The article examines the Enlightenment ideas in the part of Vera Mutafchieva’s work. The time of Kardzhali, a specific period of chaos and marauding in the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th century, is a period of the formation of enlightenment processes that Mutafchieva depicted through images and themes in her novels and scientific studies. The author is an Ottoman specialist known worldwide and one of the greatest novelists in Bulgaria. In her novels, she portrays philosophical and geopolitical ones that characterize the historical epoch embodied in her works.
Tomáš Antonín Putzlacher (1722–1796) was an important intellectual and bureaucrat of the Enlightenment. He worked as a syndic and registrar of the Prague University archives for which he obtained collections of valuable copies and documents, some of which no longer exist. At the same time, he copied documents in the archive of the former Jesuit Clementine College and collected valuable manuscripts and relics of the Society of Jesus. Thanks to his son’s gift, they became a part of the Lobkowicz library and later the Prague University Library.
The essay concentrates on a dual conception of the word seal within the religious milieu of the late 18th century Enlightenment, with a focus on the non-Catholic, the so-called tolerance religion milieu. It opens the word „seal“ in the studies on Christian sacraments and introduces the symbolism of the religious seal in the rational and magical explanations within the cultural and social history as well as auxiliary historical sciences. The duality of the connected perspectives on the sense of the word seal shows the Enlightenment as an intellectual system, which eliminated, or even destroyed boundaries that closed the belief to the science, the sacred to the ordinary, and the sentiment to the reason. The Enlightenment replaced the monologue with a dialogue.
Autorka skupia uwagę na artystycznym kształcie i funkcjach przenośnych obrazów żywiołów w wierszach Franciszka Dionizego Kniaźnina – jednego z najważniejszych poetów lirycznych polskiego oświecenia. Za pomocą omawianych w pracy środków wyrazu twórca ogarniał otaczającą go rzeczywistość trudnego czasu, a także potwierdzał więzi łączące go z konkretnymi osobami i wydarzeniami. Analiza przenośnych obrazów elementów natury w utworach Kniaźnina uzmysławia, że bardzo sugestywnie i celowo wykorzystał on te przedstawienia, głównie ognia i powietrza, w większości pozbawiając je znamion utartej frazeologii. Charakteryzowana metaforyka bardzo korzystnie zaświadcza o wyobraźni twórczej Kniaźnina, o jej kreacyjnych aspektach, a także o duchowej i emocjonalnej wrażliwości poety i dynamicznym charakterze rzeczywistości, jaką postrzegał on wokół siebie.
EN
The author of the article focuses on the artistic shape and the functions of the elements’ metaphorical images in the poems by Franciszek Dionizy Kniaźnin, one of the most important lyrist of the Polish Enlightenment. Employing the means of expression discussed in the paper, the poet attempted to fathom the difficult reality he was surrounded by, but also confirmed his connections with specific people and occurrences. An analysis of the metaphorical images of the elements in Kniaźnin’s pieces reveals his deliberate and intentional use of the representations, mainly of fire and air, devoiding them of their ordinary phraseology. The analysed metaphors well support the view of Kniaźnin’s creative imagination, its creative aspects, as well as his spiritual and emotional sensitivity, alongside of the dynamic character of the reality he perceived around him.
The Rosicrucians represent an open topic in the history of Central Europe. Central European historiography tackled it only fragmentarily, which coincides with the lack of archival materials. The paper deals with the Rosicrucians in the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, where their traces can be found in Moravia, Prague, Vienna and northeast Hungary. The Rosicrucians represented a high-level branch of the Freemasons, absolutely dominated by secrecy. The paper uses fragmentary archive materials to analyse and describe the Rosicrucian movement in the second half of the 18th century within the Habsburg Monarchy. There is even a space for an analysis of the Rosicrucian activities, which were based on various magic performances and rituals. Institutionally, Rosicrucianism was most firmly anchored in Moravia, where it was most sponsored by Count Salm-Reifferscheidt. This order was engaged in alchemy, magic and exorcism of demons. The most active Rosicrucian land within the monarchy was Hungary, where almost all lodges over contemporary Slovakia had a Rosicrucian character. The paper can serve as a theoretic base for further research on the history of this interesting fraternity.
In her article, Barbara M. Stafford argues for the conception of literacy that would encompass visual skills besides the traditional emphasis on verbal competence. Image itself is important, not merely the information it may convey. Moreover, a more extensive notion of education is necessitated by the process of radical perceptual and conceptual changes that have been occurring since the Enlightenment and are all-pervasive in Postmodernism. The new-found power and ubiquity of images needs to be recognized in order to surpass the limitative, yet enduring Platonic distrust in visual culture. Medical,environmental, physical, legal, and other practices have nonetheless profoundly benefited from the technologies of visualization.Examples from the 18th century visual endeavors such as preserving fragmented cultures, exhibition of diversity, and the externalization of somatic experience show, how images challenge the restrictions of human comprehension. With the advent of visual and electronically generated culture, the time is ripe to edify images from their low status.Visual cognition as the crucial element of knowledge should be reflected in a hybrid art-science, public policy, as well as pedagogy.
The present paper deals with the category of so-called apparent death which is closely connected with the history of medicine of the second half of the 18th century. Present-day European historiographical research shows that at the latest in the 1740s the leaders of medical discourse began to be concerned with the temporal status of biological death. The central question was how to determine conclusively that death had occurred, which permitted the burial of the dead person. Yet this was also a time when people became more concerned with the possibility that individuals might not have died and could recover by themselves. The more modern medicine progressed, however, the more people listened to anecdotal evidence about apparent deaths and premature burials. During the second half of the 18th century this originally medical issue crossed the boundaries of scholarly discourse, among other things, as a result of medical treatises being published in national languages, and became a real nightmare of the Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century poets such as Edgar Allen Poe explored this topic in great depth, starting from the assumption that people generally feared being buried while being still alive.
Mimo opublikowania kilku ważnych prac poświęconych poezji polskich wolnomularzy XVIII i początku XIX wieku (do ok. 1821 r.) problem utworów masońskich o tematyce religijnej pojawiał się dotąd jedynie marginalnie. Nie jest oczywiste, na ile w ogóle można mówić o problemie wolnomularskiej poezji „religijnej” – wydaje się jednak, że wobec systematycznie pojawiającej się problematyki i obfitości wątków sakralnych w utworach wykorzystywanych w praktyce lożowej wolno jednak posłużyć się tą kategorią. Analizie poddano kilka zbiorków poezji wolnomularskiej z pocz. XIX wieku: wieku: Józefa Elsnera (1811), Feliksa Gawdzickiego (1814), Tadeusza Wolańskiego (1817 i 1818), Franciszka Budziszewskiego (ok. 1820) i innych. Analizowane wątki i motywy wskazują, że w środowiskach wolnomularskich posługiwano się oczywiście bardzo charakterystyczną frazeologią, jednoznacznie odróżniającą braci od profanów, oraz zestawem konkretnych pieśni masońskich, związanych z realizacją rytu, ale poza tym wykorzystywano utwory literackie znane powszechnie, przede wszystkim odzwierciedlające postawy wobec wszelkich form transcendencji charakterystyczne dla XVIII-wiecznej poezji oświeceniowej. Wykorzystywano więc chętnie pieśni Ignacego Krasickiego, a stylistyka masońska miała wiele wspólnego ze zbitkami słownymi i formułami poezji typowymi zarówno dla klasycyzmu, jak i nurtu sentymentalnego. Potępienie fanatyzmu, ciemnoty, zabobonu, oskarżenia pod adresem wielkich instytucji dokonujących karygodnych nadużyć w przeszłości szło w parze z programem pozytywnym, będącym przejawem XVIII-wiecznego humanitaryzmu i dążenia do oświecenia szerokich warstw społecznych, a także prowadziło do sakralizacji takich kategorii, jak Dobroczynność, Cnota, Przyjaźń, Oświata – a także Ojczyzna.
EN
Contrary to publishing a few crucial papers in the poetry of Polish Freemason poetry of the 18th c. and beginning of 19th c. (until circa 1831), the issue of Masonic religious verse has so far been discussed only marginally. It is uncertain whether, in general, we can use the term Masonic “religious” poetry, though it seems that, facing the continuously reappearing issues and a plethora of sacral motifs found in the pieces used in Freemasonic practice, we can resort to such category. The analysis is performed on a few collections of Masonic poetry from the beginning of the 19th c., namely by Józef Elsner (1811), Feliks Gawdzicki (1814), Tadeusz Wolański (1817 and 1818), Franciszek Budziszewski (circa 1820) and other. The analysed threads and motifs indicate that the Masonic circle naturally applied characteristic phraseology, explicitly differentiating brethren from laymen, and a set of special Masonic songs connected with the rite; additionally they used the commonly known literary pieces that primarily reflected the attitudes to all forms of transcendence that were peculiar to the 18th c. Enlightenment poetry. They eagerly resorted to Ignacy Krasicki’s songs, and the Mason stylistics proved to have much in common with clusters or words as well as with formulas of poetry typical of both Classicism and Sentimentalism. Condemnation of fanatism, ignorance, and superstition, accusations of grand institutions for unpardonable overuse in the past went parallel to a positive programme, a symptom of the 18th c. humanitarianism and strive to enlighten wide social groups, as well as led to sacralisation of such categories as Charity, Virtue, Friendship, Education, and also Homeland.
This paper discusses Kołłątaj's contribution to the development of modern reflection on religion. It manifests a stronger tendency towards a rationalistic and naturalistic bias, a fact which leads to the reflection on the nature of religion as such, and not only as one of its confessional forms. The eighteenth century saw also a more empirical approach, which was a result of how science was understood in modernity when it was modelled on natural philosophy. This accounts, on the one hand, for a peculiar pre-positivistic fear of autonomically-comprehended philosophy that may be pursued only within the context of the applied sciences. On the other hand, it emphasised the import_ance of the historical method, which was closer to the mentality of science narrowly understood. Such factors would bear fruit in Kołłątaj's approach to the form of reflection on the cultural and social compound of religious phenomena. The philosophy of God, in its metaphysical form, would largely be replaced by a psychological and historical-cultural reflection on the functions of religion than on the nature of religion itself. Kołłątaj retains, however, the principal theses of the Christian outlook. Yet in view of philosophical minimalism, the justification of their legitimacy is conveyed to theology as the legitimate method of knowledge, although different from science understood by way of scientism. In his approach, religion is not only a result of human reflection on the condition of the cosmos, but it also comes from the Divine Providence revealed to the human being in a strictly religious sense, in the form of religious revelation. It is therefore bound with human nature, made manifest in culture that affects it, but it also equally transcends nature and culture. Eventually, Kołłątaj's conception of religion is a manifestation of what one calls the Christian Enlightenment which functions within the Enlightenment religiosity that is rationalistically and moralistically biased.
PL
Artykuł omawia dokonanie Kołłątaja, które wpisuje się w rozwój nowożytnej refleksji nad religią. Konstytuuje się ona w kontekście nasilenia się tendencji o charakterze racjonalistycznym i naturalistycznym, co prowadzi do podjęcia refleksji nad naturą religii jako takiej, a nie tylko jako jednej z jej konfesyjnie pojętych form. W wieku XVIII nasili się też podejście bardziej empiryczne, odpowiadające narastającemu wpływowi nowożytnie pojętej nauki, wzorowanej na przyrodoznawstwie. Tłumaczy to z jednej strony swoiście prepozytywistyczną fobię wobec autonomicznie pojętej filozofii, która może być uprawiana tylko w kontekście nauk szczegółowych. Z drugiej strony owocuje to wzrostem znaczenia metody historycznej, bliższej mentalności wąsko pojętej nauki. Czynniki te zaowocują w ujęciu Kołłątaja refleksją nad konglomeratem kulturowo-społecznych zjawisk religijnych. Metafizycznie pojęta filozofia Boga zostanie w dużej mierze zastąpiona przez psychologiczną oraz historyczno-kulturową i historyczno-społeczną refleksję raczej nad funkcjami religii niż nad samą naturą religii. Kołłątaj zachowuje jednak podstawowe tezy światopoglądu chrześcijańskiego, ale wobec minimalizmu filozoficznego uzasadnienie ich prawomocności przenosi do teologii, jako uprawnionej metody poznania, choć różnej od nauki pojętej scjentystycznie. Religia jest w jego ujęciu nie tylko dziełem ludzkiego namysłu nad kondycją kosmosu, ale także owocem Bożej Opatrzności, która objawia Boga człowiekowi w sensie stricte religijnym, w formie objawienia religijnego. Jest więc związana z ludzką naturą, uzewnętrznia się w kulturze, która ma na nią wpływ, ale w równej mierze przekracza naturę i kulturę. Ostatecznie koncepcja religii Kołłątaja jest przejawem formacji określanej jako tzw. oświecenie chrześcijańskie, funkcjonującej w kontekście racjonalistycznie i moralistycznie nachylonej religijności oświeceniowej.
The Enlightenment in Croatia – the change of paradigm?: From impoverished monomyth to liberated polymyth The paper is an attempt at a synthetic presentation of the discourse that took place in twentieth-century literary studies on the idea of the Enlightenment in Croatia. The author recognizes the model of conservative and Catholic Enlightenment centered on the North of the country, which is constructed in these studies, as a variant that impoverishes the reality of the 18th century, and propounds (referring to the Otto Marquard’s idea about the necessity that all communities are rooted in many histories) to extend the reflection on the Enlightenment in Croatia also to its south Dalmatian and Dubrovnik variant. She proposes to study the Enlightenment in non-Western countries to a lesser extent through the prism of socio-political and economic determinants, and more by tracking mental history and cultural flows. Such a mental path allows redefining the Enlightenment in Croatia focusing on its cosmopolitanism and liberalization. Oświecenie w Chorwacji – zmiana paradygmatu? Od zubażającego monomitu do wyzwalającej polimityczności Artykuł jest próbą syntetycznej prezentacji dyskursu, jaki się toczył w dwudziestowiecznych opracowaniach historycznoliterackich nad ideą oświecenia w Chorwacji. Autorka uznaje skonstruowany na ich łamach model konserwatywnego i katolickiego oświecenia, którego centrum stanowiła Północ kraju, za wariant zubażający osiemnastowieczną rzeczywistość i postuluje (powołując się na marquardowską myśl o konieczności trwania społeczeństw w wielu historiach) rozszerzenie refleksji na temat oświecenia w Chorwacji o jego południowy, dalmatyńsko-dubrownicki wariant. Przedkłada również propozycję badania oświecenia w krajach niezachodnich w mniejszym stopniu przez pryzmat uwarunkowań społeczno-politycznych oraz gospodarczych, w większym zaś poprzez śledzenie historii mentalnej oraz przepływów kulturowych, co jej zdaniem pozwala na redefinicję oświecenia w Chorwacji w kierunku jego kosmopolityzacji i liberalizacji.
The object of research for the author of the article has been the ancient realities recorded in the texts of carols from the 17th and 18th centuries. The material originates from an extensive manuscript collection of Christmas carols and songs, comprising 357 texts, owned by the cloister of Carmelite nuns in Cracow. This invaluable written monument of religious lyric poetry was published in print by Barbara Krzyżaniak in 1980. The image of the world presented in the Old-Polish carols reflects – in a careful and detailed manner – the realities of the Baroque and the Enlightenment periods, especially the realities of poor Polish rural areas, which the authors of Christmas carols must have known firsthand. Specific saturation of Christmas songs with lay motifs can be observed in the central and closing part of the studied collection. In the lexicon found in Kantyczki karmelitańskie, which describes Old-Polish realities, two basic categories can be distinguished: one of them is composed of proper names (mainly the names and nicknames of shepherds and the names of nuns), the second – much more extensive and internally diversified – comprises the names of all kinds of objects that appear in the descriptions of shepherds’ preparations prior to their journey or merry-making at Christ’s crib. They are, for example, the information about the clothes worn by shepherds, farming implements and household objects, the means of transportation, foodstuffs, dishes, the animals reared or living free, the plants cultivated by people or growing naturally, musical instruments etc.
The review article deals with a new comprehensive edition of the works of the Swiss Enlightenment by Isaak Iselin and his contribution to the formation of Enlightenment historiography in connection with the philosophy of history and mankind. Iselin was one of the pioneers of the thematization of the “history of mankind” (the title of his main work) and its developmental conception as the history of reason, culture, and humanity.
The article deals with vocabulary related to the family in the Polish Enlightenment. The analysis is based on the religious poetry of K. Benisławska, F. Karpiński, F.D. Kniaźnin, J.P. Woronicz and J.A. Załuski. The aspect of earthly life and the relationship between God and man, and their complicated inter-relationships is included in it: childhood of all people, the motherhood of Maria and brotherhood between people and Jesus-God. A total of 76 vocabulary items were analyzed. A rich group of these vocabulary items are, for example, terms for the child: potomek, niemowlę, niemówlę, niemówlątko, dziecko, dziecina, dziecię, dziatki, dziateczki, dziatwa, syn, córka, córa. Poets presenting family members indicate their duty to God and family. In Benisławska’s poetry, woman is clearly appreciated as mother and wife, participating in life and the glory of God.
PL
Artykuł dotyczy słownictwa wskazującego na rodzinę w polskim oświeceniu. Analiza opiera się na poezji religijnej K. Benisławskiej, F. Karpińskiego, F.D. Kniaźnina, J.P. Woronicza i J.A. Załuskiego. Uwzględniony został w niej aspekt życia ziemskiego i relacja między Bogiem a człowiekiem oraz wynikające z nich skomplikowane zależności: dzięcięctwo wszystkich ludzi, macierzyństwo Maryi i braterstwo między ludźmi a Jezusem-Bogiem. W sumie analizie poddano 76 jednostek, bogatą grupę stanowią np. określenia dziecka: potomek, niemowlę, niemówlę, niemówlątko, dziecko, ziecina, dziecię, dziatki, dziateczki, dziatwa, syn, córka, córa. Poeci, przedstawiając członków rodziny, wskazują na ich powinności względem Boga i najbliższych. W poezji Benisławskiej wyraźnie dowartościowana jest kobieta, która jako matka i mężatka uczestniczy w życiu na chwałę Boga.
In his 2022 volume Common Good Constitutionalism, and in a series of essays and other works prior to the book’s release, Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule advances a new vision for the American republic. Against the two dominant strains of constitutional interpretation in the United States, namely originalism and progressivism (“living constitutionalism”), Vermeule argues for common good constitutionalism, a return to the ius commune pursuit of that which is good for all in accordance with the natural law. While Vermeule’s work is ambitious and his intervention into originalist-progressivist debates welcome, a question remains: will common good constitutionalism be able to overcome America’s Enlightenment civil religion? In this paper, I consider the challenges which America’s Enlightenment civil religion poses to common good constitutionalism (and any other attempt to think past the Constitution from within a constitutional framework), concluding that common good constitutionalism, insofar as it is predicated on the pre-existing Constitution and deployed within the American politico-theological domain, cannot overcome America’s Enlightenment civil religion to effect the common good.
The paper is concerned with the life and work of Pierre Clément, a Geneva-born journalist, dramatist and poet, who was one of the first to make a freemason a protagonist in a play. Issues re- lating to that author have not been discussed in Polish so far, even though Clément was a significant figure in French playwriting as the precursor of Masonic themes
This paper focuses on August von Kotzebue’s play “Der Freimaurer” [The Freemason], as a piece within the prolific genre of comedies about freemasons which emerged in the 1740s, and a work which includes numerous worldview-related allusions. In this context, the author extensively discusses the life and the oeuvre of the playwright who thus far has not been devoted any thorough study in Polish, apart from relatively brief mentions in works on the period and writers he had inspired.
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