JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS最新文献

Although the Republic of Letters has become today a main area of interdisciplinary research, early North America has remained largely impermeable to this new body of scholarship. In this article I use the category of the Republic of Letters to overcome some of the limitations of the "Atlantic world" paradigm and to shed new light on the intellectual history of eighteenth-century America. Along with studying the means through which American savants gathered information about scholarly trends and recent publications, I also bring to light the strategies they used to actively contribute to the production and organization of knowledge.

The rise of a musical public in the early nineteenth century has been recognized as an important example of what Habermas identified as the emerging bourgeois public sphere. This article explores how patterns of musical consumption were shaped by the authority of music-critical journalism, especially given contemporary critiques about the aesthetic worth of instrumental music. To assert music's aesthetic legitimacy, the leading music journal of the period developed a critical discourse, characterized by the use of an "applied aesthetics," to guide public preferences governing music consumption and to explicate these choices within larger philosophical debates about music's aesthetic value.

This paper discusses humanist translations of Greek patristic texts dedicated to Pope Nicholas V. Patristic studies were particularly relevant for his pontificate, which followed the Council of Ferrara-Florence and witnessed the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. Nicholas's patronage was informed by his wish to unite the eastern and the western church, make Rome the ultimate capital of the Christian world, and preserve the literary heritage of the Byzantine empire. To determine the role patristics played in his translation project, this paper situates the patristic translations dedicated to him in the context of his translation patronage and collecting activities.

Responding to recent studies on the reception of Church Fathers, this paper contributes a study of how Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples edited the writings of ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite in Latin. Focusing on how Lefèvre revised the Latin translation by Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), I argue that Lefèvre adapted Traversari's text to a new context by aligning the translation with earlier Latin renderings. The article thereby undermines earlier assumptions about Lefèvre's engagement with Greek manuscripts, demonstrates continuities in the use of Latin translations of Greek patristics before and after printing, and highlights the cultural dimension of the editor's craft.

This article reconstructs the early modern growth of interest in Brillenbuchstaben, the mysterious characters commonly found in medieval Jewish kabbalistic manuscripts. It charts the confused process by which these characters were granted authority among learned Christians as alphabets derived from the stars and authored by the angels themselves. It argues that by the mid-seventeenth century, these ideas had become mainstream enough to pose serious threats (in the eyes of at least one respected theologian) to the traditional Christian understanding of angels. It concludes with reflections on the significance of these findings for the history of knowledge in early modern Europe.

This article examines responses from Lutheran pastors, theologians, and physicians to the arguments given by Johann Weyer in 1563 that those women who confessed to a pact with the devil suffered from melancholy and were thus not responsible for their acts. Weyer's conception of melancholy was a medical one, yet among Lutheran pastors and theologians the concept of a spiritual form of melancholy emerged that came from religious sources. The article clarifies the difference between the concepts of medical and spiritual melancholy within Lutheranism and reviews the respective roles they played in the debates over Weyer's arguments.