dreaming, gender and its confusions in the social imaginary are not tied to the historical practice of female-bodied persons. The femininity investigated here is positional and symbolic. There are many kinds of "female" in the early modern shake-up: the terms of sex and gender lose purchase in an avalanche of novel categories at least transitionally operative in the social and epistemological chaos of the period. Confronted by the colonial New World, European gender and other fundamental categories are visible as fragile arrays of power relations, grounded in opposing forms of consciousness.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/44/1/187?rss=1
The Early Modern Idea of Scientific Doctrine and Its Early Christian Origins
One of most surprising aspects of the shift from scholastic natural philosophy to the new mechanist natural philosophies in the early decades of the seventeenth century is the retention of a doctrinal conception of knowledge. There was an assumption not only among scholastics, but also among many of their seventeenth-century opponents, that philosophy—and especially natural philosophy—had to take a doctrinal form. This is despite the fact that many of the considerations that motivated this view among the scholastics were rejected or ignored by their modernist opponents. The central argument of this essay is that doctrine is not something at the core of religions in general, but rather something of specific concern to Christianity. In looking at how this specific concern informs the development of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, it emerges that it is not a one-way process: in entering into a symbiotic relation, Christianity and natural philosophy are both affected. Christianity becomes largely reduced to its cognitive content, becoming both more science-like and more focused on its doctrinal core, while at the same time the cognitive content of natural philosophy, already somewhat doctrinal in nature, now has this reinforced, as it becomes more like Christianity in its aspirations.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/44/1/95?rss=1
Easy Attention: Ignatius of Loyola and Robert Boyle
This essay traces shifts in meditative practice from Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises to the experimental philosopher Robert Boyle's Occasional Reflections, showing how Boyle's text participates in the evolution of the concept of "attention" as it changes from a spiritual ideal to a mental faculty. In the Spiritual Exercises, attention is an experience that is not independent of the spiritual ideal of attending to God but rather a sign and trace of the latter. Boyle sought to relax the strict regime of earlier meditations by offering a new recipe: his reformed program of "occasional meditation" entails surrendering to attention's "natural vagrancy" rather than resisting it. By allowing experiences that would have formerly counted as distractions to be acts of devotion, Boyle participated in the creation of a new psychological notion of attention.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/44/1/135?rss=1
Laudian Feminism and the Household Republic of Little Gidding
The three volumes of Little Gidding Story Books—the first published in 1899, the last in 1970—are based on shorthand transcripts of the informal seminars held on feast days during the early 1630s by members of a quasi-monastic extended family, most of them young women. The discussions center on history (i.e., "story") and theology, but also engage political topics: class, equality, governance, gender, the authority of reason, and conscience vis-à-vis that of tradition, custom, and culture. The essay focuses on these latter issues, that is to say, on the political opinions held by a mostly female group of pious Laudian gentry. Their views, defended with considerable argumentative verve, turn out to defy expectation on every front. The Story Books represent a major (and largely unknown) body of early modern women's writing, one that challenges the received pictures of feminists, republicans, and Laudians.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/44/1/69?rss=1
Labors Lost: The Work of Devotion in Tudor Literature
The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and early 1540s had significant effects on Tudor England, transforming traditional understandings of work and religious devotion. This article examines three elements of social life, associated with monasticism, that were drastically altered by the dissolution: prayer, otium, and withdrawal. As Tudor society sought to reshape or relocate these elements, writers including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare explored and appropriated them, crafting within their literary texts a place for the monastic impulse. Writers of the period transformed the inefficacy, idleness, and withdrawal that Reformers associated with Catholic religious life into the terms through which they defined their own relative autonomy. Concluding with an examination of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, the essay argues that in Renaissance England the ascetic contributes to the formation of the aesthetic.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/44/1/45?rss=1
Devotion and Intellectual Labor
This special issue is a response to three remarkable developments in the humanities: religion's return to the center of scholarly attention, an outpouring of work on the changing nature and historical conditions of intellectual labor, and the widespread revival of interest in affect. While narrowly epistemological approaches to the study of religion have long been criticized for failing to capture aspects of mental activity that can't be described in rational-propositional terms, perhaps only a small portion of anyone's intellectual life can be adequately rendered in these terms. Simone Weil's famous assertion that every school exercise is like a sacrament challenges us to reconsider the limited vocabulary we employ to describe the nature of the mind's work in both "religious" and "secular" contexts. To this end, essays explore intersections between devotional practice and intellectual pursuits like textual production and scientific investigation.
Quelle: http://jmems.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/short/44/1/1?rss=1