Introduction

Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo

In his great 1848 historical drama,Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:Auf halben Wegen und zu halber TatMit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.[That is the curse of our noble house:Striving hesitatingly on half waysto half action with half means.]True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it cannotbe said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Patat

In the last ten years, Noi credevamo (We Believed) (Martone 2010) has been the subject of a very careful criticism interested not only in its historical-ideological implications but also in its semiotic specificities. The purpose of this article is to summarize the cardinal points of these two positions and to add to them some critical observations that have not been noted so far. On the one hand, it is a matter of highlighting how, as a historical film, the work is connected with the history of emotions, a recent historiographical trend that aims to detect the narrative devices of ideological propaganda and the diffusion of feelings since the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, the article proposes a new interpretation of Mario Martone’s film, starting with the analysis of phenomena that are not only historical but also technical and structural.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew McCormack

ABSTRACTHeight is rarely taken seriously by historians. Demographic and archaeological studies tend to explore height as a symptom of health and nutrition, rather than in its own right, and cultural studies of the human body barely study it at all. Its absence from the history of gender is surprising, given that it has historically been discussed within a highly gendered moral language. This paper therefore explores height through the lens of masculinity and focuses on the eighteenth century, when height took on a peculiar cultural significance in Britain. On the one hand, height could be associated with social status, political power and ‘polite’ refinement. On the other, it could connote ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness and even castration. The article explores these themes through a case-study of John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, who was famously tall and was frequently caricatured as such. As well as exploring representations of the body, the paper also considers corporeal experiences and biometric realities of male height. It argues that histories of masculinity should study both representations of gender and their physical manifestations.


1991 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 53-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury

The literature on merchants and trade in the early modern Middle East is still rudimentary. Although the period witnessed basic changes in trade patterns of the region, there have been very few regional studies addressing the nature of trade and the various groups engaged in it, either from an internal or local perspective or from an international one (Masters, 1988; Raymond, 1984; Abdel-Nour, 1982). For much of the Arab world there is a gap in the literature between Goitein's and Ashtor's works on the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the eighteenth century on the other when northern European companies acquired a strong foothold in the area (Goitein, 1966, 1967; Ashtor, 1978). For Iraq there exist almost no general works on the early Ottoman period and the Iraqi archives remain inaccessible. Thus, any conclusions on trade and merchants in Iraq during this period are by necessity tentative and general. There are a number of issues that can be raised with respect to early modern Iraq, however, which are relevant to the history of early modern trade in general.


1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Hans Kohn

A few hours before his sudden death last year in Bonn, Hajo Holborn remarked that in spite of the ill health of his last years his life had been a happy one. He had an unusually successful career in his beloved profession, first as a young man in Germany, then as a leading scholar in his field in the United States; and he was able to finish his magnum opus,A History of Modern Germany, before his death. Its first volume appeared in 1959; its third and last, in 1969. As a disciple of Wilhelm Dilthey and of Friedrich Meinecke, Holborn gave special attention to the “realm of ideas,” to the religious, intellectual, and artistic achievements of Germany. While he wrote primarily political history and succeeded in ordering the mass of information which he provides into a meaningful narrative which holds the reader's interest, the high points are his discussion of the thinkers and poets from Germany's rapid cultural rise in the late eighteenth century to its decline after the mid-nineteenth century. One of the best of these subchapters is the one on Marx and Engels, a masterpiece of objectivity. It is to be found in the second volume of theHistory, though chronologically Marx and Engels belong in the third volume, which covers the period from 1840 to 1945. (After all, the two young men met and their public activity began only after 1840 and their thought and dedicated life began to exercise their impact only decades later.) By 1945, when Holborn's History ends, Marx had become the most widely known German, whose influence shaped history on a worldwide scale and to a degree surpassing by far that of the other great German with whom Holborn starts hisHistory, Martin Luther.


Antichthon ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 45-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lattke

41 verse texts are extant of the original 42 poems (also described as hymns, psalms or songs) which comprise the so-calledOdes of Solomon—a corpus not to be confused with the 18 so-calledPsalms of Solomon.As can be seen from the Appendix, the history of the discovery and publication of these poems began with C.G. Woide at the end of the eighteenth century.1 Up to that time the only evidence for theOdes of Solomonwas twofold. On the one hand, there was an enigmatic Latin quotation of three lines (i.e. 19:6-7a) in theDivinae Institutionesof Lactantius (c.240-c.320). On the other hand, the mere titlewas listed together with the better knownin the so-calledof Ps.-Athanasios and theascribed to Nikephoros Patriarch of Konstantinopolis (c.750-828). In these two canon-listsPsalmsandOdesappear in this order among the Old Testament's ‘antilegomena’ which is a category between ‘canonical’ and ‘apocryphal’.


1962 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 63-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Stoye

The second decade of the eighteenth century in Europe was an era of administrative experiment and reform. In certain respects, these were as impressive as the measures ofso-called ‘enlightened’ absolutists after the Seven Years War. The earlier, like the later, period discloses the attempt of governments to undo the consequences of prolonged warfare; in this case, also, in some areas, to soften the fearful effects of disease which decimated populations and their livestock in 1710–14, during the last major visitation of bubonic plague in the history of central Europe. Peter the Great tried to give a more settled form to the changes hastily improvised to take the strain of his war with Sweden. Frederick William I set to work on those schemes which led to the resettlement of derelict areas in East Prussia, and to the organization of the General Directory. In France, leaving aside the abortive constitutional reaction afterLouis XIV's death, the gigantic problem of the debt was tackled by orthodox financiers and administrators as well as by John Law. In this setting, it seems worth asking whether the Austrian Habsburgs, faced by similar problems, sought similar remedies. Such an inquiry may help to give a clearer picture of the main outlines of European development immediately after 1713, in the period which is still occasionally regarded as a featureless interim between the fiercer climaxes of the War of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War on the one hand, and the age of Frederick, Catherine and Maria Theresa on the other.


Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

This chapter surveys some of the more important developments in the history of the concept of race in eighteenth-century Germany. It reveals an inconsistency between the desire to make taxonomic distinctions and a hesitance to posit any real ontological divisions within the human species. This inconsistency was well represented in the physical-anthropological work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was, in many respects, the most important eighteenth-century theorist of human difference. Johann Gottfried Herder, a contemporary of Blumenbach's, was intensely interested in human diversity, but saw this diversity as entirely based in culture rather than biology, and saw cultural difference as an entirely neutral matter, rather than as a continuum of higher and lower. Herder constitutes an important link between early modern universalism, on the one hand, and on the other the ideally value-neutral project of cultural anthropology as it would begin to emerge in the nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hartmut Rüß

This review analyses the latest monograph of a German expert on the eighteenth-century history of German-Russian relations. Peter Hoffman has conducted a comprehensive historical analysis of Prussian-Russian relations and conflicts during the reign of Frederick II, paying special attention to the image of Russia in Frederick’s eyes and, thereby, in the eyes of part of the German elite. The reviewer focuses on the most acute aspects and moments of these relations as they are dissected and presented by Hoffman: from the nature of Frederick’s attempts to establish personal ties with the rulers of Russia to his revelations about Russia as the most dangerous country for Prussia. The reviewer demonstrates Hoffman’s “empathy for the Russians” and the associated danger of a “one-sided” view on the protagonists: on the one hand, there is Prussia and King Frederick, who is prone to persistently “false assessments” of Russia, and on the other hand, there is “open-mindedness” that was “generally characteristic of Russian diplomacy”. According to the reviewer, the author generally provides too little concrete factual material and too often requires the reader to know the sources and literature he refers to in order to defend these judgments.


Author(s):  
Boaz Huss

This chapter explores the tension between the desire to disseminate the Zohar and the wish to limit access to it. This tension is inherent in the economic logic of cultural systems as described by Pierre Bourdieu: ‘all the goods offered tend to lose some of their relative scarcity and their distinctive value as the number of consumers both inclined and able to appropriate them grows’. To increase and maintain the value of cultural products, then, a fine balance must be struck between their circulation, on the one hand, and restrictions on their accessibility on the other. In establishing the Zohar's image as a sacred and authoritative text, some circulation was necessary; yet uncontrolled access to the book was to diminish its value. The chapter focuses on eighteenth-century popularization attempts, mainly by Sabbatians, and the reactions that followed, leading to the imposition of restrictions on kabbalistic study.


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