scholarly journals A Monstrous Ideal

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Robert Stearn

The paper suggests that 17th-century writers sometimes thought about disciplines, methods, and concepts as skilful, in the sense that these objects and processes held information, were used as tools to aid discrimination (where their use might also be skilful), and were the aggregated experience of people with skill as well as the product of their activities. The paper also suggests that servants were thought about in a similar way. Drawing on range of printed texts and a series of 'ideal servant' emblems from the 16th to the 18th century – in which servant chimeras and cyborgs appear with limbs and heads replaced by animal parts and/or inanimate objects connected with domestic service – the paper asks: in what ways did these materials place servants placed in relation to skill, or make them part of an institution in which one might be skilled, or part of a practice susceptible to modification by skill? The paper concludes by looking closely at a 1682 print and argues that it articulates a similar sense of skill as that found in 17th-century written materials. The print – in which a servant holds the tools of high-status arts in which one might be skilled, but servants were not – occupies an intermediate position between the emblematic servant of the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century (whose capacities and attributes are expressed by the conventional significance of animals and tools) and the joke automaton maidservant of the eighteenth and nineteenth (made out of the objects around which and through which the work of domestic service takes place – the composite servant-body figures the energy of the living servant that puts them in motion).

1990 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Dekker

SUMMARYFrom the 15th to the 18th century Holland, the most urbanized part of the northern Netherlands, had a tradition of labour action. In this article the informal workers' organizations which existed especially within the textile industry are described. In the 17th century the action forms adjusted themselves to the better coordinated activities of the authorities and employers. After about 1750 this protest tradition disappeared, along with the economic recession which especially struck the traditional industries. Because of this the continuity of the transition from the ancien régime to the modern era which may be discerned in the labour movements of countries like France and England, cannot be found in Holland.


Costume ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Robinson

A pair of embroidered seventeenth-century gauntlet gloves, reputedly presented by King Charles I to his courtier Sir Henry Wardlaw, was donated to the University of St Andrews in 2001. This article sets out to uncover the truth behind this nearly four-hundred-year-old family legend by investigating Sir Henry’s royal connections and the social significance of the gauntlet gloves as a high-status, luxury clothing accessory. Based on the study of historic gloves in museum and private collections, it endeavours to date the gloves by discussing their design and manufacture within the context of seventeenth-century clothing fashion. This article also explores the symbolism behind the gauntlet gloves’ decorative scheme by unravelling some of the hidden messages that are conveyed about cultural, religious, political and technological developments and perspectives through seventeenth-century embroidery.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Werle

How should one go about reading German 17th century poetry? Dirk Werle answers this question on the basis of a consistently historical understanding of both genre and epoch. In the seventeenth century, “poetry” had a decidedly different meaning from what we take it to be today, and there was no such thing as our term “Baroque”. For each of the chapter's introductory analyses, from which more general considerations and points of view are developed, poems have been selected that do not appear in relevant anthologies and therefore allow unbiased access to a fascinating field of literary history. The Author shows that 17th century poetry is characterized by a poetics of repetition, based on affinity to music and the principle of convivial play. It is a form of pop literature that does not directly refer to reality, but creates a poetic world all its own. To grasp this phenomenon, a “hermeneutics of simplicity” is called for, which is introduced and explained in this book.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-133
Author(s):  
Ioan Pop-Curșeu

"Sexual Acts, Horror and Witchcraft in Cinema. The Copulation with the Devil: a Psychoanalytical Perspective. This paper tries to approach, taking as a starting point a Romanian painting from the 18th century, a scene with a strong phantasmatic load: the sexual act of a woman, who is considered a witch, with the devil. Several films are analyzed: Häxan by Benjamin Christensen (1922), Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski (1968), L’Anticristo by Alberto de Martino (1974), Angel above, Devil below by Dominic Bolla (1975). These films share some common features, important for the analytical process: the copulation with the devil, the presence of traumatized characters who are submitted to a psychological cure, the recycling of psychoanalytical vocabulary, especially “hysteria”, the problems with parental instances. In order to interpret these films, there is a coming back to Freud’s ideas on the Devil, as expressed in the letters to Wilhelm Fliess or in the study A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis (1923). The devil as an image of unconscious impulsions or as a substitute of the father are the main Freudian intuitions used here for an optimal interpretation of the chosen films. Keywords: sex, sexual act, horror, witchcraft, psychoanalysis, Freud, cinema. "


2021 ◽  
Vol 133 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Sara Matrisciano ◽  
Franz Rainer

All major Romance languages have patterns of the type jaune paille for expressing shades of colour represented by some prototypical object. The first constituent of this pattern is a colour term, while the second one designates a prototypical representative of the colour shade. The present paper starts with a short discussion of the controversial grammatical status of this pattern and its constituents. Its main aim, however, concerns the origin and diffusion of this pattern. We have not found hard and fast evidence that Medieval Italian pigment compounds of the type verderame influenced the rise of the jaune paille pattern, which first appears in French in the 16th century. This pattern continued to be a minority solution during the 17th century, but established itself during the 18th century. In the 19th century, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese adopted the pattern jaune paille, while it did not reach Catalan and Romanian before the 20th century.


Arabica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Naser Dumairieh

Abstract The Ḥiǧāz in the 11th/17th century has long been considered the center of a “revival” movement in ḥadīṯ studies. This assumption has spread widely among scholars of the 11th-/17th- and 12th-/18th-century Islamic world based on the fact that the isnāds of many major ḥadīṯ scholars from almost all parts of the Islamic world from the 11th/17th century onward return to a group of scholars in the Ḥiǧāz. The scholarly group that is assumed to have played a critical role in the flourishing of ḥadīṯ studies in the 11th/17th-century Ḥiǧāz is called the al-Ḥaramayn circle or network. However, to date, there have been no studies that investigate what was actually happening in that century concerning ḥadīṯ studies. Examining the actual ḥadīṯ studies of one of the scholars at the core of al-Ḥaramayn circle, i.e. Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan al-Kūrānī, will unpack the main interest of Ḥiǧāzī scholars in ḥadīṯ literature, reveal previously unstudied aspects of ḥadīṯ studies in the 11th/17th-century Ḥiǧāz, correct some unexamined assumptions, and situate the ḥadīṯ efforts of scholars of the 11th/17th-century Ḥiǧāz within a general framework of developments within ḥadīṯ studies.


Author(s):  
Kseniia D. Nikolskaia

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Danish East India company (Dansk Østindisk Kompagni) was established in Europe. In particular, Tranquebar (Dansborg fortress) became the stronghold of the Danes in India. In another hundred years, at the very beginning of the 18th century, the first Lutheran missionaries appeared on the Coromandel coast. At this time the Danish Royal mission was established in Tranquebar, funded by king Frederick IV. It consisted mainly of Germans who graduated from the University of the Saxon city of Halle. Those missionaries not only actively preached among the local population, but also studied languages of the region, translated Gospels into local languages and then published it in the printing house they created. They also trained neophytes from among the local children. One of the first missionaries in Tranquebar was pastor Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, who lived in India from 1706 to 1719. Information about Pastor's activities in the Royal Danish mission has been preserved in his letters and records. These letters and papers were regularly printed in Halle in the reports of the Royal Danish Mission («Ausführliche Berichte an, die von der königlichen dänischen Missionaren aus Ost-Indien»). However, besides letters and reports, this edition constantly published texts of a special kind, called «conversations» (das Gespräch). They looked like dialogues between pastor Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and local religious authorities. Those brahmans explained the basic principles of the Hindu religion, and their opponent showed them the absurdity of their creed by comparing it with the main tenets of Christianity. The following is a translation of one of these dialogues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 163 (A3) ◽  
Author(s):  
M Corradi

The Album de Colbert compiled by an anonymous author in the second half of the seventeenth century is among the most important illustrated testimonies of the art of shipbuilding. Probably commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Minister of Finance and Minister of the Navy of the kingdom of France, the Album was composed to make Louis XIV understand the complexity of shipbuilding. It was also made to support the creation of a navy with the ambition of being competitive with the Royal Navy and with the intent of modernising and expanding the French shipbuilding industry. The fifty plates that make up this illustrated treatise unravel the story of the construction of a first-rank 80-gun line vessel, from the laying of the keel to the launch. It is a unique document that has no contemporaries or precursors because it is not a didactic collection of boats, like the previous treaties that had a completely different methodological approach, more technical-descriptive than illustrative, but it wants to go beyond the scientific treatise. Its purpose was instead to measure itself with representation, showing through the strength of drawing and images the peculiar aspects of the reality of shipbuilding, using iconography as a means of transmitting knowledge related to the world of shipyards and shipbuilding in the 17th century.


2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 367-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Schlaps

Summary The so-called ‘genius of language’ may be regarded as one of the most influential, and versatile, metalinguistic metaphors used to describe vernacular languages from the 17th century onwards. Over the centuries, philosophers, grammarians, trans­lators and language critics etc. wrote of the ‘genius of language’ in a wide range of text types and with reference to various linguistic positions so that a set of rather diverse types of the concept was created. This paper traces three prominent stages in the development of the ‘genius of language’ argument and, by identifying some of the most frequent types as they evolved in the context of the various linguistic dis­courses, endeavours to show the major transformations of the concept. While early on, discussion of the stylistic and grammatical type of the ‘genius of language’ concentrates on surface features in the languages considered, during the middle of the 18th century, the ‘genius of language’ is relocated to the semantic, interior part of language. With the 19th-century notion of an organological ‘genius of language’, the former static concept is personified and recast in a dynamic form until, taken to its nationalistic extremes, the ‘genius of language’ argument finally ceases to be of any epistemological and scientific value.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 106-115
Author(s):  
A. P. Borodovsky ◽  
Yu. V. Oborin ◽  
S. L. Savosin

Purpose. This article is aimed at identifying early samples of hand firearms at different Siberian territories (Buriatia, the Upper Ob region). Such facts open new perspectives for studying and reconstructing the process of development and distribution of hand firearms in Northern Asia and helps identify regional peculiarities of this historic phenomenon. Results. One of the earliest firearms found on the territory of Southern Siberia is a bronze barrel of a Chinese hand firearms discovered in the valley of the Dzhida River in Buriatia, which refers to the Ming Epoch (the Yongle period). Judging by a serial number of the gun (50138), it was manufactured at the early period of mass production of hand firearms in China, i. e. in the first quarter of the 15th century. Currently, it is one of the earliest foreign samples of oriental firearms known in Siberia. In the Upper Ob region (in the surroundings of the Biysk Fortress (Ostrog), there was another tube of an early hand firearms found. It is of Russian origin and dates the second half of the 16th – beginning of the 17th century. These samples of Siberian firearms are archaic, which demonstrates a trend of using archaic weapons up to the beginning of the 18th century in the absence or lack of modern firearms. It is quite vividly demonstrated by the materials of the artillery treasure of the Umrevinsky Ostrog (1703). Conclusion. The buffer location of Southern Siberia between the growing territories of the Tsardom of Muscovy and Ming China starting from the 1500s A.D. determined the presence of foreign hand firearms of different origin. As evidenced by written sources, they were numerous on the territories where armed conflicts took place and defensive fortifications (Ostrogs) were subsequently constructed.


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