The splendour of bankers and merchants: Genoese garden grottoes of the sixteenth century

Urban History ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
STEPHANIE HANKE

ABSTRACT:The article analyses the diffusion of artificial grottoes in Genoa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of their role in the construction of the ruling oligarchy's social identity. No other artistic genre offered a more effective means for bankers and merchants to flaunt their wealth and their network of international contacts. Grottoes comprising expensive corals and exotic shells functioned as a strategic marketing device whose cost and splendour satisfied not only the discerning humanist but also made a profound impression upon non-expert guests who were, first and foremost, potential future business clients.

Author(s):  
Richard Suggett

Archaeology (excavation, building survey, scientific dating) has established that peasant houses in much of Britain had a durability that was probably exceptional in late medieval Europe. Peasant houses in late medieval England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland were more complex) were not self-built homes but professionally made by craftsmen, and a central aspect of material culture. Building the late medieval peasant house was an aspect of consumption that entailed important choices relating to expenditure, construction, and, above all, the plan that structured household life. The widespread adoption by peasants of the hierarchical hall-house plan was in part an appropriation of high-status housing culture and inseparable from the construction and maintenance of free peasant social identity. The eventual rejection of the hall-house in the sixteenth century ended a peasant building tradition that had begun in the thirteenth century and matured during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.


Author(s):  
Syed Azizi Wafa Syed Khalid Wafa ◽  
Muhamad Jantan ◽  
Jennifer Chow Kim Eng

Business gift giving is a universal standard of conduct for most business organizations and industries (Beltramini 1992; Brenner and Molander 1977). Organizations use gifts as means to show appreciation for past business and to influence the attitudes and behaviours of a select, prestigious group of buyers in anticipation of future business (Meredith and Fried, 1977). Vendor gifts may serve as effective means of influencing customers or prospects. This research studied the effect of types of gift (personal or corpo- rate gifts), cast of gift (expensive or inexpensive), and buyer-vendor relationship status (no relationship, moderate or strong) in relation to the buyers' (purchasing executives') feelings of indebtedness, per- ceived manipulations and intentions to reciprocate vendor's gifts. A total of 143 purchasing executives were .sampled for the study. Similar to those of Dorch and Kelly( 1994), scenarios that incorporate the various combinations of the variables of interest were used to gauge reciprocating tendencies. The results show that the type of gift received, the extent to which the buyer experiences a sense of indebtedness, and the buyers' perceptions of the level of manipulation associated with the gift does significantly affect the buyers' intentions to recipro-cate. The research also indicates that gift type and cost with respect to buyer-vendor relationship status do not influence the level of perceived manipulation of the buyers.  


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Stanley Serafin ◽  
Marilyn A. Masson ◽  
Carlos Peraza Lope ◽  
Douglas J. Kennett ◽  
Richard J. George

Dental modification represents one interesting aspect of corporeal adornment in human history that directly reflects personal social identity. Tooth filing choices distinguished certain individuals at the urban, Maya political capital of Mayapan from 1150 to 1450 ad, along with cranial modification, nose and ear piercings, tattoos and body paint. Here we examine how filing teeth, considered a beautification practice for women at Spanish Contact in the sixteenth century, is distributed across a skeletal sample of males, females, elites and commoners in this city. We evaluate the normative claim of the Colonial period and determine that while predominantly females filed their teeth, most women chose not to. Sculptural art further reveals that male personages associated with the city's feathered serpent priesthood exhibited filed teeth, and we explore the symbolic meaning of filed tooth shape. Assessing the practice in terms of associated archaeological contexts, chronology and bone chemistry reveals that it did not correlate with social class, dietary differences, or birthplace. Residents of Mayapan, a densely inhabited, multi-ethnic city of 20,000, engaged with multiple material expressions of belonging to intersecting imagined communities that crosscut competing influences of polity, city, hometown and family scale identity. Tooth filing reflects identities at the individual or family scale.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-477
Author(s):  
Feride Sh. Salitova ◽  

Research objectives: To reveal the specificity of folk and professional musical traditions and their moral and aesthetic significance in the life of the medieval ancestors of Tatars. Research materials: The study uses general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, generalization, and the main methods of historical research – namely, the historical-comparative method and the method of historical periodization. Following the principle of historicism, the author analyzed a significant number of historical sources that reflect the development of musical culture among the ancestors of Tatars from its beginnings to the middle of the sixteenth century. Also, she used the results of archaeological and ethnographic research presented in monographs, articles, and other academic publications. Basic information about the development of musical culture among the medieval ancestors of Tatars is contained in the monuments of oral and written poetry (epic legends of the ancient Turks, the dastan “Idegey”, the poems of Muhammadyar, etc.), as well as in the notes of Arab and European travelers (Ahmed ibn Fadlan, Ibn Dasta, William of Rubruck, and John of Plano Carpini). Some aspects of this phenomenon are considered in a number of historical, musicological, and ethnomusicological studies (M. Khudyakov, L. Gumilev, M. Nig­medzyanov, G. Makarov, G. Saifullina, etc.). Results and novelty of the research: The study revealed that the origins of the musical traditions of the Tatar ethnos, formed mainly in the Middle Volga region, extend back to the common Turkic forms of artistic creativity. Later, music acted as an invariable attribute of socially significant and everyday forms of artistic activity (cult, court, military, folklore) of the Tatars’ ancestors in Volga Bulgharia, the Golden Horde, and Kazan Khanate. During the Middle Ages, there was an active development of diverse genres of both vocal and instrumental music. Its stable original basis was noticeably enriched with new intonations and rhythms emanating from the repertoire of musical traditions of various ethnic groups. A special mission in the spiritual life of society was carried out by the types and genres of spiritual and secular poetry closely related to music (chanting performances, including some with instrumental accompaniment). They functioned as an effective means for moral and aesthetic education, combining a variety of pedagogical functions with strong emotional impact. By the sixteenth century, the musical culture of the Tatar people formed into an integral, reified, and original system.


Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-79
Author(s):  
W.J. Boot

In the pre-modern period, Japanese identity was articulated in contrast with China. It was, however, articulated in reference to criteria that were commonly accepted in the whole East-Asian cultural sphere; criteria, therefore, that were Chinese in origin.One of the fields in which Japan's conception of a Japanese identity was enacted was that of foreign relations, i.e. of Japan's relations with China, the various kingdoms in Korea, and from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and the Kingdom of the Ryūkū.


Author(s):  
T.W. Smith ◽  
J.A. Roberts ◽  
B.J. Martin

Chronic pyelonephritis is one of the most common diseases of the kidney and accounts for a sizeable number of cases of renal insufficiency in man, however its pathogenesis requires further elucidation. Transmission electron microscopy may serve as a uniquely effective means of observing details of the nature of this disease. The present paper describes preliminary results of an ultrastructural study of chronic pyelonephritis in Macaca arctoides (stumptail monkey).The infection was induced in these experiments in a retrograde fashion by means of a unilateral catheterization of the left ureter whereby an innoculum of 10 cc of broth containing approximately 2 billion E. coli per cc and radio-opaque dye were injected under pressure (mimicing vesico-ureteric reflux).


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristal Mills

Abstract Mentoring has long been believed to be an effective means of developing students' clinical, research, and teaching skills to become competent professionals. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) has developed two online mentoring programs, Student to Empowered Professional (S.T.E.P. 1:1) and Mentoring Academic Research Careers (MARC), to aid in the development of students. This paper provides a review of the literature on mentoring and compares and contrasts mentoring/mentors with clinical supervision/preceptors. Characteristics of effective mentors and mentees are offered. Additionally, the benefits of clinical mentoring such as, teambuilding in the workplace, retention of new staff, leadership development, and improved job satisfaction are discussed.


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