Overview

Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a much larger historical presence before and since it was given a name in the Renaissance. The contributors to this volume examine a series of case studies to explain how different cultures and religions, past and present, have wrestled with morality's exceptions and margins and the norms with which they break. For example, to what extent have the Islamic and Judaic traditions allowed smoking tobacco or gambling? How did the Spanish colonization of America generate formal justifications for what it claimed? Where were the lines of transgression around food, money-lending, and sex in Ancient Greece and Rome? How have different systems dealt with suicide? Casuistry lives at the heart of such questions, in the tension between norms and exceptions, between what seems forbidden but is not. A Historical Approach to Casuistry does not only examine this tension, but re-frames casuistry as a global phenomenon that has informed ethical and religious traditions for millennia, and that continues to influence our lives today.

Full Product Details

Author:   Professor Carlo Ginzburg (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) ,  Lucio Biasiori (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Weight:   0.526kg
ISBN:  

9781350168879

ISBN 10:   1350168874
Pages:   376
Publication Date:   25 June 2020
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Preface, Carlo Ginzburg (University of California, Los Angeles, USA; Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy) Acknowledgments Part I Casuistry and Medicine across Time and Space 1. The Royal College of Paediatrics 2004 / 2015 Guidance for Decision Making at The End of Life : A Framework for Casuistry, Avishai Sarfatti (Oxford University, UK) 2. The Medical Case Narrative in Pre-Modern Europe and China: Comparative History of an Epistemic Genre, Gianna Pomata (Johns Hopkins University, USA) Part II Religious Anomalies in the Ancient and Medieval World 3. (Un)written Laws and Transgressions in Ancient Greece and Rome, Jan Bremmer (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands) 4. The Case About Jesus: (Counter-)History and Casuistry in Toledot Yeshu, Daniel Barbu (CNRS, UMR 8584, Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes, Paris, France) Part III Legal Casuistry between Judaism and Islam 5. “I signed but I did not say”: The Status of Chess in Early Modern Judaism, Andrew Berns (University of South Carolina, USA) 6. The Many Roads to Justice: A Case of Adultery in Sixteenth-Century Cairo, Caterina Bori (Università di Bologna, Italy) 7. Islamic Casuistry and Galenic Medicine: Hashish, Coffee and the Emergence of the Jurist-Physician, Islam Dayeh (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) Part IV Casuistry between Reformation and Counter Reformation 8. The Exception as Norm: Casuistry of Suicide in John Donne’s Biathanatos, Lucio Biasiori (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy) 9. “Whether ’tis lawful for a man to beat his wife”: Casuistical Exercises in Late-Stuart and Early-Hanoverian England, Giovanni Tarantino (University of Western Australia) Part V Norms and Exceptions in the Early Modern Global World (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) 10. Indians’ Forced Labour as Case for Exception in Seventeenth-Century Colonial America, Angela Ballone (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) 11. Morality and Empire: Cases, Norms and Exceptions in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Asia, Sanjay Subrahmanyam (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) 12. An ‘Our Father’ for the Hottentots: Religion, Language and the Consensus Gentium, Martin Mulsow (Universität Erfurt, Germany) Part VI Inside and Outside Port-Royal 13. Port-Royal at grips with its own casuistry and Pascal’s stand, Silvia Berti (Sapienza - Università di Roma, Italy) 14. Casuistry and Irony: Some Reflections on Pascal’s Provinciales, Carlo Ginzburg (University of California, Los Angeles, USA; Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy) Sources Bibliography

Reviews

Ginzburg has assembled some of the world's leading thinkers to explore casuistry as a fundamental and surprisingly neglected approach to intractable dilemmas and paradoxes throughout history. Traversing disciplines and centuries, this volume will change the way we think and the way we think about thinking. * Matthew C. Mirow, Professor of Law, Florida International University, USA * As these wide-ranging essays demonstrate, casuistry is hardly so simple as normally believed, but a style of thought in which norms and exceptions are mutually constitutive, dialogically and dialectically interrelated. Time after time, we observe how established authorities in one domain or another (law, medicine, theology; Europe, Asia, the Americas) responded to deviations from what they prescribed and expected, struggling to defuse the challenge these anomalies present by construing them -- often with extraordinary ingenuity -- as exceptions that prove, rather than threaten the rule. Each chapter makes for fascinating reading, as does the volume as a whole. * Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History of Religions, University of Chicago, USA *

Author Information

Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Emeritus Professor of History of European Cultures at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Lucio Biasiori is Research Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. His interests encompass early modern religious and cultural history.

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