Arabic Philology at the Seventeenth-Century Mughal Court. Saʿd Allāh Khān’s and Shāh Jahān’s Enactments of the Sharḥ al-Radī

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-222
Author(s):  
Christopher D. Bahl
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The Other ◽  
Treasure Trove ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Courtly Life

Abstract Persian narrative sources provide a colorful picture of Mughal courtly life, but in order to zoom in on cultural practices one has to turn to the artefacts of cultural pursuits. This article studies one specimen of the empirical treasure trove of Arabic manuscripts in South Asia in order to approach a lacuna in Mughal scholarship: the role of Arabic at the Mughal court. In the following, I will analyze the different paratextual layers of a manuscript of the thirteenth century Arabic grammar commentary Sharḥ al-Radī by Radī al-Dīn al-Astarābādhī to study its reading and transmission. The manuscript version represents a written artefact, which emerged out of a series of intellectual engagements. On the one hand, these textual engagements offer a perspective on the manuscript’s initial owner, Saʿd Allāh Khān (d. 1656), and his intellectual pursuits, as well as the scholarly framework in which he was brought up and worked in. On the other hand, the history of this manuscript’s circulation highlights the treatment of Arabic written artefacts at Shāh Jahān’s court. In an exemplary manner, the manuscript’s history of circulation demonstrates how courtly elites engaged with Arabic during the seventeenth century.

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

Plutarch’s Lives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Desideri
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Rule Out

This chapter discusses first the general cosmological principles which lie behind Plutarch’s historiographical work, such as can be recovered through significant passages of his Delphic Dialogues. Second, it investigates the reasons why Plutarch wrote biographies, and more specifically parallel biographies, instead of outright histories: in this way, Plutarch aimed to emphasize, on the one hand, the dominant role of individual personalities in the political world of his own time, and, on the other hand, the mutual and exclusive relevance of Greece and Rome in the history of human culture. Third, the chapter seeks to connect the rise-and-fall pattern, typical of biography, with the general rise-and-fall pattern which Plutarch recognizes both in the Greek and in the Roman civilizations; through that connection one can rule out the idea that Plutarch had any providential view of history. Finally, some reflections are offered on Nietzsche’s special interest in Plutarch’s biographies.

scholarly journals Negative views towards TVET : the role of colonial and post-colonial TVET policies in Kenya

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Njenga
Keyword(s):  
Vocational Education ◽  
Technical Education ◽  
Negative Parity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social And Economic Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

While vital for the social and economic development of Kenya and Africa as whole, Vocational Education remains hampered by a negative parity of esteem. Individuals and households continue to view vocational education as a second option. This is in contrast with the views held by both pre-colonial and post colonial governments. Each successive government has attempted to provide vocational education and made policies to effect widespread provision. This article reviews the history of these policies and identifies the source of negative views towards vocational education on the one hand to discriminatory approaches by colonial governments and on the other hand to the burdening of technical education with the task of employment creation.

River and Ocean

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-184
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The One

This chapter looks at Scriptures, whose ambiguity is seen both as a difficulty to shake people out of exegetical complacency and as an inspired involution of multiple meanings on the page. These meanings are not only allegorical, mystical, or typological, but also literal, according to a widespread Catholic idea neglected by previous historians of biblical scholarship. The doctrine of multiple literal senses marked yet another battleground between the company of two armies, Protestant and Catholic—barring two or three defections—in the early seventeenth century. It encapsulated a profound distinction between two views of Scripture: the one a river to be cleansed and traced to the source, the other an ocean in which to swim, even to abandon oneself. Why, then, has this controversy been entirely ignored by scholarship? As modernity encroached, the doctrine became an embarrassment to Catholics, and in 1845 a professor of theology at Louvain, Jan-Theodor Beelen, wrote a treatise against it. But there are deeper reasons for the neglect. The history of biblical hermeneutics as written to date is more than usually Whiggish, seeking the precursors to Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the German and Lutheran backstory has therefore seemed inevitable, and from this perspective Catholic hermeneutics since Luther and Erasmus has been an irrelevance. Subsequently, the occlusion of the Catholic voice was attended by a narrowing of the possibilities of what biblical interpretation could be.

Philosophies of Life

2019 ◽  
pp. 275-298
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Dynamic Process ◽  
The Other ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

On the one hand, we have the development of science from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, while on the other, we have a focus on life in philosophy at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, life is understood in terms of nature as a dynamic process linked to impulse or drive. Partly stemming from a mystical discourse in the seventeenth century, the concern for life comes to be disseminated through the history of both Romantic poetry and Romantic philosophy. This vitalist spirit can be traced through to the twentieth century. Life itself comes to be articulated through a mystical theological discourse that ends in Romantic poetry and through a philosophical discourse that ends in phenomenology.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
David Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Landscape Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

The introduction commences with a ‘detour’ into the history of landscape art and the picturesque, suggesting ways that this mode pre-empted what may seem like more modern ideas about the interference between perception and representation. This discussion is folded into a brief account of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and the interventions of theorists including Doreen Massey and Marc Augé, establishing an immediate context for the work of Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair. Suggesting a twin heritage of the ‘English Journey’ on the one hand and the French Surrealists and Situationists on the other, the introduction then offers the tension between amant and amateur as a way of characterizing the balance of exotic/everyday, plan/coincidence, and high-brow/low-brow in these figures’ work. It considers the role of pedestrianism and melancholia before closing with a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Gustave Doré’s ‘New Zealander’.

The Age of the Sign: New Light on the Role of the Fourteenth Century in the History of Semiotics

Dialogue ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludger Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Scientific Interest ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
History Of ◽  
Getting Lost ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

Semiotics, the age-old investigation of signs, is still striving for acknowledgement as a scientific (and academic) discipline. Though the ‘linguistic turn’ in the philosophical disciplines seemed to be followed by a ‘semiotic turn’ in many sciences during the 1970s, efforts were not crowned by great success. When seen from a certain distance, a definition of semiotics as a discipline can only be obtained from its history. Research into the sources of the human pre-occupation with signs, and with concepts or conceptions of signs, is really desirable and even necessary when a field of considerable scientific interest at the brink of being awarded the rank of a discipline runs the risk of getting lost between the unificationism of the Morris-type and the elegance of pseudo-mathematical empty classificationism (such as demonstrated in the late Max Bense's Stuttgart School) on the one side, and profitable exploitation of the sign's popularized design qualities on the other.

scholarly journals SCHEIBE’S MISTAKE: SUBLIME SIMPLICITY AND THE CRITERIA OF CLASSICISM

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEITH CHAPIN
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
French Model

ABSTRACTIt is as a classicist that Johann Adolph Scheibe has entered the annals of music history, either as a propagator of the principles of French literary classicism, or as a champion of a ‘galant’ style that later critics would view as a foundation for a German musical classicism. But if Scheibe insisted on a quality of striking simplicity, using words clearly indebted to those of Nicolas Boileau, the doyen of seventeenth-century French critics, he was no classicist according to the French model. While all classicists depend to a certain degree on the regulation of their material – for such regulation aids them in their quest for the perfect fit between parts and whole – they will differ in how they choose to balance the codification of technique and the regulation of style, on the one hand, with the evocation of emphatic or ‘sublime’ experiences, on the other. If Boileau sought the ‘marvellous’ quality that strikes like lightening, Scheibe wished for clarity. Drawing on scholarship in the history of literature, this article first examines the origins and point of French classicist literary aesthetics, then traces the fate of these aesthetics as they were transferred from France to Germany and from literature to music.

The Role of Emulation in Corneille's Polyeucte

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 314-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Ideal Self ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Fresh Seed ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The One

Any critic writing on Polyeucle must come to grips with a problem that is specific to this particular play (not merely generic, as the conflict between two kinds of “love-duty”). He must ask himself, “Why did Corneille, the poet of heroic humanism, choose to write about Christian martyrdom?” I do not believe it is an adequate answer to say that he did not write about Christian martyrdom but, once again, about heroic humanism. It must have been obvious to Corneille that on the one hand martyrdom had something in common with heroism and on the other that it provided a new variation on the theme. The question, then, is to identify this new variation, to determine the quiddity of Polyeucte, the special light it throws on the Cornelian glorification of man. If Corneille's theater as a whole is about idealism, its potential and its dangers, then the Christian idealism of the martyr is particular in several ways. It demands the ultimate sacrifice, which is not necessarily demanded of the secular hero. The martyr must not only risk his life, he must give it. At the same time, it promises an ultimate in glory. Thus, both the “danger” and the “potential” are extreme. It is this aspect of martyrdom that enters the dramaturgy of Polyeucte in the conflicts between the heroic Christian idealism of Polyeucte and Néarque and the various forms and levels of religious and secular idealism represented by the other characters (and Polyeucte and Néarque) at different moments of the play. But there is a related yet even more fundamental aspect of martyrdom that is built into the fabric and structure of Polyeucle. As Tertullian wrote (A pologeticus, Ch. i), “The more you mow us down, the more quickly we grow; the blood of Christians is fresh seed.” Grace, working through the example of the martyr, leads others to augment the ranks of the Christians. It is this theme of emulation that is central in Polyeucte and forms the link between the two worlds of heroic humanism and Christian martyrdom. As has often been pointed out, admiration is a key emotion in Corneille's theatre. But it is not solely an emotion the playwright hopes to evoke in the spectator; it is also a basic response of many characters to the noble and courageous actions of other characters and a response they hope to arouse in others by their own actions. Now the term admiration, the act of gazing at with wonder, can (and did at times in the Latin) imply strong approval and desire. Admiration may, as it very often does in Corneille, lead to emulation. I should like to suggest that in this theme the seventeenth-century dramatist discovered a religious analogue to the admiring imitation of a model or an ideal self-image that we find typical of so many of his secular heroes.

Gender Regimes in Western Societies from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (03) ◽  
pp. 391-399
Author(s):  
Didier Lett
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Relative Success ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Regimes ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One

The concept of gender has become such an important subject in international historiography over the last two decades that it might appear odd to devote an entire dossier of the Annales to the topic. However, the relative success of this field of research may also conceal ambiguities in both the intellectual project underlying the term as well as its reception in the social sciences. For certain authors, undertaking a history of gender has meant writing a history of women. Though this form of history now enjoys proper recognition, it is still depreciated in two ways: on the one hand, it is qualified as a militant—and therefore unscholarly—history; and, on the other, it is criticized according to some vague argument claiming that no matter how it is labeled—“gender” or “women”—the inquiry is already dated. Without a doubt, the now canonical expression “history of women and gender” has generated real confusion among those scholars who are not particularly engaged with the field.1

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