Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: I t is a well-worn historiographical truism that early modern Europeans imag- ined their world in terms of binary oppositions.Leading historians of the 1970s like Peter Burke, Natalie Davis, and Robert Scribner, influenced by structuralist anthropology, suggested that early modern phenomena that defied twentieth-century logic-like the misrule of Carnival or belief that the pope was Antichrist-could best be understood as symbolic systems of inversion. 1Then in a seminal 1980 article and in his 1997 landmark book Thinking with Demons, Stuart Clark argued that binary oppositions were the fundamental building blocks of distinctively early modern thought, "one of the distinctive mental and cultural traits of the age."Clark argued that binary oppositions represented "an entire worldview," a "conceptual language presupposed" in every field of human endeavor, constituting the way the "world [was] accustomed to think." 2 Early moderns believed that the universe and the mind of God forensically divided good
Source: Journal of British Studies
DOI: 10.1086/651695
Author: Ethan Shagan
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2152331370