Gaelic law and the Tudor conquest of Ireland: the social background of the sixteenth-century recensions of the pseudo-historical Prologue to the Senchas már

1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (107) ◽  
pp. 193-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nerys Patterson

Contemporary studies of the Tudor conquest of Ireland identify numerous interest-groups whose different political strategies produced a complex course of events. This paper examines the reactions of an influential segment of the Gaelic learned class, the traditional lawyers (brehons), to the threat of conquest. It offers evidence that some important brehon families supported administrative reforms within the Gaelic lordships, in accord with crown demands, and that they used native jural traditions to support legal change.As participants in the struggles of this period, the brehons have been viewed by scholars as part of the traditional cultural élite, which included poets and historians. Their indistinct appearance in the historical record partly accounts for such treatment. Brehons are scarcely mentioned in the Irish annals, while English sources tend to depict them as ultramontanists, practising ‘secret and hidden rites’, not as administrators with policies. Unlike the bardic poets, the brehons failed to leave behind a body of work that reflected their personal opinions; their literary monument, the corpus of Irish law-tracts, presents formidable barriers to interpretation, even as jural material, let alone as testimony to social history. These difficulties arise from the brehons’ deliberate attempts to preserve an appearance of antiquity and changelessness in the jural tradition. So successful were they in this, that many scholars believe that the later brehon schools copied the old law-tracts solely for their antiquarian interest and that the tracts had little relevance to contemporary affairs.

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Zanovello

Abstract Recently discovered documents shed new light on Heinrich Isaac's biography in the sixteenth century: hitherto unknown payments by Isaac (ca. 1450––1517) to the Florentine confraternity of Santa Barbara. As it turns out, Isaac was a regular member of the association from 1502 and bequeathed a substantial sum at his death. The records, in conjunction with other documents, illuminate Isaac's life from three complementary perspectives: the composer's biography (especially in the years 1502––7 and 1509––17), the wider context of the actions Isaac took in preparation for his old age and death, and the issues they raise regarding the composer's social background and integration in Florence during the first years of the sixteenth century. Against this backdrop the new documents allow us to question a number of assumptions, including the notion that Isaac's main residence in 1502––17 was in the imperial lands and that his social integration in Florence was exclusively linked to the Medici. They enrich our understanding of the social history of northern musicians in Italy around 1500.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Lilis Muchoiyyaroh

Kartini's complex thinking about her nation was the result of observations and experiences that she experienced empirically. But Kartini's ideas about religion were explicitly influenced by the surrounding environment, both European and indigenous people themselves. This study focuses on the reconstruction of Kartini's thinking in the field of religion and the social background of the emergence of this thought. Therefore, this study uses historical methods with a social history approach to identify Kartini's ideas in the religious field. The reconstruction of her ideas as one of the national integration efforts that cannot be separated from the influence of the religiosity and social background of the people around her. Kartini's thinking about religion was critical, open, and pluralistic, which was concerned with the division of the nation due to religious differences.


1976 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith J. Hurwich

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.


2001 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 273-291
Author(s):  
Sean Stilwell ◽  
Ibrahim Hamza ◽  
Paul E. Lovejoy

A powerful community of royal slaves emerged in Kano Emirate in the wake of Usman dan Fodio's jihad (1804-08), which established the Sokoto Caliphate. These elite slaves held administrative and military positions of great power, and over the course of the nineteenth century played an increasing prominent role in the political, economic, and social life of Kano. However, the individuals who occupied slave offices have largely been rendered silent by the extant historical record. They seldom appear in written sources from the period, and then usually only in passing. Likewise, certain officials and offices are mentioned in official sources from the colonial period, but only in the context of broader colonial concerns and policies, usually related to issues about taxation and the proper structure of indirect rule.As the following interview demonstrates, the collection and interpretation of oral sources can help to fill these silences. By listening to the words and histories of the descendents of royal slaves, as well as current royal slave titleholders, we can begin to reconstruct the social history of nineteenth-century royal slave society, including the nature of slave labor and work, the organization the vast plantation system that surrounded Kano, and the ideology and culture of royal slaves themselves.The interview is but one example of a series of interviews conducted with current and past members of this royal slave hierarchy by Yusufu Yunusa. As discussed below, Sallama Dako belonged to the royal slave palace community in Kano. By royal slave, we mean highly privileged and powerful slaves who were owned by the emir, known in Hausa as bayin sarki (slaves of the emir or king).


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
MELISSA S. DALE

AbstractBy exploring cases of runaway eunuchs, this paper aims to contribute to understandings of unfree status during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and more broadly to the reconstruction of the social history of eunuchs. The abundance of cases in the historical record of palace eunuchs running away, often repeatedly, reflects poorly on the imperial court's treatment of its eunuchs and effectiveness at times in controlling its eunuch population. Confessions from captured eunuchs reveal that for many life serving as a palace eunuch proved too restrictive and too oppressive to endure. The repeated flight of eunuchs suggests that for some, the possibility of punishment was preferable to continued service and waiting for an authorised exit from the system due to old age or sickness. As the majority of palace eunuchs were illiterate, cases of runaway eunuchs give voice to eunuchs and reveal: (1) the tensions that characterised labour relations between the imperial household and its eunuch workforce and (2) that eunuch status does not fit neatly into the binary of free or unfree status, but rather is something more complicated that lies on the continuum in between.


1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil L. Kunze

It is the purpose of this essay to rescue the Henrician Poor Law of 1536 from its relative obscurity by examining the statute as the beginning of a new legislative era in English economic and social history. Although the non-exist ence of House of Commons Journals for this period prevents a detailed study of the making and makers of the Henrician poor law legislation, documents hitherto neglected, exist for a comparative study of Tudor poor law policy. Whether dealing with the nineteenth-century corn law question or with the sixteenth-century poor law policy, few historians give sufficient time and attention to a detailed analysis of the actual statutes of the realm.Historians have ignored the Henrician statutes and usually begin their discussions of English poor relief by describing and interpreting the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. If mentioned at all, the Henrician legislation is presented as an ineffective attempt to solve the problem of poverty. Often this legislation is the subject of unfavorable generalizations:The social legislation of Henry's Parliaments was not only scant but brutal and demoralizing in that it reflected a puritanical callousness in assessing poverty as the just desert of sloth and evildoing. … Thus Elizabeth inherited the problem of widespread poverty with her crown; and her legislative program was immediate, massive, and positive.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110037
Author(s):  
Jim Berryman

First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignorant of ‘the fruitful achievements of modern historical research’. Despite its considerable scholarship and erudition, Antal’s book was not warmly received, largely because he had used historical materialism to understand the production of art and the development of styles. Antal’s class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. However, although Marxist analysis was used to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not Antal’s intention to weaken art history’s disciplinary autonomy. With historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Most importantly, this approach was compatible with the discipline’s Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal’s book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. It considers why Antal’s legacy has not endured, despite the ‘social history of art’ enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Mohammad Hasan Bisyri

This study seeks to uncover the MUI fatwa from the progressive aspects of Islamic law. Fatwa is the mirror of the dynamics of Islamic law in responding to the development of society. The set of MUI fatwa, in addition to functioning as a reference source of religious guidance, are also a historical record that is a source of social history. Fatwa ideally is always dynamic and paying attention to the dynamics of reality in society. Results of this study indicate that in general the MUI fatwa still had not moved from the tradition of jurisprudence, MUI fatwa is more nuanced as the social control and social engineering.


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