A Sound of Silence in the Archives: On Eighteenth-Century Russian Diplomacy and the Historical Episteme of Central Asian Hostility

Itinerario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-571
Author(s):  
Paolo Sartori
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Russian Enterprise ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
European Colonialism

AbstractCui bono information and record keeping? In his most recent work devoted to the study of British and French imperialism in the Levant in early modern history, Cornel Zwierlein has argued that “empires are built on ignorance.” It is, of course, true that during the old regime Western knowledge of things “Oriental” was patently defective, marked as it was by blind spots and glaring gaps; and if observed in the broader context of European colonialism in Asia, the British and French cases are hardly exceptional. Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Europe's India has shown compellingly that the Portuguese, too, blindly forged ahead in their imperial expansion into South Asia, with a good dose of improvisation. By focusing on a mission to Khiva, Bukhara, and Balkh in 1732, I set out to show that the Russian venture in Asia too was premised upon ignorance, among other things. More specifically, I argue that diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and Central Asia developed in parallel with the neglect of intelligence gathered and made available in imperial archives. Reflecting on the fact that the Russian enterprise in Asia was minimally dependent on information allows us to complicate the reductive equation of knowledge to power, which originates from the “archival turn.” Many today regard archives as reflective of projects of documentation, which granted epistemological virtue to the texts stored, ordered, and preserved therein. The archives generated truth claims, we are told, about hierarchies of knowledge produced by states and, by doing so, they effectively operated as a technological apparatus bolstering the state. However, not all the texts which we find in archives always retained their pristine epistemic force. To historicise the uses, misuses, and, more importantly, the practices of purposeful neglect of records invites us to revisit the quality of transregional connectivity across systems of signification in the early modern period.

scholarly journals Jewish and Hebrew Books in Marsh’s Library: Materiality and Intercultural Engagement in Early Modern Ireland

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Anderson ◽  
Jason McElligott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Extensive Collection ◽  
Intercultural Engagement ◽  
Personal Collection

Marsh’s Library in Dublin, Ireland, is an immaculately preserved library from the early eighteenth century. Founded by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, the library has an extensive collection of Jewish and Hebrew books which includes Hebrew Bibles, Talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and Yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. This study explores a cross section of the Jewish and Hebrew books in Marsh’s collection, with particular focus on issues of materiality—that is, how these books as material artefacts can inform our understanding of early modern history, religion, and intercultural engagement. We suggest that these books, a majority of which come from Marsh’s personal collection, are a valuable resource for reflection on (1) Christian engagement with Jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (2) the production, use, and travel of Jewish books in early modern Europe, and (3) snapshots of Jewish life in early modern Ireland and beyond.

Popular and Public History

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 547-559
Author(s):  
Liz Covart
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Scholarly Identity ◽  
History Play

Abstract This essay offers a reflection on the role public and popular history play in creating understanding and awareness about early modern history. It considers Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks’ chapter “Popular and Public History” in her book, What is Early Modern History, and uses Wiesner-Hanks’ ideas as a starting point to expand understanding of early modern scholarly identity, the role museums and historic sites could play in creating broad awareness about the early modern period, and why podcasts provide historians with a powerful tool to help non-historians better connect with and understand the early modern period.

Early Modern Period (1500–1800 CE)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Spatial Concepts ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Barbary States

This chapter surveys the limited evidence on Islamic palatial architecture in the Western Mediterranean during the Early Modern Period. Northern Africa was weakly incorporated into the Ottoman Empire as the Barbary States. In the capital cities– Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers – leaders took on the trappings of traditional Islamic rulers and preserved the earlier architectural styles and concepts of space in their palace designs. In Morocco a succession of Berber and Arab dynasties resisted the Ottomans and united the far-western Maghreb. These rulers underpinned their rule by religious ideology and built huge palatial cities featuring a diversity of architectural forms at the “royal cities” (Fes, Marrakesh, Rabat and Méknes) – though, for the most part, the chief typologies and spatial concepts were developed in previous centuries. Towards the end of the period, the growing influence of European colonialism brought an end to the tradition of Islamic architecture in both regions.

Making Sense of Central Asia in Pre-Petrine Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-633
Author(s):  
Ulfatbek Abdurasulov
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Cultural Mediators ◽  
The One

Abstract The existing historiography on liaisons between Russia and Central Asia in early modern period often tends to portray the cross-cultural diplomacy between the settings as an assemblage of sporadic, inefficient, clumsy encounters, full of diplomatic failures. Further to it, the dominant paradigm emphasizes cultural differences in the region, whereby any form of cross-cultural encounters was inevitably hampered by various confessional, religious and social borders. As a result, we tend to read every case of cross-cultural encounter between early modern Central Asia and Russia as a metaphor of cultural incommensurability. In the essay, I shall offer a close reading of two 17th-century Muscovite diplomatic missions to Central Asia as test cases with which to make sense of cultural encounters through the lens of individual actors. In doing so, I shall highlight the specific practices and strategies that allowed the diplomatic actors to play key roles as cultural mediators using their language skills, local knowledge and contact networks. In the broader sense, the essay set out to examine how can we problematize cross-cultural encounters between Central Asian principalities such as Khiva and Bukhara on the one hand, and Pre-Petrine Russia on the other: and to consider what we actually mean when we speak of early modern diplomacy in Central Eurasia.

Shakespeare's Pacifism

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Marx
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Military Cultures ◽  
The Military ◽  
Of Greece

Like Youth and Age or Reason and Passion, War and Peace was one of those polarities that Renaissance writers persistently thought about as well as with. Reflection upon war and peace was at the heart of the Humanist movement, just as the conduct of war and peace was at the foundation of the European state system during the early modern period. This concern with war and peace arose from Humanism's defining traits: its exaltation of fame, its fascination with the military cultures of Greece and Rome, its emphasis on human dignity and freedom, its pursuit of secular knowledge in history and psychology, and its political commitment to improving the quality of institutional and personal life.’

The Antiquarian and the Abbess

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Jaime Goodrich
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Familial History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Gender And Genre ◽  
Monastic History ◽  
Historical Sketch

This essay considers how two Benedictine writers, Claude Estiennot (1639–1699) and Anne Neville (1605–1689), engaged with the generic conventions of historical writing, specifically the subgenre of monastic history. In an attempt to complicate critical narratives about early modern history, Estiennot and Neville are read through the lens of feminist formalism. A Maurist and antiquarian, Estiennot wrote a chronicle of the Congregation of the English Benedictine Dames that exemplifies the professional revolution in historiography. Neville, in contrast, cultivated the humbler position of an abbess, creating a historical sketch of her congregation that served as both a familial history and a personal aide-mémoire. By considering the different ways that Estiennot and Neville approached the same historical subject, this essay demonstrates that reading prose in terms of its formal qualities can provide new insights into the interrelationship of gender and genre in the early modern period.

Poetisches Wissen

Daphnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 167-187
Author(s):  
Sylvia Brockstieger
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Real World ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Critical Revision

Abstract This article examines sociability as a literary and poetic factor which reacts to real-world manifestations of social interaction. Using the pastoral text Des Hylas auß Latusia Lustiger Schau-Platz von einer Pindischen Gesellschaft (1650) as an example, the article develops how the specifically ‘bourgeois’ quality of the text may be redefined under the auspices of a particularly ‘literary sociability’ against the background of a critical revision of common genre assignments. This kind of ‘literary sociability’ results mainly from the narrative structure of the text and the skillful play between fictional and factual signals. In this way, the article also contributes to shedding light on the practice of fiction(ality) in the early modern period.

Unparteilichkeit und das Problem der Trennung von Person und Sache

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-80
Author(s):  
Daniel Stader ◽  
Anita Traninger
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Pierre Bayle

Abstract This article seeks to show how the republic of letters as an ideal of communication took shape between the early modern period and the early enlightenment by transforming the culture of debate within universities. While oral university disputations arbitrarily distributed the roles of respondent and opponent, thus intentionally dissociating the man and the position defended, the republic of letters, which operates through texts and preferably in the periodic press, presupposes all speech acts to be assertive. It is taken for granted that all defended positions are actually held by the speaker. Drawing on the works of Pierre Bayle, Christian Thomasius, and Christian Gottfried Hoffmann, this article will argue that the separation of person and argument is reconceived in the service of a newly emerging public sphere. Impartiality is introduced as a specific quality of judgement that is required of all participants as a type of self-regulation, thus compensating the loss of the institutional frame that was previously provided by disputation.

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