Buddhism in the re-ordering of an early modern world: Chinese missions to Cochinchina in the seventeenth century

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Wheeler

AbstractIn the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation in early modern maritime Asia may compare to religions like Islam and Christianity, and deserves further study.

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.


Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 59-64
Author(s):  
Liviu Cîmpeanu

By definition, a monument has extraordinary features that mark landscape and human minds alike. Without any doubt, the Medieval and Early Modern World of Europe was marked by ecclesiastical monuments, from great cathedrals and abbeys to simple chapels and altars at crossroads. A very interesting case study offers Braşov/ Kronstadt/Brassó, in the south-eastern corner of Transylvania, where historical sources attest several ecclesiastic monuments, in and around the city. Late medieval and early modern documents and chronicles reveal not only interesting data on the monasteries, churches and chapels of Braşov/Kronstadt/Brassó, but also on the way in which citizens and outsiders imagined those monuments in their mental topography of the city. The inhabitants of Braşov/ Kronstadt/Brassó and foreign visitors saw the monasteries, churches and chapels of the city, kept them in mind and referred to them in their (written) accounts, when they wanted to locate certain facts or events. The present paper aims in offering an overview of the late medieval and early modern sources regarding the ecclesiastical monuments of Braşov/Kronstadt/Brassó, as well as an insight into the imagined topography of a Transylvanian city.


Author(s):  
Edmund Burke

This essay examines several world historical events from an unfamiliar perspective, that of sixteenth-century Morocco. It seeks to provide a new way of conceptualizing empires, one that builds upon recent work, while imagining them differently. As a key player in the struggle over the western Mediterranean, Morocco’s neglected history has much to tell us about both the power and the limits of the military revolution of early modern times. Moreover, Morocco’s success in withstanding Iberian efforts to extend the reconquista to Northwest Africa served to deflect the expansionary energies across the Atlantic and around Africa. More generally, Morocco provides a useful vantage point for thinking about the emergence of the international structures of power that define the early modern world.


1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Wilks

In late medieval and early modern times West Africa was one of the principal suppliers of gold to the world bullion market. In this context the Matter of Bitu is one of much importance. Bitu lay on the frontiers of the Malian world and was one of its most flourishing gold marts. So much is clear from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings, both African and European. A review of this body of evidence indicates that the gold trade at Bitu was controlled by the Wangara, who played a central role in organizing trade between the Akan goldfields and the towns of the Western Sudan. It is shown that Bitu cannot be other than Bighu (Begho, Bew, etc.), the abandoned Wangara town lying on the northwestern fringes of the Akan forest country, which is known (from excavation) to have flourished in the relevant period. In the late fifteenth century the Portuguese established posts on the southern shores of the Akan country, so challenging the monopolistic position which the Wangara had hitherto enjoyed in the gold trade. The Portuguese sent envoys to Mali, presumably to negotiate trade agreements. The bid was apparently unsuccessful. The struggle for the Akan trade in the sixteenth century between Portuguese and Malian interests will be treated in the second part of this paper.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mònica Colominas Aparicio

Comparison figures prominently in the polemics of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula in premodern and early modern times. Its pervasiveness as a figure of thought in their sources raises the question of variety in regard to comparison—that is, the multiple expressions of comparison as well as its numerous uses—particularly in the field of polemics. This paper discusses the functions of comparison in polemics as a necessary first step to advance current knowledge of comparison as a historical practice in the making of one’s identity and the definition of groups and individuals. The discussion will focus on writings by Muslims who lived in Christian Iberia. It will focus particularly on two anti-Christian polemics: that by the Tunisian author Muḥammad al-Qaysī in an as-yet unstudied Aljamiado copy (Spanish in Arabic characters); and the Tratado de los dos caminos (Treatise of the Two Roads), an early-seventeenth-century work of Islamic doctrine by the so-called “Refugee in Tunisia”. The analysis of these two works will address the most important common points and differences between their respective polemical comparisons.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Johann Mainka

Este artigo pretende apresentar algumas informações básicas sobre o fenômeno da bruxaria, um fenômeno específico dos Tempos Modernos que surgiu a partir do início do século XV unindo a feitiçaria da Antigüidade e da Idade Média com o delito da heresia. A teoria e prática jurídica daquele tempo, incluindo a aplicação legítima de torturas, contribuíram muito para a disseminação da bruxaria na Europa. A partir do fim do século XVII, com o surgimento do Iluminismo, encerrou-se, definitivamente, este fenômeno da bruxaria, que tinha se manifestado, muito diferentemente, nos países europeus. A bruxaria pode ser interpretada como um sintoma de crise na transição do mundo medieval para o mundo moderno. Abstract This paper intends to present some basic information on the phenomenon of witchcraft, a specific phenomenon of the Early Modern Times, which came out in the beginning of the 15th century, unifying the sorcery of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages with the crime of heresy. The theory and practise of justice from that period, including the legitimate application of tortures, contributed very much to the spread of the witchcraft throughout in Europe. Since the 17th century, with the emergence of the Enlightenment, the phenomenon of witchcraft, whose appearances had been very diferent in the european states, ceased definitively. Witchcraft can be interpreted as a symptom of the transition from the medieval world to the modern world.


1966 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 92-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Jenks

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.


Author(s):  
Elia Nathan Bravo

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. On the one hand, it offers a general analysis of stigmas (a person has one when, in virtue of its belonging to a certain group, such as that of women, homosexuals, etc., he or she is subjugated or persecuted). On the other hand, I argue that stigmas are “invented”. More precisely, I claim that they are not descriptive of real inequalities. Rather, they are socially created, or invented in a lax sense, in so far as the real differences to which they refer are socially valued or construed as negative, and used to justify social inequalities (that is, the placing of a person in the lower positions within an economic, cultural, etc., hierarchy), or persecutions. Finally, I argue that in some cases, such as that of the witch persecution of the early modern times, we find the extreme situation in which a stigma was invented in the strict sense of the word, that is, it does not have any empirical content.


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