Search

1. ConceptThe idea that empires and cultures, having risen to power and greatness, must necessarily undergo decline, commonplace among ancient historians after Polybius, was revisited and reformulated by the Humanists. Until around 1800, “decadence” (also “decline”; Latin   inclinatio, ruina, depravatio; Italian  decadenza, declino, caduta; French  déclin, décadence; German  Verfall, Dekadenz) was therefore a basic category of political, social, and aesthetic discourse. As a constitutive element of a cyclical view of history, the concept den…

1. DefinitionAt its first appearance in 1690 in Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel, the term  moraliste (“moralist”) simply meant an author who treated moral questions. By around 1700, however, the pejorative secondary meaning “rigorist” had been coined, referring specifically to adherents of Jansenism. Volume 10 of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert once more denigrated the moralist, defining him in 1765 as a vain, unsystematic littérateur aiming more to amaze than to enlighten [9. 48–52]. The term  moralist literature (German Moralistik), by contra…

1. Definition and modelsIn the late 18th and 19th centuries, “history of morality” was the phrase used to denote the genre of cultural history that paid special attention to the mores and everyday world of a bygone epoch, culture, nation (Nation, nationalism), or society (Society [community]). The German equivalent, Sittengeschichte, used by Kant in contrast to Naturgeschichte (Natural history), remained limited to German [3]. Ever since Humanism, however, the concept of a historical presentation that seeks to draw conclusions about the civilized …

1. DefinitionThe term scandal – from Greek  skándalon, “(trigger of a) snare” (Latin  scandalum, especially biblical, “cause of offence,” “stumbling block”) – appeared in French in the 17th century as a (pejorative) synonym for “public sensation”; like the verb scandalize (create a sensation), it was then borrowed by the other European languages (German at the beginning of the 18th century [4]. It denotes both a sensational public event and the sensation itself, that is, discussion of it.  Scandal can thus be defined as the sum of reactions to a flagrant offense again…

1. ConceptThe early modern term sprezzatura (from the Italian sprezzare, “to neglect,” and Late Latin  expretiare, “devalue”) covered a spectrum of meaning ranging from laxity and nonchalance by way of elegance to understatement and dissimulation, and thus denoted the most important ideal of conduct in Renaissance and Baroque court society. Unlike the words from which it derived, sprezzatura was always positive in connotation [5]; [9]. Sprezzatura was coined as “a new word” ( una nova parola), if not literally invented, around 1520, by Baldassare Castiglione in C…

1. DefinitionIn many European languages in the 17th and 18th centuries, the word  Spinozism, first documented in 1699 but clearly older, was a vague collective term for all positions associated with the teachings of the Netherlandish Jewish philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677). The thinkers who affirmed these teachings or were accused of doing so were called Spinozists. Both terms were exonyms and were almost always used polemically, since contemporaries were unanimous in their belief that Spinoza’s phi…

1. DefinitionThe term  honnête homme, first attested in 1538, is defined in the  Dictionarium latinogallicum of Robert Estienne as a “cultured courtly gentleman without presumption.” Since the early 17th century, it expressed the quintessence of courtly urbanity, the social model of the new court society of the age of Louis XIV. Unlike related French words such as  courtisan, homme de qualité, homme de bien, homme galant, and  gentilhomme, the  honnête homme (and the  honnête femme) was not socially predefined; he was the classless ideal of an individual who alw…

1. Concept The term, which came into English in the Middle Ages from the French dame (compare Italian dama/ donna, German Dame), derives from the Latin  domina (“mistress”). Dame in English is generally confined to an honorific title; where derivatives of domina in other languages denote a woman of high social rank or status, English uses “lady” (Old English hlafdige = “[woman] who kneads bread”) as Spanish uses señora. As a courtly title, “Dame” was mostly used in conjunction with the possessive “my” or  ma ( Madame, Madonna, Madam, My Lady/Milady). Domina derivatives denote th…

1. A social idealManners were understood from the late 15th century as the sum of all behaviors that expressed politeness or courtesy (German Höflichkeit; Italian  cortesia, gentilezza; Spanish  cortesía; French  politesse, civilité, towards ladies also  courtoisie and  galanterie; Dame) in practice. These were therefore more than merely forms of conduct corresponding to applicable social rules. Such prescribed conduct differed in the early modern period according to gender, estate, profession, confession, and social, ethnic, and…

1. ModelThe model of the four temperaments (from the Latin temperamentum, “proper measure”) remained in the early modern period, as it had been throughout classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the norm for describing the character of individuals. The classification of four basic types (sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic), completed in ancient times by Aristotle and Galen, provided the categories whose specific combinations explained the individual subject. Although – in the words of the Baron …

1. ConceptAt the beginning of the early modern period, the Greek term charaktḗr (‘stamp’ or ‘engraving’), which Patristic writers includingAugustine had been the first to introduce into literary Latin, had an abstract and technical meaning. As in the writings of Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, it denoted both a permanent mark, distinguishing feature, or symbol, and a prevailing moral quality [5]. The combination of the two senses proved so inspiring and fruitful that by the end of the 18th century, ‘character’ had undergone a rapid change of meaning in…

1. Concept and definitionThe plural term “memoirs” adopted into all European cultural languages and derived from the Latin memoria and the French  mémoire (“memory,” “remembrance”) meant, like its Latin counterparts commentarii (“[legal] record”) and  adversaria (“[journal recording] what is before one's eyes”), a juristic, official, or diplomatic record describing the prior history and problem context of a conflict requiring negotiation. Academies also often titled their publication as “memoirs.” In its most significant connot…

1. DefinitionThe modern term is a collective designation for all works of history, historiography, and philosophy of history (History, philosophy of) published during the Enlightenment by authors subscribing to Enlightenment ideas and values.Gerrit Walther2. Questions and modelsThe Enlightenment shaped a fundamentally new conception of history. It broke with the Christian-theological view of history that had only recently reached its virtuoso apogee in Jacques Bénigne Bossuet’s Discours sur l’Histoire universelle (1681). Bossuet characterized history as the …

1. Terminology During the early modern period, the languages of the civilized European world had a wide range of words to express the process of formation designed to transform individuals through education and their own efforts into persons conformed as well as possible to the norms defined by society. From the beginning, the vernacular derivatives of Latin educatio (“education,” German Erziehung), eruditio (“literacy,” German Belesenheit), and scientia (“knowledge," German Wissen) were dominant. The English and French terms formation—a combination of learning and outw…

1. Definition The term Late Humanism is frequently applied to a cultural epoch between Humanism and Baroque, but it is seldom defined. All current usages agree on just one thing: that it should be viewed as both a social phenomenon and an ensemble of cultural and educational phenomena. Still in common use only in German-language scholarship, it was introduced into literary studies in 1931 by Erich Trunz [12], who described Late Humanism as a “class culture” of mostly Protestant scholars in the Old Empire around 1600. The historian Gerhard Oestreich extende…

1. Concept and overviewIn most of the cultural languages of Europe, dissimulation at the beginning of the early modern period was denoted using the Latin terms simulatio and  dissimulatio that had been current since Cicero and that Tacitus, in particular, made his own. While the latter meant concealing one's own views and intentions, the former meant simulating ideas and plans other than those one really had in mind. Although dissimulation, as a form of lying (Lie), was strictly frowned upon - telling the truth was a comm…

1. ConceptThe Italian expression uomo universale (universal man) denotes an individual who displays extraordinary abilities in all areas of life, knowledge, and creativity and accomplishes great things. The term was popularized by Jacob Burckhardt, whose  Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860; “Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy”) described the emergence of the model of a universally talented and educated person as the pinnacle of the “evolution of the individual” typical of the Renaissance (Individuality): “When this impul…

1. Theology and languageModern Egyptology was born on September 27, 1822, when Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) presented his Lettre à M. Dacier to the Paris Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. The document provided the basis for the decipherment of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs [8]; [9]. European scholars had begun researching the writing, language, and culture of Ancient Egypt from the 15th century, but they had done so mostly from the perspective of the theological problem of the relationship between Egyptian and…

1. Terminology and form Before 1800 the Latin word antiquitates (“antiquities”; French antiquités, German Antiquitäten), made popular by the famous (but fragmentary) antiquarian treatise Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum (“Antiquities of Human and Divine Institutions”) of the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) was used synonymously with archaeology. It referred to written accounts or material remains (such as coins, monuments, works of art, everyday objects) that could provide information about cults…

1. The termThe English noun  progress (in the sense of advancement or improvement; from Latin progressus via Old French  progres) came into use around 1600. Like its equivalents (French  progrès, German Fortschritt, Italian  progresso), it denotes the specifically early modern view of historical movement and change in contrast to earlier concepts of movement such as journey, growth, and development. It is true, though, that the related Latin roots ( progressus,  profectus, processus) can mean the change of things for the better; both classical cosmology, based …