Horst Kunze, the contemporary German authority on indexing, writes, “An index is not a tool that has its own independent existence. It is an aid for the use of another literary object. It is like a ...signpost. Like a signpost it has no other purpose than to point the way in certain directions.” Indices seldom attract scholarly investigation. Casual users accept the index as a more or less objective guide to the contents of a book. However, the index prepared in 1580 for the initial publication of the Book of Concord, appearing in several of its first printings, was designed to point in specific directions, to cultivate a particular way for its primary audience to read the volume and put it to use. It took the form of loci communes—topics—as they had been developed a generation earlier by Martin Luther's Wittenberg colleague Philip Melanchthon for the proper, fruitful, study of theology. By selecting the doctrinal topics and categories into which pastors and teachers were to organize the content of this volume for their own use, this index offers one of the first theological commentaries on the Book of Concord. The index also reveals how Melanchthon's theological method continued to dominate the way the heirs of the Wittenberg Reformation thought—in spite of the fact that it directs readers away from and against the theology of some of Melanchthon's followers whom scholars have dubbed with his name, “Philippists.” (In fact, some contemporaries objected to the Book because they believed it to be anti-Melanchthonian.)
At the beginning of the 16th century in Germany, religious ends and human art joined forces to produce a sacred rhetoric: a rhetoric that could transform human nature, and explain at the same time ...how such transformation was possible according to both science and scripture. No longer was it enough to ask in Scholastic fashion ‘What is man?’ - his essence and unique faculties, his special place in God’s world. A new question took on urgency in the wake of religious reformation, namely ‘What could man become?’ But theology alone could not provide a practical response to this question. Rhetoric, in its various adopted forms, could. Consequently rhetoric emerged as architectonic of the human sciences in Reformation Germany, shaping pedagogy as a practical art. Whereas scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the way in which the exact sciences such as mathematics influenced Enlightenment human science, the history of human science as practical art has received little attention. This article contributes to such a history by showing how rhetoric as a practical protreptic art structured human scientific initiatives in the wake of Philipp Melanchthon’s Reformation pedagogy.
Against the "presentism" of current criticism linking the "Defence's" universalizing epistemology to the absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, this study historicizes Philip Sidney's poetics as a ...consciously constructed vehicle of political liberation. The "Defence's" epistemology is recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among an intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon -- the so-called Philippists -- and the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Poetry's preeminence, Sidney maintains, derives from its serviceability in freeing us from the sovereignty of self-love and self-loving sovereigns.
Our knowledge of Melanchthon's thought on the role of godly magistrates in the church is surprisingly incomplete, despite the generally acknowledged importance of that thought. Most Reformation ...scholars are familiar with Melanchthon's argument that the Christian magistrate is, as custodian of both tables of the Law and as foremost member of the church, the incumbent of an office established for the sake of the church and thus burdened with responsibility for the establishment and maintenance of true religion. Most know too that this argument became the standard Lutheran justification for what is called the cura religionis of the magistrate. Few, however, are aware that it took Melanchthon a good decade to arrive at that doctrine, that he spent a further decade or so refining and developing it, and that during all that time there was an intimate connection between the content of his thought and the course of public events. The reason for this gap in our knowledge is that the history of the development of Melanchthon's thought on the religious duties of secular rulers has not yet been written.
Philip Melanchthon defended the teaching of astronomy as an integral part of theology. He believed that astronomy, with its doctrine of the heavens, was a step on the road to understanding the ...heavenly doctrines.
Sigmund Freud speaks of three offenses against the human love of self. The first blow is “cosmological” and is associated with the name Copernicus. The second blow is “biological” and conjures up the ...name Darwin. Freud himself performs the “psychological blow,” which is directed at human narcissism. This “psychological blow” follows from the fact that “mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions.” These discoveries “amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own house.”
Karant-Nunn reviews "Philipp Melanchthons Sicht der Rhetorik" by Olaf Berwald, "Kriminalitat in Rom 1560-1585," by Peter Blastenbrei, "Die Ritterwurde in Mittelitalien zwischen Mittelalter un Fruher ...Neuzeit," by Lorenz Boninger, and other works.
Rhetorices tabulae. Item libelli Erasmi de duplici copia, scilicet rerum et verborum tabulae.
Rhetorices tabulae. Item libelli Erasmi de duplici copia, scilicet rerum et verborum tabulae.
