The alphabet of nature /
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F. M van Helmont's Alphabet of Nature was one of many books published about language in the early modern period. The "language debate," as it has come to be called, was a topic of compelling interest to major figures such as Reuchlin, Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Postel, Boehme, Kircher, Hobbes, Descartes, Comenius, Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz. At issue were profound questions about whether language is natural or artificial, ordained by God or created by man. The answers given entailed a web of consequences that could lead to arrest, imprisonment, even execution. It is therefore not surprising that van Helmont wrote his book while imprisoned in the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-208) and index. :
9789047419983 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The self as symbolic space : constructing identity and community at Qumran /
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This volume investigates critical practices by which the Qumran community constituted itself as a sectarian society. Key to the formation of the community was the reconstruction of the identity of individual members. In this way the "self" became an important symbolic space for the development of the ideology of the sect. Persons who came to experience themselves in light of the narratives and symbolic structures embedded in the community practices would have developed the dispositions of affinity and estrangement necessary for the constitution of a sectarian society. Drawing on various theories of discourse and practice in rhetoric, philosophy, and anthropology, the book examines the construction of the self in two central documents: the Serek ha-Yahad and the Hodayot.
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1 online resource (x, 376 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 353-364) and indexes. :
9789047405153 :
0169-9962 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.