Men of prowess and women of piety: A case study of Aceh Dar al-Salam in the seventeenth century

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sher Banu A.L. Khan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Female Leadership ◽  
Successful Leadership ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Studies on leadership in Southeast Asia's early modern era have tended to centre necessarily on men, and in particular, on O.W. Wolters' concept of ‘men of prowess’. The concept of female leadership is still little researched. This case study of Sultanah Safiatuddin Syah of Aceh (1641–75) provides some insights into female leadership in the Malay-Muslim island world of Southeast Asia. Contrary to the received view that successful leadership tended to be male (men of prowess), this article demonstrates that female leadership and the justification for the position of the ruler relied less on notions of sacral and charismatic power based on male prowess, but instead shifted to Muslim notions of piety and the just ruler.

Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
CYNTHIA TALBOT
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractThe Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

The Changing Persona of the Justices and their Quarter Sessions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norma Landau
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Justices Of The Peace ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

The standard portrait of the justices of the peace of early modern England is that of gentry, landed provincials, conducting their counties’ local government and so personifying ‘self-government at the king’s command.’ This essay disputes that depiction. First, it argues that it was not until relatively late in the early modern era that local gentry determined the persona of the county bench. Second, it argues that it was not until the later seventeenth century that the early modern state sufficiently differentiated its functions so as to create ‘local government.’ In so doing, it created a sphere of government fit for provincial rulers.

Terrains of Myths and Devotion

2020 ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Eiji Okawa
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Western Japan ◽  
Surrounding Space ◽  
Popular Devotion ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
A Site ◽  
Modern Era

How do religious imaginings and practices reconstitute the environment and situate communities in the surrounding space? What can religious institutions tell us about the historical interplays among myths, societal formations, and terrains of the earth? This chapter inquires these questions with a case study from preindustrial Japan. The Buddhist monastery of Kôyasan in the mountains of Kii province in western Japan enjoyed historical prominence both on political and spiritual terms. In the late medieval era (14th to 16th centuries), it presided as a landholding overlord and ruled large estates in the plains below. As a site of popular devotion, it developed in the early modern era (or Tokugawa, ca. 1600-1867) a transregional network of worshippers who sought its ritual services that promised salvation in the afterlife. What, then, propelled Kôyasan to its historical prominence? By contextualizing clerical practices with the mythical landscape of the monastery, the chapter uncovers how Kôyasan's success was undergirded by the ritual reconstitution of the land and soil.

Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis1

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frans-Willem Korsten
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Political Event ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Peculiar Case

The distinction between the theatrical and the dramatic is pivotal for different modes of subjection in the early modern era. Institutionally speaking, society was organized ideologically, theatrically by the introjection of what was shown publicly to private, but equally collective, theatres of the mind. This could be described as a logic of torture. In contrast, and on the other hand, the dramatic application of punishment on ships, and the pain it involved, served what Robert Cover called a ‘balance of terror’, based on a logic of what Deleuze defined as ‘cruelty’. In order to clarify this distinction, and the implication it has for our ideas on gouvernmentalité, this chapter will propose a close reading of a painting by Lieve Verschuier that either depicts a peculiar case of keelhauling or, allegorically, the lynching of the brothers De Witt in 1672. Although the painting is clearly theatrical, formally speaking, it superimposes a dramatic logic on the traumatic political event of the lynching of the brothers De Witt. This will be considered in the chapter as one instance of a more general shift in the seventeenth century: a shift away from the theatrical logic of torture to the dramatic logic of cruelty.

Scholastic Approaches to Reasonable Disagreement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Schuessler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Reasonable Disagreement ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
European Intellectual History ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
First Time ◽  
Modern Era

The scholastic controversy on probable opinions in the seventeenth century was one of the most extensive and acrimonious debates of the early modern era. Historiography has treated it as a quarrel over moral casuistry, but this underestimates its import. The scholastic preoccupation with the ‘use of opinions’ should be understood as a search for a general framework for dealing with reasonable disagreement between competent evaluators of truth claims (not only moral ones). In the early modern era, scholastic analyses as well as regulations concerning the prudent and legitimate use of opinions acquired an unprecedented scope and depth. For the first time in European intellectual history, detailed theories of reasonable disagreement emerged, based on explicit characterizations of competing probable opinions as reasonably tenable.

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