Conversion in Early Modern Western Mediterranean Accounts of Captivity: Identity, Audience, and Narrative Conventions

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Grieve
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Captivity Narratives ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Narrative Conventions

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries captivity narratives written by Spanish and English captives abounded. There is a smaller corpus of such texts by Muslim captives in Spain and England, and by some travelers from the Ottoman Empire who observed their fellow Muslims in captivity. A comparative analysis illuminatingly reveals similar usage of narrative conventions, especially of hagiography and pious romances, as well as the theoretical stance of “resistance literature” taken on by many writers. I consider accounts written as truthful, historical texts alongside fictional ones, such as Miguel de Cervantes’ “The Captive’s Tale,” from Don Quixote, Part I. Writers both celebrated monolithic categories such as Protestant, Catholic, Spanish, English, and Muslim, and challenged them for differing ideological reasons. Writers constructed heroic narratives of their own travails and endurance. In the case of English narratives, didacticism plays an important role. In one case, that of John Rawlins, the account reads like Christian theology: to keep in mind, no matter how grim the situation of captivity may be, one’s identity as an Englishman. Raḍwān al-Janawī used his letters about Muslims in captivity in Portuguese-occupied Africa, in which he points out the vigorous efforts of Christian rulers to secure the liberty of their own people, to criticize Muslim rulers who, in his opinion, exerted far too little energy in rescuing their brothers and sisters from captivity. Ultimately, this essay explores the fictionality of truthful narratives and the truth in fictional ones, and the ways in which people from different cultures identified their own identities, especially against those of “the enemy.”

Cervantes and Warfare

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Stacey Triplette
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Military Action ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Personal Career

Miguel de Cervantes travelled the Mediterranean as a professional soldier, fought in the battle of Lepanto in 1571, and endured five years in captivity in Algiers before he published his first literary work in 1585. References to warfare appear throughout Cervantes’s literary production, serving as a metaphor, background, or interpolation, even in texts that concern themselves primarily with civilian life. Though Cervantes celebrates his personal career as a soldier, he subjects the theme of warfare more generally to the irony and distance with which he treats other cultural phenomena of early modern Spain. In all his texts, Cervantes expresses a concern for justice in military action. For the individual soldier, citizen, or knight-errant, personal heroism and correct behaviour appear to be possible, but on the scale of the nation, warfare leads inevitably to financial opportunism and human suffering.

Perilous Empathy on the Early Modern Frontier

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-235
Author(s):  
Kathryn Prince
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
North American ◽  
Captivity Narratives ◽  
Mary Rowlandson ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe captivity narratives produced in New England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are rich and complex sources in which to discover early modern attitudes towards empathy. Contemporary scholars including Sara Ahmed and Carolyn Pedwell have argued that empathy can be problematic, reifying and reproducing various forms of injustice under the guise of fellow feeling. On the early modern North American frontier, empathy was understood as problematic for other reasons, an undesirable response to both the captors and the captive that was often diverted, displaced, or denied in captivity narratives. By situating the captivity narratives of Hannah Swarton, Hannah Dustan, Mary Rowlandson and Elizabeth Hanson within their initial cultural contexts and contemporary theories of empathy and emotions, this essay contributes to an alternative history of empathy.

Matteo Ricci the Daoist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haun Saussy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Matteo Ricci

When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in China in the 1580s, he had to invent an identity for himself: he and his doctrine were unknowns. That would soon change as Ricci became a Ming-dynasty celebrity through his writings in Chinese and personal contacts. From an examination of contemporary writings about Ricci in Chinese, a constellation of references emerges that depict him, through repeated references to the Zhuangzi and associated texts, as a kind of Daoist sage, a hermit in the midst of the secular world, perhaps a wonder-worker or envoy from a transcendental realm. Ricci’s own role in creating this legend is unclear, but his admirers and interlocutors developed and extended the reference, as a means of giving early-modern Christian theology a purchase on the Chinese political and intellectual situation of the time.

Oviposition and the hatching of the eggs of Pieris brassicae (L.) in a laboratory culture

1962 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. L. David ◽  
B. O. C. Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Laboratory Culture ◽  
Pieris Brassicae ◽  
Mustard Oil ◽  
Green Paper ◽  
Low Light ◽  
Sucrose Solutions ◽  
Cent Relative Humidity ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Honey Solution ◽  
Different Cultures

The work described in this paper forms part of an investigation into the conditions which influence the breeding of Pieris brassicae (L.) in captivity. Observations have been made on the behaviour of the females at the time of oviposition, on factors which influence oviposition, on the appearance and weight of the eggs and on their fertility and hatching.Females which are ready to lay seek out green surfaces and, as they respond eagerly to plants from which they are separated by glass, it seems that plant odour plays little part in the attraction. Once they have alighted, however, the insects drum on the surface with their fore legs to test its suitability. Normally they lay only on plants which contain the mustard-oil glucosides, but they have been observed to oviposit on broad bean (Vicia faba), on which the larvae do not survive. Sinegrin applied to green paper stimulates the female to lay. Provided she is standing on an acceptable surface she will oviposit on any other surface, for example, filter paper or glass. The eggs are normally deposited on the under surface of the leaves. This is largely due to a preference for the physical underside but the insects also seem to prefer the morphological under surface of the leaf to the upper surface. When laying an egg, the female locates one previously laid with the tip of her abdomen and so builds up the regularly arranged batches.The females lived and oviposited as well in small cages as in large cages. They laid more eggs per day, and more eggs in a batch, at 30°C. than at 20°C. Both numbers increased until the female was about six to seven days old and then declined. Oviposition occurs at low light intensities. Fertilised females laid very many more eggs than virgin females. Oviposition occurred two to three days after copulation, and most females oviposited six or seven times in eight days. The number of eggs laid by starving insects is low: it is higher for insects given water or one per cent, honey solution and very much higher for insects given ten per cent, honey solution. Sucrose solutions are as satisfactory as honey solution.When first laid, the eggs of P. brassicae are yellow in colour and become more orange as they develop. Some batches of newly laid eggs are of a distinctly darker yellow than others but, as it is believed that the eggs are fertilised only just before oviposition, it seems that this colour difference cannot be due to the eggs being in somewhat different stages of development. The number of ribs on the shells seems to vary in different cultures.Batches of eggs which are laid within an hour of each other may begin to hatch several hours apart, and the time taken for all the eggs in one batch to hatch was found to range from two hours to about seven. A fertilised female lays scarcely any infertile eggs. The fertility after one mating falls below 100 per cent, after about 14 days, but normally the female mates again before this time. Temperature naturally affects the time taken by the eggs to hatch. The shortest time was about 3¾ days at 28°C.; the longest observed was 17 days at 12·5°C.The eggs cannot be stored for more than ten days at 3·5°C. and 50 per cent, relative humidity. Eggs will develop and hatch at very low humidities. If the eggs are detached from the surface on which they are laid by the use of acetone their capacity to develop and hatch in air dried over phosphorus pentoxide is substantially reduced.

Consuls-of-State and the Redemption of Slaves: The Dutch Republic and the Western Mediterranean, 1616–1651

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Erica Heinsen-Roach
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Customary Practices

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch Republic developed a trade empire of global proportions. The Dutch government played a substantial role in building and sustaining merchant enterprises by allowing chartered companies to act on its behalf. In the Mediterranean, however, the authorities relied on a variety of commercial-diplomatic agents to promote commerce. This article argues that Dutch consuls in the western Mediterranean transformed from merchant-consuls into state-representatives and played a crucial role in sustaining diplomatic relations with states in the Maghreb. By comparing the conditions under which consuls liberated captives in Algiers and Morocco during the first half of the seventeenth century, the article examines how consuls continuously had to adjust their mission to the interests of different institutions and individuals. The article concludes that the expansion of Dutch global commerce in the Mediterranean did not evolve according to a standard script but in consuls’ interactions with local conditions and customary practices. The article contributes to the New Diplomatic History that emphasizes how successful diplomatic relations in the early modern world depended on a range of different diplomatic actors who created forms of state diplomacy beyond treaty making and alliances.

scholarly journals From directions to descriptions: Reading the theatrical Nebentext in Ben Jonson’s Workes as an authorial outlet

Sederi ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
David J. Amelang
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
The Way

This article explores how certain dramatists in early modern England and in Spain, specifically Ben Jonson and Miguel de Cervantes (with much more emphasis on the former), pursued authority over texts by claiming as their own a new realm which had not been available—or, more accurately, as prominently available—to playwrights before: the stage directions in printed plays. The way both these playwrights and/or their publishers dealt with the transcription of stage directions provides perhaps the clearest example of a theatrical convention translated into the realm of readership.

Interactions between North Africa and Spain: Medieval and Early Modern

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilo Gómez-Rivas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
Arabic Speaking

Arabic-speaking Muslim polities existed in medieval Spain and Portugal where they were superseded by Christian empires that gradually disavowed cultural connections to this past. Hebrew and Arabic were largely expurgated from homes and libraries. Jews and Muslims who refused to convert were expelled. And while an incipient study of that past existed, echoed even in popular literary forms, the need to disavow kinship prevailed, at least publicly and officially. The Maghrib, for its part, separated by a mere fourteen kilometers of sea from the southern tip of Spain, experienced Portuguese and Spanish imperial expansion firsthand, receiving the bulk of the displaced and interacting with fortified settlements and encroachments along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Later European colonization of North Africa completed the galvanization of a Maghribi culture of resistance to and disavowal of European, Latin, and Christian cultural forms and connections. Spain and North Africa came to be conceived as separate worlds; domains of inimical faiths; divided by culture, language, religion, and a history of mutual hostility. This sense of separateness is deceptive, however, as the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa are bound by deep and extensive commercial, material, and cultural contacts. They share inextricable histories in which alternating movements of commerce, conflict, and migration have played fundamental roles in shaping recognizably Western Mediterranean societies. They should be thought of as areas of a unified region with a common culture, or at the very least, as areas sharing a common region, in which they interact regularly, creating extensive ties and parallel forms of cultural and social organization.

Dramatic Geography

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
The Relationship

Focusing on early modern plays that stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, this book asks how a sense of geographical location was created in early modern theatres that featured minimal scenery. While previous studies have stressed these plays’ connections to a historical Mediterranean in which England was increasingly involved, this book demonstrates how their dramatic geography was shaped through a literary and theatrical heritage. Reading canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, and The Tempest alongside lesser-known dramas such as Soliman and Perseda, Guy of Warwick, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Dramatic Geography illustrates, first, how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and second, how they responded to one another’s plays to create an ‘intertheatrical geography’. These strategies, the book argues, shape the plays’ wider meanings in important ways, and could only have operated within the theatrical environment peculiar to early modern London: one in which playwrights worked in close proximity, in one instance perhaps even living together while composing Mediterranean dramas, and one where they could expect audiences to respond to subtle generic and intertextual negotiations. In reassessing this group of plays, the book brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; it also contributes to current debates in early modern studies regarding the nature of dramatic authorship, the relationship between genre and history, and the continuities that run between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Cervantes, Anti-Romance, and the Novella

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brean Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Novelas Ejemplares ◽  
Don Quijote ◽  
English Novel ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Modern Sense

This chapter looks at how Miguel de Cervantes' writing influenced the genesis and development of the English novel. His most influential writings, Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares of 1613, were published at a time of exceptional English interest in Spanish culture — a country reopened to diplomatic relations in 1604 after nearly half a century of continuous rivalry and warfare. In destroying the enchantment of romance, Cervantes Saavedra's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605–15) fatally undermined those values upon which the glory of the Spanish Golden Age rested, and ushered in an era of decadence and decline. However, he was not the first writer to parody knight-errantry. Nevertheless, a persuasive case can be made that the publication of Don Quijote was one crucial factor in the creation of an early modern sense of what medievalism was.

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