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Tag Archives: Desiderius Erasmus
don quixote: erasmian touches
Miguel de Cervantes own account of his captivity by Algerian pirates is borne out by a contemporary who, in a history of Algiers written before Don Quixote had made its author famous, tells us that: According to the testimony of … Continue reading
don quixote: last twilight of the heroic age
It was this sudden shift, from one generation of Spanish life, from heroic tension to empty disillusion, that was also the background to Miguel de Cervantes own life, which formed the background to Don Quixote. … Cervantes, in a sense, … Continue reading
assault on english
…The deadening influence that official jargon can exert upon thought was a topic that preoccupied George Orwell. … In Orwell’s novel, 1984 he recounted dramatically how a government in control of all media of communication can and will so degrade … Continue reading
witch hunting: clerical pastime
European witch hunting. How can such lunacy have possessed humanity for two centuries? How could Europe’s educated laity, those lawyers, scholars and philosophers in the age of Erasmus cave in to such monkish phantasmagoria? The confessions of the so-called witches … Continue reading
witch hunts: divine folly
Witch hunting. How can such lunacy have possessed humanity for the better part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? It seems inconceivable, and yet, though the numbers have often been exaggerated, the facts themselves are not in doubt. The European … Continue reading
bruegel: too busy for the cosmic rhythm
…The only concept of the nature of things that seems never to have occurred to Bruegel is our objective scientific one by which the cosmos becomes something physically explicable, and hence godless. As for Bruegel’s god, his religious affiliation can … Continue reading
bruegel: cripple creek
At the popular level, Bruegel’s fantastic drolleries are taken at face value. A curious and delightful painter. At his true level, when these obvious charms are recognized as nothing but a pictorial skin, Bruegel is discoverable as an extraordinarily complex … Continue reading
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