Context - Texts In Context, The Rise Of Cultural Context, The Discovery Of Situation, The Contextual Turn
contextio century latin
Like "text," the word "context" is a metaphor derived from the Latin texere, "to weave." In the fourth century C.E. the Latin noun contextio described the text surrounding a given passage. In the Middle Ages, contextio came to mean "literary composition," but an interest in what we call "context," especially in biblical exegesis, was expressed through the term circumstantiae. In the ninth century, Sedulius Scotus enunciated the rule of "seven circumstances"—person, fact, cause, time, place, mode, and topic.
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It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in Italian, French, English, and German, that the term "context" (contesto, contexture, Kontext) began to be used with frequency. From the sentences before and after the passage to be interpreted, "context" came to refer to the coherence of a text, the relation of the parts and the whole. The term was also ex…
This "Counter-Enlightenment" was associated with a further expansion in the meaning of the term "context," increasingly concerned not only with local circumstances but also with the "historical context" of an entire culture, society, or age. A famous example is Madame de Staël's essay De la littérature considerée dans ses rapports ave…
In a number of disciplines in the 1920s and 1930s, especially sociology, psychology, history, and anthropology, the term "situation" came to play a central role. Karl Mannheim, for instance, one of the pioneers of the sociology of knowledge, treated ideas as socially situated (literally "tied to the situation," Situationsgebunden). At much the same time the sociologist …
In the last generation we have seen what might be called a "contextual turn," on the analogy of so many other turns in intellectual history. One sign of change is the increasing use of terms such as "contextualism," "contextualization," and "de-contextualization." In the case of theology, the "contextual reinterpretation" of rel…
Boas, Franz. "Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification." Science 9 (1887): 587–589. Burke, Peter. "Context in Context." Common Knowledge 8, no. 1 (2002): 152–177. Collingwood, R. G. "Outlines of a Philosophy of History." In The Idea of History, edited by Jan van der Dussen, 426–496. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Giglioli, Pier Paolo, c…
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