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Mapping   Reference library

Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment

...Mapmaking is shown to be a central element of French geographical traditions and an important means to the promotion of French national identity. Harley, Brian . The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography. In The History of Cartography , vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by Brian Harley and David Woodward , pp. 1–42. Chicago, 1987. A valuable essay on the nature and interpretation of maps as introduction to the first volume of a major series of edited texts by cartographic...

Ancients and Moderns   Reference library

Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment

...and Moderns . Nostalgia for a golden past was probably felt in the Near East and in Europe from prehistoric times onward. Societies codified hereditary civilizations whose classical artifacts survived most notably in architecture and sculpture, and, for the reading minorities, in writing. With the passage of generations and centuries, however, evaluations comparing then with now did not necessarily work in favor of the achievements of the ancestors. In some places and times classical models were accepted, and in others they were dismissed as obsolete....

Human Nature   Reference library

Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment

...him, there was no virtue in the state of nature. Man in the state of nature felt compassion for others, but this compassion does not deserve to be called virtue because it was automatic rather than self-conscious. Unlike Shaftesbury, Rousseau argued that the historical (and prehistorical) development of habits of reflection, rather than approving or giving moral weight to this automatic response, had the effect of vitiating it. Reflection, far from approving of compassionate behavior, replaced sympathy with a calculating selfishness that was incompatible with...

Magnus, Olaus (1490–1557)   Reference library

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation

...a running account from the dawn of Swedish history to an apology for the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic church in Sweden. In doing so, Johannes revived Jordanes's sixth-century contention that the Goths, who were invading the Roman Empire at the time, had stormed out of prehistoric Sweden into the pages of European history. In 1432 the Swedish bishop Ragvaldi had resurrected the claim of a Gothic-Swedish relationship at the Council of Basel. Johannes popularized this theory in his Historia during the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth and...

Welsh cultural revival   Reference library

An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age

...Welsh grammar. The enthusiasm of the Welsh scholars was fired by the work of the Oxford scientist Edward Lhuyd ( 1660–1709 ) and the Breton scholar Paul-Yves Pezron ( 1639–1706 ), showing that Welsh was descended from the language of the Celts, who had dominated much of prehistoric Europe. They thought they were reviving the language of the ancient druids, and even that Welsh was directly descended from the primeval language of the patriarchs. But lexicographers late in the century, such as John Walters ( 1721–97 ) and William Owen *Pughe , were also...

Rafinesque, Constantine (1783–1840)   Reference library

Peter S. Fosl

The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment

...at the Franklin Institute and elsewhere. He became a US citizen in 1832 . Anticipating the land grant system, Rafinesque planned and gained initial financing for a large university in Illinois, which, however, never materialized. Having pursued researches on more than 500 prehistoric sites, Rafinesque in 1836 published as part of his book, The American Nations , the controversial “Walam Olum” or “Red Record”—a text purported to be a translated migration narrative of the Lenape or Delaware tribe’s journey into North America. He named the “Taino” language...

Archaeology   Reference library

Jeffrey L. Hantman

The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment

...of the systematic methods of archaeological inquiry developed in Europe. But, Americans were not drawn to the application of archaeological methods in the writing of an American history until the late eighteenth century. A number of factors account for this. First, the large prehistoric Native American earthen tumuli and barrows, or mounds as they would be called, were located predominantly west of the mountains in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys and thus largely beyond the view of Euro-American settlement. American colonists would not directly...