Persian Words of Wisdom Travel to the West

Daphnis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 450-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elio Brancaforte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
The West ◽  
French Version ◽  
European Languages ◽  
European Public

This essay considers the seventeenth-century translations of the celebrated Persian poet Saʿdi’s Gulistan (1258 ad) into European languages: André du Ryer’s French version (1634), the Latin translation of Georgius Gentius (1651) and the German editions of Friedrich Ochsenbach (1636) and Adam Olearius (1654). The Gulistan – which consists of short, moralistic tales, aphorisms, proverbs, and Sufic lore – helped introduce Persian thought to the early modern European public (and later influenced Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan as well as Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes).

Rectifying a Chronicle of Contradictions: The Political Context of Abraham Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-107
Author(s):  
Patrick V. Day
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
Advisory Body ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Divine Kingship

Abraham Wheelock’s first edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle appeared at the height of the First English Civil War in 1643, and it is often treated by modern critics as an appendix to the Old English Historia Ecclesiastica to which it is attached. This paper argues that the Chronicle participated in a larger royalist campaign to establish the West Saxons as the institutional forbears of the first two Stuart kings. The West Saxon genealogies authorize a seventeenth-century conception of patriarchal, divine kingship when they trace Alfred to the biblical Adam. Alternatively, the medieval Chronicle presents the advisory body of the Anglo-Saxons, the witan, as a potentially restrictive force upon the monarchy—an image incompatible with a royalist agenda. Wheelock mediates the contradictory presence of the powerful witan by diminishing its historical importance through excision, substitution, and inconsistent translation so that the Chronicle may more easily conform to early modern perceptions of absolutist kingship.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-15
Author(s):  
Onorina BOTEZAT ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
European Public ◽  
West European

Dimitrie Cantemir was considered one of the most cultivated men of his time (i.e. the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries), and he spoke and wrote in several languages. This article examines the translation solutions proposed by Cantemir in his Descriptio Moldaviae (1716) for rendering into Latin the titles of Moldavian rulers of the seventeenth century, as well as his explanatory notes (often etymological) provided to offer a better understanding of medieval Moldovan realities to the West European public.

scholarly journals Todas las naciones han de oyrla: Bells in the Jesuit reducciones of Early Modern Paraguay

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jutta Toelle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Flexible Material ◽  
The Devil

The essay focuses on the role of bells in the Jesuit reducciones. Within the contested sound world of the mission areas, bells played an important role as their sounds formed a sense of space, regulated social life, and established an audibility of time and order. Amongst all the other European sounds which Catholic missionaries had introduced by the seventeenth century—church songs, prayers in European languages, and instrumental music—bells functioned especially well as signals of the omnipotent and omnipresent Christian God and as instruments in the establishing of acoustic hegemony. Taking the Conquista espiritual by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1639) as its main source, the essay points to several references to bells, as objects of veneration, as part of a flexible material culture, and, most importantly, as weapons in the daily fight with non-Christians, the devil, and demons.

Niels Hemmingsen and the Construction of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattias Skat Sommer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
The South ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Western Perspective

AbstractDanish reformer Niels Hemmingsen was a Lutheran, but owing to Pan-Protestant sentiments that became apparent in his later writings, he found an appreciative audience in non-Lutheran Western Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This article argues that the early modern European reception of Hemmingsen and his theology should be seen as an attempt to construct him as part of a Protestant memory. It also argues that in order to understand the dynamics behind the reception of Hemmingsen’s ideas, one has to consider the geopolitics of early modern Denmark. Due to her strategic setting in Northern Europe, Denmark played a vital role in controlling commerce and politics between the North and Baltic Seas. Arguing for a “Western” perspective, the article shows how Hemmingsen’s case substantiates that the Danish Reformation involved both importing Lutheranism from the South (Saxony), and exporting it to the West (The Low Countries, England).

“The Necessary Ornaments of Place”

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Mana Kia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
The World

This article analyzes representations of place in seventeenth-century texts to consider how early modern Persians made sense of the world. The Persian formulation of alterity stands in contrast to Edward Said’s formulation about Orientalism, by which Europe makes itself into the West. In early modern Persianate Asia, common representations of place appear in geographical and travel writing. These shared features, which I call ornaments, adorned both places that shared a learned Persian language, Muslim rule, and those beyond, in other parts of Asia and Africa. The presence or absence of these ornaments made the world intelligible for early modern Persians, creating categories of similarity and alterity that were partial, diffuse, and aporetic, defying the self-other distinctions of Orientalism. This form of knowledge about the self and the world then generated the possibility for encounters different from both modern colonial power and the nation-state.

scholarly journals "VOCABULARUL LATIN CANTEMIRIAN AL DREGĂTORIILOR MOLDOVENEŞTI ÎN DESCRIPTIO MOLDAVIAE"

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-32
Author(s):  
Maria-Luiza DUMITRU OANCEA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
European Public ◽  
West European

Dimitrie Cantemir was considered one of the most cultivated men of his time (i.e. the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries), and he spoke and wrote in several languages. This article examines the translation solutions proposed by Cantemir in his Descriptio Moldaviae (1716) for rendering into Latin the titles of Moldavian rulers of the seventeenth century, as well as his explanatory notes (often etymological) provided to offer a better understanding of medieval Moldovan realities to the West European public.

Jonson’s English Grammars

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Extant Version ◽  
Historical Contribution

Jonson’s English Grammar was printed posthumously in the 1640 Folio of his complete works. As the sole extant version of a project that was clearly unfinished it is intriguing, raising questions, for example, concerning Jonson’s authorial motivation and the critical response to the work in the seventeenth century. This chapter considers Jonson’s expressed purposes in writing the grammar of his native language and its scholarly reception within the context of the contemporary awareness of an emerging need for a grammar of vernacular English that would standardize use and establish its status alongside other European languages. It shows that despite Jonson’s negative assessment of his achievements and his acknowledging the difficulties of the task, Jonsonian English was regarded predominantly as a model for vernacular standards, Jonson as a prominent grammarian. His taking on this scholarly challenge made a major historical contribution to the production of an English vernacular grammar. It also illuminates our understanding of the early modern cultural preoccupations associated with this important venture.

Credit, Risk and Reputation in Late Seventeenth-Century Colonial Trade

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuala Zahedieh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Credit Risk ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic System ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
The Way

This essay considers the purpose and value of credit - in the sense of character esteem and regard - in the early modern economic system. Particular focus is given to the role of credit, and the nature of risk in colonial trade. The essay seeks to prove that integrity amongst merchants was essential due to the necessity of promise and trust - promises to provide and deliver goods, promises to pay, these were necessary pacts that minimised the risk of colonial trade. It also examines the way colonial merchants confined their business to small circles of correspondents rather than large trade networks. The conclusion asserts that mercantile trade system was shaped by credit, building from the evidence raised by examining trade documents concerning London and the West Indies.

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