scholarly journals Symbolic Communication in Early Modern Diplomacy: Naval Incidents and the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1667–1672)*

2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (573) ◽  
pp. 337-358
Author(s):  
David Onnekink
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Symbolic Language ◽  
Symbolic Communication ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Public Debates

Abstract This article underscores the significance of symbolic communication in early modern international relations. Taking naval incidents during the period leading up to the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1667–72) as a case-study, it shows how the use of imagery constituted an undervalued symbolic language in which vital interests were communicated by diplomats. Moreover, it argues that the way in which these incidents were discussed in diplomatic circles was relevant to and congruous with public debates. It also highlights the often-ignored international dimension of popular disputes. An overall objective is to further the debate on a New Diplomatic History for the early modern period.

scholarly journals Adjectival Agreement in Middle and Early Modern Welsh Native and Translated Prose

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Marieke Meelen ◽  
Silva Nurmio
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
And Function

This paper investigates adjectival agreement in a group of Middle Welsh native prose texts and a sample of translations from around the end of the Middle Welsh period and the beginning of the Early Modern period. It presents a new methodology, employing tagged historical corpora allowing for consistent linguistic comparison. The adjectival agreement case study tests a hypothesis regarding position and function of adjectives in Middle Welsh, as well as specific semantic groups of adjectives, such as colours or related modifiers. The systematic analysis using an annotated corpus reveals that there are interesting differences between native and translated texts, as well as between individual texts. However, zooming in on our adjectival agreement case study, we conclude that these differences do not correspond to many of our hypotheses or assumptions about how certain texts group together. In particular, no clear split into native and translated texts emerged between the texts in our corpus. This paper thus shows interesting results for both (historical) linguists, especially those working on agreement, and scholars of medieval Celtic philology and translation texts.

Moscow: The Third Rome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Russian

In the mid-19th century, three 16th-century Russian sources were published that alluded to Moscow as the “third Rome.” When 19th-century Russian historians discovered these texts, many interpreted them as evidence of an ancient imperial ideology of endless expansion, an ideology that would go on to define Russian foreign policy from the 16th century to the modern day. But what did these 16th-century depictions of Moscow as the third Rome actually have in mind? Did their meaning remain stable or did it change over the course of the early modern period? And how significant were they to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly? Scholars have pointed out that one cannot assume that depictions of Moscow as the third Rome were necessarily meant to be imperial celebrations per se. After all, the Muscovites considered that the first Rome fell for various heretical beliefs, in particular that Christ did not possess a human soul, and the second Rome, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453 precisely because it had accepted some of these heretical “Latin” doctrines. As such, the image of Moscow as the third Rome might have marked a celebration of the city as a new imperial center, but it could also allude to Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith after the fall—actual and theological—of Rome and Constantinople. As time progressed, however, the nuances of religious polemic once captured by the trope were lost. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the image of Moscow as the third Rome took on a more unequivocally imperialist tone. Nonetheless, it would be easy to overstate the significance of allusions to Moscow as the third Rome to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly. Not only was the trope rare and by no means the only imperial comparison to be found in Muscovite literature, it was also ignored by secular authorities and banned by clerics.

scholarly journals Mixed Company in the Contact Zone: the “Glocal” Diplomatic Efforts of a Prussian East Indiaman in 1750s Cape Verde

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 423-441
Author(s):  
Felicia Gottmann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract This article takes a micro-historical actor-centered approach to study the encounter between the officers of a Prussian East India Company Ship and local elites in 1750s Praia, Cape Verde. Combining recent advances in New Diplomatic History and in Company Studies with insights from the study of Contact Zones and transculturation, it analyzes the diplomatic strategies marginalized and hybrid players could adopt to project themselves onto the early modern global stage and locally counterbalance the hegemonic Northern European Atlantic powers. It thus proposes an alternative model of nonprofessional diplomatic interaction in the early modern period.

Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/1595)

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 272-291
Author(s):  
Christopher Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Popular Ballads

Abstract This article examines one of the Bodleian Library’s copies of Robert Persons’ Elizabethan succession tract A Conference about the Next Succession that a 1650s reader has heavily annotated and used to compile a miscellany of poems and extracts from religious, political and historical works. The annotations and miscellany are concerned primarily with recent religious and political history. The reader compiles copies of popular ballads and poems, quotations from religious polemic by Catholic authors and a set of calculations of the dates of recent events in English Catholic history. This marked book serves as a case study through which to explore historical consciousness and the production of particularly Catholic forms of history and memory in the early modern period. This article seeks to query critical narratives concerning apparently combative seventeenth-century political reading practice by extending the remit of the ‘political’ to encompass different generic forms and approaches. It argues that by combining chronological and analogical perspectives this reader constructs a distinctively recusant history. An appendix identifies all of the works used by the annotator and all of the known editions or manuscripts they may have used.

scholarly journals Plague, Practice, and Prescriptive Text

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 152-178
Author(s):  
Moshe Dovid Chechik ◽  
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Accepted Practice ◽  
At Home

Abstract This article studies the fate of a contradiction between practice and prescriptive text in 16th-century Ashkenaz. The practice was fleeing a plagued city, which contradicted a Talmudic passage requiring self-isolation at home when plague strikes. The emergence of this contradiction as a halakhic problem and its various forms of resolution are analyzed as a case study for the development of halakhic literature in early modern Ashkenaz. The Talmudic text was not considered a challenge to the accepted practice prior to the early modern period. The conflict between practice and Talmud gradually emerged as a halakhic problem in 15th-century rabbinic sources. These sources mixed legal and non-legal material, leaving the status of this contradiction ambiguous. The 16th century saw a variety of solutions to the problem in different halakhic writings, each with their own dynamics, type of authority, possibilities, and limitations. This variety reflects the crystallization of separate genres of halakhic literature.

Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chomel (1671–1740): A Case Study in Problems Relating to the Social Status of Scientists in the Early Modern Period

1986 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-322
Author(s):  
David Sturdy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practice Of Science

Consider this statement: the practice of science influences and is influenced by the civilization within which it occurs. Or again: scientists do not pursue their activities in a political or social void; like other people, they aspire to make their way in the world by responding to the values and social mechanisms of their day. Set in such simple terms, each statement probably would receive the assent of most scholars interested in the history of science. But there is need for debate on the nature and extent of the interaction between scientific activity and the civilization which incorporates it, as there is on the relations of scientists to the society within which they live. This essay seeks to make a contribution mainly to the second of these topics by taking a French scientist and academician of the eighteenth century and studying him and his family in the light of certain questions. At the end there will be a discussion relating those questions or themes to the wider debate. There is an associated purpose to the exercise: to present an account of the social origins and formation of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chomel (botanist, physician and member of the Academic des Sciences) which will augment our knowledge of this particular savant.

scholarly journals PUBLICITY, PRIVACY, AND RELIGIOUS TOLERATION IN HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARASH ABIZADEH
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Public Expression ◽  
Modern Period

What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of toleration, religion's freedom from coercion, and separation of church and state? At least three factors motivated Hobbes's 1651 endorsement of Independency: the Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of the politique tradition, and, paradoxically, the contribution of early modern practices of toleration to maintaining the public sphere's religious uniformity. The third factor illustrates how a key function of the emerging private sphere in the early modern period was to protect uniformity, rather than diversity; it also shows that what was novel was not so much the public/private distinction itself, but the separation of two previously conflated dimensions of publicity—visibility and representativeness—that enabled early modern Europeans to envisage modes of worship out in the open, yet still private.

Personalschriften als biographische Quelle. Ein Projekt zum personalen Gelegenheitsschrifttum in den Beständen der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha

Daphnis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466
Author(s):  
Stefan Anders
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Research Library ◽  
Joint Project ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People

This paper presents a joint project of the Institute for Early Modern Cultural History and the Research Library in Gotha, which is digitizing and making accessible about 8000 printed documents from the 16th to the 18th century. These documents were created on the occasion of such personal events as birth, marriage or death. During this process, numerous names of the people mentioned in these occasional documents are being identified and consolidated in a consistent format. The short biographies generated contain essential personal data, originating mostly from these documents but supplemented by information taken from reference books and other biographical resources. The huge potential of these occasional documents for the biographical reconstruction of persons of the early modern period is then demonstrated by a case study, which demonstrates the reliability of the collected data.

China's Hegemony

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji-Young Lee
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
East Asian Language

Many have viewed the tribute system as China's tool for projecting its power and influence in East Asia, treating other actors as passive recipients of Chinese domination. China's Hegemony sheds new light on this system and shows that the international order of Asia's past was not as Sinocentric as conventional wisdom suggests. Instead, throughout the early modern period, Chinese hegemony was accepted, defied, and challenged by its East Asian neighbors at different times, depending on these leaders' strategies for legitimacy among their populations. Focusing on China-Korea-Japan dynamics of East Asian international politics during the Ming and High Qing periods, Ji-Young Lee draws on extensive research of East Asian language sources, including records written by Chinese and Korean tributary envoys. She offers fascinating and rich details of war and peace in Asian international relations, addressing questions such as: why Japan invaded Korea and fought a major war against the Sino-Korean coalition in the late sixteenth century; why Korea attempted to strike at the Ming empire militarily in the late fourteenth century; and how Japan created a miniature tributary order posing as the center of Asia in lieu of the Qing empire in the seventeenth century.

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