Needs and Opportunities in French Colonial History

Itinerario ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-142
Author(s):  
Pierre H. Boulle

If anything is clear to the student of the history of the early modern French colonial enterprise, it is the need for a general overview to equal Boxer's and Parry's fine volumes on the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish seaborne empires, or George Winius' volume in the Minnesota series. Not that such volumes on the French colonies do not exist, in French. Indeed, there has not been a decade since the 1920s without some such publication. None of them, however, appears to me to be wholly satisfactory. The glorification of the French ‘mission’ characterizing the earlier works nowjars; the more recent works are more balanced, but still, on the whole, too descriptive. This is particularly the case for the Histoire de la France coloniale, des origines à 1914. While the authors responsible for the period which interests us, Jean Meyer and Jean Tarrade, have produced distinguished works on the French overseas empire, their survey remains somewhat uncritical and, at least for the seventeenth century, very thin. As to the treatment of New France, it draws on a rather unreliable series of monographies.

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-136
Author(s):  
Catherine Desbarats ◽  
Allan Greer

This paper re-examines the spatial foundations of North American historiography concerning the early modern period. By focusing on the history of New France in its broader context, it argues that the hegemony of a United States-centric approach to pre-national America has distorted our understanding of the basic spatial dynamics of the period. More visibly than in other zones of empire formation, but not uniquely, New France displays a variety of spaces. We discuss three of these: imperial space, indigenous space and colonial space. We call into question the entrenched tendency, derived we think, from near-exclusive attention to the history of the Thirteen Colonies, to characterize this as “colonial history” and to assume that “colonies” were the only significant vessel of this history.


Author(s):  
Gina M. Martino

The introduction sets out the book’s major topics and arguments and discusses its methodology, sources, and organization. It states that seventeenth and eighteenth-century women living in the borderlands of the northeastern America participated as essential, martial actors in wars fought by New England, New France, and Native polities. English, French, and Native societies’ existing gender ideologies included space for women to act as combatants, spies, and leaders. Women made war with the approval of their societies, and their presence in remote towns, holding the line in fortified communities was essential to polities’ strategies of expansion and colonization. In English and French colonies, European ideas that supported women taking on substantial roles as public actors in the early modern period are significant throughout the book and are introduced here. Although the book argues that these were centuries of almost continuous war, conflicts that receive particular attention include: the Beaver Wars (mid-seventeenth-century), King Philip’s War (1675-1676), King William’s War (1688-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), Dummer’s War (1723-1726), King George’s War (1744-1748), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 570
Author(s):  
James W. Watts

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern institutions resembled the biblical model. It then exposes widespread knowledge of Leviticus 25 in early modern political and economic debates. Demonstrating this awareness shows with high probability that colonial cultures presupposed the two-tier model of slavery in Leviticus 25:39–46 to naturalize and justify their different treatment of White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves.


Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Javier Ruano García

The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent scarcity of sources which supply trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical scene of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might help us contribute to complete the sketchy map of lexical provincialisms at the time.


The Perraults ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch

The introduction sets the story of the Perraults against the backdrop of early modern France. It covers the transformation of French culture in the seventeenth century (in its different dimenstion: geographical, social, and institutional, including the rise of academies and salons, the court at Versailles), the history of intellectual families, notions of family strategy, and the use of networks in historical analysis. It also includes an outline of the chapters.


1945 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams

Very little has been known about the life of the seventeenth century Yucatecan historian, Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia, author of the Relación historial eclesiástica de la provincia de Yucatán. He completed this important work on the early colonial history of Yucatan in February, 1639, but although it was known and used by Diego López de Cogolludo and later historians, it remained unpublished for nearly three hundred years. In 1937 it was finally printed in the Biblioteca histórica mexicana de obras inéditas. In his bibliographical note to this edition, Federico Gómez de Orozco tells the history of the manuscript, refuting the erroneous belief that Cárdenas Valencia wrote two works, but he does not give much new data concerning its author.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
LISA SHAPIRO

ABSTRACT:I reflect critically on the early modern philosophical canon in light of the entrenchment and homogeneity of the lineup of seven core figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. After distinguishing three elements of a philosophical canon—a causal story, a set of core philosophical questions, and a set of distinctively philosophical works—I argue that recent efforts contextualizing the history of philosophy within the history of science subtly shift the central philosophical questions and allow for a greater range of figures to be philosophically central. However, the history of science is but one context in which to situate philosophical works. Looking at the historical context of seventeenth-century philosophy of mind, one that weaves together questions of consciousness, rationality, and education, does more than shift the central questions—it brings new ones to light. It also shows that a range of genres can be properly philosophical and seamlessly diversifies the central philosophers of the period.


2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 866-903 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Trevisan

AbstractThe relationship between poetry and painting has been one of the most debated issues in the history of criticism. The present article explores this problematic relationship in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, taking into account theories of rhetoric, visual perception, and art. It analyzes a rare case in which a specific school of painting directly inspired poetry: in particular, the ways in which the Netherlandish landscape tradition influenced natural descriptions in the poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) by Michael Drayton (1563–1631). Drayton — under the influence of the artistic principles of landscape depiction as explained in Henry Peacham’s art manuals, as well as of direct observation of Dutch and Flemish landscape prints and paintings — successfully managed to render pictorial landscapes into poetry. Through practical examples, this essay will thoroughly demonstrate that rhetoric is capable of emulating pictorial styles in a way that presupposes specialized art-historical knowledge, and that pictorialism can be the complex product as much of poetry and rhetoric as of painting and art-theoretical vocabulary.


1945 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams

Very little has been known about the life of the seventeenth century Yucatecan historian, Francisco de Cárdenas Valencia, author of the Relación historial eclesiástica de la provincia de Yucatán. He completed this important work on the early colonial history of Yucatan in February, 1639, but although it was known and used by Diego López de Cogolludo and later historians, it remained unpublished for nearly three hundred years. In 1937 it was finally printed in the Biblioteca histórica mexicana de obras inéditas. In his bibliographical note to this edition, Federico Gómez de Orozco tells the history of the manuscript, refuting the erroneous belief that Cárdenas Valencia wrote two works, but he does not give much new data concerning its author.


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