Maddalena Nerli and Cosimo Tornabuoni: A Couple's Narrative of Family History in Early Modern Florence

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Calvi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Concrete Material ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Relatives ◽  
Shed Light

Trying to trace seventeenth-century Florentine family memoirs, I came upon a manuscript journal entirely written by a woman. Its frontispiece bore a date, 1623, and a heading: “In the name of God, the glorious Virgin Mary and all the saints of the Heavenly Court of Paradise, this book is the journal of signora Maddalena Nerli Tornabuoni, and in it she will keep a record of all her daily accounts starting from this very day in March 1623.“As the title specified, it was mainly an account book that covered twenty years of Maddalena's widowed life up to her death in 1641. Going carefully through its pages made me begin to perceive the boundaries of a domestic world organized and governed by a middle-aged urban patrician woman. It shed light on the social world she lived in, one of children, servants, close relatives, and sharecroppers; on the concrete material objects she was surrounded by—linens, foodstuffs, furniture, clothes, devotional items; and on the physical space she occupied—city and country homes, the district of S. Maria Novella and S. Giovanni in Florence.

“She thinks you’re kawaii”: Socializing affect, gender, and relationships in a Japanese preschool

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW BURDELSKI ◽  
KOJI MITSUHASHI
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Social World ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Participation Frameworks ◽  
Shed Light

ABSTRACTKawaii, an adjective meaning ‘cute’, ‘adorable’, and ‘lovable’, is an important aspect of Japanese material culture and a key affect word used to describe things that are small, delicate, and immature. While “cuteness” has been widely discussed in relation to Japanese society and psychology and the globalization of Japanese culture, there has been little analysis of the word kawaii in interaction. This article explores the use of kawaii in interaction in a Japanese preschool. In particular, it analyzes ways teachers use multimodal resources, including talk, embodied actions, material objects, and participation frameworks, in making assessments of things in the social world and in “glossing” children’s actions as thoughts and feelings, and it examines children’s emerging use of kawaii with teachers and peers. The findings shed light on ways everyday communicative practices shape children’s understandings and use of language in relation to affect, gender, and relationships in preschool.*

scholarly journals “The gully-hole of literature”: On the enregisterment of cant language in seventeenth-century England.

Sederi ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 99-117
Author(s):  
Paula Schintu
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Social ◽  
English Population ◽  
Dramatic Performance ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

This essay places seventeenth-century literary renditions of cant, the language spoken by rogues and criminals in Early Modern England, into the context of “enregisterment” so as to examine its role in the process of recognition, categorization and legitimation of the canting tongue and the values it entailed. Literary representations of this variety became common in the period under analysis as a result of the criminal element that threatened the English population. Drama emerged as one of the main vehicles for the representation of cant, leading to the appearance of numerous plays that dealt with the life and adventures of English rogues. In the pages that follow, it will be argued that the study of these textual artefacts can provide valuable historical insight into the use of cant and the social connotations associated with it. In fact, the corpus-based analysis of the plays selected for this study has made it possible to identify both a common lexical repertoire and a set of sociocultural features that were associated with this underworld variety and its wicked speakers by the London non-canting audience. At the same time, it has shed light on the processes whereby this encoded speech came to index derogatory cultural values, which were spread and consumed thanks, in part, to dramatic performance, leading to the enregisterment of cant language and its recognition as a stable and unique linguistic variety.

Production, Communication, and Comprehension of Knowledge of the New World: Ethnographic Descriptions in Caspar Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Britt Dams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Careful Selection ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Trading Network ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Dutch Brazil

This article deals with the textual legacy of Dutch Brazil, in particular the ethnographic descriptions in one of the most popular works about the colony: Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum. Barlaeus never set foot in Brazil, but was an important Dutch intellectual authority in the seventeenth century. To compose the Rerum per Octennium, he relied on a wide variety of available sources, not only firsthand observations, but also classical, biblical and other contemporary sources. From these, he made a careful selection to produce his descriptions. Recent research shows that the Dutch participated in networks of knowledge and imagination as well as in a more familiar early modern trading network. This article reveals that Barlaeus’ descriptions not only circulated as knowledge, but also produced new knowledge. The Rerum soon became one of the standard works about the colony due to the importance of its author and its composition. Furthermore, the article discusses the rhetorical techniques used in some selected descriptions in order to shed light upon the strategies Barlaeus used in his discourse on the strange reality of the New World. For example, his ethnographic descriptions employed parallel customs or events from the classical Antiquity or the Bible. In these comparisons he displays both his intellectual capacities and shows his desire to comprehend this exotic reality.

Belief in the Human

2018 ◽  
pp. 250-281
Author(s):  
Ethan H. Shagan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Suspension Of Disbelief

This chapter cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to describe the timeless process by which human beings believe in their own creations. As seen before, Europeans influenced by new ideas in the seventeenth century were freed to believe in spiritual objects in much the same way they believed in mundane ones, as acts of sovereign judgment. With the category so perforated, there was no intrinsic reason why belief had to remain bound to objects judged “true” in a transcendent or universal sense; it might also alight upon objects judged true in more provisional or instrumental ways. Crucially, this included the social world: ephemeral human creations, the ideas and things that humans themselves make.

The Making of a Success Story

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-32
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
The Social ◽  
Kingdom Of Naples ◽  
High Ranking Official ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter introduces the main protagonist of the book: Carlo Calà Duke of Diano, a jurist and high-ranking official in the viceregal administration. This chapter also sets the historical context of the story of the forgery by describing the main political, economic, social, and religious characteristics of the Kingdom of Naples in the seventeenth century. More specifically, this chapter explains the social, cultural, and intellectual advantages that a noble pedigree conferred to the Neapolitan non-aristocratic elites; explores the main sources of tension between the papacy and the Neapolitan viceroy; sheds light on the power dynamics between the Roman Inquisition and the local ecclesiastical leaders; and introduces the complexities of the liturgical and devotional life of early modern Catholics.

The Sea and the World of the Mutasaddi: A profile of port officials from Mughal Gujarat (c. 1600–1650)

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE FLORES
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social World ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
The Social ◽  
Business Politics ◽  
The World

AbstractThis article seeks to trace the profile of the governors (mutasaddis) of the main port-cities (especially Surat and, to a lesser extent, Cambay) of the Mughal province of Gujarat in the first half of the seventeenth century. My research on the careers of individual mutasaddis – based mainly (but not exclusively) on existent Portuguese materials – allows us to better understand the social world of those occupying key positions in the ‘waterfront’ of the Mughal Empire and its dealings extensively with the European powers (Portuguese, Dutch and English). Hence, the analysis of the professional and personal trajectories of the Indian Muslim doctor Muqarrab Khan and the Persian Mir Musa Mu'izzul Mulk presented here demonstrate how far business, politics and cultural patronage were often entangled in the career of a Mughal mutasaddi of Gujarat.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

scholarly journals Teaching Punctuation in Early Modern England

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-49
Author(s):  
Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Oral Delivery ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Shed Light

Teaching Punctuation in Early Modern England Much has been written on the punctuation practice of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers in order to work out the ultimate function of marks of punctuation. The main point of discussion has almost ever been whether punctuation indicated syntactic relationships or represented speech pauses either to give emphasis in oral delivery or just to be able to breathe. The focus of this paper, however, is the theory rather than the practice, in particular, the set of rules and conventions used by schoolmasters to guide students in their use of stops. Thus, textbooks used at the time to teach reading and writing will constitute our main sources of information to achieve the following aims: (i) to offer a classification of the different marks of punctuation described, (ii) to establish the functions schoolbooks assigned to punctuation marks in general, and (iii) to assess the importance schoolmasters gave to pointing. The results of this study - which follows the works by Ong (1944) and Salmon (1962, 1988) - will contribute to shed light on the ever-lasting debate on the principles guiding Early Modern English punctuation usage.

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