Providence and exile in early seventeenth-century Ireland

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (114) ◽  
pp. 174-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Caball

The depth of change which the country experienced in the reign of James I has become an axiom of early modern Irish historiography. The extension of crown government throughout the island, the flight of the northern earls, the subsequent plantation in Ulster and the putative religious reformation of the indigenous inhabitants contributed to a climate of flux and tension. The burgeoning scholarly interest in this phase of Irish history has resulted in a more detailed understanding of administrative, political, regional and religious trends in the period. Progress has also been made in the study of contemporary mentalities. An interesting development has been the use of sources in the Irish language for the reconstruction of previously obscure intellectual currents amongst the Gaelic élite. The recent appearance of Michelle O Riordan’s monograph on the Gaelic reaction to the collapse of traditional society represents the fullest exposition yet of an interpretation which has characterised the early modern Gaelic ideological response to conquest and social change as fundamentally passive and backward-looking. O Riordan has, in effect, elaborated upon the conclusions of preceding commentators, notably Tom Dunne and Bernadette Cunningham, in portraying the Gaelic understanding of socio-political transformation as lacking in critical perception. This essay is intended as a further contribution to the elucidation of the mental climate of the time. More particularly, it will focus on two themes which figured prominently in the separate, but in this instance similar, communal reactions of the Gaelic Irish and the New English settlers to their respective political and social environments.

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Ueda Shinya ◽  
Nishino Noriko

Abstract Nishimura Masanari argued that the construction of enclosed-type levees caused the water level of the Red River to rise in seventeenth-century northern Vietnam, and he suggested that this phenomenon triggered social changes that brought about the establishment of Vietnamese “traditional society,” represented by the autonomous villages of the Red River Delta. Nishimura’s archaeological discussion of the transition from horseshoe-shaped levees to enclosed-type levees suggests new ways of studying socioeconomic change in early modern Vietnam. This article examines the utilization of the dry riverbed area of the Red River near Hanoi and tracks changes in the position of the levee near the neighboring villages of Bát Tràng and Kim Lan from the seventeenth century onward. The article shows that Nishimura’s argument concerning the levee network makes it possible to locate the establishment of early modern Vietnamese society in the “Age of Commerce.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 227-256
Author(s):  
Angela Vanhaelen

Abstract The angel was a recurrent marginal embellishment on hundreds of maps made in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, whose innovative commercial mapmaking dominated the international market. This essay explores how the mapmakers adapted pervasive conventions of cartographic angelology as a means to explore the expanding possibilities as well as the limitations of their own practice. The peculiar pictorial partnership between cartographers and their guardian spirits was a means to delineate cartography as inspired work. However, an interrogation of the implications of this spiritual service tracks the angels’ descent as downfall. The migrations of this ubiquitous visual device across numerous maps and representations of Amsterdam reveal the various ways that spirits were enlisted into their earthly ministry to the global mapping enterprises of the Dutch trading empire.


1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (98) ◽  
pp. 116-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Cunningham

The study of history at both national and local levels featured prominently among the intellectual activities of early modern Europeans. The desire to know more of their own countries (as evidenced by the growth of mapmaking) and the use of history as a political tool both played important parts in the emergence of the past as a vital force in the present. The same was true of early modern Ireland. Settlers coming to a new environment looked to the past both as a way of understanding their new home, and as a way of legitimising current political realities. Sir James Perrott noted in the introduction to his Chronicle of Ireland ‘the use of reading histories is twofold: either private for a man’s particular knowledge and information, or public for the application of it to the service of the state’ Thus Sir John Davies’s treatise on the Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued was as much a justification of existing royal policy in Ireland as an explanation of Irish history Each, for his own reasons, was looking to the past to explain the present.


Leadership ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin MS Bezio

Discussions on the nature of leadership—and, specifically, the nature of kingship or sovereignty—are ubiquitous to most historical overviews of leadership studies. This paper suggests that leadership studies would benefit from the use of complex literary and historical analyses, which can then be applied to aid in the understanding of appropriate modern-day corollaries. In particular, the paper presents an interrogation of Shakespeare’s late romance Pericles to examine how early moderns saw the development of proto-democratic ideals. In addition, this paper suggests that Pericles was an open critique of the Union between England and Scotland proposed by King James I in the early seventeenth century. To the early modern English, Union represented the abuse of royal prerogative and the potential loss of English national identity. Finally, the paper concludes by using Pericles and Union to examine the traditions and concerns facing the present-day United Kingdom in the immediate aftermath of the referendum to withdraw from the European Union.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-178
Author(s):  
Robert Bauernfeind

Abstract A seventeenth-century dry preparation of a porbeagle which was combined with a wooden sculpture of the prophet Jonah is analyzed using pictorial theories that emphasize the paradox of preparations being both subject and material of a visual representation. It explains the combination of Jonah and the shark by referring to speculations of early-modern natural history that the large fish that devoured Jonah must have been a shark. The preparation’s characteristic posture appears to be an adaptation of the depiction of a great white shark in Konrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1558), which had itself been drawn after a deformed dry preparation. The preparation of the porbeagle – probably made in an ecclesiastical context – thus represents less itself than a large shark.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič

Abstract The histories of early modern religion and trade have both benefited from the global turn in recent years. This article brings the two fields together through the study of religious objects in Prague in the seventeenth century and shows ways in which religion and religious practice were entangled with new commercial and artistic ventures that crossed regional and international borders. Among the possessions of seventeenth-century Prague burghers were religious objects that had come from exotic lands, such as a “coconut” rosary and a ruby and diamond “pelican in her piety” jewel. These objects were made in multiple locations and traded to satisfy a new demand for items that could aid and display devotion as well as act as markers of wealth and confessional identity. Through this study of religious objects, Central Europe is revealed to be an important locale to the global history of the early modern period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.


Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).


Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.


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