From erotic desire to egalitarian romantic passion

Babel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 865-886
Author(s):  
Jean Tsui
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The West ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Romantic Passion ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
Honglou Meng ◽  
Radical Transformation

Abstract Informed by the sociological theory of “Conventionalization” developed by Frederick Bartlett, the article examines transformations the expression “love” brought to the indigenous Chinese socio-moral-emotive paradigm during the early twentieth century. It focuses on examining usages and semantic connotations of “愛”, a loose Chinese equivalence of love, in Yínbiān yànyǔ 吟邊燕語 (Chanting the Swallows’ Talks), a translation by Lín Shū 林紓 (1852–1924) of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare published in 1904, a time that witnessed a vast number of translation projects as well as the transformative impacts they brought to China. By illustrating how “ai” in Lin’s translation has departed radically from its traditional usages as depicted in the mid-Qing novel The Story of the Stone (紅樓夢 Hónglóu mèng) and become a close equivalence of the western notion of love, the article shows that the Chinese’s emotional experiences during the early modern period may in all likelihood be different from those of the West, but the two seem to have become increasing comparable. When we seek to understand modern Chinese emotional experience, apart from asking how it is ethnically, socially, culturally, historically different, it might be equally important to ask in what ways the West has made it different from before, and how it has managed to retain its unique identity during a time of radical transformation.

Introduction

Loyola's Bees ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Annabel Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
The West ◽  
Gradual Decline ◽  
Didactic Poetry ◽  
Special Part ◽  
Classical Traditions

From antiquity, to the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, and to the early modern period, a genre of poetry flourished in the West that has fallen out of favour in the recent times. This is didactic poetry, poetry of instruction in astronomy, hunting, farming, philosophy, and in all fields of sciences, arts, and recreational activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits produced a great quantity of Latin didactic poems. These poems revealed of the early modern Jesuits, local literary fashions, classical traditions, contemporary events and inventions, scientific developments, cultural knowledge, and social mores. Didactic poetry was the best literary genre for the cultivation of the Jesuits, the modern teaching order par excellence. The majority of Jesuit didactic poems were written by teachers, most of whom were writing in a radically transformed world of print and science, and in the scholarly language of Latin that was facing its gradual decline in the eighteenth century. Most of these poems were initially written for their fellow Jesuits and not for the proper literary classes of humanities and rhetoric. By the turn of the eighteenth century, didactic poems began to take a special place among the Jesuits, and a consciousness of contributions to the Jesuit tradition and microtradition ensued wherein the didactic poems took a special part.

Written Proof Between Capitulations and Ottoman Kadi Courts in the Early Modern Period

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Maurits H. van den Boogert
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The West ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
Trade Partners

Abstract The introduction of legal reforms in the sixteenth century that gave the Hanafi school its central place in the Ottoman legal system coincided with the arrival of new trade partners from the West, first France and later England and the Dutch Republic. The Ottoman authorities’ own emphasis on the primacy of written proof and the marginalization of oral testimony was also reflected in the privileges granted to these new arrivals from the West. Although many European ambassadors and consuls distrusted “Turkish justice”, the Ottoman legal system’s stability and predictability contributed considerably to creating favourable conditions of trade.

The Great Convergence from a West-European Perspective: Some Thoughts and Hypotheses

Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 9-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Luiten Van Zanden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The West ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
New Generation

Between 1995 and 2000 a number of synthetic studies on the economic history of Asia in the Early Modern Period were published which have changed – or should change – our ideas and perceptions of the ‘rise of the west’ and the parallel ‘decline of the east’ in a fundamental way. The potential impact of these studies is comparable to that of a previous brief spell of brilliance in our profession, the early 1970s, with the pioneering publications by, amongst others, Wallerstein, Brenner, and North and Thomas. Whereas these studies proposed fundamentally new views on the long term dynamics of the ‘rise of the west’, and concentrated heavily on the economic and socio-political history of Europe (albeit sometimes within a ‘world system perspective’), the new generation of innovative works focuses on a new analysis of the economic history of parts of Asia - on China and India in particular. Much of the detailed empirical research on which this revisionism is based, was done before the books of Goody, Frank, Wong, Pomeranz, and Lee and Wang were published, and forerunners of the revisionism can be identified. But only now the movement has created a clear set of hypotheses that challenges the accepted wisdom about die economic and institutional contrasts between both sides of the Eurasian Continent.

Merciful Father, Impersonal State: Russian Autocracy in Comparative Perspective

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 635-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Kivelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Central State ◽  
The West ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
State Apparatus

Comparative analyses traditionally have done Russian history no favors. Invidious comparisons have situated Russia firmly in a context of backwardness relative to the West. The term ‘medieval’ customarily applies to Russia until the era of Peter the Great, that is, until the early eighteenth century, and even the least condemnatory scholars point out similarities between Muscovite Russia of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries and early medieval tribal formations of northern Europe. Along with ‘backwardness,’ comparative history has customarily found in Russia an example of extraordinarily oppressive autocratic despotism, while at the same time, and omewhat contradictorily, decrying the incompetence and rampant corruption of the central state apparatus. These and other unflattering comparative generalizations arose in the observations of Western travellers who recorded their impressions of Russia in the early modern period and have continued in the writings of scholars and journalists to this day.

scholarly journals The History of the Normative Opposition of “Language versus Dialect”: From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe’s Ethnolinguistic Nation-States

2016 ◽  
pp. 164-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kamusella
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
A Value ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

The History of the Normative Opposition of “Language versus Dialect”: From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe’s Ethnolinguistic Nation-StatesThe concept of “a language” (Einzelsprache, that is, one of many extant languages) and its opposition to “dialect” (considered as a “non-language,” and thus subjugable to an already recognized language merely as “its” dialect) is the way people tend to think about languages in the West today. It appears to be a value-free, self-evident conception of the linguistic position. So much so that the concept of “language” was included neither in Immanuel Kant’s system of categories, nor in the authoritative Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. This paper sketches the rise of the “dialect vs language” opposition in classical Greek, its transposition onto classical Latin, and its transfer, through medieval and renaissance Latin, to the early modern period. On the way, the Greek and Latin terms for “language” (and also for “dialect”) sometimes functioned as synonyms for peoples (that is, ethnic groups), which – importantly – contributed to the rise of the normative equation of language with nation in the early nineteenth century. It was the beginning of the ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism that prevails to this day in Central Europe. Dzieje normatywnej dychotomii języka i dialektu: Od greko-łacińskich źródeł po państwa etnicznojęzykowe Europy ŚrodkowejPojęcie języka jako jednego z wielu (Einzelsprache) stawiane w diametralnej opozycji do „dialektu” (czyli „nie-języka”, który normatywnie musi zostać przyporządkowany jakiemuś już wcześniej uznanemu językowi jako jeden z jego dialektów) stanowi formę pojęciową, poprzez pryzmat której postrzega się języki i dyskutuje o nich we współczesnym świecie Zachodu. Z powodu powszechnego uznania owa forma pojęciowa wydaje się tak oczywista i wolna od nacechowania ideologicznego, że Immanuel Kant nie uwzględnił języka w zaproponowanym przez siebie systemie kategorii filozoficznych, podobnie jak i autorzy niezmiernie wpływowego dzieła z zakresu historiografii i socjologii politycznej o znamiennym tytule Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. W niniejszym artykule przedstawiam wyłonienie się opozycji języka wobec dialektu w starożytnej grece oraz jego recepcję na gruncie łaciny od starożytności rzymskiej po okres nowożytny. W ciągu wieków utarło się używanie greckich i łacińskich terminów w odniesieniu do „języka” jako synonimów na określenie ludów (czy też grup etnicznych), co we wczesnym XIX stuleciu silnie wpłynęło na wykształcenie się normatywnego zrównania języka z narodem. Stanowiło to początek fenomenu znanego pod nazwą „nacjonalizmu etnicznojęzykowego”, który na poziomie państw dominuje po dziś dzień w całej Europie Środkowej.

Satanic Pacts/Diabolism

2020 ◽  
pp. 384-426
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Career Advancement ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
The West ◽  
Tit For Tat ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Devil

This chapter explores the satanic pact, the voluntary decision to sell one's soul to the devil, which emerged as an important plank in European witch lore in the early modern period. The trope of the satanic pact dates back to the early Middle Ages, and was generally associated with some kind of tit-for-tat: a sinful human would exchange his soul — and in the earliest versions it is usually a man entering such a deal — for money, career advancement, knowledge, power, or sexual favors. The idea of a satanic pact provided early modern demonologists with the causal mechanism they wanted. Fueled by invidious notions about female bodies and minds, demonologists adumbrated ideas about how women were driven by envy, greed, and insatiable lust to turn to demons to satisfy their desires. Legends of male pacts with the devil circulated in Byzantium as well as in the medieval West, and some of these stories crossed over into the Slavic Orthodox world, but they never rose to the fore in trials of witches in Russia as they did in the West. Building on this observation, subsequent scholarship has confirmed that this finding held true both in the Russian and in the Ukrainian lands and continued through the eighteenth century.

The Petrine Divide and the Periodization of Early Modern Russian History

Slavic Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 410-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The West ◽  
Traditional Use ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Court Politics ◽  
Law Of Succession ◽  
Gradual Transformation

Among the chief problems in determining the boundaries of the early modern period in Russian history is die reign and reforms of Peter I the Great. In this article, Russell E. Martin situates Peter's reign within the context of dynastic marriage politics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He argues that the centuries from roughly 1500 to 1800 constitute a single, coherent period. Court politics were dominated by concerns of kinship and marriage: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the search for a domesdc bride for the Russian rulers through bride shows; then, in the eighteenth century, by the gradual transformation of court politics away from domestic brides and toward a more traditional use of dynastic marriage as a tool in foreign policy. The early modern period ends, Martin argues, only with the promulgation of a new law of succession by Paul I (as modified by Alexander I). The so-called Petrine divide, then, is elided in a periodization of Russian history that very much mirrors the boundaries that are conventional in the west.

Un Grand Dérangement: Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in South Asia, 1740-1800

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 337-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Political System ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
The West ◽  
Persian Empire ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Counterfactual State

AbstractThe essay proposes a counterfactual historical exercise centered around the conquest of the Mughal empire in nothern India in 1739 by Nadir Shah Afshar, ruler of Iran. This episode, which was of enormous significance for contemporaries, has largely been neglected by more recent historians. After a survey of Nadir Shah's career and of the politico-economic conditions of the period, I propose a scenario here wherein the ruler of Iran does not return to his country (as he did), but instead participates in the articulation of a new political system, which would (in my view) have obviously been far more resistant to European ambitions than the Mughal empire turned out to be. A sketch of this counterfactual state system is provided, and the essay concludes by considering the implications of such a view for standard narratives of the 'Rise of the West' in the early modern period.

scholarly journals Contested enslavement: the Portuguese in Angola and the problem of debt, c. 1600–1800

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-275
Author(s):  
Judith Spicksley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Central Coast ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Slave Traders

The Portuguese were keen slave traders on the west central coast of Africa in the early modern period, but governors in Angola appear to have been increasingly unhappy about certain aspects of enslavement in relation to debt, and in particular that of children. Slavery for debt was uncommon in early modern Europe, where three arguments, drawn from Roman law, were usually cited by way of justification: birth; war; and self-sale. Cavazzi, an Italian Capuchin missionary travelling around Angola between 1654 and 1665, suggested several similarities between the legal justifications for slavery in Africa and Europe, but also pointed up a major difference: while in Angola in the early modern period enslavement could result from a number of instances of default, in Portugal at the same time - and in Europe more widely – debtors tended to find themselves imprisoned if they defaulted on a payment, rather than enslaved. This paper will consider the nature of debt enslavement in Angola in the early modern period, and how it impacted on the transatlantic slave trade.

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