Mounted Archery and Firearms

Vulcan ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-65
Author(s):  
Barton C. Hacker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Social Technology ◽  
Military Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Technical Basis

David Ayalon’s classic and highly influential 1956 study of Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom left some surprising questions unexamined. He attributed Ottoman victory primarily to Ottoman firearms, while Mamluks stubbornly clung to the arms of the mounted archer. But despite the technological underpinnings of his thesis, Ayalon discussed the technology of neither the traditional warfare of mounted archery nor the newfangled warfare of gunpowder weapons. Was Mamluk mounted archery actually inferior to Ottoman firearms? This essay addresses the technical basis both for the mounted archery central to Mamluk military prowess and the characteristics of late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century firearms adopted by the Ottomans, both in the context of the social technology of Muslim military slavery. By opening the black box of Mamluk and Ottoman military technology, this essay seeks to show more precisely in what ways military technology did and did not shape the outcome of the struggle.

The Social Place of a German Renaissance Artist: Hans Baldung Grien (1484/85–1545) at Strasbourg

1975 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Brady
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Professional Association ◽  
Guild Structure ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The Social ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Renaissance Artist

In Jakob Burckhardt's classic vision of the emergence of a new, individualistic consciousness in Renaissance Italy, the artist took his place behind the tyrant as one of the early escapees from the crumbling prisons of medieval corporate institutions. Although the picture of his progress from craftsman to free professional is more nuanced and qualified in the recent literature, the Italian artist continues to enjoy his reputation as one of the few permanent beneficiaries of the Renaissance. As the Wittkowers have written: “But the new day came when artists began to revolt against the hierarchical order of which they were an integral part—a day when they regarded the organization meant to protect their interests as prison rather than shelter.”1 At Florence, where artists first achieved a new self-consciousness as theorists and men of letters, private patronage supplied the wealth for a new level of status, higher than that of the craftsman, and weakened the ties of guild life. Not that Florentine artists of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invariably became either successful businessmen or bohemians—though both types could be found there and elsewhere in Italy—nor did they revolt against corporate institutions altogether. But their new organization, the Accademia del Disegno, resembled the old guild structure only superficially and was, as its name suggests, a professional association uniting the artistic crafts rather than a type of guild.2 If the sixteenth century Italian artist lacked the social prestige of the lawyer, the notary, or the physician, neither was he any longer lumped together with the cobbler, the stonemason, or the apothecary.

Broken Promises and the Rise of a Stereotype

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Political History ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Balance Of Trade

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.

Islamic Monuments as Christian Trophies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Urquízar-Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Chronicles ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Rodrigo Jimenez De Rada ◽  
The Way

Chapter 3 approaches the notion of trophy through historical accounts of the Christianization of the Córdoba and Seville Islamic temples in the thirteenth-century and the late-fifteenth-century conquest of Granada. The first two examples on Córdoba and Seville are relevant to explore the way in which medieval chronicles (mainly Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his entourage) turned the narrative of the Christianization of mosques into one of the central topics of the restoration myth. The sixteenth-century narratives about the taking of the Alhambra in Granada explain the continuity of this triumphal reading within the humanist model of chorography and urban eulogy (Lucius Marineus Siculus, Luis de Mármol Carvajal, and Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza).

Las Yslas de Esperar en Dios: The Jesuit Mission in Moro 1546–1571

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Mission Field

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.

On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Case History ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archaeology Of Knowledge

When George Balandier proposed his theoretical approach to a colonial situation, the colonization of language was not an issue that piqued the interest of scholars in history, sociology, economics, or anthropology, which were the primary disciplines targeted in his article. When some fifteen years later Michel Foucault underlined the social and historical significance of language (‘l'énoncé*’) and discursive formation, the colonization of language was still not an issue to those attentive to the archaeology of knowledge. Such an archaeology, founded on the paradigmatic example generally understood as the Western tradition, overlooked the case history in which an archaeology of discursive formation would have led to the very root of the massive colonization of language which began in the sixteenth century with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

TWO RENAISSANCES: URBAN POLITICAL CULTURE IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND RECONSIDERED

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Renaissance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Historiography

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.

Merchants and Society in Tokugawa Japan

1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-488
Author(s):  
Charles D. Sheldon
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Common People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Tokugawa Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Military

Merchants in the Tokugawa period were placed at the bottom of the shinōkōshō hierarchy of samurai-peasants-artisans-merchants. This social hierarchy was produced by a combination of social reality at the time Japan was unified in the late sixteenth century and an ancient Chinese physiocratic theory, never taken very seriously, in practical ways, in China. Once the country was unified, the social mobility of the previous years, of a kind which permitted men of ability to climb from the lowest ranks to join the military nobility—Hideyoshi is the prime example of this mobility—was viewed, by Hideyoshi above all others, as a cause of prolonged chaos and internecine warfare. With the argument that war had been abolished and common people therefore no longer needed weapons, Hideyoshi carried out his ‘sword-hunt’. He thus established the most fundamental of the class distinctions, between the samurai, the ruling class, who now enjoyed a monopoly of bearing arms, and the common people, who were henceforth expected simply to produce the food and other necessities of life, and to pay their taxes, which remained high even though warfare was supposedly ended.

scholarly journals THE RISE OF THE AMBASSADRESS: ENGLISH AMBASSADORIAL WIVES AND EARLY MODERN DIPLOMATIC CULTURE

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEMMA ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Decision Making ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractThis article reveals how the ambassadress became an important part of early modern diplomatic culture, from the invention of the role in the early sixteenth century. As resident embassies became common across the early modern period, wives increasingly accompanied these diplomatic postings. Such a development has, however, received almost no scholarly attention to date, despite recent intense engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of early modern diplomacy. By considering the activities of English ambassadresses from the 1530s to 1700, accompanying embassies both inside and outside of Europe, it is possible not only to integrate them into narratives of diplomacy, but also to place their activities within broader global and political histories of the period. The presence of the ambassadress changed early modern diplomatic culture, through the creation of gendered diplomatic courtesies, gendered gift-giving practices, and gendered intelligence-gathering networks. Through female sociability networks at their host court, ambassadresses were able to access diplomatic intelligence otherwise restricted from their husbands. This was never more true than for those ambassadresses who held bonds of friendship with politically influential women at their host or home court, allowing them to influence political decision-making central to the success of the diplomatic mission.

scholarly journals Unlocking the Black Box of AI Listening Machines: Assemblages for Art, Technology and Innovation

Artnodes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Technology And Innovation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Artistic Interventions ◽  
Creative Interventions

The black box of innovation in the realm of connected AI technologies renders not only their technicalities opaque but also, and more importantly, the social effects and relations that constitute their creation and mediation. This presents an opportunity for creative interventions by artists and researchers, to unveil the networked relations that are part of AI technologies, and speculate on their ontological effects. This article presents such an unpacking around an AI listening machine present today in ubiquitous devices like voice assistants and smart speakers, and incorporates computational models of machine audition. By tracing the scientific research, technical expertise, and social relations that led to our cultural adoption of AI listening machines, the article presents a socio-technical assemblage within which these machines operate. At the same time, the article reveals various contexts for artists as well as innovation researchers to engage with the socio-technical complexity of AI listening machines, by sharing some instances of creative and artistic interventions that have attempted to unveil the nature of their assemblages.

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