scholarly journals Garments, Signatures, and Ottoman Self-Fashioning in the Imperial Periphery: Moldavian Voyvode Ştefan Tomşa II and Ottomanization in the Early Seventeenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 317-340
Author(s):  
Michał Wasiucionek
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Conversion To Islam

Abstract The paper examines the strategies of self-representation pursued by Moldavian Voyvode Ștefan Tomșa II (r. 1611-1615, 1621-1623). From his ascension to the throne, Tomșa faced accusations of wholesale adoption of Ottoman customs and fashion, and even conversion to Islam. While Romanian scholars have largely dismissed these claims as a product of hostile propaganda, the paper argues that—while remaining an Orthodox Christian—the voyvode deliberately emphasized his affinity to the Ottoman cultural idiom and presented himself to his subjects as a member of the Ottoman ruling class. By examining the nexus between Tomșa’s career, material objects he commissioned, and chancery innovations during his reign, the paper looks into the process of Christian Ottomanization in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.

The ‘Highest Roade to Happiness’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Knights
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Orthodox Christian

Knights explores the writings of the later seventeenth-century merchant James Boevey, which digested his own experiences, apparently for the benefit of himself, his family circle and friends, though possibly with an eye to publication. In thirty manuscript volumes, Boevey set out an ‘Active Philosophy’, developed in the light of his manifold difficulties—extended litigation, imprisonment, associated commercial losses, brushes with death and a far from easy family life. He saw happiness as an art, and as something to be achieved. In that context suffering was something from which lessons could be learned, but he did not employ an orthodox Christian framework for this view: he does not seem to have been a Weberian merchant motivated by protestant ethics but instead endorsed a more speculative set of beliefs which nevertheless helped to advance mercantile values.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges

Rural History ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social

Analyses of enclosure in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England have tended to focus on the social work of representations, in particular estate maps. I depart from this emphasis, however, in my attempt to focus on the consequential and often contradictory role of material objects in producing enclosure. In particular, I emphasise the important work that hedges did, physically, symbolically and legally, in the dispossession of the commoner. Acting as an organic barbed wire, the hedge was increasingly put to work to protect the lands of the powerful. Disrupting the propertied spaces of the commoning economy, hedges were not surprisingly targeted by those who opposed privatisation. The hedge, as both a sign and material barrier, served complicated and sometimes opposing ends. It materialised private property's right to exclude, but thus came into conflict with common property's right not to be excluded. The hedge was both an edge to property and was itself property. Both the encloser and the commoner, however, had property interests in the hedge. If broken, the hedge could signal violence and riot, or the legitimate assertion of common right. The hedge served as an often formidable material barrier, yet this very materiality made it vulnerable to ‘breaking’ and ‘leveling’.

Patrician Culture: Venice and Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, visitors to both cities were struck by the obvious physical similarities between Venice and Amsterdam. The social similarities were no less great. In a Europe mainly composed of monarchies, each was the greatest city of a republic. In a Europe where the ruling class still tended to identify with warriors, the patricians of Amsterdam and Venice were predominantly civilian. In a Europe whose political leaders usually despised trade, Venice and Amsterdam stood out as places where trade and politics could be combined with success, at least early in the seventeenth century. In a Europe whose ruling classes tended to spend most of their time on their country estates, the patricians of Venice and Amsterdam lived mainly in town.

Introduction to the Mirror

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Susan Mokhberi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Global History ◽  
Modern Period

During the seventeenth century, French missionaries, travelers, diplomats, and writers raised comparisons between France and Persia that established Persia as a suitable mirror for France. The two countries were connected through diplomatic contacts, images, material objects, and texts, which together laid the basis for an imagined relationship. Frenchmen created an image of Persia that matched their own tastes and political circumstances and evolved over the course of the century. Inspired by new trajectories in global history, the case study of France and Persia challenges traditional ideas of Orientalism by uncovering the variety of European responses to Asia in the early modern period.

Orthodox Christians in the Kadı Courts: The Practice of the Sofia Sheriat Court, Seventeenth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossitsa Gradeva
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
The Church

AbstractThe attitude of Balkan Christians to Ottoman rule has been subject to various, often contradictory, assessments. In this essay I examine one aspect of this subject, namely, the Christian attitude toward the sheriat court as a judicial institution, as reflected in kadı sicils from Sofia and other Balkan cities and in documents issued by Orthodox Christian ecclesiastical authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Examination of these sources reveals that Christians frequently chose the sheriat judge over that of the church courts. In most cases this behaviour can be explained by the desire of the Christian litigants to seek out the court that would provide the most favourable solution to the dispute. The participation of Christians in sheriat court proceedings strengthens the impression that they did not avoid the sheriat court in practice, despite the hostility manifested by Christian religious authorities toward such behaviour. Indeed, the sources point to relatively smooth relations between the two communities in the Ottoman Balkan provinces in the period immediately preceding the national awakening of Balkan peoples.

Passage to India: Jesuit Spiritual Economy between Martyrdom and Profit in the Seventeenth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines G. Županov
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
New Material ◽  
Spiritual Energy ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Spiritual Conquest

Abstract Historians today seem to agree that passions for spices and for acquisition of objects and territories from the late fifteenth century fuelled the “mercantile revolution” on a global scale. This article will argue that spirituality and commercial enterprise worked together to produce material objects, some of exceptional artistry. These artifacts, books, sculptures, paintings, and the attractive narratives written about or around them sparked spiritual enthusiasm wherever they reached their audience and became fundraising tools for further spiritual conquest and for creation of new material objects. In this case, I will trace the career of one particular Jesuit missionary, Marcello Mastrilli, who invented his own life and future martyrdom with a series of printed books and works of art, all marked by Mastrilli’s spiritual energy and his ability to fill the Jesuit purse.

From Shahāda to ʿAqīda: Conversion to Islam, Catechisation and Sunnitisation in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Rumeli

Islamisation ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 296-314
Author(s):  
Tijana Krstić
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Insufficient Knowledge

In a recent article, Derin Terzioğlu introduced a heretofore unknown seventeenth-century catechetical work in Ottoman Turkish by a certain Nushi al-Nasıhi. Hailing most probably from the Ottoman European domains (Rumeli) and writing in roughly the 1630s, Nushi lamented the state of basic religious instruction in the empire and blamed the woes of the Ottoman state on insufficient knowledge of faith and on laxity in the observance of religious laws. He went on to outline a detailed plan of how the condition should be remedied: the authorities should send out town criers to all neighbourhoods and announce that from that point on everyone over the age of seven regardless of their social status would be examined on their knowledge of ‘faith and Islam and ablution and ritual prayer’ (īmāndan ve İslāmdan ve ābdest ve namāzdan suʾāl idüp).1 He further enjoined that those who fail to show satisfactory knowledge should be ‘publicly scolded, administered discretionary punishment or evicted from the neighbourhood’.2

scholarly journals St Pientia and the Château de la Roche-Guyon: Relic Translations and Sacred History in Seventeenth-Century France

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 257-271
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hillman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Sacred History

This article explores the connections between the translation of an early Christian relic to the Château de la Roche-Guyon in the mid-seventeenth century and the writing of local sacred histories by the priest and prior Nicolas Davanne. It finds that the translation of a finger bone of St Pientia was the culmination of efforts by a local scholar to revive the sacred history of the Vexin and to celebrate the regional liturgical traditions associated with its early Christian martyrs. In doing so, it finds support for the recent historiography on local, sacred histories which emerged during the Counter-Reformation in response to liturgical standardization. The article also discusses the unstable nature of relics as material objects and explores the ways in which relics were continually reinvested with meaning. It is shown that Pientia's relic was not only part of a defence of a local spiritual heritage in response to Trent, but also part of a claim to an early Christian spiritual heritage for a deviant and heretical movement within the Church.

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