The Discovery of Nitrogen and the Disappearance of Alchemical Nitre: The Rise of Agricultural Chemistry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. J. Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Plant Growth ◽  
Soil Fertility ◽  
Sodium Nitrate ◽  
Scientific Basis ◽  
Crystalline Solid ◽  
Agricultural Chemistry ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

So far, we have seen how sophisticated systems of agriculture had grown up in many different places and at various times in order to overcome problems associated with the decline of soil fertility arising from continuous exploitation. In Europe and elsewhere, it was clearly understood that manures and various materials such as potassium (or sodium) nitrate could rejuvenate the soil, and empirically probably little more could have been achieved in this direction. Nevertheless, the supply of the products capable of doing this was clearly limited. Only when the scientific basis of the action of fertilisers and manures had been fully understood could further advances be made, and this only happened with the scientific revolution, which began to flower in the sixteenth century and continues in bloom to this day. The empirical experience of centuries seems to have led to the supposition in Europe that the air was somehow involved in restoring the fertility of soils and in the facilitation of plant growth. However, the reason for this influence could not have been presented in modern terms. A lot of the discussion was centred about the mysterious substance nitre, which was then not simply the salt we recognise today. There are many instances of statements to the effect that nitre was absorbed from the air and even references in the older literature to aerial nitre. Solid nitre was, of course, very well-known in the form of saltpetre and was widely employed as a constituent of gunpowder. This kind of nitre could also be used as a fertiliser, though there was not enough of it around to “waste” by spreading it on the soil. Then, as is often true today, warfare was regarded as a more important use for such a resource. Nitre could be extracted from manures and from ashes, and, because it was a crystalline solid, it certainly was not the mysterious something that was present in the air. There was no understanding of the modern notions of elements and compounds. It would take a long time—two centuries—for a truly scientific approach to agricultural chemistry to be developed, but it is still worthwhile to enquire what exactly writers of treatises in the mid-seventeenth century really meant.

Ottoman Tapu Title Deeds In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries: Origin, Typology And Diplomatics

2000 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Minkov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
National Library ◽  
Land Transfer ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

AbstractAlthough the existence of tapus is well known, their typology, form, and structure have not been the object of a detailed analysis. Based on research undertaken in the Ottoman archive of the National Library of Bulgaria, I analyze eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman tapu title deeds. I argue that their 'classical' eighteenth-and nineteenth-century form is the outcome of the amalgamation of (1) receipts for payment of the tapu fee (resm-i tapu) and (2) records of land transfer. I also argue that the process of amalgamation probably started in the middle of the sixteenth century and continued until the second half of the seventeenth century.

Privacy, Display and Over Extension: Walter Strickland's Rebuilding of Sizergh

2002 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 197-245
Author(s):  
Ian Goodall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Sizergh– known as Sizergh Hall from the seventeenth century, and renamed Sizergh Castle in the mid-nineteenth century– has been the seat of the Strickland f amily for over seven hundred years. Although it has a medieval core, the house as it exists today is substantially the work of Walter Strickland (1516–69) who, in the mid- 1550s, initiated a comprehensive rebuilding programme, which more than trebled it in size. The enlarged house, built around three sides of a courtyard, reflected, in its rooms and their disposition, the concern for privacy and segregation that characterized the age. The fitting-out of the interior with high-quality panelling, ceilings and furnishings was incomplete on Walter's death, but was continued by his family over the next two or three generations. The house was altered and subdivided during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but much of the integrity of the mid-sixteenth-century building still survives.

The Portuguese on the Zambezi: An Historical Interpretation of the Prazo System

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Local Administration ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Administrative Policy ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

From the sixteenth century until the coming of the Salazar regime, Portuguese control in the Zambezi basin rested on the prazos da coroa—grants of crown land. Portuguese acquisition of land and jurisdiction began with the establishment of the trading fairs in Mashonaland in the second half of the sixteenth century. Private titles first became common in the seventeenth century, when individual conquistadores, who had obtained concessions from chiefs in return for their help in local wars, sought official titles for their land from the Portuguese crown. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Crown tried to modify the terms of these grants and alter the character of the institution of the prazos. The prazo-holders successfully resisted these encroachments because their power rested on their followings of African slaves and clients, and on their control of local administration and their family alliances. In the nineteenth century their dependence on their African followings, coupled with increasing inter-marriage, greatly accentuated the African characteristics of the prazos. The most important of the prazo holders became the chiefs of newly emerging African peoples, and adopted the customs and beliefs associated with chieftainship. At the same time the disordered state of the Zambezi following the Ngoni invasions and the growth of the slave-trade eliminated the weaker families and concentrated power effectively in the hands of four major family groupings. The wars waged by the Portuguese government against these families lasted from the 1840s till teh end of the century. In spite of many victories, the internal feuds among the prazo families and the establishment of British administration in Central Africa brought about the end of their dominance. The prazos themselves survived into the twentieth century as units of fiscal and administrative policy.

The Covenant of Works

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. V. Fesko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Interpretive Methods ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The book surveys the origins of the doctrine of the covenant of works. The doctrine originates in the patristic era and fully flowers in the sixteenth century among Reformed theologians. The doctrine develops from a web of biblical texts and becomes codified in confessions of the seventeenth century. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, support for the doctrine began to wane until Reformed theologians in the twentieth century outright rejected it. There were, however, theologians who continued to promote the doctrine because they continued to use the same interpretive methods as earlier proponents of the doctrine. Critics no longer employed the Reformation principle of good and necessary consequence, rejected Reformed scholasticism, and embraced biblicism. By way of contrast, proponents of the doctrine continued to use good and necessary consequences, saw Reformed scholasticism as resource, and rejected bibliclism.

Academic Feud, Bloodfeud, and William Welwood: Legal Education in St Andrews, 1560–1611-Part I

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Joint Meeting ◽  
Academic Education

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Lutherans and the Suffering of Christ

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Heal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Mining Region

Chapter 5 focuses on one particular type of Lutheran devotional image: the crucifix. It examines transformations in Lutheran Passion piety from the early Reformation to the era of Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), using this to illustrate the increasing significance accorded to images. Luther himself had condemned the excesses of late-medieval Passion piety, with its emphasis on compassion for Christ and the Virgin Mary, on physical pain and on tears. From the later sixteenth century onwards, however, Lutheran sermons, devotional literature, prayers and poetry described Christ’s suffering in increasingly graphic terms. Alongside this, late-medieval images of the Passion were restored and new images were produced. Drawing on case studies from the Erzgebirge, a prosperous mining region in southern Saxony, and Upper Lusatia, the chapter investigates the ways in which images of the Passion were used in Lutheran communities during the seventeenth century.

Commercial Linkages with Central Asia and Iran

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott C. Levi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Family Firms ◽  
Indian Region ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Commercial System ◽  
Northern India

While it may seem counterintuitive, the increase in Mughal India’s maritime trade contributed to a tightening of overland commercial connections with its Asian neighbors. The primary agents in this process were “Multanis,” members of any number of heavily capitalized, caste-based family firms centered in the northwest Indian region of Multan. The Multani firms had earlier developed an integrated commercial system that extended across the Punjab, Sind, and much of northern India. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Multanis first appear in historical sources as having established their own communities in Central Asia and Iran. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at any given point in time, a rotating population of some 35,000 Indian merchants orchestrated a network of communities that extended across dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and villages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran, stretching up the Caucasus and into Russia.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

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