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Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was one of the universal thinkers of the late Renaissance who was at home in both of the ˵two cultures″, the sciences and the humanities, although today we think of him almost exclusively as a scientist, and in a still more restricted sense, as an astronomer. Mark Peterson's recent study, Galileo's Muse, does much to broaden our conception of the man known as the ˵the Father of modern science″. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adorno claimed that ‘with Schoenberg affability ceases’. Benjamin said of Proust's ‘invectives against friendship’ that ‘he cannot touch his reader either’. Joyce's texts are just as unfriendly, though perhaps less aloof than Proust, since they display their scepticism with an open face, staring back at the readers looking in, acknowledging the difference. One point of this refusal of affability is to guard against the transformation of writing into Culture, to prevent the biens culturels from appropriating the ‘fahroots hof cullchaw’ (FW 303.20), and Joyce succeeded in this more than most by showing that the ‘fruits of culture’ had far-off roots and spoke in many voices. By resisting the critical appropriation of his writing into Culture, Joyce both refused the affable handshake of the biens culturels and remained aloof from ordinary readers. The well-meaning individual who wrote to Joyce in 1926 to express his sense of ‘a real friendship between reader and author’ may not have received the reply he requested. We have become used to thinking of modernism as a collective movement distinguished in part by its expulsion of mass culture and so-called ordinary readers. The critical invention of an ‘ordinary reader’, which was concomitant with modernism, belied a nostalgic but misleading appeal to a false sense of shared cultural values and representation. While Joyce may be regarded as something of a special case in the general account of modernist politics, the question of who exactly might read him was much debated in his own lifetime as well as now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To include discussion, in a book on epic in the nineteenth century, of Middlemarch and Aurora Leigh is an indication, it might be thought, of the overwhelming predominance of the novel in the period. Certainly the pull of the novel form – its massive cultural and social presence as much as its specific gravity as a mode – makes any discussion of contiguous genres necessarily involve some negotiation with its characteristic procedures. Not only epic in the nineteenth century but also romance, the drama and painting (to restrict examples to the aesthetic sphere) were dragged into the orbit of the novel. On the other hand, an opposite usage has taken the transformations of epic, envisaged by such writers as Barrett Browning and George Eliot, and used the word to describe almost indiscriminately the novel itself, so that it has become possible to speak with apparent appropriateness of the novel as providing the epic of bourgeois life, or more generally the epic of ordinary lives. It is not far from here to contemporary usages of the term in which epic is simply equivalent to ‘long’. Behind these usages are various and complex generic negotiations such as those which I sought to describe in the previous chapter. But the relationship of epic to novel, in large terms, was also the subject of considerable and fruitful debate in the twentieth century; the critical and theoretical arguments to be considered in this chapter were not, however, mere acts of retrospective reflection on an inert literary history, but more importantly constituted a way of arguing through questions of modernity, nationality, and – latterly – the phenomenon we have come to know as globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I really cannot believe that you did not realize that the whole book circles around a single idea: to show the tragic consequences of a split personality, of a split culture … Totalitarianism in Germany and Italy The global Great Depression of 1929–33 did not in itself cause the unraveling of Europe's fragile political stability of the 1920s, but it certainly accelerated its demise. The reasons for the vast economic downturn were myriad and complex. Economic expansion in both the United States and Europe had been strong between 1924 and 1929, and financial speculation abounded. The injection of American money into Germany through the Dawes Plan, beginning in 1924, created not only an artificial economic boom (by 1926 Germany would again push past Great Britain in industrial production) but also a situation of fiscal dependency. In addition, there was the problem of war reparations, which Germany could not and, later, would not repay. The crash of the American stock market in October 1929 in itself simply signaled a period of deflation. A dramatic fall in industrial production led to a fall in the price of consumer goods, a fall in wages, and a sharp rise in unemployment. With the collapse of two German banks in 1931, the world's system of credits and currencies was thrown into disarray. Communists and socialists blamed the deteriorating situation on laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalists and financiers blamed the problem on the conservative monetary and fiscal policies endorsed by politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been said more than once that a writer's duty is to insult, rather than flatter. Yeats inclined to the view that whenever a country produced a man of genius, he was never like that country's idea of itself. Without a doubt, the literary movement now known as modernism consisted primarily in a revolt against all prevalent styles and a rebellion against official order; and yet, by its very innovative nature, it was precluded from establishing a fixed style of its own. ‘Modernism must struggle but never triumph,’ observed Irving Howe, ‘and in the end must struggle in order not to triumph.’ By the 1960s, this movement had come to an end, as society tamed and domesticated its wild bohemians, converting them from radical dissidents into slick entertainments. ‘The avant-garde writer’, bemoaned Howe, ‘must confront the one challenge for which he has not been prepared: the challenge of success … Meanwhile, the decor of yesterday is appropriated and slicked up; the noise of revolt magnified in a frolic of emptiness; and what little remains of modernism denied so much as the dignity of an opposition.’ Irish modernism had been largely an emigrant's affair – and those Gaelic writers who remained at home produced not a literature which peered into the abyss or fought the new establishment, but one which (in the view of Máirtín Ó Cadhain) was more suited to an audience of credulous schoolchildren and preconciliar nuns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Never mistaken as a man of principle, Marchamont Nedham is famous for his astonishingly rapid changes in alliances, writing at different times in support of Parliament, king, and Cromwell during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. He began his career as a journalist in 1643 by writing for Mercurius Britanicus, a parliamentary newspaper. As a consequence of his use of the newspaper to disseminate his mocking humor, which he aimed directly at the king, he went to jail. He then changed alliances just in time to be on the losing side, taking up the Royalist banner and editing Mercurius Pragmaticus beginning in 1647 and continuing through June of 1649, with a minor interruption in publication after the execution of Charles I. This episode ended with him again in jail, but this time his captors were the Parliamentarians. In order to win his freedom, he agreed to write a pamphlet supporting the fledgling government, and to edit a governmental newspaper. He fulfilled the latter agreement when, the next year, he published The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated and assumed the editorial duties of Mercurius Politicus, a newspaper that John Milton supervised for a time. His two treatises, The Case of the Commonwealth and The Excellencie of a Free State, would offer his editorials from this newspaper in a more coherent form. During the Protectorate, he served Cromwell in the capacity of a spy. Later, Nedham opposed the Restoration when it appeared a foregone conclusion, and finally fled to Holland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In delineating the culture of market society in a previous chapter, I proposed that the market-form projects a distinctive sense of reality and, with it, certain clear epistemological standards, strategies, and forms of knowing that are intrinsic to it. These new protocols of knowing suffuse the whole social and mental order where that order has shed much of its traditional, precapitalist moral and political constraints. One aspect of the market-form's uniqueness lies in the character of its time-sense or the individual and collective experience of temporality. As in the concept of relativity in physics, market society weakens the concept of a singular, collective historical time. Public time exists, but only by segmenting the day strictly into work-time, leisure-or consumption-time, by the opening and closing bells of various activities, like the school-day or the operations of a bourse. Temporal segmentation lays over the lived experience of duration an abstract time-scheme that regulates the form and content of daily routines. Premodern forms of time-reckoning were tied more intimately to natural, environmental processes, like the rising and setting of the sun, the changing of the seasons, and the like. These natural processes persist, but today they have slipped into the domain of rhetoric as powerfully nostalgic metaphors. Other experiences of communal time have also withered away altogether or run aground within religious sects or in the varieties of fundamentalism we find lodged awkwardly in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The landscape discourse in geography ‘Describing the Earth’ is the literal and the most basic definition of ‘Geography’ as an activity, but that apparently simple task has provoked many long-standing debates, not only about the art and science of geographical description but also about the nature of the object to be described. One such debate for more than a century has focused on the concept of ‘landscape’ and there persists to this day some ambiguity and confusion about it. I will, therefore, set out my own understanding and use of the term ‘landscape’, not least because I consider it to be significantly different from ‘environment’ and ‘region’ with which it has been – and still is – often confused. I will explore first the use of the concept of landscape in modern Western geography and then consider the idea of landscape more generally, both in earlier times and in other cultures. This will serve as a context for examining the connections of the landscape discourse in geography with the study of landscapes in history and other disciplines before considering in greater depth the specific concerns and contributions of historical geography to landscape studies. The history of the word which gave rise to the concept of ‘landscape’ in different European languages has yet to be written (Besse 2000: 40), but it is clear that the term Landschaft became part of modern geographical currency in Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most disturbing message of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is its insistence that humiliation is the necessary precondition for Christian life. In a move that powerfully repels even the Catholic West, much more mainstream Protestantism or existentialism, Dostoevsky forces his characters far beyond a comfortable exercise in the virtue of humility to an abject state of humiliation. Only those individuals who admit the justice of being mocked and despised by all normal-minded people realise clearly enough the truth of human kind's fallen condition honestly to feel the necessity for grace. This theme binds into a remarkable unity characters as different as Marmeladov, Marmeladov's daughter Sonya, Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov. Each character must decide between an assertion of will and complete humiliated acknowledgment of his or her non-being without the creative power of God. The emphasis on true humiliation as true humility is a doctrinal commitment which should not be translated into any psychological category of masochism as a physical or psychic eros. Similarly the conception of humiliation pushes the reader beyond noble tragedy or transcendentalism. The doctrine of self-abnegation does not spring from a diseased psyche but from the Orthodox tradition of apophatic knowledge. It is within that tradition that Dostoevsky's meaning can best be grasped. Apophatic knowledge, as Bishop Kallistos Ware explains, is a way of knowing that employs negative as well as affirmative statements, saying what God is not rather than what he is. Through this method human beings can describe God's essence or their own only by a set of assertions and negations which admit the incomplete and distorting nature of the ideas asserted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time is right, apparently, for a rebirth of trinitarian theology in the West. From the Enlightenment until the mid-twentieth century, the doctrine had been largely left for dead; those who continued to affirm it often did so in merely formulaic ways, which did little to help anyone understand its significance. Nevertheless, while the doctrine has all too rarely been explicated in adequate ways, its claims have remained present – in ordinary Christian practice, in the European intellectual milieu, and even in the very air that was breathed in the (ostensibly antitrinitarian) Enlightenment. Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued that ‘the Doctrine of the Trinity <…> has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding’. So the soil was already fertile as the seeds of trinitarian theology were resown in the early twentieth century, by theologians such as Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. These seeds are now producing a bumper-crop of thoughtful reflection on the Christian doctrine of God – much of it very good fruit (though not without the occasional weed). The renaissance of trinitarian theology also owes a great deal to the East: to the early Greek fathers, to the ongoing Orthodox tradition, and – in general – to a region of theological discourse within which the doctrine did not fade from view (as it had in the West). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opposition between law (pravo) and Grace (Blagodat′) in Dostoevsky's poetics can be traced back to the Old Russian Orthodox opposition between Law (Zakon) and Grace first enunciated by Metropolitan Hilarion more than nine centuries ago. In Western theology the opposition between justification by works of the law and justification by faith (Luther) or grace (Calvin) was one of the decisive issues in the Reformation disputes between Roman Catholicism and early Protestantism. As Luther and Calvin in particular insisted, this opposition is firmly rooted in the epistles of Paul, and the letters to the Romans and to the Galatians were particularly important sources of proof texts for their polemics. However, this same opposition appears in the Orthodox tradition in quite a distinctive form, and it was this tradition which nourished Dostoevsky's art and thought. The history of original Russian literature begins with the famous, eleventh-century Sermon on Law and Grace, a seminal work of Russian homiletics and spirituality, by Hilarion (Ilarion), an outstanding preacher who became the first Russian Metropolitan of Kiev in 1051. Medievalists differ on the exact date when the Sermon was preached, but, more important for us, are its sources and position in the annual Orthodox cycle, and on this point scholars are virtually at one: it was ‘based on a New Testament text’ and was given only on Easter. From his first lines, Hilarion speaks ‘of the Law of Moses given to him by God, and of the Grace and Truth which has appeared in Jesus Christ, and of how the Law has departed’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most astute and enlightened Orthodox readers of Dostoevsky wrote of him in the 1930s: Dostoevsky dreamt of Russian socialism, but what he saw was a ‘Russian monk’. And that monk had neither the intention nor the wish to build ‘world harmony’ he was in no way a builder within the historical process. It is clear, therefore, <…> that Dostoevsky's dream did not coincide with Dostoevsky's vision. Dostoevsky's place in the history of Russian philosophy belongs to him not because he worked out a philosophical system, but because he opened up and deepened actual metaphysical experience <…> and Dostoevsky shows more than he argues. To read Dostoevsky religiously it is not ‘necessary to put everything in its proper place so that everything can be reconciled’ as, according to Sergei Averintsev, the Neo-Thomist ‘theology of art’ tends to do. Dostoevsky is no Dante, but a nineteenth-century writer whose ‘dreams’ are influenced not by Christian theology but by secular European Utopianism and Romanticism, though his vision and his ‘metaphysical experience’ are Christian and, indeed, in many ways specifically Russian Orthodox Christian. One can only accept these contradictions, and work from within the paradox. Most great art reflects the world as chaos and this is particularly evident in Russian art. Dostoevsky, in his novels, reflects religious dereliction and aspiration and is capable of ‘showing’ profound insights, ‘metaphysical experience’, even Grace, but these are seen from within ‘the sphere of our sorrows’, glimpses not to be reassembled according to any all-embracing concept of hierarchy and order. In his notebooks for 1880–81, Dostoevsky speaks of his ‘Hosannah’, having passed through a furnace of doubt (27,86). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dostoevsky has emerged as the most provocative writer in Russian literature, the one who speaks most to the modern human condition. His influence on world literature has been immense. Artists working in other media have found inspiration in Dostoevsky for their own translations of his works into opera, drama, film and the graphic arts. He has stimulated writers and thinkers of the most diverse persuasions and callings (philosophers, theologians, marxists, conservatives, psychologists, literary critics). Books, articles, critical debates, comments, allusions abound. His themes of crime, urban alienation, family breakdown, psychic derangement, the decline of religious faith, as well as his penetrating psychological insight and prophetic grasp of the murderous potential of modern totalitarian ideologies and of the social and spiritual chaos spawned by unrestrained capitalism, profoundly resonate with the twentieth century. Other nineteenth-century writers took up these themes; few matched Dostoevsky's psychological acumen, none his ideological prescience. But what is above all peculiar to Dostoevsky is his genius for eliciting strong pro or contra responses, for tempting us to make global, essentially religious statements. Dostoevsky had a gift, virtually unique among modern writers, for making Christianity dynamic, for subtly forcing the ideological challenges of the modern age to interact dialogically with his Christian vision and for embodying this vision in psychologically compelling characters. To ‘read Dostoevsky religiously’, then, would mean to engage with this dialogue which runs through his entire post-Siberian oeuvre. This makes those who would rather bypass the religious issues uneasy; they are more comfortable discussing the psychology of his characters and the ideas debated in his fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many women enjoyed reading as ‘pure pleasure’, ‘cheap’, but ‘an unspeakable benefit’, capable of ‘softening the cruellest Accidents … there is no Remedy so easy as Books’, but pleasure itself could also be a problematic area. Anne Grant loved books, but felt guilty about literary pleasure: she enjoyed Byron's poems but worried about their morality, and was ‘fully convinced of the bad tendency’ of the works of Peter Pindar exactly because of ‘the amusement I derive from them’. Reading might corrupt the woman reader or distract her from household concerns, but the very pleasure which was its major advantage might be equally its chief moral problem. One reason for this lies in the period's constant elision of textuality and sexuality, especially in the case of women, whose reading is repeatedly figured as a sexual act or seen to reveal their sexual nature. In Mary Hays’ clandestine courtship with John Eccles, her coded signal to him that she was alone was to ‘lay a book against the window’. Reading could, in fiction and real life, figure and facilitate a virtuous relationship: Maria Josepha Holroyd was drawn to her soldier-husband by shared literary tastes, with ‘Madame Roland's works’ representing ‘classical ground in our history’, and in Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796) the virtuous relationship of Rebecca and Henry is cemented by shared reading, for Henry ‘never read a book from which he received improvement, that he did not carry … to Rebecca's, in contrast with William's seduction of the ‘illiterate’ Hannah (1, pp. 132, 180). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organisation arises as product of the struggle … organisations … are … born from the mass strike … from the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the mass strike and the street fighting rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions. … In the midst of the struggle the work of organisation is being more widely extended. Class struggle, which is itself structurally limited and selected by various social structures, simultaneously reshapes those structures. … Class struggle is intrinsically a process of transformation of structures, and thus the very process which sets limits on class struggle is at the same time transformed by the struggles so limited. … Organizational capacities are objects of class struggle. … The organizational capacity of the working class to engage in struggle is itself transformed by class struggle. In history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for. UNEXPECTED FINDINGS, ONE MORE TIME: CLASS CONFLICT AS THE INDEPENDENTVARIABLE Just when we thought that we had it all wrapped up, with a pat solution for the temporal dynamics of Italian strikes in the postwar period, the reversal of the causal reading at the end of Chapter 8 (strikes as the cause, rather than the effect, of economic, organizational, institutional, and political factors) has brought in a new twist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two types of criticism are frequently levelled at the history of ideas in general and the history of political theory in particular. The first is very much that of historians practising in other fields; that it is written as a saga in which all the great deeds are done by entities which could not, in principle, do anything. In it, Science is always wrestling with Theology, Empiricism with Rationalism, monism with dualism, evolution with the Great Chain of Being, artifice with nature, Politik with political moralism. Its protagonists are never humans, but only reified abstractions – or, if humans by inadvertence, humans only as the loci of these abstractions. The other charge, one more frequently levelled by philosophers, is that it is insensitive to the distinctive features of ideas, unconcerned with, or more often ineffectual in its concern with, truth and falsehood, its products more like intellectual seed catalogues than adequate studies of thought. In short it is characterised by a persistent tension between the threats of falsity in its history and incompetence in its philosophy. At first sight both these charges seem plausible. One might well suppose that the status of propositions about the history of thought would be at issue both in the accuracy of their location of a particular event in the past and in the adequacy of their understanding of the nature of the event so located. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confession of Christ as Lord is the heart of the Christian faith. To him God has given all authority in heaven and on earth. As Lord of the Church he bestows the Holy Spirit to create a communion of men with God and with one another. To bring this koinonia to perfection is God's eternal purpose. The Church exists to serve the fulfilment of this purpose when God will be all in all. Christian authority is Christ's authority. The debates on authority which rent apart the Church in the West in the sixteenth century turned again and again on whether Christ's sovereignty was being set at risk in the Church's life; and whether his Word, Holy Scripture, was being disregarded or overridden by those in authority in the Church. The chapters which follow look first at sixteenth-century concerns over the authority on which Christians believe matters of faith. As textual scholarship investigated Greek and Hebrew and raised the possibility that there ought to be emendations, Scripture itself could no longer be looked upon, in an uncontroversial way, as a text to which one could simply point. The testimony of the authorities other than Scripture with which everyone in the West had been familiar for generations, ceased to be uncontroversially acceptable to many Protestants, and qualifications hedged about the use even of the Fathers. Proof by reasoning, which had reached a high point of sophistication in the late Middle Ages, and in which there had normally been embedded authorities to support propositions, underwent revolutionary attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of what historians, over the last thirty years or so, have agreed to call the ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century has prompted a certain amount of sporadic and genteel debate. It is a subject that has aroused interest but not passion, unlike the gentry controversy and, more recently, the ‘revisionist’ version of the causes of the English civil war. My own previous contribution to the debate, an article published in 1984 called ‘Scotland and the “General Crisis” of the seventeenth century’, argued that ‘general crisis’ as a way of explaining what happened in Europe in those years, though appealing, was unsound. The article demonstrated, at least to its author's satisfaction, that the Scottish case was an exception to all of the many hypotheses that scholars had floated as to the nature of that supposed crisis, and therefore, since events in Scotland precipitated what happened in England, clearly ‘Exhibit A’ in any crisis theory, the whole idea was fatally flawed. It goes without saying that what transpired in Scotland and England, and Ireland too, would not have happened as it did, or perhaps at all, had it not been for the Anglo-Scottish union of 1603. Alas for authorial pride, however: the idea of a ‘general crisis’ still seems to be alive and well, though rather less written about in the last few years. So what follows is a reconsideration of the nature of the seventeenth-century ‘crisis’, if that is the proper word, once again from the Scottish vantage-point, and some suggestions which may provide a new starting-place for discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Mexico is that of man in search of his filiation, his origin. At first glance, José Vasconcelos appears to be a throwback to the figure of the heroic nineteenth-century writer-statesman, striving to combine intellectual reflection with direct political action and believing himself destined to play a leading role in the development of his country. In many aspects (the sense of a quasi-messianic calling not being the least of them) he reminds the reader of Sarmiento. Both men are educators, self-appointed “civilizers” of their barbarian compatriots (Vasconcelos espouses Sarmiento's simplistic yet effective formula, civilizatión y barbarie, which he translates into Mexican terms – Quetzalcóatl vs. Huichilobos), both perceive themselves as greater than nature and are eager to have others see them with the same generous eye. If Adolfo Prieto, borrowing from Karl Mannheim, found a matchless description for Sarmiento's overbearing, chaotic personality – “the gesticulating adult” – Francisco Madero himself, during the first days of the Mexican Revolution, echoed Nietzsche in his own, perfect characterization of Vasconcelos – “el supermuchacho,” Superboy. As in Sarmiento, there is indeed in Vasconcelos an element of near-adolescent instability coupled with a constant need for recognition; a fervent desire to do rivaled only by the desire to show himself doing; finally, a tendency to tantrums and overreactions that make him (again like Sarmiento) all the more vulnerable to criticism and jibes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I experienced everything through the transmuted substance of my body … I had no other thing to offer under the species of linked words, under the bread and wine of the spirit we call literature. That, in sum, could well be the epigraph of every one of my texts … The more I strayed from it, childishly heeding who knows what convention of the hateful “I”, the weaker my writing was – flabby, without substance. Books, many books are mentioned throughout Victoria Ocampo's texts. If autobiographies are wont to highlight the privileged encounter with the written word as a symbolic beginning for their life stories, an acknowledgment of the very tools for self-definition, this highlighting usually occurs, emblematically, close to the beginning of their narrative. In the case of Victoria Ocampo, however, there is no such clearcut inception of the readerly into the life story; not one, not two, but many encounters with books are described in her text. The significant gesture is tirelessly repeated: one scene of reading brings on another, book follows upon book and discovery upon discovery, so that we are left with many beginnings; so many, in fact, that they blur into a dizzying continuum in which the bare gesture – reading – perpetuates itself as the self-sustaining motion of one, consistent autobiographical act. I have already referred to Ocampo's initial version of the scene of reading, recorded amongst her earliest childhood recollections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And surely the myths are, as a whole, false, though there is truth in them too. Mythologia, prima rerum historia, cur hactenus infelix? The Survival of the Pagan Gods in Western Christian civilization, as Jean Seznec has taught in the book bearing that title, is so obvious that it needs no proof: ‘Even the gods were not restored to life’, writes Seznec, ‘for they had never disappeared from the memory or imagination of man’. The legendary figures of Prometheus, Orpheus, and Narcissus; the heroic adventures of Jason, Odysseus and Aeneas, and the tragic tales of Medea, Oedipus and Antigone; these and other tales have exercised an unbroken authority over the imagination of poets, philosophers, theologians, explorers, and laymen in the West. Although these Greek figures are clearly defined by and in concrete local conditions, they have not been confined to them; on the contrary, they have proven to be perfectly adaptable to changing times and tastes. To the European eye they appeared to be supra-national, seemingly devoid of any religious or ethnic identity, and over the centuries they have created a network of concrete references which, alongside the Biblical figures, established for all the European nations a complete repository of ideas and examples on which they have built much of their own cultural lores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community, And no community not lived in praise of god To sum up, from all that we have set forth in this work, it is to be finally concluded that this Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise. Principles of New Science of Giambattista Vico concerning the Common Nature of the Nations: As the full title of his work indicates, Vico's aim was to lay down the universal principles of the comune natura della nazioni. Alas, as any reader of the work could see, Vico confined his range of meditations and investigations mainly to the profane history of gentile nations, and repeatedly emphasized the fact that his discoveries and conclusions about the ferine origins and growth of humanity should not be applied to the sacred history of the Hebrew-Christian nations. In his account, the Hebrews, upon receiving the revealed truths directly from God, began to live a kind of hidden life, isolated from all other nations, and so were able to retain and safeguard their true beliefs, customs, and records for themselves. Hence, Vico's conclusion that their entire development was radically different from that of all other peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 14 May 1825, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a letter to a friend, describing his first impressions of Vico's New Science: I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico, and if I had (which thank God's good grace I have not) the least drop of Author's blood in my veins, I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume (I have not yet begun the second) have exclaimed: ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere’. Coleridge's curse in disguise still haunts Vichian scholars, many of whom must have had felt the same ambivalent sensation of déjà lu, as if they had already read – if not actually written – Vico's words. Of all the legends surrounding the man and his work, the legend of Vico the forerunner, the sage who grasped and expressed many truths of the future, has proven the most attractive, though hardly the most constructive, to interpreters of his work. Like Coleridge, many modern readers of the New Science believe, genuinely enough, to have discovered in its cryptic formulations affinities, or even outright solutions, to their own research problems. If, as Isaiah Berlin has noted, there is ‘a particular danger that attends the fate of rich and profound but inexact and obscure thinkers, namely that their admirers tend to read too much into them, and turn insensibly in the direction of their own thoughts’, then surely Vico and his interpreters have been particularly prone to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From all parts of the castle, the lord enjoys the happiest view of the countryside, dominating from it his entire village. The view of Southern Italy and Sicily held by educated Italians and Europeans is heavily shaped by literary images, ancient and modern. It is hard, perhaps pointless, to escape the suggestions of Carlo Levi's memoirs, of Verga's novels, of Lampedusa's Gattopardo, not to mention rural sociologists, who depict a world of millennial traditions, of immobile, proud backwardness, of resigned and internalized hostility to, and alienation from, public authority. Still today, many parts of the rural South appear to have changed but little in centuries, whatever the signs of modernity one sees everywhere. Leaving behind the highway in the Vallo di Diano, one reaches the village of Brienza much more easily than did its masters and visitors of old; but the village itself those masters would still recognize. The ruined medieval castle hovers over the remains of the old village, uninhabited after the earthquake of 1980, and climbing on its walls, one visually dominates vast fields, hills, and pastures. The way to the neighboring villages is harder, as it climbs over hills and mountains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]