Literary Conduits for ‘Consent’

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kumar Jha

The making of the imperial subjects is as much a matter of historical process as the emergence of the empire. In the case of the Mughal state, this process started much before its actual establishment in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in North India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.

1986 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Pound

The economic standing of the English parochial clergy in the early sixteenth century has been re-examined recently by Michael Zell, and the evidence at his disposal suggests that many of them were poverty-stricken in the extreme. He points to the large surplus of unendowed curates, chaplains and the like, and to the fact that when employment was available it was neither rewarding, in a monetary sense, nor necessarily secure. Stipends were officially regulated by an early fifteenth-century statute which set a maximum of £5 6s. 8d. per annum, and ‘evidence from all regions of England indicates that very rarely were curates and chaplains given more than that’. It was not uncommon for areas in the north to pay even less than this. In Lancashire, for example, the average salary of about 100 curates and chaplains in 1524 was £2 9s. 6d. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a year later it was £4. On the basis of such evidence, Mr Zell reasonably concludes that the unbeneficed clergy must have found it very difficult to survive, and that ‘the average country priest could not have been a person of high social status’.


Author(s):  
Pankaj Jha

Historians rarely write about the fifteenth century in north India. When they do, it is within certain set frames, for instance, as an interregnum, or as part of ‘regional’ histories. Occasionally, they write about the ferment of the bhakti ‘movement’ during the period. Tracing the narrow lanes of this historiography, the chapter also points to recent researches that raise some interesting questions. These relate to military labour, literary cultures, vernacularization, multilingualism, and so on. Apart from taking a critical stock of this historiography, the chapter explores how literary history might be fruitfully linked to ‘mainstream’ political history. It analyses meanings of, and the relationship between, literature, history, and power. Texts are not just innocent sources and repository of information. They are also seen as interventions in an ongoing conversation with other texts in the same and related themes and areas.


AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Adolf E. Hofmeister

There is little evidence of Bremen merchants in Norway before the royal charters issued from 1279 onwards, even though Bremen had been the seat of the missionary archbishop for the Nordic countries since the ninth century. Trade in Bergen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was dominated by the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic Sea coast led by merchants from Lübeck. Despite opposition from Hanseatic merchants sailing to Bergen, merchants from Hamburg and Bremen developed new trading posts to barter cod on Iceland and Shetland in the fifteenth century. Traders from Hamburg and Bremen on Iceland competed for licences issued by the Danish king. The 1558 debt register of a merchant from Bremen in Kumbaravogur provides considerable insight into this trade. The Danish king restricted sailings to Iceland to Danish merchants from 1601. On Shetland the Scottish foud allotted landing places to foreign skippers and traders. Merchants from Bremen became respected members of the island communities and in the seventeenth century they changed to trading in herring. Several tariff rate rises led to the end of Bremen sailings to Shetland by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bremen merchants in Norway succeeded in breaking the Lübeck dominance in Bergen in the sixteenth century. By 1600, other Norwegian harbours in the North Atlantic, notably Stavanger, were also destinations for ships from Bremen.


2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-169
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr

This paper builds on my earlier study of the relationship between the elephant and imperial sovereignty in north India, extending the argument from 1200 to 1600ce. The ritual and military use of the elephant signalled a self-conscious imperial formation, based on the Ghaznavid model, with the emperor as king-of-kings and elephant-master, ruling over subjugated tributary monarchs. However, new conditions in the sixteenth century led to the rise of a centralised and expansive state, now armed with gunpowder weapons, and thus no longer dependent on tributary relations or the elephant. The elephant, which formerly stood for divine or satanic power, was now humanised, and the emperor’s status was elevated above it as the closest living being to God. In short, studying the imperial formation in the north through its use of elephants renders meaningless the characterisation of linear evolution from a more orthodox Islamic state (‘Delhi Sultanate’) to a tolerant one (‘Mughal Empire’).


Archaeologia ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-358
Author(s):  
Roland W. Paul

In the latter half of the fifteenth century great changes took place in the fabric of the priory church at Great Malvern, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century it had been transformed from what was largely, if not entirely, a Norman church to one of Perpendicular character. With the exception of a doorway on the south side of the nave, the nave arcade, and the bases of the piers that support the central tower, there are no evidences of work prior to the alteration. To this rebuilding both Richard III. and Henry VII. are said to have contributed, the west window of the nave is said to have been the gift of the former and the north window of the transept that of the latter, besides a very long list of benefactors, members of well-known families of the day, local and otherwise; and it is therefore not surprising that even in its present comparatively mutilated state the decorative work in this church is among the finest in England of its date, and the glass and encaustic tiles practically unsurpassed for beauty and interest.


Author(s):  
Innocent Pikirayi

Archaeologists struggle to understand the demise of Great Zimbabwe because of poor appreciation of local and regional histories of the southern Zimbabwe plateau, post-fifteenth century. Listening to some of these extant regional histories and living narratives is key to understanding developments around Great Zimbabwe from the sixteenth century onwards. The focus in this chapter is on two sites, Boroma, a toponym east of Great Zimbabwe, and Chizhou Hill, some 80 kilometers to the north. In sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts, "Burrom" (Boroma) is presented as a prince in charge of a 'fortress' whose location coincides with Great Zimbabwe. Local narratives and indigenous histories collected from villagers near Chizhou Hill, as well as documented written sources, connect the site to the resettlement of the area by migrants from the Mutapa State in northern Zimbabwe. Combined, both sites attest to a complex process leading to the demise of Great Zimbabwe and its culture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.


2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Orsini

How can we conceptualise multilingual literary culture, and how can we research it? Using the turbulent ‘long fifteenth century’ in north India as a site, this article questions research models based on single languages (Hindi, Urdu) and engages critically with early modern taxonomies and archives. The article focuses on the materiality of the archive—the language, script and format in which texts were written down and copied—on the spaces and locations in which literature was produced and performed, and on the oral-performative practices and agents that made texts circulate to audiences in ways not bound by the script in which the texts appear to us. Not only are the models of composite culture and language-specificity questioned as a result, but the sites of literary production move from the court to a series of intersections, and areas that were peripheral move into view and connect with others.


Archaeologia ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 117-142
Author(s):  
J. G. Mann

The Franciscan monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie is situated on the bank of the Mincio some five miles west of Mantua on the road to Cremona. My attention was first drawn to it by the late Baron de Cosson during a conversation in Florence in 1926, when he showed me a photograph of the interior of the church. He understood that the local tradition was that the statues were clad in armour taken from the battlefield of Marignano in 1515, and mentioned that there appeared to be some basis for this belief as the armour looked to to him genuine enough, so far as it was possible to see it from the floor of the church. ‘Rien n'est plus rare qu'une arinure ancienne’ The suggestion that there might be in existence a church full of armour dating from the early part of the sixteenth century, hitherto unrecorded, inspired a desire to visit the place at the first opportunity. I was unable to fulfil my intention that year, but two years later I was in the north of Italy again and was able to make the promised pilgrimage. The antiquary is well used to receiving specious accounts of treasures which on examination turn out to be utterly worthless. Perhaps objects associated with warlike exploits lend themselves even more commonly to exaggeration than most, and I was prepared to find that I had made a journey in vain. On my arrival a brother informed me that the armour on the statues was only of carta pesta and not worth looking at. But the first figure that I inspected showed that my hopes had been exceeded. Not only was much of the armour real, so far as one could tell through a coating of thick black paint overlaid with the dust of countless Italian summers, but its form was not that of the time of Marignano but of some fifty years earlier, when the art of the Italian armourer had reached its zenith. Last year I returned to the monastery and arranged to have a scaffold erected, and to have the seventeen figures which wear armour out of the total of sixty-seven photographed; for permission to do this I wish to record my gratitude to Monsignor Guarnieri and the Soprintendente di Belle Arti of.the district.


Author(s):  
A. Teixeira da Mota

SynopsisThe idea that only after 1490 the European sailors had ‘come for the first time in recorded history to struggle with the limitations placed on sailing ships by the winds and currents of the open ocean’ does not correspond to reality. There is enough proof to show that much earlier, in the fifteenth century, the North-East Trades’ regularity, the wind variability in the zone directly north of them, and the Canaries Current were already known. When the fifteenth century ended, the Portuguese had already verified the symmetry of wind patterns in the Atlantic on both sides of the equatorial calm zone, which led them to apply the significant name of ‘ventos gerais’ to the trade winds of both hemispheres.Accurate knowledge of the wind and current systems was essential to good navigation and the Portuguese ratters of the sixteenth century, chiefly ‘carreira da India’ rutters, include an increasing amount of information on that subject, referring especially to zones in the passage from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic. The report of a voyage (1503) proves that at that time the Portuguese already knew the Gulf of Guinea winds and currents sufficiently well. As a result of oceanic sailing, the traditional ratters, exclusively coastal, developed considerably, not only by adding data about latitudes and compass variations but also by the indication of winds and currents. There appeared also an even newer type of ratter, the ‘oceanic rutter‘, in which the safest and quickest routes, because of the changeability of winds and current patterns, are indicated.Information about elements concerning winds and currents which are included in the Portuguese ratters was revealed in printed matter after the end of the sixteenth century and this allowed some European scientists to study, because of the availability of better information, the causes of those physical phenomena, which had already been treated briefly in the sixteenth century by two nautical treatise writers, D. João de Castro and Father Fernando Oliveira.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN MOLINEAUX ◽  
JOANNA KOPACZYK ◽  
RHONA ALCORN ◽  
WARREN MAGUIRE ◽  
VASILIS KARAISKOS ◽  
...  

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.


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