‘Indian Gowns Small and Great’: Chintz Banyans Ready Made in the Coromandel, c. 1680–c. 1780

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-73
Author(s):  
Ariane Fennetaux

The article focuses on the close study of a group of eighteenth-century chintz nightgowns that were ready-made or partly ready-made in India for the European market. Whereas nightgowns are usually associated with the taste for the exotic and the spread of the fashion is sometimes linked to the availability of the garment on the ready-made market, the production of ready-made gowns in India and the methods put in place to manufacture these commodities have not been studied. Based on a close reading of surviving chintz nightgowns, the article attempts to understand production techniques put in place by Indian craftsmen to meet European demand. Material evidence suggests streamlined production processes were in place in India from the end of the seventeenth century that had no real equivalent in Europe. The article thus sheds further light on the idea of Europe's ‘Indian apprenticeship’, showing that Indian mastery of colour was coupled with production methods combining artisanal, non-mechanized work with a level of bulk production and enhanced efficiency.

Author(s):  
David Pearson

Studies of private libraries and their owners invariably talk about ‘book collecting’—is this the right terminology? After summarizing our broadly held understanding of the evolution of bibliophile collecting from the eighteenth century onwards, this chapter considers the extent to which similar behaviours can be detected (or not) in the seventeenth, drawing on the material evidence of bookbindings, wording in wills, and other sources. Do we find subject-based collecting, of the kind we are familiar with today, as a characteristic of early modern book owners? Some distinctions are recognized in ways in which medieval manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) were brought together at this time. The relationship between libraries and museums, and contemporary attitudes to them, is explored. The concluding argument is that ‘collecting’ is a careless word to use in the seventeenth-century context; just as we should talk about users rather than readers, we should use ‘owners’ rather than ‘collectors’ as the default term, unless there is evidence to the contrary.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Scarpa

The Spread of Neilos Kabasilas’s Anti-Latin Treaties in Russian Manuscripts in the 17th Century In the 17th century, Neilos Kabasilas’s anti-Latin works, along with Gregory Palamas’s Contro Becco, were considerably widespread in Russia. The first copy was made for Arseniĭ Sukhanov in the 1630s, another copy – supplemented with several polemical texts – was then prepared for the Patriarchal Library. Four manuscripts are associated with the activity of the monks Simon Azar’in, Efrem Kvašnin and Sergij Šelonin, who were in Moscow in the 1640s, and are perhaps related to the question of the religious confession of Prince Valdemar, who was designated to marry the Tsar’s daughter. In mid-seventeenth century another manuscript appeared in Ukraine, marked at that time by the controversies which followed the Union of Brest. In the 1660s, two copies were made in the Solovetskiĭ Monastery. At the end of the century, Archbishop Atanasiĭ Kholmogorskij, involved in the controversy over Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, made further three copies of these works. Four manuscripts from the first half of the eighteenth century testify in their turn to the interest of particular individuals in this collection of texts on the Procession of the Holy Spirit. Rozpowszechnienie antyłacińskich traktatów Nila Kabazylasa w rękopisach ruskich w XVII wieku W XVII wieku antyłacińskie traktaty Nila Kabazylasa, obok Contro Becco Grzegorza Palamasa, były dość dobrze rozpowszechnione na Rusi. Pierwszy odpis został przygotowany przez Arsenija Suchanowa w latach trzydziestych XVII wieku. Drugi wzbogacony o kilka tekstów polemicznych powstał dla biblioteki patriarchalnej. Cztery kolejne rękopisy wiążą się z działalnością przebywających w latach czterdziestych w Moskwie mnichów Simona Azarina, Efrema Kwasznina i Sergija Szelonina i odsyłają prawdopodobnie do sprawy wyznania księcia Waldemara, kandydata na męża dla carskiej córki. W połowie XVII wieku tekst pojawia się na naznaczonych polemikami wyznaniowymi po unii brzeskiej ziemiach ukraińskich. W latach sześćdziesiątych dwa odpisy powstają w Monastyrze Sołowieckim. Pod koniec stulecia, zaangażowany w polemiki wokół obecności Chrystusa w Eucharystii, arcybiskup Atanasy Chołmogorski dokonuje kolejnych trzech odpisów. Cztery odpisy z pierwszej połowy XVIII wieku świadczą natomiast o zainteresowaniu indywidualnych osób zbiorem tekstów o pochodzeniu Ducha Świętego.


1909 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-422 ◽  

The phrase “ most-favored-nation ” first appeared in commercial treaties toward the close of the seventeenth century. The clause in which it was used had been invented earlier in the century to meet the exigencies of that great commercial expansion which had followed upon the restless activities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The growth of international trade in the eighteenth century called for the multiplication of commercial treaties, and with the treaties the necessity for using the new clause increased.After the American revolution, a series of treaties were made in which the clause was given an expanded and modified form. Henceforth there appear both the unqualified and the qualified forms. During the nineteenth century, while international trade became world commerce, commercial treaties became so common that they now bind the trading nations in a fine-meshed web. In these treaties the clause of the most-favored-nation was inserted with so few exceptions as to warrant its characterization as the “ corner-stone of all modern commercial treaties.”


Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-547
Author(s):  
Erik Odegard

This article examines the decision-making process for a new fort which the Dutch West India Company proposed to build near Takoradi in present-day Ghana in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. By closely following the process of design, evaluation, and redesign of the fort, this article argues that the WIC was institutionally incapable of coordinating and carrying out such a complex project. The original design for the new fort was made in 1774 by Johan Frederik Trenks, a Silesian-born engineer who, as it turned out, was not current with modern design practices and used Dutch examples from the first half of the seventeenth century. The design was sent to the Netherlands for evaluation and returned with scathing criticism. The long, drawn-out process of design, evaluation, and redesign of what was after all a relatively small fort show the institutional paralysis of the WIC in the years leading up to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84). Though the fort would never be completed, construction did begin shortly before the war. The conflict, followed shortly thereafter by the dissolution of the WIC, meant the project would never be completed.


2004 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirine Hamadeh

Architectural transformations in the eighteenth-century Ottoman capital Istanbul are usually interpreted as expressions of an overarching process of cultural westernization that began in the wake of Ottoman military defeats against European powers in the late seventeenth century. In this article, I reevaluate the extent and significance of Ottoman westernization against visual and architectural evidence, and against two diverging discourses that emerged among contemporary Ottoman and European observers of architectural change. I argue that the architectural idiom of the eighteenth century was far more hybrid and culturally uncommitted than the notion of westernization implies. Based on a close reading of Ottoman poetry and narratives and European travelers' accounts, I show that although the rhetoric of westernization was dominant in the latter's descriptions of the built environment, Ottoman perceptions centered instead on notions of innovation and originality of expression, reflecting a new attitude toward change, novelty, and the canons of a long-established architectural tradition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.


1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-291
Author(s):  
P.S.M. PHIRI ◽  
D.M. MOORE

Central Africa remained botanically unknown to the outside world up to the end of the eighteenth century. This paper provides a historical account of plant explorations in the Luangwa Valley. The first plant specimens were collected in 1897 and the last serious botanical explorations were made in 1993. During this period there have been 58 plant collectors in the Luangwa Valley with peak activity recorded in the 1960s. In 1989 1,348 species of vascular plants were described in the Luangwa Valley. More botanical collecting is needed with a view to finding new plant taxa, and also to provide a satisfactory basis for applied disciplines such as ecology, phytogeography, conservation and environmental impact assessment.


Author(s):  
Guangya Zheng ◽  
Jupei Xia ◽  
Zhengjie Chen

: China primarily contains medium and low-grade phosphorus ores that are used to produce phosphoric acid. Here, we provide an overview of phosphoric acid production processes, including wet, thermal, and kiln methods, as well as the fundamental principles, major equipment, and technological aspects of each process. Progress in the kiln method using lowgrade phosphate rock is described, which involves the KPA and CDK processes. The literature shows that the addition of admixtures adds great competitiveness to kiln phosphate production methods and has considerable development prospects.


Author(s):  
William E. Nelson

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


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