Among figures both well known and not are Christine de Pisan, with her redoubtable defence of women’s worth Erasmus, praising the “folly” of love the erudite Montaigne, wondering what on earth he knew Spinoza, challenging the accuracy of biblical narratives Voltaire, lampooning “the best of all possible worlds” and ridiculing the notion that “whatever is, is right” Thomas Paine, who deemed religion “irreligious” in its claustrophobic gloom John Stuart Mill, with his incisive analysis of the oppression of women and Bertrand Russell, sent to prison for opposing war.įree thinking, inquiry and hope – these, says Bakewell, are perennial humanist principles. This runs from medieval umanisti (students of humanity), who remained Christian even while resurrecting “the flowering, perfumed, fruitful works of the pagan world spring” (as John of Salisbury called them), to today’s (more secular) self-declared humanists.Īlong with intellectual developments, Sarah Bakewell gives us their material background – books, book-selling, printing, corpse dissection, plagues and sprezzatura (courtly nonchalance). But Humanly Possible traces a lineage, less of theories than of kindred spirits, over seven centuries in Europe. To date the rise of “humanism” to the early Renaissance is, strictly speaking, anachronistic there was no such term until the 19th century. Increasingly, morality’s concern was to alleviate suffering, not to justify God for inflicting it. But as early as the 1300s, Italians were enthusiastically quoting Psalm 8: “Man is only a little lower than the angels.” The passion for finding, collecting and imitating ancient Greek and Roman texts had readjusted moral priorities – away from arduous obedience to supposedly God-given rules and towards celebrating and fostering human happiness. In 1452 Giannozzo Manetti answered Innocent point by point in his own On the Dignity of Man. The events of these sieges show that a bold and vigorous sortie in force might carry destruction through every part of a besieger's approaches, where the guard is injudiciously disposed and ill commanded but that if due precautions have been observed in forming the approaches and posting the defenders, any sortie from a besieged place must be checked with loss in their advance, when the approaches are still distant or when the approaches are near, should a sortie succeed in pushing into them by a sudden rush, the assailants must inevitably be driven out again in a moment, with terrible slaughter.“M an was formed of dust, slime and ashes … conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the … stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin.” So wrote Pope Innocent III in his 12th-century On the Misery of the Human Condition. Sir John Thomas Jones, analyzing a number of sieges carried out during the Peninsular War (1807–1814), wrote: Purposes of sorties include harassment of enemy troops, destruction of siege weaponry and engineering works, joining the relief force, etc. If the sortie is through a sally port, the verb to sally may be used interchangeably with to sortie. In siege warfare, the word sortie refers specifically to a sudden issuing of troops against the enemy from a defensive position-that is, an attack launched against the besiegers by the defenders. The sortie rate is the number of sorties that a given unit can support in a given time. For example, one mission involving six aircraft would tally six sorties. In military aviation, a sortie is a combat mission of an individual aircraft, starting when the aircraft takes off. A sortie (from the French word meaning exit or from Latin root surgere meaning to "rise up") is a deployment or dispatch of one military unit, be it an aircraft, ship, or troops, from a strongpoint.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |