Missionary Art and Architecture of the Society of Jesus between China and Brazil

Author(s):  
Gauvin Alexander Bailey

This chapter discusses Jesuit strategies in mission art and architecture in the early modern world through two eighteenth-century case studies, one in China and the other in Brazil. The first is an episode in the Jesuit artistic campaign at the Qing court in Beijing when Jesuit artists worked closely with court artists and the Chinese emperor Qianlong to create the Xiyanglou (European-style buildings) at the imperial gardens at Yuanming Yuan. The second is the Jesuits’ introduction of Chinese style decor into church interiors in colonial Brazil as a symbol of Christian victory over paganism. These two episodes will also complicate our idea of Jesuit exceptionalism since non-Christians, Franciscans, and other orders were involved in these activities, sometimes as much as the Jesuits.

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Hellyer

AbstractThe Society of Jesus established an extensive range of measures designed to ensure uniformity in natural philosophical questions. These culminated in the Ordinatio pro Studiis Superioribus of 1651. Such measures did have significant effects on the teaching and publishing of physics among the Jesuits in Germany; it was impossible for Jesuits to openly adhere to atomism, the Cartesian view of body or heliocentrism, for example. But many Jesuits did not agree with all the provisions governing censorship and attempted to mediate their implementation in several ways which this study identifies. The most important of these was the use of terms such as true, probable or false. Provided that Jesuit authors identified the orthodox opinions as true or most probable, they could discuss alternative views in great depth. The essay culminates in two case studies from Germany, one from the mid-seventeenth century, the other from the first half of the eighteenth century, which illustrate the interaction of censorship and physics in actual practice.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Ivanova ◽  
Michelle R. Viise

The most well-known practitioner of dissimulation among early modern Christians of the Eastern Rite is Meletii Smotryts'kyi (ca. 1577–1633), the Orthodox archbishop of Polatsk (in modern-day Belarus), who was suspected of being a Uniate for several years before he was openly charged with apostasy during a council of the Orthodox hierarchy of Poland-Lithuania in August of 1628. For the previous year Smotryts'kyi had lived a double life, outwardly an Orthodox archbishop but secretly a Uniate, having formally accepted the Union with Rome on July 6, 1627. In this period of clandestine Uniatism and the years leading up to it, during which he flirted with conversion, Smotryts'kyi fulfilled his official duties, playing a leading role in Orthodox synods and risking exposure that would bring public disgrace and even physical harm. Smotryts'kyi had a positive reason for keeping his conversion secret: he argued that the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition should allow him to remain in office as an Orthodox bishop so that he might convene a council of the Orthodox hierarchy and elite and, “received as a schismatic [an Orthodox], would be able to set forth and to explain the twofold causes of the present discord of the Church & and to cause doubt for them in the schismatic faith (through the reasons that had taught him himself that there was no contradiction in thing [essence], only in words, between the holy Greek and Latin fathers).” Smotryts'kyi concluded his request for secrecy by comparing his situation with that of Jesuits engaged in mission work with non-Christians: “Wherefore, indeed, if the fathers of the Society of Jesus and the other priests in India can live with the heathens in secular habit, this should cause no one scandal, especially since, with God’s help, we will hope for the much greater fruit of holy Union from his hidden Catholicism & than if he were now known by all.”


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 623-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA HOSTETLER

‘Consulting literary sources is not as satisfactory as observation . . . If one wants to control the barbarian frontier area, one must judge the profitability of the land, and investigate the nature of its people.’—Qian Shu‘If one does not differentiate between their varieties, or know their customs, then one has not what it takes to appreciate their circumstances, and to govern them.’—‘Miaoliao tushuo’


Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher

Chapter 2.5 begins with Pierre Huet’s early eighteenth-century description of the school of Montaigne, which he says has been flourishing for more than a century. He denounces the Essais as ‘the breviary of urbane loafers and ignorant pseudointellectuals’, of undisciplined, over-free literates who do not want to pursue proper scholarship and knowledge. The chapter goes on to offer two further case-studies of the life-writing of such free literates in early modern France (Jean Maillefer and Pierre de L’Estoile), as well as a coda on Pierre Coste and John Locke. Both read Montaigne’s work while writing manuscript journals to domestic and private ends; both combined reading and writing in books with the keeping and reviewing of personal records. L’Estoile reveals the significance of Montaigne’s references to the Essais as a registre––both institutional and personal registers were ubiquitous in this period.


2010 ◽  
Vol 84 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 63-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han Jordaan

Two case studies show the daily practice of justice regarding free Blacks and Coloreds in Curacao and the functioning of the early modern Dutch legal system pertaining to colonial and slavery-related matters. According to the author, both cases reveal that the application of the law, when free non-Whites were involved, was apparently open to interpretation and that there was a divergence in this respect between the colony and the metropole. Author assesses this conflict between the theory of the law and the practice of the administration of justice in the colonies.


2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy

AbstractThis article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.


2010 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy

This article contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that in contemporary Western Europe, and (b) there is insufficient basis to infer either growth or decline in average income in the eighteenth century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Gabriella Gilányi

Abstract This study surveys the musical notation appearing in the liturgical manuscripts of the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit from the fourteenth until the eighteenth century. As a Hungarian foundation, the Pauline Order adopted one of the most elaborate and proportionate Gregorian chant notations of the medieval Catholic Church, the mature calligraphic Hungarian/Esztergom style, and used it faithfully, but in a special eremitical way in its liturgical manuscripts over an exceptionally long period, far beyond the Middle Ages. The research sought to study all the Pauline liturgical codices and codex fragments in which this Esztergom-Pauline notation emerges, then record the single neume shapes and supplementary signs of each source in a database. Systematic comparison has produced many results. On the one hand, it revealed the chronological developments of the Pauline notation over about four centuries. On the other hand, it has been possible to differentiate notation variants, to separate a rounded-flexible and a later more angular, standardized Pauline writing form based on the sources, thereby grasping the transition to Gothic penmanship at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A further result of the study is the discovery of some retrospective Pauline notation types connected to the Early Modern and Baroque period, after the Tridentine Council. The characteristics of the notations of the choir books in the Croatian and the Hungarian Pauline provinces have been well defined and some individual subtypes distinguished – e.g. a writing variant of the centre of the Croatian Pauline province, Lepoglava.


AJS Review ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (01) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Shai A. Alleson-Gerberg

In an era when cannibalism occupied the European imagination and became a political weapon that could be effectively aimed against the Other within or elsewhere, as well as a test case for the concept of humanity, it is hardly surprising to find similar rhetoric in internal Jewish discourse of the early modern era. This article shows Rabbi Jacob Emden's contribution to this discourse in the eighteenth century, and extends the boundaries of the scholarly discussion beyond establishing Jewish-Christian proximity. Emden's halakhic position on the question “Is it permissible to benefit from the cadaver of a dead gentile?” (She'elat Ya‘aveẓ) connects cannibalism and theological heresy springing from an overly literal reading of the rabbinical canon, as well as ties it to the concept of the seven Noahide laws. For Emden, the consumption of human flesh, literally and particularly metaphorically, distinguishes between the sons of Noah and heretics, as well as between humanity and savages. Emden advanced this concept in his polemical writings against the Sabbatian heresy in the 1750s, when he became embroiled in controversy with Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz and the Frankists.


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