Secularization and the Jōruri Plays

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 76-97
Author(s):  
Koh Kawata

Abstract This paper aims to show, primarily through analysis of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century jōruri 浄瑠璃 plays, the radical changes in the vision of salvation shared among ordinary people, focusing especially on Jōruri monogatari 浄瑠璃物語, Sonezaki shinjū 曽根崎心中 and Kinpira jōruri 金平浄瑠璃, and highlights how such changes are related to contemporary social processes of secularization. José Casanova famously claimed that the classical concept of secularization as the decline of religious belief is not adequate for the task of understanding general historical processes. Nevertheless, an equivalent to this process of religious decline is an important phenomenon in early modern Japan. In this secularization process, Japanese people of the early modern period sought more secular visions of salvation. Strong, persistent attention to kokoro 心 (mind or spirit), regarded as the means of realizing secular values such as wealth or happiness, was an expression of these concerns. Analyzing jōruri plays reveals how the increasing power of the centralized state, defeating religious powers one by one, became the key to changing people’s visions of salvation and thus, of secularization processes.

Author(s):  
Corey Tazzara

Chapter 8 situates Livorno amidst a larger picture of competition in the central Mediterranean. It analyzes the spread of free ports by considering the two axes along which Italian ports liberalized during the early modern period: hospitality toward merchants and openness toward goods. Despite much institutional variation, a maritime free trade zone was in existence by the mid-eighteenth century. The intellectual legacy of free ports such as Livorno was nonetheless ambivalent. Though some Enlightenment thinkers used free ports to formulate general theories of free trade, others believed they promoted the subjection of state policy to foreign merchants.


Author(s):  
Downing A. Thomas

The fundamental assumption of commentators from the early modern period is that tasteful music functions simultaneously to express sentiment and to move listener-spectators. The three core elements of the baroque operatic spectacle—poetry, music, and dance—are defined by their ability to express and convey passion. Commentators point to the particular ability of musical language—and its combination with poetry and movement—to represent that which is out of reach of spoken language, or below the threshold of linguistic representation. Although both dramma per musica and the tragédie en musique arose and were fundamentally grounded in monarchical cultural worlds, both also endured successfully as public art forms. Aesthetically, baroque opera exhibits and revels in nested structures, manifested in plays within plays and in references that place the operatic moment within a social world outside the opera. Opera left this aesthetic behind as it moved into the second half of the eighteenth century, influenced by the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the works of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck among others.


Impact ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (7) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
Fumiko Sugimoto

Professor Fumiko Sugimoto has been analysing the history of the 18th century and first half of the 19th century with a focus not only on the temporal axis but also on the relationships between specific spaces and the people who live and act as subjective agents in these spaces. During the past few years, she has been endeavouring to decipher the history in the period of transition from the early modern period to the modern period by introducing the perspective of oceans, with a focus on Japan. Through the study of history in terms of spatial theory that also takes oceans into consideration, she is proposing to present a new concept about the territorial formation of modern states. [Main subjects] Law and Governance in Early Modern Japan Judgement in Early Modern Society The Evolution of Control over Territory under the Tokugawa State A Human Being in the Nineteenth Century: WATANABE Kazan, a Conflicting Consciousness of Status as an Artist and as a Samurai Early Modern Maps in the Social-standing-based Order of Tokugawa Japan The World of Information in Bakumatsu Japan: Timely News and Bird's Eye Views Early Modern Political History in Terms of Spatial Theory The Emergence of Newly Defined Oceans and the Transformation of Political Culture.


Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Stefan Eklöf Amirell

This article traces the long historical background of the nineteenth-century European notion of the Malay as a human “race” with an inherent addiction to piracy. For most of the early modern period, European observers of the Malay Archipelago associated the Malays with the people and diaspora of the Sultanate of Melaka, who were seen as commercially and culturally accomplished. This image changed in the course of the eighteenth century. First, the European understanding of the Malay was expanded to encompass most of the indigenous population of maritime Southeast Asia. Second, more negative assessments gained influence after the mid-eighteenth century, and the Malays were increasingly associated with piracy, treachery, and rapaciousness. In part, the change was due to the rise in maritime raiding on the part of certain indigenous seafaring peoples of Southeast Asia combined with increasing European commercial interests in Southeast Asia, but it was also part of a generally more negative view in Europe of non-settled and non-agricultural populations. This development preceded the notion of the Malays as one of humanity’s principle races, which emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century. The idea that Malays were natural pirates also paved the way for several brutal colonial anti-piracy campaigns in the Malay Archipelago during the nineteenth century.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Anderson ◽  
Jason McElligott

Marsh’s Library in Dublin, Ireland, is an immaculately preserved library from the early eighteenth century. Founded by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, the library has an extensive collection of Jewish and Hebrew books which includes Hebrew Bibles, Talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and Yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. This study explores a cross section of the Jewish and Hebrew books in Marsh’s collection, with particular focus on issues of materiality—that is, how these books as material artefacts can inform our understanding of early modern history, religion, and intercultural engagement. We suggest that these books, a majority of which come from Marsh’s personal collection, are a valuable resource for reflection on (1) Christian engagement with Jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (2) the production, use, and travel of Jewish books in early modern Europe, and (3) snapshots of Jewish life in early modern Ireland and beyond.


In the early modern period, Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions were impelled to establish colleges for the education and formation of students in more hospitable Catholic territories. The Irish, English and Scots Colleges founded in France, Flanders, the Iberian peninsula, Rome and elsewhere are the best known, but the phenomenon extended to Dutch and Scandinavian foundations in southern Flanders and the German lands. Similarly colleges were established in Rome for various national communities, among whom the Maronites are a striking example. The first colleges were founded in the mid-sixteenth century and tens of thousands of students passed through them until their closure in late eighteenth century. Only a handful survived the disruption of the French Revolutionary wars to re-emerge in the nineteenth century. Historians have long argued that these exile colleges played a prominent role in maintaining Catholic structures by supplying educated clergy equipped to deal with the challenges of their domestic churches. This has ensured that the Irish, English and Scots colleges in particular have a rich historiography laid out in the pages of Archivium Hibernicum, the Records of the Scots Colleges or the volumes published under the aegis of the Catholic Record Society in England. Until recently, however, their histories were considered in isolating confessional and national frameworks, with surprisingly little attempt to examine commonalities or connections. Recent research has begun to open up the topic by investigating the social, economic, cultural and material histories of the colleges. Meanwhile renewed interest in the history of early modern migration has encouraged historians to place the colleges within the vibrant migrant communities of Irish, English, Scots and others on the continent. The Introduction begins with a survey of the colleges. It assesses their historiographies, paying particular attention to the research of the last three decades. The introduction argues that an obvious next step is to examine the colleges in transnational and comparative perspectives. Finally, it introduces the volume's essays on Irish, English, Scots, Dutch, German and Maronite colleges, which provide up-to-date research by leading historians in the field and point to the possibilities for future research on this exciting topic.


2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Emmer

In the early modern period (1500–1800), shipping and trade within Europe were the domain of individual merchants and small companies organised on a temporary basis. Outside Europe, however, new financial and commercial institutions such as permanent joint stock companies came into existence in order to limit the risks. These large institutions played an important role in inter-continental trade and shipping, albeit that their role in Asia differed from that in the Atlantic, where small companies as well as individual merchants remained the dominant form of organisation. In addition, privateers played an important role in the Atlantic economy in times of war while piracy could flourish in those parts of the overseas world where the Iberian trade circuits bordered on those of France, England and the Dutch republic. The conclusion points to the fact that a direct link between the overseas expansion of Europe and its industrialisation might be difficult to construct, but that the creation of long distance trading companies created the institutional environment that must have facilitated Europe's rapid economic growth after the middle of the eighteenth century.


2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (144) ◽  
pp. 581-597
Author(s):  
Eoin Magennis

The effectiveness of the government of Ireland throughout the period of its rule by England and then Britain depended on the accuracy of the information provided to Dublin Castle and sent from thence to the political masters, based largely in London. The text reproduced below is one of a large number of manuscripts that were sent periodically in the early modern period and the eighteenth century to inform those not resident in Ireland about conditions in the country. Some of these are calls to action for various monarchs or their ministers, with prescriptions for the ‘reform’ of Ireland.


2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-91
Author(s):  
Heather Hyde Minor

In the early modern period, families of popes had an extraordinary ability to shape Rome's architectural and urban fabric. The most important architectural project of any papal family in the papal capital was their palace. In 1753, when Cardinal Neri Corsini contentedly surveyed his palace, the satisfaction he felt would have been familiar to papal relatives for more than 250 years. But unlike generations of papal nephews before him, Neri could take added pride in the fact that he had done it all on his own, relying on his wit rather than the papal coffers. The Palazzo Corsini, like the Palazzo Albani and the Palazzo Braschi, was a rarity in eighteenth-century Rome. Through a combination of the traditional practice of careful study of primary sources with cultural history, broadly conceived, this article illuminates the set of political exigencies and social circumstances that led to the extinction of this architectural form, which had shaped the Eternal City for centuries.


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