scholarly journals Mermaid Iconography and Early Modern Anglo-American Maritime Culture

Author(s):  
Vaughn Scribner

This article builds upon recent research on early modern Anglo-American maritime culture to demonstrate how mariners used shared mermaid iconography (such as spaces, symbolism, objects, superstitions, and songs) to cultivate an ‘imagined community’ that linked their lives at sea to that on land, and vice versa. Ships and taverns were key to such efforts, as these public spheres – themselves branded by mermaid iconography – served as well-recognised nodes of maritime identity-ways. Ultimately, early modern Anglo-American sailors claimed mermaid iconography as critical symbols of maritime culture that transcended space and time, thereby helping diverse constituents of global empires to create connections wherever they travelled.

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 463-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth F. Cohen

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectivelyjus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through whichjus tempusbecame a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points aboutjus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle ofjus tempusis applied in a diverse array of political contexts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Teresa Schröder-Stapper

The Written City. Inscriptions as Media of Urban Knowledge of Space and Time The article investigates the function of urban inscriptions as media of knowledge about space and time at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period in the city of Braunschweig. The article starts with the insight that inscriptions in stone or wood on buildings or monuments not only convey knowledge about space and time but at the same time play an essential role in the construction of space and time in the city by the practice of inscribing. The analysis focuses on the steadily deteriorating relationship between the city of Braunschweig and its city lord, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and its material manifestation in building and monument inscriptions. The contribution shows that in the course of the escalating conflict over autonomy, a change in epigraphic habit took placed that aimed at claiming both urban space and its history exclusively on behalf of the city as an expression of its autonomy.


2008 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Claus Bernet

AbstractQuakerism is the first Anglo-American religion that has gained ground in Germany, especially in the north, in the second half of the 17th century. Contrary to older church historiography, this was not a marginal phenomenon. Rather, stable congregations developed, as did a Europe-wide network of missionary work and a differentiated culture of polemic writings. These points of encounter allowed the Quakers to establish contact with supporters of Böhme and radical pietists while at the same time enabling an Antiquakeriana campaign against them. At the center of this study lies the question for the religious-historical positioning of Quakerism. The author argues that due to impulses of extra-ecclesiastical pietism, positions arose that transgressed Christianity's frame of reference. Therefore the reference to the early modern understanding of esoterism has proven especially useful.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
Charlotte A. Lerg

Using transmediality as an approach to analyse the use of symbols in Anglo-American protest culture during the 1760s and 1770s sheds new light on the process of creating ideological alliances and the making of meaning. In the same way written text created a shared realm of ideas even as they were read and reinterpreted in accordance with different political and social contexts, visual templates, for example in carricature, also featured as points of reference. Relating these images to performances of protest and objects from a material culture of revolution brings together forms of resistance that have previously been examined separately. Arguably, by using a shared arsenal of symbolism protesters identified with an imagined community that in reality was never socially or politically coherent.


2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT MAYHEW

This paper extends discussions of the sociology of the early modern scientific community by paying particular attention to the geography of that community. The paper approaches the issue in terms of the scientific community's self image as a Republic of Letters. Detailed analysis of patterns of citation in two British geography books is used to map the ‘imagined community’ of geographers from the late Renaissance to the age of Enlightenment. What were the geographical origins of authors cited in geography books and how did this change over time? To what extent was scholarship from other cultural arenas integrated into European geography? Such an analysis draws on and interrogates recent work in the history of science and in the history of scholarship more broadly, work which has made important contributions to our understanding of the historical geography of scholarly communities in early modern Europe.


Author(s):  
Alessandra Consolaro

Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the body as a socio-cultural artefact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed, and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic identities, in this article I introduce world-renowned Indian painter MF Husain’s verbal and visual autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī as a series of sketches of a performative self, surfing the world in space and time. Bodies and spaces are envisioned as “assemblages or collections of parts” in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art – MF Husain being foremost a painter – and eventually also in literature. I look for strategies that MF Husain uses in order to construct or deconstruct the self through crossings and linkages. I try to investigate how the self is performed inside and outside private and public spaces, how the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community is portrayed, and how this autobiography does articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Devereaux

The most celebrated and influential history of execution in England, V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (Oxford, 1994), uses a survey of execution rates to make two very striking and seemingly persuasive assertions. First, more people were being hanged in early nineteenth-century England than at any time since the early modern era; and second, that the end of capital punishment came far more suddenly than previous studies have recognized. This article acknowledges and extends the importance of Gatrell’s first insight, while arguing that he nevertheless both understates the complexity of developments and overstates the suddenness with which both the letter and the practice of capital punishment were abandoned. It does so through a careful recalculation and analysis of execution rates at London’s Old Bailey courthouse, where execution was practiced on a far larger scale than in any other jurisdiction in the Anglo-American world, and whose practice most profoundly shaped the perceptions of both critics and proponents of capital punishment alike.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-87
Author(s):  
Abram C. Van Engen ◽  
Evan Haefeli ◽  
Andrew Pettegree ◽  
Fred van Lieburg ◽  
David D. Hall

Abstract David D. Hall’s book comprises a transatlantic history of the Puritan movement from its sixteenth-century emergence to its heyday under Oliver Cromwell and its subsequent political demise after 1660. Hall provides insights into the movement’s trajectory, including the various forms of Puritan belief and practice in England and Scotland and their transatlantic migration. In Hall’s sweeping view, Puritanism was a driving force for cultural change in the early modern Atlantic world and left an indelible mark on religion in America. The four reviewers praise Hall’s book for its monumental achievement, with Abram Van Engen emphasizing the centrality of Puritan theology. They place it within its historiographical context, as Evan Haefeli does by comparing it with Michael Winship’s Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (2018) and as Fred van Lieburg does by reminding us of the centuries-old German tradition of Pietismusforschung. The reviewers also raise critical questions as to the audience of Puritan publications and point to the benefits of studying Puritanism in an even wider comparative framework, one that looks forwards and backwards in time and one that speaks to the large, overarching questions raised by global history and digital humanities, including Andrew Pettegree’s ustc project. In his response David Hall begins by acknowledging the decades of Anglo-American scholarship on the Puritan movement on which his book builds, replies to points raised by the reviewers, and reflects on the situation of Puritan studies in the United States at this moment in time.


Author(s):  
Willem A. deVries

Analytic philosophy is rediscovering Hegel. This chapter examines a particularly strong thread of new analytic Hegelianism, sometimes called ‘Pittsburgh Hegelianism’, which began with the work of Wilfrid Sellars. In trying to bring Anglo-American philosophy from its empiricist phase into a more sophisticated, corrected Kantianism, Sellars moved in substantially Hegelian directions. Sellars’s work has been extended and revised by his Pittsburgh colleagues John McDowell and Robert B. Brandom. The sociality and historicity of reason, the proper treatment of space and time, conceptual holism, inferentialism, the reality of conceptual structure, the structure of experience, and the nature of normativity are the central concerns of Pittsburgh Hegelianism.


Author(s):  
Scott A. Trudell

This chapter examines the volatility of occasional entertainments in space and time as a reflection of how adaptable the conventions of early modern theatre could be. It considers how occasional entertainments, fully interactive with the richly physical and symbolic ecologies around them, reveal the role of a fixed stage in the design and procurement of early modern theatricality. It shows that poetic verse was a relatively insignificant element in the entertainments, pageants, and Lord Mayors shows of the period and explains how print became a way to transform the contingencies of occasion into an enduring ‘poesy’: in print, the noise, rain, mud, crowds, bored monarchs, tired children, and sheer formal incoherence of the event all resolved into a grand and silent art.


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