LAWRENCE NORMAND and GARETH ROBERTS (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland. James VI's Demonology and the North Berwick Witches

2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-71
Author(s):  
William G. Naphy
Keyword(s):  
2004 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Mortimer

The licensing of provincial surgeons and physicians in the post-Restoration period has proved an awkward subject for medical historians. It has divided writers between those who regard the possession of a local licence as a mark of professionalism or proficiency, those who see the existence of diocesan licences as a mark of an essentially unregulated and decentralized trade, and those who discount the distinction of licensing in assessing medical expertise availability in a given region. Such a diversity of interpretations has meant that the very descriptors by which practitioners were known to their contemporaries (and are referred to by historians) have become fragmented and difficult to use without a specific context. As David Harley has pointed out in his study of licensed physicians in the north-west of England, “historians often define eighteenth-century physicians as men with medical degrees, thus ignoring … the many licensed physicians throughout the country”. One could similarly draw attention to the inadequacy of the word “surgeon” to cover licensed and unlicensed practitioners, barber-surgeons, Company members in towns, self-taught practitioners using surgical manuals, and procedural specialists whose work came under the umbrella of surgery, such as bonesetters, midwives and phlebotomists. Although such fragmentation of meaning reflects a diversity of practices carried on under the same occupational descriptors in early modern England, the result is an imprecise historical literature in which the importance of licensing, and especially local licensing, is either ignored as a delimiter or viewed as an inaccurate gauge of medical proficiency.


Itinerario ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhaswati Bhattacharya

Both overseas trade and shipbuilding in India are of great antiquity. But even for the early modern period, maritime commerce is relatively better documented than the shipbuilding industry. When the Portuguese and later the North Europeans entered the intra-Asian trade, many of the ships they employed in order to supplement their shipping in Asia were obtained from the Indian dockyards. Detailed evidence with regard to shipbuilding, however, is very rare. It has been pointed out that the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were more particular than their North-European counter-parts in the following centuries in providing information on seafaring and shipbuilding. Shipbuilding on the west coast has been discussed more than that on the eastern coast of India, particularly the coast of Bengal. Though Bengal had a long tradition of shipbuilding, direct evidence of shipbuilding in the region is rare. Many changes were brought about in the history of India and the Indian Ocean trade of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1750s. When the English became the largest carriers of Bengal's trade with other parts of Asia, this had an impact on the shipbuilding in Bengal. It was in their interest that the British in Bengal had their ships built in that province.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-628
Author(s):  
Vesa-Pekka Herva ◽  
Janne Ikäheimo ◽  
Matti Enbuske ◽  
Jari Okkonen

The unknown and exotic North fascinated European minds in the early modern period. A land of natural and supernatural wonders, and of the indigenous Sámi people, the northern margins of Europe stirred up imagination and a plethora of cultural fantasies, which also affected early antiquarian research and the period understanding of the past. This article employs an alleged runestone discovered in northernmost Sweden in the seventeenth century to explore how ancient times and northern margins of the continent were understood in early modern Europe. We examine how the peculiar monument of the Vinsavaara stone was perceived and signified in relation to its materiality, landscape setting, and the cultural-cosmological context of the Renaissance–Baroque world. On a more general level, we use the Vinsavaara stone to assess the nature and character of early modern antiquarianism in relation to the period's nationalism, colonialism and classicism.


2019 ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
John Henderson

This chapter discusses the origins and spread of plague in northern Italy. Plague arrived in Italy in 1629 with French and German troops. It is no accident that the initial cases of plague identified in October of 1629 were first in Piedmont in the Val di Susa, west of Turin and near the border with France, and secondly in the Valtellina in Lombardy, subsequently travelling to Lake Como to the north of Milan. Other cities in northern Italy soon became infected and on May 6, 1630, the authorities as far south as Bologna announced the official outbreak of plague. Judging by the rapidity with which plague spread between these northern urban centres, one would have expected the epidemic to have arrived in Tuscany by early May, given that Bologna is only 65 miles north of Florence, but it was delayed by both natural and man-made factors. Tuscany is separated from Reggio-Emilia by the Apennine mountain range, which provided a physical barrier and facilitated the control of traffic coming from the north. The chapter then traces the preventive measures adopted by the health board as the plague approached Tuscany, including cordons sanitaires along frontiers, the removal of the sick to quarantine centres, and the rapid burial of the dead.


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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 131-148
Author(s):  
Alan Montgomery

The Agricola of Tacitus is the most extensive surviving ancient literary source on Roman Britain, and much of it deals with the Roman general Agricola’s conquest of Caledonia. Apparently providing evidence of the military prowess and civilising intentions of Rome whilst also describing a brave Caledonian hero named Calgacus, the text could be interpreted differently according to the political and patriotic affiliations of its early modern readers. As chapter seven will reveal, the Agricola would become something of an obsession amongst Scotland’s antiquarians, providing historical information on Roman exploits in the north but also lacking key geographical and historical details, encouraging conjecture which sometimes tipped into pure fantasy. As a result, a phenomenon christened ‘Agricolamania’ had already been noted by the end of the eighteenth century.


Sibirica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Art Leete

This article explores the ethnographic, philosophical, and political background of the image of the northern peoples as “silent,” by analyzing the diachronic perspective descriptions of the Finno-Ugric peoples of the north who inhabit Western Siberia and the Russian North from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Early modern ethnographies treated the Siberian peoples as aggressive, although from the end of the eighteenth century this image was reassessed and a different view of the silent character of the indigenous people was introduced in scholarly literature. Silent conduct was assessed as an archaic quality of the Finno-Ugric temperament, or as the result of the colonial encounter. This manifestation of silence was the most distinctive marker of the modern transformations of power and knowledge in the arena of Siberian studies.


PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-692
Author(s):  
Nguyễn-Võ Thu-Hương

Whoever goes down to Bà Ria and happens by the cemetery in the sand at the village of Phu'ó'c Lě, I beg you to go in that cemetery and look for the grave with a cross painted half black, half white, by the side of the Church of Martyrs–to visit that grave lest it become pitiful. Because it has been two years since anyone visited or cast as much as a glance.—Nguyễn Trong QuanSO opens nguyễn trọng quản's thẩy lazaro phiển (“lazaro phiển” 22). The narrative begins at an obscure gravesite evokes the life of a man as both victim of state violence and perpetrator of private deaths. Lazaro Phiển is a ictional work written in the romanized script and was published in Saigon in 1887 in a novelistic format almost forty years before Hoàng Ngọc Phách's Tố Tâm. Yet the latter, published in Hanoi in 1925, is oten touted in official literary history as the first modern Vietnamese novel. Although Nguyễn Trọng Qu.n's narrative revolves around the recovery of an elided story, the author could not have anticipated the elision of his work from a nationalist literary genealogy that locates the origin of modern Vietnamese literature in the North. he elision was part of a general omission of works from the South in the last decades of the nineteenth century and irst two decades of the twentieth. his genealogy was by no means limited to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North but was also perpetuated in the Republic of Vietnam in the South ater independence and the partitioning of the country into North and South in 1954


Author(s):  
Carla Gardina Pestana

Religion shaped the early modern Atlantic world in many ways. Although Iberian expansion began before the Protestant Reformation, Europe soon divided between Protestant and Catholic, and this division created a context for European understandings of the purpose of expansion. With permission from the pope to evangelize outside the Old World, the Spanish and the Portuguese split the extra-European world between them; Spain was responsible for most of the Americas (excluding only the area that would become Brazil), while Portugal took Brazil and Africa (as well as Asia). Soon representatives of each kingdom were at work, conquering, colonizing, and evangelizing. Protestantism, although it arrived late in the contest for colonies and trade in this New World, was central to Spanish understanding of its work; evangelizing the native peoples of the Americas would add additional souls to the church, making up for those who had been lost to the Protestant Reformation. When Protestants finally became involved in colonizing the Americas and trading with Africa, they similarly understood their role as combating the reach and influence of their Catholic rivals. If in 1600 the European presence outside of Europe was overwhelmingly Catholic, by 1700 a map of the spread of Christianity showed varied results. Spain controlled the central area of the Americas, including much of South America and the Caribbean, all of Central America, and all the southern area of North America (from Florida and New Mexico south). Portugal had Brazil, while Catholic France held Quebec to the north and selected islands in the Caribbean. The Protestant presence was predominantly British, and included eastern North America between Quebec and Florida as well as some islands in the Caribbean. The Protestant Dutch also held island colonies and a South American outpost. West Africa and West Central Africa hosted trading forts controlled by most of these European powers, from which were shipped slaves as well as trade goods. The religious rivalries of early modern Europe had been effectively exported. Every faith represented along the shores of the Atlantic prior to contact would participate in the intermixing that occurred afterward. The history of religion in the Atlantic world therefore explores the variety of traditions within that world and the effects of the circulation, transplantation, and encounter of these various faiths.


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