scholarly journals Testing the New World: early modern chemistry and mineral prospection at colonial Jamestown, 1607–1610

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 6851-6864
Author(s):  
Umberto Veronesi ◽  
Thilo Rehren ◽  
Beverly Straube ◽  
Marcos Martinón-Torres
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
New World ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Modern Chemistry ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Many ◽  
New Research ◽  
Copper Ores

AbstractThe paper presents new research on an assemblage of metallurgical crucibles used in the assay of minerals at colonial Jamestown. The aim of the study is to explore the range of chemical operations carried out at the site of the first permanent British settlement in America, for which little is known in the documents. The results show that the colonists used high-quality Hessian crucibles to perform tests on different types of complex polymetallic sulphides. This was done to (1) prospect for potential silver and copper ores and (2) to find suitable sources of zinc and tin to be alloyed into brass and bronze through cementation with imported copper offcuts. This study makes a relevant contribution to the growing field of the archaeology of early chemistry and mineral prospection as well as the archaeology of early European colonies in the New World. In particular, material culture can shed fresh light on how European settlers reacted to the many challenges of a new and unfamiliar natural environment and how they tried to make sense and exploit it for financial profit.

scholarly journals Handling the Theme of Hands in early Modern Cross-over Contexts

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Anne Sophie Haar Refskou ◽  
Laura Søvsø Thomasen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Human Hand ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
The Many ◽  
Frequent Presence

The human hand is a complex phenomenon within the contexts of early modern visual and textual culture. Its frequent presence in early modern texts and illustrations - as well as the many different types of described and depicted hands - raises a number of questions as to its functions and significances. In this article, we examine the role of the hand and two of its familiar functions –pointing and touching – against diverse and diverging understandings of human perception and cognition in the period focussing particularly on relations between bodies and minds. Through comparative analyses of cross-over examples from both medicine, manuals and drama – primarily John Bulwer’sChirologia and Chironomia, William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – we explore the questions implied by hands and their contributions to the knowledge probed and proposed by these texts and illustrations.

Benedict XIV’s donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna (1751) Origins and history

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuele Tacconi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
New World ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jesuit Missionary ◽  
The City

Abstract In 1751 Pope Benedict XIV made a donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, a scientific academy located in the city of his birth. This article reconstructs the history of this group of objects back to its origins in the Jesuit missions of the upper Amazon basin, by presenting and examining new documentary evidence. The encounter between a Jesuit missionary and Pope Benedict XIV is analysed in the context of the early modern reception of the New World and its peoples in Catholic Europe. Finally, an overview is presented of the items in this collection, which represent some of the scarcest and oldest known examples of native material culture from the region.

scholarly journals Towards Interoperable Network Ontologies for the Digital Humanities

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Langmead ◽  
Jessica M. Otis ◽  
Christopher N. Warren ◽  
Scott B. Weingart ◽  
Lisa D. Zilinksi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Functional Data ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Data Models ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The Many ◽  
Methodological Considerations ◽  
Coherent Body

Scholars have long been interested in networks. Networks of scholarly exchange, trade, kinship, and patronage are some of the many such longstanding subjects of study. Recent and ongoing digital humanities projects are now considering networks with fresh approaches and increasingly complex datasets. At the heart of these digital projects are ‘network ontologies’ — functional data models for distilling the complicated, messy connections between historical people, objects, and places. Although scholars creating network ontologies necessarily focus on different types of content, if these networks are to form a coherent body of scholarship in the future, we must work towards the creation interoperable ontological structures, rather than yet another set of competing standards. Here we examine the methodological considerations behind designing such interoperable ontologies, focusing primarily on the example of Early Modern historical networks. We argue that it would be infeasible to adopt a single ontological standard for all possible digital humanities projects; flexibility is essential to accommodate all subjects and objects of humanistic enquiry, from the micro-level to the longue-durée. However, we believe it possible to establish shared practices to structure these network ontologies on an ongoing basis in order to ensure their long-term interoperability.

A Hybrid New World... or Not?

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Fatima Essadek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Cultural Pattern

During the last three decades, early modern scholarship has drawn heavily on twentieth-century theorisation to analyse the socio-cultural conditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An example of such scholarly endeavours is the attempt to appropriate the concept of hybridity to explain the constitution of cultural identity. This article re-evaluates this critical trend by reviewing the model of hybridity in relation to early modern cultures; it simultaneously proposes the existence of another cultural pattern that is here labelled ‘cultural transformation’. The article also contends that hybridisation is more manifest in the domain of material culture: the ethno-cultural characteristics of early modern communities made them more receptive towards accepting and integrating material objects but less welcoming towards assimilating beliefs, values or cultural practices from other nations.

scholarly journals Boston in New England, Intoxicant Town

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Mark Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article explores the relationship between a distinctive early modern city, Boston, Massachusetts, and the dramatic expansion of the production and consumption of intoxicants in the emergent Atlantic world. In particular, it attempts to draw together two strands of Boston's history seldom considered together: its origins as an aspirational settlement of English puritans aiming to build a godly city, and the deep involvement of its merchants and consumers in the overseas trade in intoxicants – tobacco, sugar, rum, wine, coffee, tea, chocolate, and others. By considering the cultures of consumption associated with godliness alongside other clusters of consumption in which intoxicants also played a part, it attempts to open new avenues for thinking about the many ways in which new forms and objects of desire transformed the economy and material culture of early modernity.

scholarly journals Stone Raft: allegory on the spread of European urbanistics in Early Modern times

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Rossa
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Transfer Of Knowledge ◽  
Urban Networks ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
New Research

Cities were the foundational cores of Western Civilization and, at least for westerners, civilization is still unthinkable without cities and urban networks. Inevitably cities have been one of the main tools used by Europeans to establish their colonial systems, starting with the first, the Portuguese and Spanish, in Early Modern times. This paper aims to highlight the role of Iberian colonizing processes as vehicles of European city planning culture.There are basically two large urbanistic pattern families for colonial towns: the orthogonal grid known since Ancient Greece, based on square blocks; and the sequences of long and narrow plots, systematically used in Europe since the beginning of the second millennium. The latter is more flexible and topographically more adaptable than the former. Both patterns are present in Europe, but also in the parts of the world that experienced European colonization.The Portuguese conveyed and developed the plot system in the remaining four continents, while the Spanish codified and carried the block one to the New World. That established a distinction that has been dissected for decades. However, when these two modes are regarded from a global perspective, they appear as two complementary and diverse aspects of the spread of European urbanistics rather than an opposition.The allegory taken from José Saramago’s famous novel The Stone Raft aims not only to give us an image of that European transfer of knowledge to the New World, but also to make us think about new research attitudes and goals around that extraordinary and long lasting legacy.

Domestication

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-27
Author(s):  
Timothy Alborn
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Gold Extraction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Gold Bearing ◽  
The Way

After surveying early-modern gold extraction and export from the New World, this chapter discusses the contrasts Britons developed between their own and Iberia’s encounters with gold during the three centuries after the Conquest, as well as their relief at never being subjected to the temptation of possessing gold-bearing colonies. Such efforts paralleled the way they thought about the many other commodities they imported from exotic climes. In all these cases, a process of domestication converted a barbaric substance into a signifier of civilization. Throughout the century after 1750, Britons tirelessly debated the boundaries between gold’s productive, unproductive, and corrosive uses, all the while pondering what exactly rendered it so valuable.

A Copper Still and the Making of Rum in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Nuala Zahedieh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Collaborative Effort ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Many ◽  
Tools And Techniques

Abstract This article focuses on a copper still transported from London to the Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica and used to convert waste sugar products into rum, one of the many New World intoxicants which transformed British consumption patterns in the early modern period. Much has been written about the consumer revolution which allowed these commodities to be absorbed into everyday lives but less interest has been shown in the producer revolution needed to get the goods to market. The labour, skills, and materials embodied in the production and use of the copper still highlight how slave production of rum was integrated into a steadily advancing industrial capitalism linking dispersed sites and workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rum production was a collaborative effort in which Caribbean plantations were inextricably chained to the local, regional, and international economies, and it involved adaptations in skills, tools, and techniques which were incorporated into Britain's long, slow industrial revolution.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

Touchy-Feely History: The ‘Stuff’ of American Culture

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18
Author(s):  
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
New Research

This state of the field essay examines recent trends in American Cultural History, focusing on music, race and ethnicity, material culture, and the body. Expanding on key themes in articles featured in the special issue of Cultural History, the essay draws linkages to other important literatures. The essay argues for more a more serious consideration of the products within popular culture, less as a reflection of social or economic trends, rather for their own historical significance. While the essay examines some classic texts, more emphasis is on work published within the last decade. Here, interdisciplinary methods are stressed, as are new research perspectives developing by non-western historians.

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