Exile

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-84
Author(s):  
Yaacob Dweck
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Material Support ◽  
Sephardic Diaspora ◽  
Printing House

This chapter traces the life of Jacob Sasportas prior to Sabbatianism. It places Sasportas in a series of different contexts: a member of a leading Sephardic family in Spanish Oran, a corrector in the printing house of Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam, and a minister to the fledgling congregation of Portuguese Jews in London. In each of these contexts, Sasportas emerges as “a man against,” challenging truisms and opposing received opinions, even as he sought patronage from wealthy Jews whom he scorned. Sasportas's response to the different centers in the western Sephardic Diaspora—Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Livorno—was conditioned by the fact that he experienced them as an outsider. Much of this was a rhetorical posture. Sasportas repeatedly placed himself on the margins of the places in which he lived, even as the Jews in these cities provided him and his family with material support. However, his marginality was not only rhetorical; or perhaps the rhetoric itself bears close scrutiny. What few accounts remain indicate that Sasportas was perceived by others, particularly other Jews, as an outsider as well. Occasionally, this led to comity and a meeting of the minds. More often, though, this posture of the outsider led to conflict, and these conflicts frequently left a long paper trail—a paper trail that offers a perspective, however partial, on the Sephardic Diaspora in western Europe in the seventeenth century.

The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.

From koine to standard: the early modern origin of a key linguistic term

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-302
Author(s):  
Raf Van Rooy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early History ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
Linguistic Term ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Abstract In this paper, I explore the early history of the word standard as a linguistic term, arguing that it came to compete with the designation common language in the seventeenth century. The latter phrase was, in turn, formed by ideas on the Greek koine during the Renaissance and appears to have been the first widely used collocation referring to a standard language-like entity. In order to sketch this evolution, I first discuss premodern ideas on the koine. Then, I attempt to outline how the intuitive comparison of the koine with vernacular norms that were being increasingly regulated resulted in the development of the concept of common language, termed lingua communis in Latin (a calque of Greek hē koinḕ diálektos), in the sixteenth century. This phrase highlighted the communicative functionality of the vernaculars, which were being codified in grammars and dictionaries. Scholars contrasted these common languages with regional dialects, which had a limited reach in terms of communication. This distinction received a social and evaluative connotation during the seventeenth century, which created a need for terminological alternatives; an increasingly popular option competing with common language was standard, which was variously combined with language and tongue by English authors from about 1650 onwards, especially in Protestant circles, where the vernaculars tended to play a more prominent role than in Catholic areas. Of major importance for this evolution was the work and linguistic usage of the poet John Dryden (1631–1700). This essay uncovers the early history of standard as a key linguistic term, while also presenting a case study which shows the impact of the rediscovery of the Greek heritage on language studies in Western Europe, especially through the term common language.

The Study of Arabic Historians in Seventeenth Century England: The Background and the Work of Edward Pococke

1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.M. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Principal Result ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
The Third

Arab historical writing was not a specialized study in the seventeenth century. Organized work in Arabic and Islamic studies was still a recent development in western Europe generally. The first modern English Arabist, William Bedwell (1562–1632), was during most of his life an isolated figure: the principal result of his studies was an Arabic lexicon which was never printed, although he bequeathed the MS to Cambridge with a fount of Arabic type for that purpose. In the third decade of the century, however, some younger scholars began to interest themselves in Arabic.

Ecological Selves and Organizational Leadership Values that Matter

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina S. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Soil Erosion ◽  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Natural Systems ◽  
Body Of Knowledge

One striking feature in the sweep of history is the extent to which humans have manipulated the natural environment to serve our needs and our desires. In the early written record, there are tales of deforestation and soil erosion (Plato, 360 BCE). As early as the seventeenth century, natural historians compared the grasslands around villages to inhabited areas and speculated on the consequences of human activity on natural systems ( Goudie, 2006 , p. 3). The onset of the industrial revolution in Western Europe combined with a growing understanding and knowledge base of science has rendered a circumstance of uncontrolled manipulation of the ecosystems and ever finer ways to measure these consequences. This article is an invitation to challenge us as scholars and practitioners to seek understanding as companies and other organizations take up their roles in a world that we are transforming irrevocably. Why does it matter, after all, that we seek to build a body of knowledge around corporate functioning? It is my intention that this article helps us ponder and reflect on that question.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
State Building ◽  
Court System ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church ◽  
Written Sources

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. Like their European neighbors, Russia and the Ukrainian lands recorded incidents of witchcraft and sorcery from the times of the earliest written sources, and along with other Christian cultures, they formally condemned the practice of magic outside of the Church. In synch with their European contemporaries, they saw spikes in formal legal prosecution during the early modern period. In the case of Russia, this was a time of ambitious state building and expansion of the tsarist court system. Formal trials of witches there began as a minute trickle in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when they were already well underway or even inching toward an end in parts of Western Europe. Peaking in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, Russian and Ukrainian trials abated only during the 1770s but did not cease altogether until the mid-nineteenth century. Witchcraft was energetically prosecuted in Russia and Ukraine after the entire notion of magic had fallen into disrepute (or even become laughable) among most members of the educated classes in Western areas.

The Mughal Polity—A Critique of Revisionist Approaches

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Athar Ali
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Private Property ◽  
State Ownership ◽  
Progressive Decline ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Over Exploitation ◽  
Ownership Of Land

The nature of the pre-colonial Indian state, especially as one could see it in similarity or opposition to the state in Europe, has exercised a particular fascination since the seventeenth century, when François Bernier spelled out his theory about Oriental monarchies, with special reference to the Mughal Empire and Turkey. It may be recalled that he saw eastern states different from the European in two major particulars: (1) The king here was the owner of the soil, in other words, the exactor of rent; and (2) those who actually collected the tax-rent held only temporary tenures, as holders of jagirs or timars, unlike the hereditary European lords. The temporary tenures, which were a necessary reflex of state ownership of land led to over-exploitation of the peasantry, and, therefore, a progressive decline of the economy and polity. This was in contrast to Western Europe, where the limitation of state right of sovereignty and the dominance of private property over the land, under its protection, were the surest means to progress and prosperity. Already in Bernier we have the articulation of the contrast between the Oriental despotic state and the occidental laissez faire state.

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