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Abstract
This contribution focuses on a Neo-Latin hexameter poem written by a Jesuit priest around the year 1700 as an example of a poetic reaction to a natural philosophical polemic in prose of the seventeenth century: the debate over the doctrines of René Descartes. It will offer a telling instance of polemic and dissent against one famous and notoriously combative, but at the time already deceased figure of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Introducing the poem Mundus Cartesii and reflecting upon its Neo-Latin and vernacular background, several peculiar reactions to Cartesius’ opinions from the Society of Jesus will show how polemic could take an imaginative, satirical, playful form and bring forth literary compositions which defy traditional formal standards.
Abstract
This article investigates Michael Maier’s (1569–1622) strategic use of invectives in his self-fashioning as an expert in the marketplace of entrepreneurial alchemy. Maier’s insults not only represent performances of expertise but also defend aurum potabile as a medical strategy. Building upon the adage that “the best defense is a good offense”, this study explores how chymists utilized the pervasive notion of alchemical fraud to their advantage. To that end, it examines Maier’s works Coelidonia (1609), De Circulo Physico Quadrato (1616), Jocus Severus (1617), and Examen Fucorum Pseudo-Chymicorum (1617) as well as his English friend Francis Anthony’s Apologia (1616), to which he contributed material.
Abstract
The dispute between Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla (1452–1453) was the intellectual contest par excellence of the Italian Quattrocento, and the scholarly confrontation among them stood out especially in the first two orationes in Vallam of the ‘Florentine’, and in the first Antidotum in Pogium of the Roman. In these examples, an intense mutual criticism of the opponent’s linguistic skills, grammatical method, and teaching of Latin appears. This contribution focuses on the subsequent development of the dispute, i.e., on Poggio’s oratio tertia and quarta in Vallam and Valla’s Apologus. In these cases, the mutual metamorphosis of the opponent from a real enemy to a dramatis persona (as character of a ‘tale’) will be investigated. With this literary mechanism, the conventional norms of the invectiva are transformed into a different approach characterised by a sort of theatrical performance, with an higher content of fantasy, literary freedom, and humour.
Abstract
This issue of Daphnis will examine the use of invective between scholars in the early modern period. The introduction places the findings of the individual contributions in a broader context.
Abstract
This article offers a revisionist interpretation of the early modern Republic of Letters by offering a contextual analysis of explicit mentions of the term by scholars across Europe in the period. The current historiography on the Republic of Letters tends to present it as the place of friendly, solidary and democratic cooperation across national and religious boundaries. This article argues, instead, that members of the Republic of Letters conceptualised it as a battlefield of permanent warfare. Early modern scholars often compared themselves to soldiers of a hierarchically organised army or to fighters in a civil war. It is claimed that a militarised conceptualisation of the Republic of Letters offers the opportunity to re-engage with Reinhart Koselleck’s influential Kritik und Krise. Evidence is presented from fifteenth-century Italy to early nineteenth-century Hungary.
Abstract
In academic thesis prints (dissertationes) from Early Modernity, questions of the appropriate or reprehensible behaviour of scholars were sometimes discussed. The debate on envy (invidia, also invidentia), which belongs among the mortal sins, is particularly interesting. On the one hand, writings on this topic are not always about the affect of envy, but sometimes also about being envied. The perspective on the persons concerned and thus also their moral judgement can therefore differ. On the other hand, invidia can also be interpreted in a broader sense as cautious prudence (prudentia) and then evaluated positively, for example if you withhold knowledge because you fear it could be misused. Some authors even consider invidia to be synonymous with aemulatio and see ‘envy’ of others as an incentive to improve one’s own performance. The article analyses several writings on the subject. At the centre is the disputation on ‘permissible’ envy (De licita eruditorum invidentia) held in Rostock in 1718 under the presidency of Franz Albert Aepin, which triggered an exciting debate. The historical context of the disputations is also considered. Therefore texts by René Descartes, Christian Thomasius and Gottlieb Spizel are discussed.