Counsel for Kings: Wisdom and Politics in Tenth-Century Iran

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Culture Volume ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Eastern Iran ◽  
Contextual Study ◽  
The City

This two-volume work represents a textual and contextual study of an early Arabic mirror for princes, the book known as Naṣīḥat al-mulūk (‘Counsel for Kings’) and attributed to the jurist and polymath Abū l-Ḥasan al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058). Following earlier studies, Wisdom and Politics in Tenth-Century Iran finds the Arabic mirror’s traditional ascription to al-Māwardī to be unlikely, and proposes instead an early tenth-century dating, and an eastern Iran setting. On this assumption, Wisdom and Politics interprets the mirror as a product of and reflection on the political culture and social and cultural conditions of the early Samanid period, portrayed through the critical argument and counsel of an author, referred to as Pseudo-Māwardī, likely to have resided in or near the city of Balkh. Pseudo-Māwardī’s perceptions and opinions reflect a largely Ḥanafite legal affiliation and strongly Muʿtazilite patterns of thought, of a kind associated with Abū l-Qāsim al-Kaʿbī al-Balkhī (d. 319/931), who furthered the ‘Baghdadi’ branch of Muʿtazilite theology in eastern Iran. Naṣīḥat al-mulūk also displays an affinity with the philosophical perspectives of Abū Zayd al-Balkhī (d. 322/934), and a thorough familiarity with Arabic literary culture. Volume I explores the context in which Naṣīḥat al-mulūk arose and to which it responds. Against an early tenth-century Samanid background, it studies Pseudo-Māwardī’s portrayal of kingship and governance, his arguments for the ruler’s optimal treatment of the various social groups, his references to the diversity of the region’s religious culture, his largely inclusive but also boundary-establishing assertions regarding religious beliefs and practices, the literary representations of heterodoxy that shaped his mentality and the resonance of his text in the setting that produced it.

DIALOG Z HUMANIZMEM RENESANSOWYM W DZIEŁACH PIOTRA SKARGI / PIOTR SKARGA’S DIALOGUE WITH RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka -Jeżowa
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Ignatian Spirituality ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

Summary The article tries to outline the position of Piotr Skarga in the Jesuit debates about the legacy of humanist Renaissance. The author argues that Skarga was fully committed to the adaptation of humanist and even medieval ideas into the revitalized post-Tridentine Catholicism. Skarga’s aim was to reformulate the humanist worldview, its idea of man, system of values and political views so that they would fit the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. In effect, though, it meant supplanting the pluralist and open humanist culture by a construct as solidly Catholic as possible. He sifted through, verified, and re-interpreted the humanist material: as a result the humanist myth of the City of the Sun was eclipsed by reminders of the transience of all earthly goods and pursuits; elements of the Greek and Roman tradition were reconnected with the authoritative Biblical account of world history; and man was reinscribed into the theocentric perspective. Skarga brought back the dogmas of the original sin and sanctifying grace, reiterated the importance of asceticism and self-discipline, redefined the ideas of human dignity and freedom, and, in consequence, came up with a clear-cut, integrist view of the meaning and goal of the good life as well as the proper mission of the citizen and the nation. The polemical edge of Piotr Skarga’s cultural project was aimed both at Protestantism and the Erasmian tendency within the Catholic church. While strongly coloured by the Ignatian spirituality with its insistence on rigorous discipline, a sense of responsibility for the lives of other people and the culture of the community, and a commitment to the heroic ideal of a miles Christi, taking headon the challenges of the flesh, the world, Satan, and the enemies of the patria and the Church, it also went a long way to adapt the Jesuit model to Poland’s socio-cultural conditions and the mentality of its inhabitants.

Rethinking Iconoclasm in Early Modern England: the Case of Cheapside Cross

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 379-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Budd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Complex Variety ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

AbstractProtestant iconoclasm has generally been understood as an assault on the beliefs and practices of traditional religion. This article challenges that understanding through a detailed study of Cheapside Cross, a large monument that was repeatedly attacked by iconoclasts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It draws on contemporary pamphlets and the manuscripts records of the City of London to reveal the complex variety of associations that Cheapside Cross acquired before and during the Reformation era. It argues that perceptions of the monument were shaped not only by its iconography but also by its involvement in ceremonies and rituals, including royal coronation processions. The iconoclastic attacks on Cheapside Cross should be interpreted not merely as a challenge to traditional beliefs but as attempts to restructure the monument's associations. The paper concludes that attacks on other images may be understood in a similar manner.

The Virtues of Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Distinct Role

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Mayte Green-Mercado
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Isidore Of Seville ◽  
John Of Rupescissa

This chapter provides an introduction to the analysis of the efflorescence of apocalyptic beliefs and practices among Moriscos. The last Spanish Muslims to be forcibly converted to Catholicism in sixteenth-century Spain, Moriscos and their descendants were also referred to as New Christians. The chapter describes how Moriscos were not impervious to the apocalyptic excitement of their Old Christian counterparts, such as reading the same prophecies of St. Isidore of Seville and John of Rupescissa. It also explains how Morisco political culture and practice were transformed, amd it highlights events in which Moriscos met such powerful Mediterranean actors like the Ottomans, the French monarch Henry IV, and the Saʿdī sultans of Morocco.

The challenges of populism

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Sue Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Political World

This chapter discusses the contextual landscape of populism, considering it through the framework of political culture. A political culture refers to a set of shared views, imaginaries, beliefs, and normative judgements about the political world. The chapter then offers some introductory thoughts on the problematic intersections between community development, democracy, and populism. There are now many criticisms of populism, from a variety of perspectives. But for the purposes of the chapter, the focus is on the ways in which populism undermines civil society. Understanding populist assaults on civil society is important for community development, because civil society provides the habitat in which the various forms of community development operate. To understand how populism threatens civil society, one can begin with the contrast between civil society and populism in regard to pluralism. After analysing convergences and disjunctions, the chapter looks at the ways in which the beliefs and practices of populism challenge community development. It concludes with a brief discussion of community development responses to populism.

The Woman in the Street

2021 ◽  
pp. 213-230
Author(s):  
Amy Richlin
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
War News ◽  
Punic Wars ◽  
The City ◽  
Political Actions

Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the streets of Rome and throughout Italy in the war-torn mid-Republic. Comedy is the best contemporary witness, developing as it did from the 270s BCE onward. City sackings entailed rape, enslavement, loss of kin, and the movement of refugees across Italy, and the resulting issues inflect the content of comedy, emblematized in a slave-woman’s fake jewelry in the shape of the goddess Victoria. Comedy addresses women in the audience, while, onstage, women move through the city and participate in political actions and discourse, laying claim to rights. In Livy’s later accounts of the Punic Wars, women appear in religious worship and reacting to war news, demonstrating bereavement like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They even join in the fighting, in ways seen in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, or as Cicero’s wife Terentia defended her own home.

Exercising Power in the City

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-464
Author(s):  
Veronica West-Harling
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The City

This chapter shows the exercising of power in action in the public space. It looks at who ‘owns’ this, the Christianization of it in Rome, and the increasing role of the papacy in appropriating and in running it, revalorizing it as part of Rome’s Christian past and present, expressed through pilgrimage. This appropriation is contested by the secular aristocracy, which in turn appropriates the public space and rewrites the topography of the city in the tenth century. The use of the public space as an area of either social cohesion or conflict is studied, through the ceremonies, elections, oaths, processions, assemblies, justice and defence meetings; but also riots, conspiracies, and contested elections. This space of cohesion or conflict is fundamental to the creation of the unity and sense of identity of the city, especially around the patron saint or, sometimes, around or indeed against an imperial ruler

Is Culture a Key to Development?

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-17
Author(s):  
Robert Klitgaard
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Equatorial Guinea ◽  
Critical Variable ◽  
Finance Minister ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Free Market Reforms ◽  
Practical Question

In the late 1980s the economy of the small African country of Equatorial Guinea was foundering. Macroeconomic adjustment hadn’t controlled corruption or strengthened the institutions of property, credit, and taxation. As a result, so-called free-market reforms had made little difference in, of all places, the market. Do reforms need to take account of local cultural conditions—including the possibility that what outsiders call development is not a priority? The finance minister explained to me the relevance, in cultures like his, of dictatorship, forced labor, and restrictions of freedom of speech and assembly. Indeed, he argued that Westerners can’t understand apparent torture without an appreciation of his country’s history and political culture. If not so stridently, other Africans agree that culture is a critical variable in advancing, or resisting, various forms of development. Some say, “We need to change our culture to move ahead.” Others argue, “At least we should adjust our policies to our cultural specificities.” How to take culture into account becomes a crucial practical question in development policy and management.

Policing Religion

MOVE ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 123-152
Author(s):  
Richard Kent Evans
Keyword(s):  
Federal Bureau ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
State Police ◽  
The City

This chapter focuses on the role that policing plays in classifying groups, beliefs, and practices as either religious or secular. Almost from the very beginning of the group, MOVE was under surveillance from the city police’s extensive surveillance apparatus. By the early 1980s, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Pennsylvania State Police, and the Secret Service had all targeted MOVE for surveillance, infiltration, or prosecution. To be sure, MOVE brought much of this attention on themselves. But their claims to religious legitimacy were met, early on, with the presumption of criminality. One reason MOVE was not allowed to be a religion was because MOVE never existed apart from government policing and surveillance.

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