Exposed and Concealed Sexuality: Virgin Records in the Eighteenth-Century Ashkenazi Protocols of Amsterdam

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-273
Author(s):  
Tsila Rädecker

Abstract This article analyses the documentation of the accidental loss of virginity in the eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Community records of Amsterdam. By revealing the interplay between theology and Jewish Community life, various aspects, such as the economization and the institutionalization of virginity, come to the fore. Furthermore, the virgin records show that conflicting notions of physical and spiritual virginity were decontextualized and used to serve the community’s purposes. In short, documentation of virginity, although based on a rich rabbinic tradition, gives insight into the readaption and creation of theological concepts to accommodate the social and financial interests of Jewish families, especially the mercantile elites.

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 94-152
Author(s):  
Simon D. I. Fleming

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of resource remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the nature of those who subscribed to music, including their social status, place of employment, residence, and musical interests. They naturally also provide details as to the gender of individual subscribers.As expected, subscribers to most musical publications were male, but the situation changed considerably as the century progressed, with more females subscribing to the latest works by the early nineteenth century. There was also a marked difference in the proportion of male and female subscribers between works issued in the capital cities of London and Edinburgh and those written for different genres. Female subscribers also appear on lists to works that they would not ordinarily be permitted to play. Ultimately, a broad analysis of a large number of subscription lists not only provides a greater insight into the social and economic changes that took place in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, but also reveals the types of music that were favoured by the members of each gender.


2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-228
Author(s):  
Anderson Hagler

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between ritual specialists, nanahualtin or nahualistas (pl.) and nahualli or nahual (sing.), and healing practices, adding context to the social roles they fulfilled and the range of feats they performed. The cases examined here reveal that nanahualtin operated as intellectuals in their communities because of their ability to control animals, prognosticate, and heal or harm individuals at will. Some nanahualtin shapeshifted from humans to animals while others possessed animal companions. The elevated status of nanahualtin led commoners to seek their advice, which conflicted with the established orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Because clergymen championed the sacraments as the best way to access the divine, non-orthodox rituals performed in mountains, rivers, and caves were derided as idolatrous devil worship.The 11 criminal and Mexican Inquisition cases examined here range from 1599 to 1801. Two seventeenth-century cases (1678 and 1685) and one eighteenth-century case (1701) contain Nahuatl phrases and testimonies from Chiapas and Tlaxcala, respectively. The cases from Chiapas demonstrate the use of Nahuatl as a vehicular language outside the central valley of Mexico. This article examines the gender of the animals into which ritual specialists transformed as an emergent category from trial records, which provides insight into Catholic officials’ understanding of the nahualli. Last, this study notes social divisions between rural and urban clergy regarding the power of nanahualtin and the efficacy of their magic.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Wendy Rona Pond

<p>The work embarks on a quest to discover the parameters of faiva, the dances, martial arts, aquatic and land-based sports which are exhibited on Tongan festival grounds as trials of skill. The work is organised as a succession of festivals (katoanga), shows, receptions, night concerts, funerals, and regattas spanning 200 years, from the 1770s to the 1970s. The work employs a strategy of Juxtaposing ethnographic and historical evidence. This technique enriches historical records with an ethnographic reading, and allows historical insight into the choreographic and aesthetic conventions of Tongan performances. It indicates which accounts to trust and what sense to impute to fragments. Contest on the festival ground, contest in twentieth century social status rivalry, and contest in eighteenth century political challenge, all follow the same codes. The work proposes a new paradigm for interpreting Tonga's political history. That paradigm is faiva. The work proposes a critical theory for reading Tongan records. Tongan accounts are not intended to recount historical origins, but to validate new configurations. In politics, history, and faiva, the eighteenth century objective was to harness the realm of the sacred. Part I is an ethnographic description of villagers rehearsing a dance in 1971, torn between reluctance to fulfill feudal obligations to the ruling aristocracy, and the appeal of retaining a reputation as the island's leading dancers. Of all tasks, presentation of a faiva was given priority. Part II is a historical reconstruction of the repertoire of the late eighteenth century. Here each faiva is seen exhibited in its lakanga : appropriate occasion. Martial arts and implement dances accompanied presentations between chiefs contesting for power. Mock battles followed presentations to the gods. Night dances were lit by torchlight. High-ranking women processed at the weddings of sacred chiefs. Appropriate settings enhanced the peculiar aesthetic of each faiva; political and religious agendas added force to performances. Part III describes the process of a new repertoire emerging, and the social fabrication of its legitimacy. The Appendix assembles an eighteenth century repertoire of choreographies and song texts, demonstrating that records exist for the scholarship of early Tongan music and dance.</p>


1996 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 96-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Robins

During the past few years the extensive manuscript journals of the Georgian amateur composer and musician John Marsh (1752–1828) have become increasingly recognised as valuable source material which provide a unique insight into provincial musical making in the southern counties of England. For long known only in the heavily abridged (by Marsh's youngest son Edward Garrard) and incomplete version in the Pendlebury Library, Cambridge, the emergence of the original version in 1990 has brought about a substantial re-evaluation of Marsh's career and personality. Subsequently sold at Christie's in December of that year, the original is now housed in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The complex history and a description of the journals and their contents can be found in an article by the present writer in the Huntington Library Quarterly, an issue which also includes an article on the social importance of the journals by William Weber. My purpose here is to provide an introduction to Marsh's experiences as a concert manager and leader in the cities in which he was resident.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Wendy Rona Pond

<p>The work embarks on a quest to discover the parameters of faiva, the dances, martial arts, aquatic and land-based sports which are exhibited on Tongan festival grounds as trials of skill. The work is organised as a succession of festivals (katoanga), shows, receptions, night concerts, funerals, and regattas spanning 200 years, from the 1770s to the 1970s. The work employs a strategy of Juxtaposing ethnographic and historical evidence. This technique enriches historical records with an ethnographic reading, and allows historical insight into the choreographic and aesthetic conventions of Tongan performances. It indicates which accounts to trust and what sense to impute to fragments. Contest on the festival ground, contest in twentieth century social status rivalry, and contest in eighteenth century political challenge, all follow the same codes. The work proposes a new paradigm for interpreting Tonga's political history. That paradigm is faiva. The work proposes a critical theory for reading Tongan records. Tongan accounts are not intended to recount historical origins, but to validate new configurations. In politics, history, and faiva, the eighteenth century objective was to harness the realm of the sacred. Part I is an ethnographic description of villagers rehearsing a dance in 1971, torn between reluctance to fulfill feudal obligations to the ruling aristocracy, and the appeal of retaining a reputation as the island's leading dancers. Of all tasks, presentation of a faiva was given priority. Part II is a historical reconstruction of the repertoire of the late eighteenth century. Here each faiva is seen exhibited in its lakanga : appropriate occasion. Martial arts and implement dances accompanied presentations between chiefs contesting for power. Mock battles followed presentations to the gods. Night dances were lit by torchlight. High-ranking women processed at the weddings of sacred chiefs. Appropriate settings enhanced the peculiar aesthetic of each faiva; political and religious agendas added force to performances. Part III describes the process of a new repertoire emerging, and the social fabrication of its legitimacy. The Appendix assembles an eighteenth century repertoire of choreographies and song texts, demonstrating that records exist for the scholarship of early Tongan music and dance.</p>


Author(s):  
Hannah Young

Women have remained virtually invisible in the historiography of slavery and absenteeism. However, there were a significant number of female absentees who managed their vast West Indian estates -and those enslaved upon them-from metropolitan Britain. This chapter examines the correspondence of one such slave-owner. Anna Eliza Elletson was a London-based absentee who was heavily involved with the transatlantic management of Hope estate, her Jamaican plantation. The correspondence she sent to her Jamaican attorneys contains detailed discussions of the practicalities of running her estate and provides a unique insight into the mindset of a late eighteenth-century female slave-owner. In analysing the attitudes and behaviour of this particular woman this chapter investigates the extent to which she variously reinforced, subverted and challenged the social mores and gendered assumptions of late eighteenth-century Britain.


1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL SZECHI

George Lockhart of Carnwath is best known for his bitter denunciation of the Anglo-Scottish Union in his Memoirs, concerning the affairs of Scotland, first published in 1714. There Lockhart appears as a wholly Jacobite narrator and moralist, passionately inveighing against the iniquity of his peers. Yet we know that his background was not cut from the same cloth as that of his more stereotypical Jacobite contemporaries. Not for him the brooding presence of a Cavalier ancestor ‘martyred’ while fighting alongside Montrose or ancient traditions of loyalty to the Stuarts. Rather, like many Scotsmen after him, he was converted to Jacobitism in the course of the political crisis gripping early eighteenth-century Scotland. From the point of view of the historian studying the dynamics of political commitment the fact that Lockhart falls into this category is a godsend. Uniquely among his Jacobite peers, in the Memoirs and in his many surviving letters, as well as the correspondence and accounts of affairs penned by contemporaries, Lockhart has left the historian a substantial amount of evidence to work on. This article will explore the social and intellectual background to George Lockhart's adherence to the Stuart cause, focusing in particular on the interplay of social forces that shaped his childhood and teenage years, before going on to trace the key features of his understanding of politics and society. Lockhart was not a natural convert to Jacobitism, and the fact that he and many like him moved in that direction merits close analysis. By better understanding why a man like Lockhart embraced the exiled Stuarts we can gain a more general insight into the revival of the Jacobite cause in Scotland in the early eighteenth century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamás Szemethy

In my prosopographic examination of new aristocrats in the eighteenth century, I came across Georg Wolfgang Chiolich, an atypical member of this group, as he was the only one to receive the title of baron for himself alone, as a bishop, during the century. What was the point of conferring a noble title on a bishop? Searching for a reply to this question, we can gain some insight into the social, economic, and especially political processes of the Habsburg Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Descended from a wealthy patrician family of Senj (Zengg), while Chiolich proved to be a talented organizer and took significant steps towards rebuilding his still-ruined bishopric in the mid-eighteenth century, he may not have been a saint. The rumors about the bishop of Senj (Zengg) finally escalated into a scandal in Vienna and in the Holy See in 1759, when a local noble family accused him of making a daughter of the head of the family pregnant. The legal proceedings, including the investigative material, were partly preserved in the Vatican Archives, and most of them were published by Tihamér Vanyó. Georg Wolfgang Chiolich eventually traveled to Rome, where the investigation declared him innocent despite all the efforts of the affronted family. If we look more closely at the main stages of his career and the course of this investigation, I believe that we can get closer to the political, social and economic conditions of a peripheral region of the Kingdom of Hungary.


2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phu Van Han

After more than 30 years of national reform, Ho Chi Minh City has made great changes in economy, living standards and society for all population groups, including the Cham Muslim community. The study clarifies the social characteristics, community development trends in the current sustainable development process of the Cham Muslims. At the same time, explore the adaptability of the community, clarify the aspects of social life and the development of Cham Muslims in Ho Chi Minh City. Thereby, providing insight into a unique cultural lifestyle, harmony between religion and ethnic customs, in a multicultural, colorful city in Ho Chi Minh City today.


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