Debating Revolution: Early eighteenth century Sikh public philosophy on the formation of the Khalsa

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 1096-1133 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARDIP SINGH SYAN

AbstractThis paper examines the public debate that happened among Delhi's Sikh community following the formation of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh. The detail of this debate was expressed in the early eighteenth century Sikh text, Sri Gur Sobha. The Sri Gur Sobha explains how Delhi's Sikhs became divided into pro-Khalsa and anti-Khalsa factions, and how this conflict resulted in a campaign of persecution against Delhi's Khalsa Sikhs. In this paper I endeavour to analyse exactly why this dispute occurred and how it reflects wider political and socio-economic processes in early modern India and Sikh society. In addition, the paper will explore how the elite Khatri community consequently became an object of hatred in eighteenth century Khalsa Sikh literature.

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 201-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faramerz Dabhoiwala

Notions of honour and reputation were ubiquitous and important in early modern England for a variety of reasons. They were part and parcel of how individuals in this society conceived of the relationship between the personal and the public, and between the projection and the perception of one's character. More particularly, they lay at the heart of two crucial issues: how people thought about social status, and about the differences between men and women.


Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart

This chapter looks at examples of scholars who, in the early eighteenth century, worked on texts that were highly controversial from a moral perspective. The focus is on Pieter Burman’s edition of Petronius (1709) and Bentley’s work on Horace. Looking at this material from a perspective of textual criticism allowed Burman and Bentley to avoid delving too deeply into passages of a sexually loaded nature. Nevertheless, political and scholarly opponents of both men tried to blacken their reputation by connecting their research interests with their private lives. It is demonstrated that the association of textual critics with immorality was a commonplace in early modern Europe and that the tensions between in particular Burman and his opponents reveals a struggle to make classical philology a more independent field of enquiry versus other disciplines, such as theology.


Author(s):  
Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

Chapter 1 examines the hagiography of local holy woman Anna Guerra de Jesús who migrated to Guatemala’s capital in the late seventeenth century. While the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure, obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a poor abandoned wife and mother. And although Church decrees clearly required actively religious laywomen to live in cloistered communities, Anna became an independent beata (laywoman who took informal vows) and Jesuit tertiary. This chapter explores Anna’s lived religious experience as a poor migrant and abandoned wife and mother, her engagement with female mysticism and devotional networks, and her alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. It also places Anna’s story within the context of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, particularly urban demographic shifts and social tensions, as well as movements for spiritual renewal and enthusiastic lay female piety.


Author(s):  
Roni Cohen

Abstract This article examines an unknown collection of 16 letters written by the 14-year-old Moses Samuel ben Asher Anshel of Gendringen found in a small booklet for Purim that he copied in Amsterdam in 1713. In the letters, written in Hebrew and Yiddish and decorated with illustrated frames, Samuel (as he calls himself) writes to his parents about his studies and ambition to become a professional scribe. This article discusses Samuel’s letters as sources for the history of Jewish book culture in Early Modern Amsterdam, and for the history of professional Jewish scribes and copyists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It does so by offering an analysis of Samuel’s descriptions of his studies and his own self-perception, and of the letters in context of their presence in Samuel’s booklet.


1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (123) ◽  
pp. 328-342
Author(s):  
Neal Garnham

At least twice during the first half of the eighteenth century criminal prosecutions were undertaken in Ireland which gripped the public imagination. The first of these celebrated cases, involving the trial for rape, conviction and subsequent execution of the Cork Jacobite James Cotter in 1720, has also come to hold an extraordinary fascination for historians of eighteenth-century Ireland. Few writers concerned with early Georgian Ireland have been able to avoid its allure. For the most part, however, the incident has been referred to only fleetingly, employed variously as a motif of religious or political conflict or ethnic alienation. For Kevin Whelan, it is illustrative of the ‘conflict between old and new families’ in Munster, and indicative of a ‘partisan popish paranoia’ on the part of the province’s Protestant rulers. For Louis Cullen, it was ‘part of the legacy of the 1690s’, yet an event which would provide ‘the spark which set alight the sectarian tensions in Munster in the 1760s’. Other commentators have seen the case as one in which ‘a trumped-up charge’ was laid, for political purposes, against a man ‘generally believed’ to be innocent. A few have offered more guarded conclusions. Thomas Bartlett ventures only that this was ‘certainly a sensational event’. James Kelly both recognises the unique circumstances of Cotter’s case and suggests that it is ‘unlikely that he was the victim of judicial assassination’. S. J. Connolly goes further, stressing that Cotter had ‘quite clearly been guilty of rape’. However, the fullest and most recent examination of the case, in an essay written by Breandán Ó Buachalla in an ‘attempt to correlate a specific literary text to the career of a specific political activist’, returns us firmly to the recurrent context of Catholic Jacobite resistance and Protestant collusion.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 539-560
Author(s):  
Julia Reed

Abstract In the early eighteenth century, the French Jansenist physician Philippe Hecquet began publishing prolifically on the benefits of what he called “meatless medicine,” calling for a “Catholic cook” to guide France’s physical, moral, and spiritual health. This paper analyzes Hecquet’s defense of vegetarianism as an early modern example of a distinct kind of Biblical medicine – what Hecquet termed “theological medicine” – in the context of his understanding of bodily mechanism, natural history, and Biblical literalism, in his Traité des dispenses du carême (1709) and La medecine théologique, ou la medecine créée (1733). I argue that vegetarianism was the first principle of Hecquet’s Biblical medicine, which he considered both a natural and revealed truth to be grasped and applied by the pious physician.


2019 ◽  
pp. 12-37
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham

Chapter 1 introduces the individuals described in standard histories as “Particular Baptists.” Drawing upon the manuscript collection of the early eighteenth-century Baptist historian Benjamin Stinton, the chapter surveys their origins, formation, and early attempts at ecclesiastical organization. But, more importantly, the chapter examines the development of Baptist historiography and the ways in which the deliberate distortions of early Baptist historians continue to influence present scholarship. As the chapter contends, the basic interpretive framework within which early English Baptists have been understood is seriously flawed. Rather than growing organically out of the evidence, many of the fundamental conventions which govern scholarly discussion of early modern English Baptists have been bequeathed to modern historians by eighteenth-century Baptist churchmen. These early denominational historians wrote the story of their collective past with an eye firmly fixed upon the needs of their own collective present, and their decisions continue to negatively affect modern scholarship.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudi Matthee

This essay analyzes the incontrovertible weakening of the Safavid state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century by putting it in a larger context. It does so by comparing various manifestations of Iran’s “decline” at the time to conditions and developments in the adjacent Ottoman and Mughal states, where similar processes were playing out in the same period. In order to arrive at a measured and balanced view of similarities and differences between these three early modern Islamic empires, it singles out and focuses on four areas: geographical/environmental and economic conditions, political developments, the state of the army, and ideological characteristics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1487 ◽  
Author(s):  
KUMKUM CHATTERJEE

AbstractThis paper makes a case for exploring the cultural facets of Mughal rule as well as for a stronger engagement with sources in vernacular languages for the writing of Mughal history. Bengal's regional tradition of goddess worship is used to explore the cultural dimensions of Mughal rule in that region as well as the idioms in which Bengali regional perceptions of Mughal rule were articulated. Mangalkavya narratives—a quintessentially Bengali literary genre—are studied to highlight shifting perceptions of the Mughals from the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. During the period of the Mughal conquest of Bengal, the imperial military machine was represented as a monster whom the goddess Chandi, symbolizing Bengal's regional culture, had to vanquish. By the eighteenth century, when their rule had become much more regularized, the Mughals were depicted as recognizing aspects of Bengal's regional culture by capitulating in the end to the goddess and becoming her devotees. This paper also studies the relationship of the Mughal regime with Bengal's popular cultural celebration—the annual Durga puja—and explores its implications for the public performance of religion and for community formation during the early modern period.


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