Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Religion ◽  
Material Record ◽  
Everyday Religion

By combining the study of early modern everyday religion and the study of material culture, new light is shed on daily religious beliefs, practices, and identities. This chapter examines what the material record discloses about everyday religion in the light of new theoretical developments in material culture studies and studies of material religion in anthropology and sociology. It sets out how detailed, qualitative analysis of inventories and objects provides access to the inner devotional lives of Prague burghers. The analysis is embedded in a broader discourse of religion and material culture across the early modern world. It situates the study in a wider context by comparing and contrasting seventeenth-century Prague to milieus elsewhere in Europe.

Land Surveying in Early Pennsylvania

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Gallo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Land Surveying ◽  
World English

By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the importance of surveying to any system of land ownership. Most historians of colonial British have similarly taken colonial surveying practices as a given. This article complicates these assumptions through an examination of Pennsylvania in a wider context. In fact, land policy in colonial Anglo-America differed significantly from practices elsewhere in the early modern world. English colonizers embraced a model of settler colonialism that created a market for land, thus encouraging the proliferation of modern surveying practices.

The Archaeological Remains of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism on Guam and Their Implications

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boyd Dixon ◽  
Andrea Jalandoni ◽  
Cacilie Craft
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Contact Period ◽  
Archaeological Remains ◽  
Spanish Colonialism ◽  
Low Level

Using a late seventeenth century map of Jesuit religious structures and native Chamorro communities on Guam, this chapter explores the possible impacts of early Spanish colonialism, in the period just prior to La Reduccion, on the island as reflected in the rather sparse record of Contact Period archaeological remains at these same communities. Is this a manifestation of the low level of colonial investment from Spain in Guam, the amalgamation of Chamorro and Spanish material culture, or the lack of archaeological attention to these possible sites?

Making things on the side: creativity at a time of institutional decline

Hot Metal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Adams Stein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
English Language ◽  
Work Time ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Institutional Decline ◽  
Customary Practices ◽  
Over Time

A ‘foreign order’ is an industrial colloquialism referring to a practice whereby workers produce objects at work – using factory materials and work time – without authorisation. This is an under-explored but global phenomenon that many names, including homers, side productions, government jobs, and la perruque. There are silences about these clandestine acts of creative production in English-language studies. This chapter considers this practice from the interdisciplinary perspective of labour history and material culture studies. Using oral and archival sources, the chapter traces the ancestry of foreign orders to seventeenth century English customary practices of the Commons. It provides an account of a playful and creative culture of pranks and making in a printing factory, and identifies the workers’ motivations for creating foreign orders. Finally, the chapter explains how the making of foreign orders became more overt and politicised over time, as workers sensed their insecurity. This practice of making ‘on the side’ enabled print-workers a degree of agency and the ability to narrativise their own plight.

scholarly journals Globalisation and Difference: Cosmopolitanism Before the Nation-State

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Limited Perspective ◽  
The Indian Ocean

In this paper, I have tried to reflect on what cosmopolitanism might mean in a very different era of globalisation than the present. Although cosmopolitanism, as an expansive and sociable vision, is often contrasted with the geographically limited perspective and claustrophobic affinities of nationalism, the term originates in a historical period before the rise of nationalism in Europe. I argue that the residents of the civilisations around the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern world were cosmopolitan even by the standards of the high modernist meaning of the term. Not only did a range of people transact and translate across different languages, but they also knew how to conduct themselves in different cultural settings with people of different religious beliefs, while respecting the disparate religious, social, and cultural practices of their neighbours.

Divine Illumination, Mechanical Calculators, and the Roots of Modern Reason

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Dear
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Inferential Reasoning ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mechanical Reasoning ◽  
Divine Illumination ◽  
Natural Philosophers

ArgumentTalk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

The Material Dimension of the Bible from Print to Digital Text

2020 ◽  
pp. 413-432
Author(s):  
Katja Rakow
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Digital Text ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
God's Word ◽  
Material Religion ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
David Morgan

The chapter addresses the material dimension of the Bible in the discourse and practice of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. According to surveys commissioned by the American Bible Society, announcements from big Bible publishers, and my own observations among contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal Christians in America, digital Bibles and Bible apps are on the rise. The transition from print culture to digital culture has not gone uncontested, and the discussions among Christians about the appropriateness of digital Bible media for religious practices points toward a contestation of the materiality of the medium through which God’s Word, and thereby God, is made present to religious practitioners. Thus the first part of the chapter introduces the frame of material culture studies and the approach to materiality in the study of religion. The second part discusses an analytic model suggested by the material religion scholar David Morgan along which a material analysis of religious objects should be developed. It will subsequently be applied to explore the relation between the Bible and its concrete materiality with a comparative focus on print and digital versions of the Bible.

Muck, Mummies and Medicine: Disgust in Early Modern Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-65
Author(s):  
Sarah-Maria Schober
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This essay shows that early modern practices that used human bodily matter cannot be – as hitherto – explained by the absence of the emotion of disgust nor as being conducted in spite of disgust. Instead, it proposes to read those practices’ changing history as part of the history of the ‘paradox of disgust’. Four case studies (on anatomy, excrement, mummies and skulls) demonstrate that disgust was highly productive: it attracted fascination, allowed physicians to fashion themselves, and was even believed capable of healing. Over time and for complex reasons, however, the productive side of disgust declined. Combining current approaches in the history of emotions and material culture studies, this essay sets out not only to propose a new narrative for the changing role of disgust in early modern science and societies, but also to explore how variations in settings and human intervention changed the way emotions were used and perceived.

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