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The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century
Author: Lucien Febvre
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1982
Total Pages: 556
ISBN-13: 9780674708266
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Lucien Febvre's magisterial study of sixteenth century religious and intellectual history, published in 1942, is at long last available in English, in a translation that does it full justice. The book is a modern classic. Febvre, founder with Marc Bloch of the journal Annales, was one of France's leading historians, a scholar whose field of expertise was the sixteenth century. This book, written late in his career, is regarded as his masterpiece. Despite the subtitle, it is not primarily a study of Rabelais; it is a study of the mental life, the mentalit , of a whole age. Febvre worked on the book for ten years. His purpose at first was polemical: he set out to demolish the notion that Rabelais was a covert atheist, a freethinker ahead of his time. To expose the anachronism of that view, he proceeded to a close examination of the ideas, information, beliefs, and values of Rabelais and his contemporaries. He combed archives and local records, compendia of popular lore, the work of writers from Luther and Erasmus to Ronsard, the verses of obscure neo-Latin poets. Everything was grist for his mill: books about comets, medical texts, philological treatises, even music and architecture. The result is a work of extraordinary richness of texture, enlivened by a wealth of concrete details--a compelling intellectual portrait of the period by a historian of rare insight, great intelligence, and vast learning. Febvre wrote with Gallic flair. His style is informal, often witty, at times combative, and colorful almost to a fault. His idiosyncrasies of syntax and vocabulary have defeated many who have tried to read, let alone translate, the French text. Beatrice Gottlieb has succeeded in rendering his prose accurately and readably, conveying a sense of Febvre's strong, often argumentative personality as well as his brilliantly intuitive feeling for Renaissance France.
A Past of Possibilities
Author: Quentin Deluermoz
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 393
ISBN-13: 030022754X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"What if history, or life, had followed a different path? What is called counterfactual reasoning occurs naturally in conversation to enrich hypotheses on the potentialities of the past and unactualized futures. It permeates literature, political thought and all forms of entertainment. What would have happened if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter? If Donald Trump had won the presidential elections in 2020? Delving into this issue, Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou have meticulously investigated a vast array of literature for a full grasp of the diversity in how counterfactual analysis is used--from the most bizarre uchronic fiction to the most serious scientific hypotheses. They have focused on a precise understanding of the conditions under which its use is legitimate and pertinent for history, whether social, economic or global, and more generally the social sciences, while rethinking the issues of causality and truth, and the relationships between history and fiction, determinism and contingency. Their work has gradually brought to light the rich potential of investigating the possibilities of the past and paved the way for rigorously documented experimentation in both research and education. An ambitious and innovative investigation into the writing of history, its object, and how it can be shared"--
A Companion to François Rabelais
Author: Bernd Renner
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2021-08-30
Total Pages: 639
ISBN-13: 9004460233
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.
The Cheese and the Worms
Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2013-10-15
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1421409895
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition. The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." Ginzburg’s influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory. In a thoughtful new preface, Ginzburg offers his own corollary to Menocchio’s story as he considers the discrepancy between the intentions of the writer and what gets written. The Italian miller’s story and Ginzburg’s work continue to resonate with modern readers because they focus on how oral and written culture are inextricably linked. Menocchio’s 500-year-old challenge to authority remains evocative and vital today.
Writing the History of the Mind
Author: Cristina Chimisso
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-11
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 1134788150
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →For much of the twentieth century, French intellectual life was dominated by theoreticians and historians of mentalité. Traditionally, the study of the mind and of its limits and capabilities was the domain of philosophy, however in the first decades of the twentieth century practitioners of the emergent human and social sciences were increasingly competing with philosophers in this field: ethnologists, sociologists, psychologists and historians of science were all claiming to study 'how people think'. Scholars, including Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Léon Brunschvicg, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien Febvre, Abel Rey, Alexandre Koyré and Hélène Metzger were all investigating the mind historically and participating in shared research projects. Yet, as they have since been appropriated by the different disciplines, literature on their findings has so far failed to recognise the connections between their research and their importance in intellectual history. In this exemplary book, Cristina Chimisso reconstructs the world of these intellectuals and the key debates in the philosophy of mind, particularly between those who studied specific mentalities by employing prevalently historical and philological methods, and those who thought it possible to write a history of the mind, outlining the evolution of ways of thinking that had produced the modern mentality. Dr Chimisso situates the key French scholars in their historical context and shows how their ideas and agendas were indissolubly linked with their social and institutional positions, such as their political and religious allegiances, their status in academia, and their familial situation. The author employs a vast range of original research, using philosophical and scientific texts as well as archive documents, correspondence and seminar minutes from the period covered, to recreate the milieu in which these relatively neglected scholars made advances in the history of philosophy and science, and produced
Robert Estienne, Royal Printer
Author: Elizabeth Armstrong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-04-28
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 0521170664
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book was originally published in 1954. Mrs Armstrong gives a full-length historical study of an important and admirable figure of Robert Estienne. Through his scholarly work and his ideals of artistry and craftsmanship of printing, he also brought understanding to the dissemination of a culture.
An Analysis of Lucien Febvre's The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century
Author: Joseph Tendler
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 2018-02-21
Total Pages: 124
ISBN-13: 0429939833
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Febvre asked this core question in The Problem of Unbelief: “Could sixteenth-century people hold religious views that were not those of official, Church-sanctioned Christianity, or could they simply not believe at all?” The answer informed a wider debate on modern history, particularly modern French history. Did the religious attitudes of the Enlightenment and the twentieth century—notably secularism and atheism—first take root in the sixteenth century? Could the spirit of scientific and rational inquiry of the twentieth century have begun with the rejection of God and Christianity by men such as Rabelais, writing in his allegorical novel Gargantua and Pantagruel – the work most often cited as a proto-"atheist" text prior to Febvre's study? The debate hinged on some key differences of interpretation. Was Rabelais mocking the structures of the Christian Church (in which case he might be anticlerical)? Was he mocking the Bible scriptures or Church doctrines (in which case he might be anti-Christian)? Or was he mocking the very idea of God’s existence (in which case he might be an atheist)? The other great contribution that Febvre made to the study of history can be found not so much in the fine detail of this work as in the additions that he made to the historian's toolkit. In this sense, Febvre was highly creative; indeed it can be argued that he ranks among the most creative of all historians. He sought to move the study of history itself beyond its traditional focus on documentary records, arguing instead that close analysis of language could open up a gateway into the ways in which people actually thought, and to their subconscious minds. This concept, the focus on "mentalities," is core to the hugely influential approach of the Annales group of historians, and it enabled a switch in the focus of much historical inquiry, away from the study of elites and their deeds and towards new forms of broader social history. Febvre also used techniques and models drawn from anthropology and sociology to create new ways of framing and answering questions, further extending the range of problems that could be addressed by historians. Working together with colleagues such as Marc Bloch, his understanding of what constituted evidence and of the meanings that could be attributed to it, radically redefined what history is – and what it should aspire to be.
Annales
Author: Stuart Clark
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9780415202374
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This collection reprints key articles written within the past 30 years on the Annales school, their journal, their influence on history, historiography and other academic fields.
Sebastian Castellio, 1515-1563
Author: Hans R. Guggisberg
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 1351901516
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Sebastian Castellio, linguist, humanist and religious reformer, is one of the most remarkable figures of the Reformation. Attracted by Calvin's reforms, Castellio moved to Geneva in the 1540s, where he wrote his influential work on educational reform. Ironically, it was Castellio's work as a scholar in Geneva, which was to lead to his falling out with Calvin, and ultimately his forced departure from Geneva and his resettlement in Basle. Exiled from Geneva, Castellio soon attracted a circle of like-minded reformers who opposed the intolerant attitude of Calvin, exemplified by the execution of the heretical Michael Servetus. It is Castellio's residence in Basle, where he developed his 'liberal' humanist approach to religious toleration in opposition to Calvin's dogmatic othodoxy, which forms the core of this study. It explores what toleration meant and how both sides argued their case. Much attention is paid to Castellio's most important work 'On Heretics', in which he argues against the execution of those who err in the faith. By telling the fascinating tale of Castellio's life, this work illuminates the furious debate which he unleashed and how it marked a crucial stage in the development of Protestant thought.
