“Ismaël pria Osman de luy donner quelques Chrestiens”: Gift Exchanges and Economic Reciprocity in trans-Saharan Diplomacy (Sixteenth–Seventeenth Centuries)

Diplomatica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-247
Author(s):  
Rémi Dewière
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Dimension ◽  
Political Dialogue ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
In Trans ◽  
Gift Exchanges

Abstract The practice of gift-giving was omnipresent in trans-Saharan embassies. Gifts were the material expression of the political dialogue between rulers. Their quality and quantity was a good barometer of relations between rulers. A close analysis of the gifts sent or received by the Borno rulers (present-day Nigeria) between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals a system of norms and customs on the part of the Borno chancellery. Their material value also raises the question of their economic dimension and how they were recycled. By focusing on the embassies between Tripoli and Borno in the early modern period, the aim of this article is to demonstrate that the gifts were a part of a normalized practice of diplomacy. Beyond the message carried by the gifts themselves, the Borno sultans mixed economic and political interests by integrating the exchanges of gifts into the wider trans-Saharan trade.

Select document: ‘The present state of Ireland’, 1749

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (144) ◽  
pp. 581-597
Author(s):  
Eoin Magennis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present State ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Government

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.

Thomas Müntzer and John Knox: Radical and Magisterial Reformers?

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-545
Author(s):  
PETER MATHESON
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Political Realm

A distinction is often made between magisterial and radical reformers in the early modern period, Luther and Thomas Müntzer being frequently taken as representatives of two quite different reformations, especially in regard to the understanding of Scripture and of the political realm. It can, however, be argued that the Reformation as a whole was radical, and that it is misleading to characterise one aspect of it as mainstream, another peripheral. The comparison between Müntzer and the Scottish reformer, John Knox, appears to support the contention that the chasm between the two camps is not unbridgeable.

scholarly journals A Hive of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-194
Author(s):  
Shannon Jane Garner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Key Participants

While much important work has been done on the early modern fascination with the political nature of bees and bee societies, this essay instead takes a closer look at the conflation of honeybees, women, and domestic spaces within the multi-generic textual ecology of early modern beekeeping. In the early modern period women were the primary beekeepers. As key participants in this art of sustained and intimate collaboration across species and environment, these women managed their own hives using the multifaceted skills of the early modern housewife, including textile arts, brewing, distilling, medicine, horticulture, and husbandry. This essay highlights the tension between knowledgeable women apiarists and male textual authorities in early modern apiary treatises and husbandry manuals and focuses on the persistent descriptive slippage between both bees and women and the hive and home in early modern sources. In early modern texts women’s bodies, domestic spaces, and hives are all over-determined entities invested in containment, preservation, and productivity. This essay emphasizes the ways in which early modern women and the occupants of the hives they cared for resisted and worked within the allegorical, anthropocentric, and patriarchal frameworks provided for them in the textual narratives of the early modern period.

Hippologischer Fachdiskurs und dialogische Fiktion

Daphnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 416-443
Author(s):  
Stefanie Stockhorst
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Textual Strategies

Abstract This contribution analyses the textual strategies in Danup’s literary dialogue, which is enriched in many ways with literary topoi and rhetorical devices. It is, in fact, a specialised text on the art of horsemanship, which proves to be surprisingly innovative in this regard. However, it is not only relevant to the hippological, but also to the political culture of the early modern period. For the author updates a literary genre pattern, takes up literary traditions and uses aesthetic means for successful self-promotion as an expert.

scholarly journals Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luise Schorn-Schütte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Professional Education ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Comparable Level ◽  
Modern Europe

The discussion above can be summarized in three points that refer back to the introductory remarks.1. On the basis of their social origin and social integration, both Protestant pastors and Catholic pastoral clergy were a part of that bourgeois group who acted in the service of the secular authority; this applies to all of early modern Europe. What the pastors' family achieved on the social level through familial contacts in Protestant areas was established through the mediated connections of extended family, clientage, and friendship in Catholic areas. The similarities are strengthened by the comparable form and contents of education and of educational institutions. Insofar as the state of research allows generalization, it seems that the pastoral clergy of both confessions had attained a comparable level of education by the seventeenth century. In Catholic areas university study was the exception but priests were required to complete their education at a seminary, whose standards surely met the qualifications for a specialized professional education. A complete course of study in theology was not the rule within Protestantism, either; having graduated from a philosophical faculty was a sufficient qualification. In comparison with the standards of pre-Reformation education, there was a clear improvement in education that can be called the early modern “path toward a profession.” This, together with the development of a social and familial network, allows us to characterize the pastoral clergy of Europe during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a part of that “power elite”144 who were essential for the early modern period.2. The formal conditions for the suitability of clerical officeholders reached cum grano salis a comparable level in all confessions throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. The disagreements concerning the evaluation of these conditions stem from the measures by which historical change is characterized. For the group of pastoral clergy examined here, the category of modernization proves to be insufficient, since there was a tendency transcending the confessions to appeal to prereformatory traditions in establishing an understanding of office. Historians must be able to describe how tradition was able both to accommodate and to be transformed.3. From this point of view the question of the clergy’s suitability for the goal of the developing modern state encompasses only half of the historical reality. The clergy and their contemporaries who comprised their congregations were also concerned with their role as mediators of the holy, of “the religious” in the world. Clerical perception of self and of office was decisively stamped by the conviction that despite all contradictions these formed an insoluble unity. For this reason we must also consider for both confessions the broad impact of the doctrine of the Christian state, whose core was the doctrine of the three estates. In the political and social controversies of the late sixteenth century the political impulse of this doctrine grew in strength in a way more clearly seen in Protestantism than in the territories that remained Catholic. Nevertheless the concept of the monarchia temperata in the Catholic understanding of authority also gave the clergy a right to criticize the ruler. The long tradition of the correctio principis was put into practice through the clerical understanding of office in both confessions and became a very concrete reality for people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a typically early modern way of developing tradition further through the consensus of generations, whose relevance the historian of the early modern period must take just as seriously as the attempts of the secular authority to use the power elites in their own interests.

scholarly journals Percorsi familiari e preminenza a Nola alla fine del Medioevo. Il caso degli Albertini di Cimitile

2021 ◽  
pp. 465-514
Author(s):  
Luigi Tufano
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
Important Family ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period

Through the parchments of the aristocratic archive, the essay reconstructs the events and paths of construction and consolidation of the political and social role of the Albertini of Cimitile, an important family of the Nolan élite, of legal professionals and with consolidated relations with the Orsini count dynasty, in the period between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-166
Author(s):  
John-Mark Philo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

The conclusion draws together the main themes and concerns of the book: namely how the translation and application of Livy in Tudor England was intricately connected to the most pressing political and cultural concerns of the day. So too it reflects on Livy’s impact on the vernacular literatures of the period, including William Painter’s novellas and Shakespeare’s poetry and prose. It also underlines the fact that, rather than a diminishing interest in Livy, the seventeenth century saw the historian at the heart of the constitutional debates underpinning the English Civil War. The translation of Livy in the early-modern period, as the conclusion underlines, functioned not only as a reflection of the political concerns of the moment, but also as an active attempt to reshape, refashion, and urge forward those concerns. Though Livy’s part in the Classical Reception of the early-modern era is sometimes underplayed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Livy’s contribution to the culture and politics of sixteenth-, and indeed seventeenth-, century England.

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