Eighteenth-Century Identified Copies of MāšāʾAllāh’s Kitāb Qiyām al-Ḫulafāʾ from Yemen: Text Edition and Contextualization

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 270-291
Author(s):  
Anne Regourd
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Field Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Textual Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Collection

Abstract A copy of the Kitāb Qiyām al-Ḫulafāʾ (Book on the reign of Rulers), identified in Ḏamār, Yemen, in 1993, is dated 8 Ǧumādā Awwal 1150 AH (= Sept. 1737 AD). Under the name of the famous Jewish astrologer MāšāʾAllāh, who practised at the early ʿAbbasid Court together with the Banū Nawbaḫt, this book displays the horoscopes of the Prophet Muhammad and of the caliphs up to Hārūn al-Rašīd. E.S. Kennedy & D. Pingree offered an English translation of the Kitāb Qiyām al-Ḫulafāʾ in The Astrological History of MāšāʾAllāh, Cambridge (MA), Harvard U. Press, 1971, Appendix 2, on the basis of “two late manuscripts”, one from Berlin, the other at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Since then, K. Yamamoto & Ch. Burnett have edited the text on the basis of three manuscripts, adding one from Bursa, and offered a revised English translation. Meanwhile, I came upon a second copy of the book in Ṣanʿāʾ. The copy preserved at the Waqf Library of Ḏamār belonged to the personal collection of a Yemeni cadi, who was a divinatory practitioner (munaǧǧim). At the intersection of textual studies and field work, this paper, following an introduction to the text, will concentrate on the circulation of the 1150/1737 manuscript and its potential uses.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

Cameralism, Josephinism, and Enlightenment: The Dynamic of Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–92

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
Franz Grillparzer ◽  
Do So

In his great 1848 historical drama,Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:Auf halben Wegen und zu halber TatMit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.[That is the curse of our noble house:Striving hesitatingly on half waysto half action with half means.]True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it cannotbe said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.

Longfellow's “Lapland Song”

PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 1188-1192
Author(s):  
James Taft Hatfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Folk Poetry ◽  
Latin Work

It is known that the “Lapland song,” quoted at the end of each stanza in Longfellow's poem, My Lost Youth, was first taken down from a native Laplander, Olaus Matthiae Sirma, and printed in the original, together with a Latin prose version, by Professor Johannes Scheffer of Upsala in his exhaustive Latin work Lapponia (Frankfort 1673). The enormous currency of this book, as well as its various translations, and the wide literary interest aroused in different countries by the two primitive Lapland songs which it contained, have been discussed by F. E. Farley and H. Wright. The English translation of Scheffer's work (Oxford, 1674) was so successful as to lead to a second edition in London in 1704. The latter edition was timely for nourishing the flame of enthusiasm for folk-poetry first kindled by Addison's epoch-making essay from the text, Interdum vulgus rectum videt, published in the Spectator of May 21, 1711. On April 30, 1712, there appeared in the Spectator a new rhymed translation of the song under consideration, by an anonymous author, who professed to derive his version from the “original history,” though it is luminously evident that he looked no deeper than into the metrical version given in the English “History of Lapland.” The song printed in the Spectator was widely popular in England during the entire eighteenth century, and led to a number of other English versions, not one of which, however, contained the lines quoted by Longfellow, or went back to the Latin source.

The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Lorraine Piroux
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Book Culture

This study focuses on the French Enlightenment's fascination with the materiality of non-Western and nonalphabetic scripts in the broader context of the history of the book. By examining definitions of writing in the Encyclopédie as well as Françoise de Graffigny's novelistic appropriation of the Inca quipu script in Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), I argue that there emerges from these texts a conception of the literary sign capable of challenging the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment printed book: dematerialized textuality and absolute legibility. Shaped by the scriptural imagination of eighteenth-century book culture, literature was able to acquire full aesthetic legitimacy only insofar as it was defined as the other of the purely semantic text. (LP)

‘Carolina Hat’: Vona Groarke's Lament for Art O'Leary

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mills Harper
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
The Other ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Oral Composition

Vona Groarke's 2008 version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's famous keen for her husband, Chaoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, features a poetic voice overtly inflected by Irish, English, and American diction and usage. Groarke's poem emphasizes its status as a textual event in more than one time frame as well as another spatial setting. The other time is multiple, including the many translations and discussions of the lament from its eighteenth-century composition until now. The place is also multiple: it might be Dublin or Manchester, Boston or London, or Wake Forest, North Carolina, where Groarke spends part of every year. This new poem stresses the mobility of Eileen's passionate lament: in Groarke's hands, it becomes a poem of the particular place that manages also, intriguingly, to highlight transnational cultural and linguistic implications. This version, another chapter in the history of a work that begins in the fluidity of oral composition and is repeatedly reworked in translations, emphasizes domestic space as generative as well as excessive, the site of desire. Groarke's poem locates itself both inside and, crucially, outside, a place to which one comes ‘carrying nothing’ in order to find, in a seeming paradox, nonrestrictive structures.

Noi credevamo (We Believed): Story and history of emotions

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Patat
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The One

In the last ten years, Noi credevamo (We Believed) (Martone 2010) has been the subject of a very careful criticism interested not only in its historical-ideological implications but also in its semiotic specificities. The purpose of this article is to summarize the cardinal points of these two positions and to add to them some critical observations that have not been noted so far. On the one hand, it is a matter of highlighting how, as a historical film, the work is connected with the history of emotions, a recent historiographical trend that aims to detect the narrative devices of ideological propaganda and the diffusion of feelings since the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, the article proposes a new interpretation of Mario Martone’s film, starting with the analysis of phenomena that are not only historical but also technical and structural.

Native and Trade Currencies in Southern Nigeria during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Africa ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. I. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Field Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Nigeria ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

IntroductionIn this paper an attempt is made to combine contemporary field work with historical data in the study of certain early currency systems of Southern Nigeria with special reference to the Rivers Province.My historical sources for the period up to the eighteenth century are Pacheco Pereira, Dapper, and John and James Barbot, mainly the last three; for the early nineteenth century mainly Captains Adams and Bold, together with the other sources detailed in the bibliography. For ethnographical data I have had to rely on Talbot supplemented by my own work during the period 1927 to 1946; and during a period of more recent field work in the Rivers Province and Old Calabar in 1956 I was able to make a specific study of the traditional political and economic systems of the Oil Rivers Ports.

Loadstones and Earths

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wothers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Silicon Dioxide ◽  
English Translation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mineral Salt ◽  
Chemical Compositions ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848), discoverer of the elements selenium, thorium, cerium, and silicon and deviser of the chemical symbols we use today, was one of the last in a long list of Swedish mineralogists and chemists active during the eighteenth century. Berzelius himself regarded one of his predecessors, Axel Fredrik Cronstedt (1722–65), as the founder of chemical mineralogy. We met Cronstedt in Chapter 2 as the discoverer of the element nickel, isolated from the ore kupfernickel. But another of Cronstedt’s achievements was perhaps of even greater significance: his development of a classification of minerals based not on their physical appearances, as had been common up to this time, but on their chemical compositions. He first published his scheme anonymously in Swedish in 1758, but it was later translated into English as An Essay towards a System of Mineralogy. Cronstedt recognized four general classes of minerals: earths, bitumens, salts, and metals. As their name suggests, the bitumens were flammable substances that might dissolve in oil but not in water. The main difference between the salts and the earths was that the former, which included the ‘alcaline mineral salt’ natron, could be dissolved in water and recrystallized from it. The earths he defined as ‘those substances which are not ductile, are mostly indissoluble in water or oil, and preserve their constitution in a strong heat’. Cronstedt initially recognized nine different classes of earth. By the time of Torbern Bergman (1735–84), these had been reduced to five which ‘cannot be derived from each other or from anything simpler’. Lavoisier and his collaborators included these five in their great work on nomenclature even though they suspected that, like soda and potash, they were most likely not simple substances, but species that contained new metals. In the 1788 English translation of the nomenclature these were called silice, alumina, barytes, lime, and magnesia. The first two eventually, in the early nineteenth century, yielded the elements silicon and aluminium. The word ‘silicon’ derives from the Latin ‘silex’ (meaning ‘flint’—a form of silicon dioxide), with the ending ‘-on’ reflecting its resemblance to the other non-metals carbon and boron.

TALL HISTORIES: HEIGHT AND GEORGIAN MASCULINITIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Health And Nutrition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

ABSTRACTHeight is rarely taken seriously by historians. Demographic and archaeological studies tend to explore height as a symptom of health and nutrition, rather than in its own right, and cultural studies of the human body barely study it at all. Its absence from the history of gender is surprising, given that it has historically been discussed within a highly gendered moral language. This paper therefore explores height through the lens of masculinity and focuses on the eighteenth century, when height took on a peculiar cultural significance in Britain. On the one hand, height could be associated with social status, political power and ‘polite’ refinement. On the other, it could connote ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness and even castration. The article explores these themes through a case-study of John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, who was famously tall and was frequently caricatured as such. As well as exploring representations of the body, the paper also considers corporeal experiences and biometric realities of male height. It argues that histories of masculinity should study both representations of gender and their physical manifestations.

scholarly journals Hearing Things: Music and Sounds the Traveller Heard and Didn’t Hear on the Grand Tour

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Agnew
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Historical Reenactment ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
History Of

For Charles Burney, as for other Enlightenment scholars engaged in historicising music, the problem was not only how to reconstruct a history of something as ephemeral as music, but the more intractable one of cultural boundaries. Non-European music could be excluded from a general history on the grounds that it was so much noise and no music. The music of Egypt and classical antiquity, on the other hand, were likely ancestors of European music and clearly had to be accorded a place within the general history. But before that place could be determined, Burney and his contemporaries were faced with a stunning silence. What was Egyptian music? What were its instruments? What its sound? The paper examines the work of scholars like Burney and James Bruce and their efforts to reconstruct past music by traveling to exotic places. Travel and a form of historical reenactment emerge as central not only to eighteenth-century historical method, but central, too, to the reconstruction of past sonic worlds. This essay argues that this method remains available to contemporary scholars as well.

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