The Birth and Early Demise of a Liberal Interpretation of Ireland’s Early Modern Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 326-355
Author(s):  
Nicholas Canny
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Past Injustice

Lecky, an Irish Protestant landowner, and liberal commentator on Irish affairs considered historians to be responsible to adjudicate between opposing views, having appraised the evidence. On this basis he condemned the English for harshness that provoked rebellion in 1641, insisted that no massacre had been involved, and that the Cromwellian confiscation had been falsely justified. However, he considered this injustice so ancient as to be irreversible, and he represented the government’s land reform measures as compensation for past injustice. Lecky’s call for moderation made no impression on the authors of Catholic county histories written to refute the elite narratives by insisting the landowners and Protestant were a foreign, malign presence in each county, and that memory was a surer guide to truth than documentary evidence. Protestant authors who insisted that a massacre in 1641 was well documented also decried Lecky’s views.

scholarly journals Integrating isotopes and documentary evidence: dietary patterns in a late medieval and early modern mining community, Sweden

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2075-2094 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ylva Bäckström ◽  
Jan Mispelaere ◽  
Anne Ingvarsson ◽  
Markus Fjellström ◽  
Kate Britton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Dietary Patterns ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Mining Community

Benedict XIV’s donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna (1751) Origins and history

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuele Tacconi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
New World ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jesuit Missionary ◽  
The City

Abstract In 1751 Pope Benedict XIV made a donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, a scientific academy located in the city of his birth. This article reconstructs the history of this group of objects back to its origins in the Jesuit missions of the upper Amazon basin, by presenting and examining new documentary evidence. The encounter between a Jesuit missionary and Pope Benedict XIV is analysed in the context of the early modern reception of the New World and its peoples in Catholic Europe. Finally, an overview is presented of the items in this collection, which represent some of the scarcest and oldest known examples of native material culture from the region.

Festive Friars: Embodied Performance and Audience Affect

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Author(s):  
Erika T. Lin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Ritual Practices

This essay models a method for unearthing performance traces in texts that seem on the surface to be strictly literary. Centering on Thomas Dekker's The Raven's Almanac, a compilation of stories akin to those in early modern jest books, it analyzes a bawdy tale about a friar and an abbess that reveals deep connections to May games. Festivity constituted a mode of embodied knowledge, a somatic and kinesthetic process that conditioned playgoer responses. This essay demonstrates how examining nondramatic performance, including quotidian, ceremonial, and ritual practices, allows the recovery of ephemeral audience affect. Studying spectators’ emotions is notoriously challenging but can productively complicate concepts such as character and narrative. Moreover, it was through amorphous feelings and sensations that theater actively produced cultural understandings. Expanding the methodological toolkit for investigating performance offers a useful blueprint for researching other ineffable but consequential historical experiences that exceed, by definition, the documentary evidence.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Secular Vocal Performance in Early Wales

2009 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-183
Author(s):  
Christopher Macklin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThere are many historical repertories of interest for which documentary evidence is scant. In such areas traditional models of musicological research, driven by notation, may be of limited use, and there is thus a need to develop alternative formulations for the relationship between the performance, the performer and the text. In this study, textual analysis and ethnographic comparisons of structurally similar performance cultures (namely, classical Greece and Rome and bardic traditions of south-eastern Europe and eastern Africa) are combined to examine one such tradition: the secular music of the bards of medieval and early-modern Wales. Contemporary accounts pertaining to this repertory are characterized by a systematic ambiguity in their description of speech and song, and a selective use of musical notation for instrumental but not vocal figuration. Comparisons with other musical cultures that share this ambiguity lead to the development of a model of performance that accounts for these textual features.

Land Reform in South Africa: An Overview

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Rugege
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Black People ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Fundamental Cause ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
The Many

South Africa suffered a long history of colonization, racial domination and land dispossession that resulted in the bulk of the agricultural land being owned by a white minority. Black people resisted being dispossessed but were defeated by the superior arms of the newcomers. As Lewin has written, “whatever minor causes there may have been for the many Bantu-European wars, the desire for land was the fundamental cause.” Despite the claims that South Africa was largely uninhabited at the time of the arrival of Europeans, documentary evidence shows that in fact the land was inhabited. Thus the journal of the first European to settle at the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck records incidents of confrontation with the indigenous Khoi-khoi (or Hottentots) in 1655.

Lesotho's land tenure regimes: experiences of rural communities and the calls for land reform

2004 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville W. Pule ◽  
Motlatsi Thabane
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Customary Land ◽  
Ownership Of Land

Calls to reform Lesotho's traditional or customary land tenure abound. The main argument of those who call for reform is that there is no security of tenure, and therefore economic development and foreign and local investment in agriculture are lacking. Lately, traditional land tenure has been blamed for environmental degradation of agricultural land. Using oral and documentary evidence collected in the Rothe Ward, Mafeteng District, and the Mafeteng District Secretary's Office, this paper argues that the traditional land tenure is ambiguous on ownership of land, and is in need of reform designed to prevent various forms of chiefly abuse. However, no evidence of insecurity of tenure per se was found. Instead, poverty and lack of capital with which to acquire agricultural inputs in order to improve production were most prevalent in the responses of rural communities. Finally, the paper ends on a note of caution that reforms as envisaged may have calamitous long-term consequences both for rural communities and the country.

Critical Chorography: A Pedagogical Approach

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
Jason E. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Gis Technology ◽  
The West ◽  
Pedagogical Approach ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Comparative Model

This essay articulates the concept of ‘critical chorography’ through a discussion of the productive intersection of pedagogy in the spatial humanities and map theory as applied to the visualization of early modern maps using contemporary GIS technology. In method, the essay lays out a comparative model for the analysis of maps across early modern and contemporary digital practices by theorizing student-driven practices of mapping first through a deep attention to historical location and documentary evidence, and second, through an inquiry into the digital implications of mapping jurisdictional conflicts through case studies focused on westward expansion in the West Indies. To those ends, the essay examines the drive in contemporary spatial humanities to use the map as a tool of analysis, rather than merely as a platform for visualization and presentation.

Psychoanalysis and the scientific mind: Robert Boyle

1999 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
KARL FIGLIO
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Psychoanalytic Understanding ◽  
Scientific Mind ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Way

It is a tempting exercise, both historically and psychoanalytically, to contribute to a psychoanalytic understanding of Robert Boyle. Over many years, historians of science have been amassing evidence of science as a social activity, part of the culture of its time. As these studies progress, they stumble into psychoanalytic territory willy nilly. Indeed, the very notion of enquiry into nature becomes a psychoanalytic issue, as soon as we think of it as an emotionally charged approach to an object. If we think of Boyle as an early modern scientific investigator and as a personification of the tensions surrounding the investigation of nature as an object in the psychoanalytic sense, then we have a double reason for bringing a psychoanalytic understanding to bear upon him.One of the criticisms of a psychoanalytic enquiry into any historical figure or situation is that the object of study is not present in the way a patient is present. It is not simply that the patient is not there – after all, there is documentary evidence to stand in for the missing person – but that the key feature that makes the enquiry psychoanalytic is missing. There is no transference, and no way to monitor the accuracy of interpretations. That means that the analyst cannot sit in the place of the objects in which the subject has an intense emotional investment, and from which vantage the subject of these investments can be studied. In that sense, the enquiry cannot be said to be properly psychoanalytic in method.

The Lost Map of Matteo de’ Pasti: Cartography, Diplomacy, and Espionage in the Renaissance Adriatic

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Sean Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Historical Sources

The sculptor Matteo de’ Pasti left Rimini in 1461 bound for Ottoman Sultan Mehmed ii’s court at Constantinople with gifts from Sigismondo Malatesta. When his ship stopped in Crete, Matteo was detained by the island’s Venetian authorities on charges of espionage. Contemporaries report that he carried with him a map, now lost, but assumed to be a strategically valuable one of the Adriatic. Discussions of Matteo’s mission claim that it attempted to supply the sultan with essential intelligence for an invasion of Italy. Yet, this spy story finds little confirmation in historical sources. Indeed, our knowledge of the map’s very existence derives from the reports of Sigismondo’s enemies. I examine this prominent embassy as a means to reconsider attitudes toward the utility of maps in the scholarly imagination and the role of art and artists in early modern diplomacy. Revisiting documentary evidence and the claims scholars have grounded therein, I explore how we have told the tale of this journey in ways that conform to our own shifting expectations, sometimes at the expense of fidelity to the sources at hand. Overwhelming focus on the absent map has obscured both Matteo’s role as envoy and the distinctive place of evidently skillful and delightful visual culture in this attempted exchange.

Re-Imagining Ireland’s Early Modern Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 221-256
Author(s):  
Nicholas Canny
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Past Injustice ◽  
National Sentiment

Historians—Protestant and Catholic—associated with the Nation newspaper who were identified as members of Young Ireland constructed a romantic narrative of Ireland’s history in English verse that lauded heroes who had created an Irish nation by resisting English intrusion. This successful venture was designed to cultivate national sentiment among people with limited schooling. The more serious intellectual endeavour of Young Ireland was to sponsor a reasoned prose narrative of Ireland’s past to honour all—regardless of origin or denomination—who had fashioned an inclusive Irish nation. This proved less successful because it required their Catholic members to suppress memories of past injustice. Also, Catholic Church authorities, suspicious of the liberal agenda of Young Ireland, encouraged a counter-narrative that would dwell on past sufferings and celebrate those who had become martyrs for Catholicism rather than heroes of some imaginary Irish nation state.

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