scholarly journals LANGUAGE AND POWER IN AN ENGLISH CONVENT IN EXILE, c. 1621 – c. 1631

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILIE K. M. MURPHY

AbstractScholarship on transnational encounter has predominantly focused on men's cross-cultural interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring women's roles in similar forms of linguistic and power negotiation within the context of English convents founded in Europe during the seventeenth century. Moreover, recent scholarship on English convents has so far remained silent on the question of how these women negotiated the language barriers that many of them faced. This article proposes an answer by examining the correspondence sent in the 1620s from the English Benedictine convent in Brussels. These letters reveal the changing ways in which English nuns relied on both male and female translators to communicate. In so doing, this article expands existing scholarly understanding of epistolary and literary culture by exploring the authorial strategies employed in the convent, which afforded the nuns a sense of authority over their texts. The letters were vital avenues for the women to express dissent, and raise concerns over the way their community was governed. Finally, despite being enclosed institutions, English convents in exile were not monoglot spaces but porous sites of multi-lingual encounter.

Author(s):  
Hamsa Stainton

Part of the enduring appeal of the stotra form has been the way that it has enabled specific communities to creatively negotiate Kashmir’s literary and religious pasts. This chapter analyzes stotras in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries to explore how hymns have functioned as part of tradition as a process. In the seventeenth century, Sāhib Kaul’s devotional poetry provides evidence for how one community of immigrants to Kashmir integrated themselves into a complex religious and literary culture while using its Maithila Śākta heritage as a resource for innovation. In the twentieth century, Swami Lakshman Joo promoted the study and practice of stotras in influential ways. Lastly, the chapter argues that stotras have been pivotal to the configuration of “Kashmir Śaivism” as a distinct regional tradition.


NASPA Journal ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Celina Valentina Echols ◽  
Young Suk Hwang ◽  
Connie Nobles

This paper uses students’ responses from the dialogues of a town hall meeting to examine the beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge about racial and cultural diversity at a mid-size, predominantly white university in Louisiana. The four major themes that emerged from this experience were: (1) perceptions about race, (2) stereotypical beliefs about cross-cultural interactions, (3) uncomfortable campus climate, and (4) disequilibria associated with prejudicial teaching by parents. Implications and recommendations for increasing positive cross-cultural interactions among members of the campus community are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 163-184
Author(s):  
Elise Watson

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.


2009 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Baki Tezcan

AbstractA short chronicle by a former janissary called Tûghî on the regicide of the Ottoman Sultan Osman II in 1622 had a definitive impact on seventeenth-century Ottoman historiography in terms of the way in which this regicide was recounted. This study examines the formation of Tûghî's chronicle and shows how within the course of the year following the regicide, Tûghî's initial attitude, which recognized the collective responsibility of the military caste (kul) in the murder of Osman, evolved into a claim of their innocence. The chronicle of Tûghî is extant in successive editions of his own. A careful examination of these editions makes it possible to follow the evolution of Tûghî's narrative on the regicide in response to the historical developments in its immediate aftermath and thus witness both the evolution of a “primary source” and the gradual political sophistication of a janissary.


1988 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-305
Author(s):  
Jerome Roche

It is perhaps still true that research into sacred types of music in early seventeenth-century Italy lags behind that into madrigal, monody and opera; it is certainly the case that the textual aspects of sacred music, themselves closely bound up with liturgical questions, have not so far received the kind of study that has been taken for granted with regard to the literary texts of opera and of secular vocal music. This is hardly to be wondered at: unlike great madrigal poetry or the work of the best librettists, sacred texts do not include much that can be valued as art in its own right. Nevertheless, if we are to understand better the context of the motet – as distinct from the musical setting of liturgical entities such as Mass, Vespers or Compline – we need a clearer view of the types of text that were set, the way in which composers exercised their choice, and the way such taste was itself changing in relation to the development of musical styles. For the motet was the one form of sacred music in which an Italian composer of the early decades of the seventeenth century could combine a certain freedom of textual choice with an adventurousness of musical idiom.


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