Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajeev Kinra
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Popular Memory ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
Cultural Historiography

Despite many advances in recent scholarship, a good deal of Mughal cultural historiography—not to mention the popular memory of the Mughal era—is still dominated by attention to the patronage and liberal outlooks of two figures, the Emperor Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and his great-grandson, Prince Dara Shukoh (1615–1659), both of whom are viewed as having been especially, even heroically, tolerant toward the non-Muslims in their midst. However, while both of these men are certainly worthy of the attention they have received, the emphasis on their individual contributions to the Mughal attitude of ‘universal civility’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) has in some ways obscured the broader cultures of everyday tolerance that pervaded Mughal life in the seventeenth century. This article aims to present a preliminary—though far from exhaustive—survey of evidence for this broader and continuing Mughal approach to handling India’s diversity in the post-Akbar period and to try and connect it, via the suggestive comments of several influential European commentators of the early Enlightenment, to the larger connected histories of tolerance in global early modernity.

All Hail to the Archpriest

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lake ◽  
Michael Questier
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The Core ◽  
Public Argument ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Public Politics

This volume revisits the debates and disputes known collectively in the literature on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England as the ‘Archpriest Controversy’. We argue that this was an extraordinary instance of the conduct of contemporary public politics and that, in its apparent strangeness, it is in fact a guide to the ways in which contemporaries negotiated the unstable later Reformation settlement in England. The published texts which form the core of the arguments involved in this debate survive, as do several caches of manuscript material generated by the dispute. Together they tell us a good deal about the aspirations of the writers and the networks that they inhabited. They also allow us to retell the progress of the dispute both as a narrative and as an instance of contemporary public argument about topics such as the increasingly imminent royal succession, late Elizabethan puritanism, and the function of episcopacy. Our contention is that, if one takes this material seriously, it is very hard to sustain standard accounts of the accession of James VI in England as part of an almost seamless continuity of royal government, contextualized by a virtually untroubled and consensus-based Protestant account of the relationship between Church and State. Nor is it possible to maintain that by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the fraction of the national Church, separatist and otherwise, which regarded itself or was regarded by others as Catholic had been driven into irrelevance.

Milton's Alleged Ramism

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (7) ◽  
pp. 1035-1053
Author(s):  
P. Albert Duhamel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Recent Scholarship

Recent scholarship has tended to overstress Milton's adherence to Ramism and to overlook his significant deviations in both theory and practice. The distrust of the human thought processes in theoretical or practical deliberation and the faith in the immediate intuitive perception of logical relations, which is the ultra-spiritual epistemology implied throughout the Ramistic logics, were much more in keeping with the enthusiasm of the radical sects of the seventeenth century than with the rationalism of Milton. Milton was an independent thinker in logical matters as elsewhere and the balance of scholarly evaluation is in need of some readjustment.

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’.

Confession as Encounter with Early Modernity

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-58
Author(s):  
Nadieszda Kizenko
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Practical Purpose ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Social Discipline ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Control

Chapter 1 examines confession in seventeenth-century Muscovy and Ukraine as part of the European ‘disciplinary revolution’. In their use of confession as a way of meeting challenges to religious and political harmony, seventeenth-century Russia and Ukraine resembled the broad European tendency to religious unification, social discipline, and control. First separately, and then together, Muscovite and Ukrainian clerics in the seventeenth century began to emphasize the sacraments in ways similar to that pursued in the Roman Catholic world. Their emphasis on confession created a new religious culture that brought Orthodox East Slavs into the religious and disciplinary framework of modern Europe. The Old Believer schism in the middle of the century gave confession a practical purpose: it was the most effective way of establishing who was Orthodox, and therefore broadly reliable, and who was schismatic, and therefore dangerous.

scholarly journals The Ambiguities of the Holy: Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain*

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Olds
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Spanish Town

Recent scholarship has shown that, even at the heart of the Catholic world, defining holiness in the Counter-Reformation was remarkably difficult, in spite of ongoing Roman reforms meant to centralize and standardize the authentication of saints and relics. If the standards for evaluating sanctity were complex and contested in Rome, they were even less clear to regional actors, such as the Bishop of Jaén, who supervised the discovery of relics in Arjona, a southern Spanish town, beginning in 1628. The new relics presented the bishop, Cardinal Baltasar de Moscoso y Sandoval, with knotty historical, theological, and procedural dilemmas. As such, the Arjona case offers a particularly vivid example of the ambiguities that continued to complicate the assessment of holiness in the early modern period. As the Bishop of Jaén found, the authentication of relics came to involve deeper questions about the nature of theological and historical truth that were unresolved in Counter-Reformation theory and practice.

The ‘Death Of Moses’ in the Literature of the Falashas

1961 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Ullendorff
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Accurate Picture ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Long Time

For a long time now the Falashas have, with questionable justification, been dubbed the ‘Jews of Abyssinia’. A good deal of legendary information about the Falashas appears already in such medieval writings as Sefer Eldad and in an account given by Benjamin of Tudela who gathered some news on the Falashas while on his way from the Yemen to Egypt. The great seventeenth-century scholar Job Ludolf included some notes and questions in his monumental work on Ethiopian history—based, to a large extent, on information supplied by Abba Gregory who thought that the Falashas dialecto Talmudica corrupta inter se utuntur (no doubt a reference to their Agaw vernacular which Gregory did not understand). Thus misled, Ludolf is understandably curious to know quando vel qua occasione Judaei isti primum in Aethiopiam venerint? Karraeorumne vel aliorum Judaeorum sectae sint addicti? James Bruce of Kinnaird provides a fairly detailed, though not necessarily accurate, picture of Falasha life which became the stimulus of subsequent interest in this peculiar form of ‘Judaism’.

Books for the common man

2021 ◽  
pp. 68-95
Author(s):  
David Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Man ◽  
Ownership Patterns

The best-documented private libraries are typically those of the educated, professional, or wealthy classes in urban centres, but there is plentiful (if scattered) evidence of widespread ownership of books across society more widely. This chapter examines this, using particular examples such as Bibles, where inscriptions and other annotations testify to these kinds of ownership patterns. The annotations in a book owned and used in rural Cumbria in the seventeenth century are described. The tendency for books to circulate within geographical localities, and to move from better-off households to poorer ones, is observed. Relevant recent scholarship in this field is acknowledged and summarized.

scholarly journals Custom and the Social Organisation of Writing in Early Modern England

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 257-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Wood
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
English Society ◽  
Mind Set

Social historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have tended to see literacy as a modernising force which eroded oral tradition and overrode local identities. Whereas the increasing literacy of the period has long appeared an important constituent element of Tudor and Stuart England's early modernity, custom has been represented as its mirror image. Attached to cumbersome local identities, borne from the continuing authority of speech, bred within a plebeian culture which was simultaneously pugnacious and conservative, customary law has been taken to define a traditional, backward-looking mind-set which stood at odds to the sharp forces of change cutting into the fabric of early modern English society. 1 Hence, social historians have sometimes perceived the growing elite hostility to custom as a part of a larger attack upon oral culture. In certain accounts, this elite antipathy is presented as a by-product of die standardising impulses of early capitalism. 2 Social historians have presented the increasing role of written documents in the defence of custom as the tainting of an authentic oral tradition, and as further evidence of the growing dom-nation of writing over speech. Crudely stated, orality, and hence custom, is seen as ‘of the people’; while writing was ‘of the elite’. In this respect as in others, social historians have therefore accepted all too readily John Aubrey's nostalgic recollections of late seventeenth century that Before printing, Old Wives tales were ingeniose and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil warres, the ordinary Sort of people were not taught to reade & now-a-dayes Books are common and most of the poor people understand letters: and the many good Bookes and the variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt the old Fables out of dores: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellowe and the Fayries.

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