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This book investigates the ways in which the crusades have been observed by historians from the 1090s to the present day. Especial emphasis is placed on the academic after-life of the crusades from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. The use of the crusade and its history, by humanists and other contemporary writers, occupied a world of polemic, serving parochial religious, cultural and political functions. Since the Renaissance humanists and Reformation controversialists, one attraction of the crusades had lain in their scope: recruited from all western nations, motivated by apparently transcendent belief systems and fought across three continents. From the perspective of western Europe's engagement with the rest of the globe from the sixteenth century, the crusades provided the only post-classical example to hand of an ideological and military world war. Remarkably, the patterns of analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have scarcely gone away: empathy; disapproval; relevance; the role of religion; materialist reductionism. Despite the explosion of literary attention, behind the empathetic romanticism of Michaud or the criticism of Mills and Scott, the themes identified by Thomas Fuller, Claude Fleury, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and William Robertson persisted. The idea of the crusades as explicit precursors to modern events, either as features of teleological historical progress or as parallels to modern actions remains potent. The combination of ideology, action, change, European conquest and religious fanaticism acted as a contrast or a comparison with the tone of revolutionary and reactionary politics.
This book traces discussions about international relations from the middle ages up to the present times. It presents central concepts in historical context and shows how ancient ideas still affect the way we perceive world politics. It discusses medieval theologians like Augustine and Aquinas whose rules of war are still in use. It presents Renaissance humanists like Machiavelli and Bodin who developed our understanding of state sovereignty. It argues that Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau laid the basis for the modern analyses of International Relations (IR). Later thinkers followed up with balance-of-power models, perpetual-peace projects and theories of exploitation as well as peaceful interdependence. Classic IR theories have then been steadily refined by later thinkers – from Marx, Mackinder and Morgenthau to Waltz, Wallerstein and Wendt.
The book shows that core ideas of IR have been shaped by major events in the past and that they have often reflected the concerns of the great powers. It also shows that the most basic ideas in the field have remained remarkably constant over the centuries.
artist a paradox. Aristotle claims that ‘definition and form’ are male creative forces, which make him ‘better and more divine in nature’; this set of ideas was adopted by Renaissance humanists Benedetto Varchi and Giorgio Vasari among others (Jacobs 1994: 80). The adoption and dissemination of Aristotle’s ideas in the Renaissance and the importance of these ideas in the exclusion of women from the artistic process has been explored in the work of feminist art historians (Jacobs 1994, 1997; Garrard 1992: 69–70). Fredrika Jacobs (1994: 81) has written that, under the
, as several recent art historians not panicked by the idea that Renaissance humanists talked dirty have suggested, by Pirckheimer himself. And what then does it mean? Is it a bit of straight locker-room humor? Is it implying something about Pirckheimer’s − or Dürer’s − sexual tastes? If Pirckheimer is the scribe, does it express what he wants from his
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, word and strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 475–502, at 497, n. 81. 52 P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (2 vols, New York, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 8–11; C. S. Calenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, 2004). 53 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘“Manus the magnificent”: O’Donnell as Renaissance prince’, in A. Cosgrove and D. McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), pp. 15–37. 54 Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican
4 Humanists and genealogists on nobility and the human body ሉሊ How did the Renaissance humanists who debated true nobility, and the genealogists who served the elite, explain human heredity? This chapter will focus on two instances of Irish intellectual engagement with this problem: the dispute between John Lynch and Richard O’Ferrall in the 1660s over the nobility of Irishmen of English descent; and Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh’s physiognomical analysis of the peoples of Ireland, an analysis undertaken also in the household of Gianbattista Rinuccini. The
not be dictated by private interests were a commonplace of civic humanism. The role of the governing institutions of the city was to prevent the actions of a few from exploiting others.8 This idea of the commonwealth in the city was not new. It had been embraced by the Anglo Irish of the Pale in the 1530s and 1540s, drawing on the rhetoric of those who were influenced by early Renaissance humanist ideas.9 It had been applied to the wider stage in the creation of the ‘kingdom’ of Ireland in the 1540s. It is difficult to measure, for want of evidence, the extent to
literary critical trends and seeks to see how these different trends can enrich one another through their very differences. In keeping with this approach, this study seeks to foster a critical dialogue between ‘Language Criticism’, as inherited from Structuralism (including ‘Practical Criticism and Stylistics’, with a specific focus on ‘the particular arrangement of words, sounds and phrases which were central to Renaissance
writing. Shakespeare writes as a Renaissance humanist, and the Gawain -poet too, from his late medieval religious perspective, writes with understanding of the human condition. They express their vision in the literary forms most available and congenial to them: Shakespeare writes poetic plays in the Renaissance genres of tragedy and comedy, and the Gawain -poet writes religious poems and a high-level romance. For both, language is all-important. On the one hand they have their linguistic showpieces (Shakespeare’s soliloquies, the Gawain- poet’s ‘set
taking place in archaeology were never such as to threaten the link with the societies, but the same could not be said about history. The study of antiquities was a product of the Renaissance. It began with a desire to recover the history and antiquities of ancient Rome, and – like archaeology – it expanded into other historical periods. Antiquaries used manuscripts, inscriptions and coins to retrieve and record this past. Renaissance humanists, by contrast, understood history as the study of events in classical antiquity. In their view it should be written within a