It was the French art critic Philippe Burty (1830-1890) who gave a name to the new movement interested in Japanese art, in 1872. He used the neologism in a series of articles that were published in the review “Le Renaissance Littéraire et Artistique”.

A French mathematician and philosopher, co-editor (along with Denis Diderot) of the Encyclopedia. He is also known for his work on differential equations and partial derivatives.

French semiotician (1947-2001) trained in semiotics by Algirdas Julien Greimas, who directed the visual semiotics workshop of the “Groupe de recherches sémio-linguistiques” (EHESS-CNRS) in Paris and taught at the architecture school of Versailles. His works had mainly to do with the analysis of advertising discourse and the semiotics of spaces and stylism. He is the author of Petites mythologies de l'œil et de l'esprit. Pour une sémiotique plastique (1985), Formes de l’empreinte (1986) and Identités visuelles (1995). He is noted for a refusal of all a priori categorisation or hierarchy among the arts and languages.

The jejunum is the central of the three divisions of the small intestine and lies between the duodenum and the ileum.

The Jesuit order, or the Society of Jesus, is a Catholic religious order founded by the Spanish gentleman soldier (hidalgo) Ignatius de Loyola (1491-1556) in 1534. It was approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. The main goal of the Society, whose motto is Ad majorem Dei gloriam (‘for the greater glory of God’) was the spreading of faith, in Christian territories through teaching and preaching, and in heathen countries through the establishment of missions, notably in China and India. The Jesuits played a vital role in the establishment of the Counter-Reformation (or Catholic Reformation) which tried to both prevent the expansion of Protestantism and to reform the Church. By 1640 the Society had already set up over 500 colleges in Europe. The Society was dissolved by Pope Clement XIV and was not re-established until 1814 by Pope Pius VII. Ignatius de Loyola was made a saint in 1622.

An Arab word signifying struggle or supreme effort; a holy war to spread or to defend Islam.

American photographer born in New York in 1939; his work has visionary aspects and tends toward the abnormal, even monstrous, an artistic approach that gives horror a sublime beauty. This makes his images provocative, whether they are in colour or in black and white – they are lay icons, and he says they represent “the struggle for the redemption of souls”.

A German philosopher who, after having left Nazi Germany to join the Jewish Brigade in Palestine, under British command, definitively settled in the United States. In his main work, The Imperative of Responsibility, he outlines an ethical concept for use in the technological age which our societies have entered: before using a technology, it is imperative to envisage the harmful, even apocalyptic, consequences of its use, for the environment as much for the future generations. The ‘principle of precaution’ recommended by certain European directives is no stranger to this policy of warning.

In 1714 the Netherlands passed under the crown of the Austrian Hapsburgs. The Emperor from 1780, Joseph II (1741-1790), known as an ‘enlightened despot’, attacked traditions under the guise of modernising the Netherlands. The clergy became subject to the state, the administrative and justice systems were modernised, convents and pilgrimages were suppressed, the persecution of non-Catholics was brought to an end, and civil marriage and divorce were instituted. Imposed too brutally, Joseph II’s reforms led to the Brabant Revolution of 1787-1790.

Unit of energy and quantity of heat corresponding to the work done when the point of application of a force of one newton is displaced through a distance of one metre in the direction of the force.

The Irish born writer (1882-1941), who ended up in self-imposed exile, an ambivalent state of mind which he sometimes revelled in, as much as one of geographical displacement, is one of the most influential writers known to literature, and is renowned for his novelistic innovation and as a towering figure in literary Modernism. To highlight his achievement it suffices to mention his novel Ulysses, published in 1922. This complex and challenging work, which is at the same time warm and humorous, has had a massive influence on literature ever since, both in terms of style and subject matter, and has been cited by many as the greatest novel ever written. Over the space of more than 600 pages, it deals in intimate detail and in innovative ways with a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, its main protagonist, who lives in Dublin, also the city of Joyce’s birth. A city which in many ways possessed Joyce, in that he hardly wrote about anything else, despite the fact that he spent the majority of his adult life living elsewhere, notably in Paris and the Italian town of Trieste. Joyce is also the author of The Dubliners (1914) (a collection of short stories, though such a weak description hardly does justice to its monumental achievement), and two other novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939). The first was a ground breaking work which was initially much misunderstood, and Joyce was driven to despair by criticisms of it, saying that people tended to ignore the ‘young’ in the title, whilst his last novel has intrigued and inspired such notable scholars and philosophers as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Andrew Norris.

It follows the Restoration. It was brought into being through the liberal revolution of the 27th, 28th and 29th July, 1830 (known as ‘The Three Glorious Days’) which forced Charles X into exile. Within ten days Louis-Philippe of Orléans had consolidated his power and brushed aside any threats. At first known by the title ‘lieutenant-general of the country’ he was recognized ‘King of the French’ on 9th August 1830. A constitutional monarchy, the July Monarchy took as its emblem the tricolour blue-white-red flag. It was brought to an end during the 1848 February days which saw the second Republic founded and the inauguration of universal suffrage.

Liberty Leading the People - Eugène Delacroix (1830)

The ensemble of legal decisions made on a particular subject area, in as such as they constitute one of the sources of law. Jurisprudence in effect shows how the judges apply the law, by essence general and abstract, to the particular and concrete cases which are submitted to them. To do jurisprudence: to be authoritative and serve as an example in a given case; creating a precedent.