At the end of the 16th century and early 17th century, France emerges from thirty years of extreme violence and a series of massacres. During these Religious wars, both sides, using the literal religious meaning of the word, referred to the notion of holocaust: if Protestants tend to practice this biblical reference from the point of view of the victims, the Catholics, particularly the members of the catholic League, have rather used it in the sense of a (necessary) Holocaust against (...) the Protestants. Anyway, the two sides are mutually bleeding themselves white: they imposed on the whole people, involved or not, an incredible horror, and unforgettable for all the individuals who lived after this period. Therefore, during the period of relative peace which followed Henry IV’s accession to the throne (1593-1594), and even if the Edict of Nantes forbids to recall it, the collective consciousness of a just passed disaster remains, especially in theatre and in the tragedies. This disaster is seen as a radical event for the world, as an absolute worst the humanity can generate in terms of inhumanity. Do people must forget this disaster or do they have to look back on it to think and judge what occured some years before? (shrink)

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) is often considered one of the staunchest defenders of toleration, especially in the domain of religion. His Commentaire philosophique, published in 1686, one year after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, argued for a broad idea of toleration, to be extended with no exceptions to all sects and religions. However, his thought can hardly be reduced to an exaltation of the “rights of the conscience,” for he realized very soon that such an exaltation risks (...) bringing forth religious fanatism, which in turn is the cause of religious wars and acts of violence. Toleration, in these conditions, is only a political remedy for the sickness of the human mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 71-98MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Hospitality after the Death of GodTracy McNultyPierre Klossowski's fiction has been only sporadically published in English, and largely dismissed as perverse erotica or soft-core porn. When his 1965 trilogy Les lois de l'hospitalité was partially translated in English (under the title Roberte, ce soir & The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes), its Library of Congress classification characterized it simply (...) as "erotic fiction—French." Even in France, Klossowski has become the very signifier of perversion. His artwork graces the cover of Serge André's L'imposture perverse and of numerous erotic novels, he has been "diagnosed" as a pervert by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and unironic readers of his Sade mon prochain hail him as Sade's disciple and heir.1Admittedly, the larger stakes of Klossowski's work are easily obscured by its free adaptation of the stock themes of libertine literature. His fictional works, like his visual compositions (essentially representations of rape scenes, often on historical themes—Diana and Actaeon, the Rape of Lucretia), explore the conflict between a woman's chaste moral attitude and her gradual surrender to an assailant's advances. The Laws of Hospitality concerns the erotic awakening of "hospitality" in a woman, which exposes a contradiction within her moral character and reveals her symbolic identity to be without foundation. Its protagonist Octave, who bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator, is a collector of artworks that eroticize the moment of moral hesitation experienced by women submitting to the sexual advances of a chance stranger—or even a "spiritual" apparition. His "laws of hospitality" are the fruit of his desire to experience this operation firsthand; they name a practice wherein the master of the house "offers" his wife to fortuitous guests, in order to savor the moment of her surrender.However, the stakes of Klossowski's "perverse" meditations are very different from the Sadeian project of uprooting religious morality. Sade challenges the patriarchal and religious authorities of his day by demonstrating that the paternal signifier on which their laws are based is without foundation. In proving that the law cannot hold [End Page 71] up against the repeated assaults of libertinage, he mounts a systematic deconstruction of the symbolic order of language by the real of jouissance. But although Klossowski may share Sade's perverse drive to "humiliate the law with the object,"2 his target is not the signifier as such, but rather the imaginary consistency afforded by what he calls the "grammatical fiction of the 'I,'" the illusion of autonomous personhood. The "object" he confronts it with is not the natural "truth" of jouissance, but rather the feminine object who disrupts the identity of the "master" who offers her.Klossowski's reflections on the special status of femininity in Enlightenment culture—at once marginal and singularly "extimate"—have never been fully appreciated, despite their enormous interest for the study of culture. In a way unique among contemporary authors, Klossowski sheds light on Jacques Lacan's enigmatic insight that the cultural importance of the feminine object consists in its sublimated status as an "object raised to the dignity of the Thing" [Lacan 112]. His fiction underscores the close ties between the feminine and what Freud called das Ding, the Thing uncannily internal to subjectivity that Lacan later identified with the function of the Nebenmensch, as the apotheosis of the Christian idea of the prochain, or neighbor [Lacan 151–52].Although Klossowski's erotic scenario invites comparisons with Sade's and Fourier's utopian calls to dissolve the privative boundaries between subjects, what he understands by "hospitality" is not the abolition of personal identity, but rather the staging of its internal contradiction.Hospitality, at the Limits of the LawThe act of hospitality—whose theological and philosophical origins this former Dominican novice and Latin scholar was intimately acquainted with—concerns a very particular tension. Etymologically, the host is the "master," the one who "eminently personifies" identity: not only his own identity, but also that of the group in whose... (shrink)

Through a glass darkly / Joshua Mitchell -- Skepticism, self, and toleration in Montaigne's political thought / Alan Levine -- French free-thinkers in the first decades of the Edict of Nantes / Maryanne Cline Horowitz -- Descartes and the question of toleration / Michael Gillepsie -- Toleration and the skepticism of religion in Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus / Steven B. Smith -- Monopolizing faith / Alan Houston -- Skepticism and toleration in Hobbes' political thought / Shirley Letwin -- John (...) Locke and the foundations of toleration / Nathan Tarcov -- Pierre Bayle's atheist politics / Kenneth R. Weinstein -- Of believers and barbarians / Diana Schaub -- Tolerant skepticism of Voltaire and Diderot / Patrick Riley. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Germany Left the Republic of LettersKasper Risbjerg EskildsenA common culture of scholarship existed across Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. This culture possessed its own institutions, traditions, and rituals that connected its members across borders and religious divides. A professor from Lisbon, a librarian from Hanover, and a schoolmaster from Turku would all speak nearly the same language and wear nearly the same clothing. They would (...) share many of the same dreams, celebrate many of the same heroes, and have similar memories from their youth and adult life. They were convinced that they belonged to the same cultural group and were normally willing to make personal and economic sacrifices when called upon by members of this group. Long before the emergence of European nation-states, the community of scholars formed what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined community, united by the forces of language, culture, and writing.1From around 1500, the community of scholars went by the name respublica litteraria—the Republic of Letters. Italian humanists already used the metaphor in the early fifteenth century, and with Erasmus of Rotterdam's Antibar-barorum liber, it became commonplace within Europe.2 To Erasmus and his [End Page 421] circle the Republic of Letters signified the natural community between all students of creation, divine reason, and Greek and Roman antiquity. It gathered scholars across space and time and set them apart from the hordes of ignorant barbarians. To most early modern scholars, however, respublica litteraria signified much more than a community of reason and knowledge. They used the metaphor to describe every aspect of the culture of scholarship that connected its members and demarcated them from surrounding society. Universities, academies, and secret societies were talked about as parts of the Republic of Letters. Scholarly letters and conversations tête-à-tête, books, lectures and seminars, rituals and traditions were all included. The metaphor demarcated invisible borders between learned and lay, tacitly known to insiders but rarely strictly defined.3The Republic ChallengedDuring the last decades of the seventeenth century the metaphor of the Republic of Letters lost much of its force and elasticity. Scholars used and debated the metaphor more than ever before, but these heated and emotional discussions were not necessarily—as is assumed in much of the work on the eighteenth century4 —a sign that the metaphor and the culture it represented had gained ground. The discussions were, much rather, a symptom of crisis. The end of the great religious wars and the emergence of modern centralized states forced scholars to rethink their role in society and their relationship to the new military and administrative elites. Philosophical skepticism and philological criticism threatened established academic teachings and methods.5 Debates about the Republic of Letters reveal the scholars' efforts to answer these political and intellectual challenges. In her studies of learned Huguenots who, after 1685, were spread across Europe, Anne Goldgar has described how the alienated community of scholars at the turn of the eighteenth century came increasingly under pressure.6 The Huguenots felt marginalized in their adopted [End Page 422] homes, lost income and patronage, and suffered a decline in social prestige. According to Goldgar, these external pressures resulted in stronger internal bonds, as exiled scholars rallied around the ideal of the borderless Republic of Letters. But already before Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot scholars defined a French version of the republic—La République des Lettres—in strong opposition to the forces suppressing the Protestant minority. In 1684 Pierre Bayle defiantly declared from his Dutch refuge,It is not a matter of religion, but of science: therefore one should put an end to all boundaries that divide men into different camps, and consider only that which unites them, namely their rank as noblemen in the Republic of Letters. In this sense all scholars should regard themselves as brothers, and consequently one another as family. They should say:We are all equal We are all relatives } as children of Apollo.7Protestant Northern Europe did not witness the same religious and political conflicts that France did.8 Scholars there were also ridden by crisis at the turn... (shrink)

Th e contemporary right to freedom of thought together with all its further declinations into freedom of speech, religion, conscience and expression, had one of its earliest historical recognitions at the end of the Wars of Religion with the Edict of Nantes (1598). In several respects one can saythat the right to freedom of thought is virtually “co-original” with the endof the Wars of Religion. Following this thought further, one might think that human rights defi ne the boundaries (...) of our social coexistence and are inextricably connected to the “fact” of cultural pluralism. (shrink)

Pierre Bayle is perhaps most well-known for arguing in his Dictionary (1697) that the problem of evil cannot be solved by reason alone. This skepticism about theodicy is usually credited to a religious crisis suffered by Bayle in 1685 following the unjust imprisonment and death of his brother, the death of his father, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But in this paper I argue that Bayle was skeptical about theodicy a decade earlier than these events, (...) from at least the time of his Sedan philosophy course (1675–77). I then argue that both the Various Thoughts on the Comet (1683) and Philosophical Commentary on Luke 4:23 (1686–88), which are usually read as treatments of superstition and toleration respectively, are works that also closely engage the problem of evil and demonstratethe skepticism of Bayle toward theodicy. (shrink)

Before the emergence of the concept of individual rights, in the eighteenth century, toleration was conceded by states only to the corporations that constituted the state. Many states that, like France after the Edict of Nantes, conceded a form of toleration, did so without accepting the principle of toleration. The recognition or toleration of rights for individuals first became possible only in a wholly secularised society such as that of colonial north America.

À la fin du xvie siècle et au début du xviie, la France sort d’une série de massacres et d’une trentaine d’années de violences extrêmes. Et durant ces Guerres de religion, l’un et l’autre camp se sont référés à la notion d’holocauste, prise au sens religieux et littéral du terme. Si les protestants ont été plus enclins à pratiquer cette référence biblique du point de vue de la victime, les catholiques, en particulier ligueurs, l’ont plutôt employée dans le sens d’un (...) holocauste des réformés. Toujours est-il que les deux camps, réciproquement, se saignent à blanc et font subir à toute une population, impliquée ou non, une horreur qui marque les esprits des « gens d’après ». Si bien que, durant la période de paix intérieure relative qui suit l’accession d’Henri IV au pouvoir, la conscience d’une catastrophe juste passée s’impose, en particulier au théâtre et dans les tragédies. Une catastrophe à laquelle les contemporains se réfèrent comme événement radical du monde d’alors, un pire absolu de ce que l’humanité peut produire d’inhumain, une horreur qu’il faudrait peut-être oublier et/ou sur laquelle il est pourtant nécessaire de faire retour, pour tenter de la penser. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Edict of Oedipus (Oedipus Tyrannus 223–51)Edwin CarawanI utter to all Cadmeans this proclamation! Whoever among you knows at whose hands Laius, son of Labdacus, perished, him I command to tell me all! If he is afraid that if he removes upon himself, well and good, he shall suffer nothing else unwelcome, but shall leave the land unharmed. But if someone knows another of you, or a foreigner, (...) to be the killer, let him not be silent; for I can dispense rewards, and gratitude also shall be his. But if you remain silent and someone, fearing for a friend or for himself, rejects this order—what I shall do then you must hear from me! I forbid all belonging to this land, over which I rule and sit upon the throne to receive him or to speak to him, or let him share in prayers and sacrifices to the gods, or to touch holy water; but all must drive him from their homes, since we are polluted as the Pythian oracle of god has just now revealed to me. This is how I shall fight side by side with the god and with the man who died.(223–45)[And I pray that the doer of the deed, whether a single man has gone undetected or he has acted with others, may wear away a miserable life in misery, miserable as he is. And I pray further that if he is by the hearth in my own house with my own knowledge, I may suffer the fate with which I have just cursed others.](246–51)1 [End Page 187]The speech of Oedipus to the assembled Thebans contains this notorious pronouncement of his own doom. It is a troublesome text and has been treated with much ingenuity. I quote above the recent Loeb translation by Lloyd–Jones, not because it has any singular defect, but on the contrary because it is an apt and representative treatment and the translator has fully justified his changes to the text. In the first paragraph he supposes that Oedipus sentences the killer of Laius to exile or excommunication, as almost all other commentators suppose: the penalties described in lines 228–29 and 236–41 must apply to the killer himself. Unfortunately, the text that has come down to us in the manuscripts does not quite say as much. So, as many scholars do, Lloyd– Jones finds a lacuna after line 227 and makes other alterations to suit; the curse against the killer in lines 246–51 now seems superfluous, so he brackets it. These changes are not prompted by any difficulty in the text itself but by the editor's understanding of what the text must mean. One presumes that Oedipus is addressing his every remedy against the perpetrator, the killer who slew Laius by his own hand.2 This essay challenges that presumption and the editorial license that derives from it.In the first section we consider the text that is preserved in the manuscripts, along with the major editorial changes, and find that modern editors, almost without exception, have proceeded on the assumption that the order for exile and excommunication can only apply to the actual killer or "author of the crime." The second section presents the evidence for a different assumption on the part of the ancient audience: that anyone who conceals and consorts with a killer bears a measure of guilt and may be punished accordingly. In the third section I offer a new interpretation of the edict and its implications later in the play, based upon this presumption of guilt by association.§ 1 The speech of Oedipus to the Theban assembly (216–75), as found in the manuscripts, has three sections. There is first a preamble (216–22), lamenting the difficulty of the task. We are then presented with what I shall call "the edict" (223–51), including various measures to assure discovery and punishment of the guilty parties and concluding with [End Page 188] the curse that Oedipus takes upon himself (the passage that Lloyd–Jones bracketed, 246–51). The edict is followed... (shrink)

The edicts expounding Dharma--the laws of piety and morality--which the Indian emperor Asoka caused to be inscribed on rocks and pillars set up throughout the kingdom. The editors have rearranged these edicts in an order designed to render them more accessible to the general reader in a clear, readable translation.--L. S. F.

U ovom radu pokusacemo da ponudimo opstiji nacrt za razmatranje odnosa izmedju toga kako se na pitanje religijske tolerancije gleda u dva dokumenta koja hriscanska i islamska religijska tradicija priznaju i slave. Rec je o Milanskom ediktu i o Ustavu Medine. Ovi dokumenti su za svoje vreme bili revolucionarni. Medjutim, sami ovi dokumenti, kao i religijska ucenja, na kojima su oni zasnovani, ne mogu biti merilo za uredjivanje odnosa u nase vreme. Oni su izlozeni u pojmovnom okviru i u vrednosnom (...) sistemu koji je vladao u doba kada su ta ucenja i ti dokumenti nastali. Mnogi odnosi koji su tada postojali, danas ne postoje. Na primer, u Milanskom ediktu afirmise se opste pravo na religiju, a u Ustavu Medine uzajamna tolerancija avramovskih monoteistickih religija, dok se osobe koje danas nazivamo ateistima ili agnosticima uopste pominju. (shrink)

"A literary translation which is also easy and pleasing to read."—Ludwik Sternbach, _Journal of the American Oriental Society _.

Since its enactment in AD 313, the Edict of Milan, an edict that freed Christianity from empire-wide persecution, Constantine’s declaration has received a significant amount of attention within Christendom. Most of the discussion has centered on Constantine’s conversion, the precursor to the actual edict, with many suggesting that Constantine was acting more as a politician than a Christian. While this line of inquiry is legitimate, perhaps a better approach to the question may be more helpful to present-day (...) Christians. That is, while it is logical to deduce that every prudent politician will ignore the largest religious movement in his/her time at his/her own peril, Christians of every age will be better served if they critically evaluate their reception of each and every major policy that is clearly aimed at their benefit. With this background, this paper will attempt to critically examine the reception of Constantine’s edict by the Church in the years immediately following its enactment. Two early exhibits will be brought to bear here: the Donatist controversy and the Arian controversy. In so doing, the thesis that while Christians had every reason to celebrate the enactment of the edict, down the road, an uncritical adoption of the emperor’s policies and favors towards the church opened a door for an unhealthy marriage between earthly powers and the church that proved detrimental in the ensuing years, will be defended. As such, the Church’s reception of the Edict of Milan continues to be a lesson to Christians of every age in their relationship with the political leadership of their time. (shrink)

Immunity was an institution of Roman and Frankish public law that conferred exemption from various kinds of state obligations. In Roman law, immunity might be granted to an individual, group, or community by the public authority, whether the Roman state itself or one of its constituent self-regulating bodies. It was not an institution with a fixed content; terms varied according to the discretion and powers of the grantor and the system of obligations from which relief was sought. Exemption might be (...) for a limited duration and was always liable to be revoked, especially by imperial authorities, a circumstance that makes it difficult to evaluate the role and extent of immunities in the late empire. Immunities conferred by the emperors are mentioned quite frequently in the legal sources of the fourth and fifth centuries in reference to exemptions from taxation and other public burdens. These imperial grants are generally regarded as the forerunners of Merovingian concessions. (shrink)

Zed Shaw has perfected the world's best system for learning Python. Following it, students will succeed-just like the hundreds of thousands of beginners Zed has taught to date! InLearn Python 3 the Hard Way, students will learn Python while working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Read them. Type their code precisely. (No copying and pasting!) Fix mistakes. Watch the programs run. As they do, they'll learn how software works; what good programs look like; how to read, write, and think about (...) code; and how to find and fix your mistakes using tricks professional programmers use. -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 5-56.

India is one of the most culturally, philosophically and religiously diverse countries in the world. The roots, not only of these diversities but also of morally appropriate responses to them, i.e. to pluralism, go very deep. This presentation substantiates this claim by looking at the relevant edicts of Emperor Asoka who reigned in India in the 3rd century BCE. Asoka not only advises people with deeply divergent worldviews to live together face to face but also suggests what the basis for (...) this coexistence could be. He claims that resources exist in all traditions to exercise self-restraints. These self-restraints are of two kinds: self-related and other-related. Everyone should exercise both these self-restraints, particularly in speech. This ‘control of tongue’ is crucial for morally legitimate and principled coexistence. In the article, I try to explicate the meaning of these edicts and flesh out this argument by providing a vivid, quasi-phenomenological account of what public life in Asokan times was like. (shrink)

Making extensive use of archival and published documents from the eighteenth century, this book argues that the public sphere in eighteenth-century Prussia was a conservative realm that was deeply invested in methods of social control.

Apollo's oracle gives specific instructions concerning the treatment of the murderer of Laius. Oedipus issues an edict of excommunication and bindshimself under a curse. I wish to examine the relationship between these three pronouncements as they occur initially and as they are used throughout the play. The basis of what I have to say is tentative in that it consists in a particular interpretation of Oedipus' addres, 216 ff., and in the assumption that Sophocles employed a distinction between an (...) edict, that is a secular command of the kingas governing authority, and a curse which, once pronounced, is felt to operate independently. However, both the interpretation and the assumption are farfrom arbitrary, and if they are acceptable the resulting analysis reveals whatmight be called Sophocles' creative use of past episodes. The terms of the oraclegive way to an edict of excommunication, and this in turn, becomes the contentof a curse which initially had a different content. (shrink)

Abstract:This article uses a large corpus of previously understudied documents—i.e., appointment edicts of medieval China—to reveal how real-time negotiation between the imperial court and its provincial officials gave rise to two sophisticated theories of political reciprocity that impose limits on the sovereign. The first, well-studied in existent scholarship, claimed that the ruler was obliged to appoint worthy officials to promote the well-being of the commoners. The second, which this article excavates, stated instead that the ruler, while enjoying the services of (...) the employed officials, was obliged to repay the services properly, sometimes even at the cost of commoners. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe main objective of the New Philosophy was to ‘improve the lives of people and nations in part by improving medical practice’. To this end, Oliva Sabuco sought to improve humankind's know...

The paper examines how the Religious Edict, seen as a public-law instrument for the management of religious peace, might provide a new context for Kant's theology, now seen as an unsettling public intervention in a concrete religious and political culture. I shall begin by outlining a revisionist account of the Religious Edict as a representative instance of Prussian 'enlightened absolutist' Religionspolitik ; then move on to a sketch of Kant's philosophical theology as a rational religious intervention in the (...) volatile North German religious Aufklarung ; before concluding with some remarks on the historical significance of Kant's religious and political metaphysics in the context of his encounter with the censors. (shrink)

Through its struggle for three centuries, a demonstration of the strength of their beliefs, the patience and suffering of Christians in the beginning of IV. have achieved to a large extent what they demanded, what they wrote and what the apologists of Christianity sought. The latter gained the right to freedom of his being in a polytheistic state.

In recent times, scholars of precolonial South Asia have been solicited to take part in public debates regarding ‘ancient traditions of tolerance’. The general idea is to request them to collect and exhibit ‘evidence’ and exempla from classics and historical sources about political and practical form of tolerance, so to permit non-specialists to learn from the past and to derive behavioural patterns from ‘historical samples’. Nevertheless, although the patriarchal motto ‘historia magistra vitae’ is still widely believed, looking at the past (...) is not that smooth and easy, as can be seen from the problematic history of the reception of the paradigmatic figure of Aśoka. (shrink)

This paper begins with a brief review of evidence for migration to the relatively affluent city of Rome during the earlier Empire. Then it is suggested that most slaves coming to Rome at this time originated in the Greek East and that these slaves were volunteers not forcible captives. Slavery by contract made it possible for individuals to overcome credit constraints limiting their ability to borrow to finance training and migration. This view is tested by examining literary, epigraphic and archaeological (...) evidence to decide whether slave markets in the Greek East (at Acmonia, Ephesus, Magnesia on Meander, Thyatira and Delos) and in Rome itself were suitable for processing „dangerous merchandise“ (= forcible captives). The totality of the evidence suggests they were not. Near Easterners conveyed through local and Roman slave markets were probably willing self-sellers seeking economic advancement. A new, positive, light is cast on the role of slave dealers who profited from reallocating labor power from less to more productive uses. (shrink)

Cicero, after a discussion of the value of Cornelius' bill about privilegia, is clearly here dealing with the bill, ‘ut praetores ex edictis suis perpetuis ius dicerent’ . The pluperfect subjunctives suggest that he is arguing that notorious unjust judgements of previous years would not have happened, if Cornelius' bill had been then in force. Cicero, after a discussion of the value of Cornelius' bill about privilegia,' is clearly here dealing with the bill, ‘ut praetores ex edictis suis perpetuis ius (...) dicerent’ . The pluperfect subjunctives suggest that he is arguing that notorious unjust judgements of previous years would not have happened, if Cornelius' bill had been then in force. (shrink)