The Origins of Plaid Wearing

2021 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-454
Author(s):  
David H. Caldwell

This paper reviews documentary and pictorial evidence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries concerning the wearing of plaids by men. Initially, sixteenth-century sources that specifically use the term ‘plaid’ are examined, in order to build a working definition, and this is then applied to earlier sources in languages other than Gaelic, where the terminology is uncertain. The early sources provide insight regarding the origins of traditions associated with plaid wearing. It is suggested that the origins of Highland military dress lie in the west Highlands and Islands in the mid-sixteenth century with the adoption of tartan plaids by local warriors. The article also draws attention to an apparent long running belief that plaids were derived from ancient Greek or Roman dress.

Author(s):  
Marian H. Feldman

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.


2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-367
Author(s):  
Jennifer Birch ◽  
John P. Hart

We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.


1955 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams

The island of Trinidad was discovered by Columbus on the third voyage in 1498. One of the largest and most fertile of the West Indian islands, for many years it remained on the fringe of European activity in the Caribbean area and on the coasts of Venezuela and Guiana. A Spanish settlement was founded there in 1532, but apparently it disintegrated within a short time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Berrio and Raleigh fought for possession of the island, but chiefly as a convenient base for their rival search for El Dorado, or Manoa, the Golden Man and the mythical city of gold. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explorers, corsairs, and contraband traders, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, passed near its shores, and many of them may well have paused there to refresh themselves and to make necessary repairs to their vessels. But the records are scanty and we know little of such events or of the settlements that existed from time to time.


Zograf ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Dragan Vojvodic

In the katholikon of the monastery of Praskvica there are remains of two layers of post-Byzantine wall-painting: the earlier, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and later, from the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the conclusion based on stylistic analysis and technical features. The portions of frescoes belonging to one or the other layer can be clearly distinguished from one another and the content of the surviving representations read more thoroughly than before. It seems that the remains of wall-painting on what originally was the west facade of the church also belong to the earlier layer. It is possible that the church was not frescoed in the lifetime of its ktetor, Balsa III Balsic.


1912 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. B. Wace ◽  
M. S. Thompson

Although one of the smaller and less well-known cities in Thessaly Halos in Achaia Phthiotis has played an important part in history. Tradition attributes its origin to Athamas, and its position guarding the coast route between Othrys and the sea into the Spercheios valley, brought it on several critical occasions into prominence. In 480 B.C. together with the rest of Thessaly it submitted to Xerxes without a struggle, but in 346 B.C. it withstood a long siege by Philip and Parmenio. Some mediaeval and Turkish fortifications on the ancient Greek acropolis show that its strategic importance continued down to the last century. The walls which surrounded the city in the plain and the citadel on the hill to the west can still be traced, but of the city itself nothing is now visible. The acropolis is the last peak of the projecting spur of Othrys, which running down towards the bay of Halmyros shuts off the plain of Sourpe from that of Halmyros. This is now a bare limestone hill covered with scrub, and whatever may exist in the plain is hidden beneath the cultivated fields.


Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski

The concept of perfect goodness had a central place in ancient Greek and medieval philosophy, and is still frequently discussed in contemporary natural theology. Medieval philosophers adopted the idea from the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with the difference that they identified perfect goodness with a personal God. In ancient and medieval philosophy the concept is primarily a metaphysical one, since goodness was thought to be extensionally equivalent to being, but it is secondarily a moral concept referring to the distinctive sort of goodness appropriate to those beings that have wills. Thus it is fundamental to a long tradition on the metaphysical basis of value which lasted from Plato until at least the sixteenth century. In Plato, perfect goodness is the Form of the Good, upon which everything that has being is ontologically and causally dependent. In Aristotle, the good is identified with the end or purpose of a natural being. The good is that towards which all things move for the fulfilment of their natures. By the time of Aquinas, medieval philosophers had identified the good in both the Platonic and Aristotelian senses with the Christian God and had argued that God is both the perfectly good creative source and the perfectly good end of all beings other than himself. The concept of a perfectly good being in Christian philosophical theology faces two major kinds of difficulty. One is the problem that perfect goodness appears to be incompatible with the divine attributes of omnipotence and freedom of the divine will. And if a perfectly good being does not have a will that is free in a morally significant sense, that being seems to lack goodness in the moral sense of goodness. The second kind of problem is that the existence of a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good seems to be incompatible with the existence of evil. In spite of these problems, there is a strong attraction to the idea of a perfectly good God in contemporary philosophical theology. The category of perfect goodness is therefore one of the most persistent of the concepts in the Platonic legacy.


2020 ◽  
pp. 218-265
Author(s):  
John Stratton Hawley

This chapter shows how innovation emerges in one of Vrindavan’s most influential religious lineages, the Chaitanya or Gaudiya community that traces its origins back to the sixteenth century when Vrindavan emerged as a built presence on the banks of the Yamuna. In the West the best-known figure in the Gaudiya community is undoubtedly the founder of ISKCON, but in India Shrivatsa Goswami is almost equally renowned. Shrivatsa’s father was a major innovator in the generation just past; we watch Shrivatsa perform his funeral rites. How does Shrivatsa, a person with global connections, represent the old and the new Vrindavan at once?


1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Clay

The Lords Petre were always one of the most prominent of English Catholic families, and they were also one of the richest. Their landed estates had been built up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Sir William Petre, Secretary of State to three Tudor sovereigns. Sir William's son, John, was created a Baron in 1611, but in the early 17th century the family properties ceased to grow in size, partly because Catholicism excluded them from the profits of office, and partly because provision for younger sons offset such new acquisitions as were made. But even so the estates inherited by the third Lord Petre in 1637 were large enough to place him clearly in the ranks of the great landed magnates. In Essex he had a well-consolidated belt of land lying to the west and south-west of Chelmsford, and centred on the two family residences of Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall. Altogether in Essex Petre had about 11,000 acres of freehold land and the lordship of seventeen manors, and these produced some £5,500 per annum or considerably more than half his total income from land. In addition he had a large estate on the opposite side of the country, in Devon. This lay in two distinct areas, one centred on Axminster and extending down the Axe valley and its tributaries, and the other in the southerly projection of the county on the southern edge of Dartmoor, where the principal possession was the vast moorland manor of South Brent. Besides the main estates in Essex and Devon, there were some isolated properties: the manor of Osmington down on the Dorset coast; Toddenham and Sutton in Gloucestershire; Kennett and Kentford on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.


Author(s):  
Frank Burch Brown

Music has often been regarded as the most directly emotional of the arts and the art most intimately involved with religious and spiritual life. In the endeavor to understand music's relation to emotion and religion, a variety of approaches and disciplines are relevant. There are, for example, scientific and psychological studies that can yield insight into the character of musical and emotional response, and of music's access to the affective life. Thus, multiple disciplines are pertinent, from musicology (including ethnomusicology) and history to philosophy, psychology, and various branches of religious studies, particularly theology and comparative religions. This essay deals with historical perspectives, major theories, and current issues regarding music, emotion, and religion. It begins by considering classic and exceptionally enduring images and ideas of music, including the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus. It then considers musical ethics and metaphysics in the West from antiquity through the Renaissance. The essay also examines remaining issues and unresolved tensions about music, emotion, and religion.


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