|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
For centuries the society and politics of Old Regime Europe relied
on the strong connection between past, present, and future and on a
belief in the unstoppable continuity of time. What happened during
the eighteenth century when the Age of Revolutions claimed to
cancel the previous social order and announced the dawn of a new
era? This book explores how antiquarianism provided new political
bodies with allegedly time-hallowed traditions and so served as a
source of legitimacy for reshaping European politics. The love for
antiquities forged a common language of political communication
within a burgeoning public sphere. To understand why this happened,
Marco Cavarzere focuses on the cultural debates taking place in the
Italian states from 1748 until 1796. During this period,
governments tried to establish regional "national cultures" through
erudite scholarship, with the intent of creating new administrative
and political centralization within individual Italian states.
Meanwhile, other sectors of local societies used the tools of
antiquarianism in order to offer a counter-narrative on these
political reforms. Ultimately, this book proposes a localized way
of reading antiquarian texts. Far from presenting timeless
knowledge, erudition in fact gave voice to specific tensions which
were linked to restricted political arenas and regional public
opinion.
Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early
modern knowledge cultures; indeed, awareness of the fragility and
plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element for
understanding early modern science as a whole. Yet early modern
actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself and
never objected to the notion that truth is out there, universal,
and therefore safe from human manipulation. This book investigates
how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern
relativism, despite the increasing uncertainties and blatant
disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An
international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields
ranging from the history of science to theology and the history of
ideas analyses a number of practices that were central to
maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth.
Through such an interdisciplinary research the book shows how
certainty about truth could be achieved, and how early modern
society recognized the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in
differentiating fields of knowledge.
|
|