Changes in the Pattern of Malay Politics, 1629–c. 1655

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-452
Author(s):  
D. K. Bassett

For almost a century before 1629, the sultanate of Acheh in north Sumatra was the most formidable indigenous state on either side of Malacca Strait. A stalemate had developed between Acheh and the Portuguese in Malacca, with the Portuguese unable to maintain sufficient forces locally to invade Acheh, and the Achinese unable to press their numerous sieges of Malacca to a successful conclusion before the Portuguese relief fleet arrived from India. Under additional Dutch pressure early in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese seem to have been unable to render the assistance against Acheh which they had given the Malay states on occasion in the sixteenth century. In 1613–20 Johore, Pahang, Kedah and Perak were conquered by Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607–36) of Acheh. In most cases, the defeated sultan was carried off to Acheh and a relative installed as a vassal of Acheh. Sultan Ala'ud-din Ri'ayat Shah II of Johore escaped when the Achinese overran Batu Sawar in June 1613, but died a few years later. His half-brother, Raja Bongsu or Raja Seberang, was taken to Acheh, married to Iskander Muda's sister, and sent back to Batu Sawar as Sultan Abdu'llah Ma'ayat Shah (1613–23). When Abdu'llah rejected Iskander Muda's sister and married a daughter of the Sultan of Jambi about 1617, he also rejected the Achinese tradition of hostility to the Portuguese. For this, the Achinese pursued him from his new capital at Lingga to Tambilan, where he died of “hartseer” (despair) in 1623. Carpentier, the Dutch governor-general at Batavia, assumed that the once mighty Johore empire had come to an end.

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


Author(s):  
Bridget Heal

Chapter 5 focuses on one particular type of Lutheran devotional image: the crucifix. It examines transformations in Lutheran Passion piety from the early Reformation to the era of Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), using this to illustrate the increasing significance accorded to images. Luther himself had condemned the excesses of late-medieval Passion piety, with its emphasis on compassion for Christ and the Virgin Mary, on physical pain and on tears. From the later sixteenth century onwards, however, Lutheran sermons, devotional literature, prayers and poetry described Christ’s suffering in increasingly graphic terms. Alongside this, late-medieval images of the Passion were restored and new images were produced. Drawing on case studies from the Erzgebirge, a prosperous mining region in southern Saxony, and Upper Lusatia, the chapter investigates the ways in which images of the Passion were used in Lutheran communities during the seventeenth century.


Author(s):  
Scott C. Levi

While it may seem counterintuitive, the increase in Mughal India’s maritime trade contributed to a tightening of overland commercial connections with its Asian neighbors. The primary agents in this process were “Multanis,” members of any number of heavily capitalized, caste-based family firms centered in the northwest Indian region of Multan. The Multani firms had earlier developed an integrated commercial system that extended across the Punjab, Sind, and much of northern India. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Multanis first appear in historical sources as having established their own communities in Central Asia and Iran. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at any given point in time, a rotating population of some 35,000 Indian merchants orchestrated a network of communities that extended across dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and villages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran, stretching up the Caucasus and into Russia.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


1976 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton

WHEN on the previous two occasions I discussed Parliament and Council as political centres, as institutions capable of assisting or undermining stability in the nation, I had to draw attention to quite a few unanswered questions. However, I also found a large amount of well established knowledge on which to rely. Now, in considering the role of the King's or Queen's Court, I stand more baffled than ever, more deserted. We all know that there was a Court, and we all use the term with frequent ease, but we seem to have taken it so much for granted that we have done almost nothing to investigate it seriously. Lavish descriptions abound of lavish occasions, both in the journalism of the sixteenth century and in the history books, but the sort of study which could really tell us what it was, what part it played in affairs, and even how things went there for this or that person, seems to be confined to a few important articles. At times it has all the appearance of a fully fledged institution; at others it seems to be no more than a convenient conceptual piece of shorthand, covering certain people, certain behaviour, certain attitudes. As so often, the shadows of the seventeenth century stretch back into the sixteenth, to obscure our vision. Analysts of the reigns of the first two Stuarts, endeavouring to explain the political troubles of that age, increasingly concentrate upon an alleged conflict between the Court and the Country; and so we are tempted, once again, to seek the prehistory of the ever interesting topic in the age of Elizabeth or even Henry VIII.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-291
Author(s):  
Magnus Tessing Schneider

AbstractThis article presents a reading of Gian Francesco Busenello's and Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'incoronazione di Poppea in light of seventeenth-century theatrical practices. Reconstructing the doubling plan from the opera's premiere in 1643 on the basis of contemporary doubling practices and the correspondence of the Ferrarese music patron Marquess Cornelio Bentivoglio, the author argues, adducing circumstantial evidence, that Ottavia and Drusilla were conceived as a double role for the operatic quick-change artist Anna Renzi. While Renzi is known to have created Ottavia, this part is half the size of all other roles written for her, which invariably involve dramatic, emotional and musical variety to a much greater extent than does Monteverdi's tragic Empress. Renzi was admired for her command of both tragedy and comedy, and the essay develops the hypothesis of the double role as an intertextual interpenetration of the title heroines from the pseudo-Senecan tragedy Octavia and Girolamo Bargagli's sixteenth-century comedy La pellegrina.


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.


AJS Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-250
Author(s):  
David Malkiel

Ghettoization stimulated sixteenth-century Italian Jewry to develop larger and more complex political structures, because the Jewish community now became responsible for municipal tasks. This development, however, raised theological objections in Catholic circles because Christian doctrine traditionally forbade the Jewish people dominion. It also aroused hostility among the increasingly centralized governments of early modern Europe, who viewed Jewish self-government as an infringement of the sovereignty of the state. The earliest appearance of the term “state within a state,” which has become a shorthand expression for the latter view, was recently located in Venice in 1631.


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