Introduction to the Mirror

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Susan Mokhberi

During the seventeenth century, French missionaries, travelers, diplomats, and writers raised comparisons between France and Persia that established Persia as a suitable mirror for France. The two countries were connected through diplomatic contacts, images, material objects, and texts, which together laid the basis for an imagined relationship. Frenchmen created an image of Persia that matched their own tastes and political circumstances and evolved over the course of the century. Inspired by new trajectories in global history, the case study of France and Persia challenges traditional ideas of Orientalism by uncovering the variety of European responses to Asia in the early modern period.

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 272-291
Author(s):  
Christopher Archibald

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.


1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria R. Boes

One of the most fascinating aspects of criminal adjudication is the method of identifying the criminal. Who committed the crime? While crime-detecting agents of the twentieth century use an array of sophisticated methods, such as fingerprinting, psychology, and, most recently, DNA sampling, no such methods were available to their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts. In fact, during the early modern period there were hardly any police forces to speak of. How, then, did contemporaries detect and report their culprits? Here I address these intriguing questions using an urban case study of Frankfurt am Main from 1562 to 1696.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-335
Author(s):  
Richard Maber

An informed engagement in a wide variety of advanced intellectual pursuits was entirely normal in the early modern period; less predictable, though, were the crucial dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Uniquely in seventeenth-century France, Caen saw the foundation of two separate learned societies, the principal Académie de Caen and the smaller but distinct Académie de physique. The latter was also unique: inspired by the Royal Society of London and founded well before the Parisian Académie des sciences, it gained royal recognition and finance in 1668 before failing soon after 1672. In this essay, these remarkable events are reconsidered in the light of the individuals involved, especially the dominant personality of the strong-minded polymath Pierre-Daniel Huet, and their relationships. Based on primary documents that have been unstudied or misinterpreted, it serves as a case-study of the complex ways in which intellectual life in France operated in practice during the later seventeenth century.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Nora Berend

Wrote Miklós Zrínyi (Nikola Zrinski) in the mid seventeenth century about those who died fighting against the Ottomans. The poet, who himself was engaged in both politics and war, defined Hungarian identity as Christian and premised on warfare unto death against Muslims.


2016 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 131-201
Author(s):  
Inga Mai Groote ◽  
Dietrich Hakelberg

Recent research on the library of Johann Caspar Trost the Elder, organist in Halberstadt, has led to the identification of a manuscript with two unknown treatises on musica poetica, one a lost treatise by Johann Hermann Schein and the other an unknown treatise by Michael Altenburg. Together they offer fresh insights into the learning and teaching of music in the early modern period. The books once owned by Trost also have close connections to his personal and professional life. This article situates the newly discovered manuscript in the framework of book history and Trost’s biography, and discusses the two treatises against the background of contemporary books of musical instruction (Calvisius, Lippius, or Finolt). The historical context of the manuscript, its theoretical sources and its origins all serve to contribute to and further the current understanding of musical education in early modern central Germany. An edition of the treatises is provided.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Marieke Meelen ◽  
Silva Nurmio

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.


Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Javier Ruano García

The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent scarcity of sources which supply trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical scene of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might help us contribute to complete the sketchy map of lexical provincialisms at the time.


Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson

“The Accidents of the Soul” asks which disciplines were seen to provide a knowledge of the passions in the early modern period, and how that map of the disciplines changed over time. It opens by noting the relatively minor position the passions held in a received philosophical “science of the soul,” itself divided between physics and metaphysics. As “accidents of the soul”—that is, contingent qualitative alterations in the soul—the passions lay at the margins of philosophical knowledge: they were seen as subject to too much particularity and contingency to belong to what one author called “certaine science.” They belonged instead to the “low” sciences, the practical sciences, fields that study human actions and that therefore were seen to produce a merely probable knowledge of particulars: fields like rhetoric, politics, poetics, ethics. The passions also belonged to medicine insofar as diagnostic medicine was understood as an art: in medicine, “accidents” are symptoms and the phrase “accidents of the soul” belongs to medical discourse insofar as it takes account of the particularities of the passions as part of a regimen of health. The chapter situates the seventeenth-century treatises on the passions in relation to various kinds of discourse on the passions all seen as promoting forms of probable knowledge on the model of medical diagnostics: physiology and “characterology,” most notably. It ends with a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello as a text that probes the limits—and the dangers—of this probable knowledge of the passions.


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