- Industry: Library & information science
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Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The ...
A province of NW. Persia, between the SW. border of the Caspian Sea and the Elburz Mountains; is low-lying, swampy, and unhealthy towards the Caspian, but the rising ground to the S. is more salubrious; wild animals are numerous in the vast forests; the soil, where cleared, is fertile and well cultivated; the Caspian fisheries are valuable; the people are of Iranian descent, and speak a Persian dialect.
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A public place in Rome and Roman cities where the courts of justice were held, and popular assemblies for civic business.
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A range of mountains lying between Saxony and Bohemia; the highest peak is the Keilberg, 4052 ft.; is rich in various metallic ores, especially silver and lead.
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A rationalistic mystic, the most distinguished scholar and thinker of the 9th century, of Irish birth; taught at the court of Charles the Bald in France, and was summoned by Alfred to Oxford in 877; died abbot of Malmesbury; held that "damnation was simply the consciousness of having failed to fulfil the divine purpose"; he derived all authority from reason, and not reason from authority, maintaining that authority unfounded on reason was of no value; d. 882.
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A realistic romancer, born at Rouen; author of "Madame Bovary," a study of provincial life, which became the subject of a prosecution, and "Salammbo," wonderful for its vigour and skill in description; he indulged in repulsive subjects (1821-1880).
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A reformed brotherhood of Cistercian monks, founded in 1577 by Jean de la Barrière, abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Feuillans, in Languedoc. The movement thus organised was a protest against the laxity which had crept into the Church, and probably received some stimulus from the Reformation, which was then in progress. The Feuillans settled in a convent in the Rue St. Honoré, Paris, which in after years became the meeting-place of a revolutionary club, which took the name of Feuillans; founded in 1790 by Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld, etc., and which consisted of members of the respectable property classes, whose views were more moderate than those of the Jacobins. They could not hold out against the flood of revolutionary violence, and on March 28, 1791, a mob burst into their place of meeting and dispersed them.
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A region of utter darkness in the depths of Hades, into which no mortal ever penetrated, the proper abode of Pluto and his Queen with their train of attendants, such as the Erinnyes, through which the spirits of the dead must pass on their way to Hades; equivalent to the valley of the shadow of death.
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A religious body in Scotland which originated in 1843 under the leadership of James Morison of Kilmarnock, and professed a creed which allowed them greater freedom as preachers of the gospel of Christ. See Morisonianism.
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A religious communistic fraternity, never very numerous, that grew up on the soil of Judea about the time of the Maccabees, and had establishments in Judea when Christ was on earth, as well as afterwards in the time of Josephus; they led an ascetic life, practised the utmost ceremonial cleanness, were rigorous in their observance of the Jewish law, and differed from the Pharisees in that they gave to the Pharisaic spirit a monastic expression; they represented Judaism in its purest essence, and in the spirit of their teaching came nearer Christianity than any other sect of the time; "Essenism," says Schurer, "is first and mainly of Jewish formation, and in its non-Jewish features it had most affinity with the Pythagorean tendency of the Greeks."
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A religious enthusiast in the reign of Charles I.; was elected a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1610; afterwards devoted himself to medicine and travelled on the Continent; subsequently joined his father in business in London, and entered Parliament in 1624; but a year later retired to the country, and at Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, founded, with some of his near relations, a religious community, known as the "Arminian Nunnery," some account of which is given in Shorthouse's "John Inglesant"; it was broken up by the Puritans in 1647; he was the intimate friend of George Herbert; this community consisted of some "fourscore persons, devoted to a kind of Protestant monasticism; they followed celibacy and merely religious duties, employed themselves in binding prayer-books, etc., in alms-giving and what charitable work was possible to them in their desert retreat, kept up, night and day, a continual repetition of the English liturgy, never allowing at any hour the sacred fire to go out" (1592-1637).
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