The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe / / Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn Press eBook Package Complete Collection
• HerausgeberIn: Blair, Ann,; Grafton, Anthony,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2010]; ©1990
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.) :; 8 illus.

The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe focuses on the ways in which culture is moved from one generation or group to another, not by exact replication but by accretion or revision. The contributors to the volume each consider how the passing of historical information is an organic process that allows for the transformation of previously accepted truth.The volume covers a broad and fascinating scope of subjects presented by leading scholars. Anthony Grafton's contribution on the fifteenth-century forger Annius of Viterbo emphasizes the role of imagination in the classical revival; Lisa Jardine demonstrates the way in which Erasmus helped turn a technical and rebarbative book by Rudolph Agricola into a sixteenth-century success story; Alan Charles Kors finds the roots of Enlightenment atheism in the works of French Catholic theologians; Donald R. Kelley follows the legal idea of "custom" from its formulation by the ancients to its assimilation into the modern social sciences; and Lawrence Stone shows how changes in legal action against female adultery between 1670 and 1857 reflect basic shifts in English moral values.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgment -- Introduction: Notes from Underground on Cultural Transmission -- 1. Invention of Traditions and Traditions of Invention in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo -- 2. Inventing Rudolph Agricola: Cultural Transmission, Renaissance Dialectic, .and the Emerging Humanities -- 3. Cortés, Signs, and the Conquest of Mexico -- 4. "Second Nature": The Idea of Custom in European Law, Society, and Culture -- 5. The Making of a Political Paradigm: The Ottoman State and Oriental Despotism -- 6. Civic Chivalry and the English Civil War -- 7. Theology and Atheism in Early Modern France -- 8. Honor, Morals, Religion, and the Law: The Action for Criminal Conversation in England, 1670-1857 -- Contributors -- Index