scholarly journals Writing Self, Writing Empire

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Aria Fani
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Literary Environment

The seventeenth century marks an exciting period in the life of Persian literarycultures in northern India. Established as a language of administration byTurco-Afghans in the early thirteenth century, several centuries later Persianhad extended well beyond its initial administrative strongholds to become animportant medium for literary and religious composition, historiography, andtranslation. In a literary environment that prized both literary aesthetics andfierce rivalries, the massive textual production on vastly diverse subjects, aswell as the presence of literary salons, standalone bookstalls, and mushā‘irahs(poetic assemblies), cumulatively point to a lively Persian literary culture thatechoed across political, religious, and socio-cultural terrains.Unfortunately, most of the scholarship on Persian in the medieval Indiancontext over the past decades has failed to illuminate this dynamic scene.Moreover, most studies seek to highlight Persian’s influence on India or examineIndia’s civilizational impact on Persian. Both paradigms assume a natural(read: Iranian) ecumene for Persian and thus do not critically considerthe slippage between linguistic, ethnic, and geographic designations wh

On the Applicability of Mathematics to Nature: Roger Bacon and his Predecessors

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Applicability Of Mathematics ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Roger Bacon has often been victimized by his friends, who have exaggerated and distorted his place in the history of mathematics. He has too often been viewed as the first, or one of the first, to grasp the possibilities and promote the cause of modern mathematical physics. Even those who have noticed that Bacon was more given to the praise than to the practice of mathematics have seen in his programmatic statements an anticipation of seventeenth-century achievements. But if we judge Bacon by twentieth-century criteria and pronounce him an anticipator of modern science, we will fail totally to understand his true contributions; for Bacon was not looking to the future, but responding to the past; he was grappling with ancient traditions and attempting to apply the truth thus gained to the needs of thirteenth-century Christendom. If we wish to understand Bacon, therefore, we must take a backward, rather than a forward, look; we must view him in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors; we must consider not his influence, but his sources and the use to which he put them.

A Demon with Ruby Eyes

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-369
Author(s):  
Manan Ahmed Asif
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
The Past ◽  
Textual Production

This essay takes a longitudinal look at how different communities dealt with political and theological difference in the same space. It examines accounts of Uch Sharif, in contemporary Pakistan, from the thirteenth century to the present. It specifically traces a motif of ‘ruby eyes’ in Arabic and Persian historiography in an effort to delineate how difference was represented and assimilated. It argues that until the late colonial period, religious difference was mutually comprehensible, even if incommensurate. The rupture of meaning in recognising difference continued in different ways in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. The study provides a methodological argument for reshaping the ways in which we look at landscape, built environment and community, in contemporary South Asia. By situating the textual production of the past alongside the material remnants of the past, this essay reads simultaneously ethnographic and textual understandings of difference in Uch Sharif.

The thirteenth-century runic revival in Denmark and Iceland

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-129
Author(s):  
Tarrin Wills
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Revival Movement

While in the High Middle Ages runic literacy appears to have been very much alive in urban centres such as Bergen, interest in runes appears to have been of a different nature in learned circles and in other parts of the Scandinavian world which had adopted widespread textual production of the Latin alphabet. This paper examines a number of runic phenomenon from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Denmark and Iceland to argue that they belong to a cultural revival movement rather than forming part of a continuous runic tradition stretching back into the early Middle Ages. Some of these runic texts show some connection with the Danish royal court, and should rather be seen as forming part of the changes in literary culture emanating from continental Europe from the late twelfth century and onwards: they all show a combined interest in Latin learning and vernacular literary forms.

Commercial Linkages with Central Asia and Iran

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott C. Levi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Family Firms ◽  
Indian Region ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Commercial System ◽  
Northern India

While it may seem counterintuitive, the increase in Mughal India’s maritime trade contributed to a tightening of overland commercial connections with its Asian neighbors. The primary agents in this process were “Multanis,” members of any number of heavily capitalized, caste-based family firms centered in the northwest Indian region of Multan. The Multani firms had earlier developed an integrated commercial system that extended across the Punjab, Sind, and much of northern India. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Multanis first appear in historical sources as having established their own communities in Central Asia and Iran. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at any given point in time, a rotating population of some 35,000 Indian merchants orchestrated a network of communities that extended across dozens, if not hundreds, of cities and villages in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran, stretching up the Caucasus and into Russia.

Ela Longespee's Roll of Benefits: Piety and Reciprocity in the Thirteenth Century

Traditio ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 1-56
Author(s):  
Emilie Amt
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Reciprocal Relationships ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Archives

Ipsa autem, bonorum temporalium liberalissima ac spiritualium avida beneficiorum …— 1293 charter of Oxford University, describing Ela LongespeeIn 1293, the elderly and twice-widowed Ela Longespee, countess of Warwick, or someone acting on her behalf, gathered together eighteen charters that had been issued to her over the past dozen years and sent them to the bishop of Lincoln, to be confirmed and copied into a single roll. The original charters have long since vanished, but the enrolled copy survives in The National Archives at Kew. Its component documents, all of them detailed grants to Ela by religious institutions in the Oxford area, are highly unusual; even when compared to the few surviving parallels, they stand out for their specific content. The roll itself, comprising eighteen such documents in a private archive created for a thirteenth-century laywoman, is unique. And when it is examined along with other surviving evidence of Ela's religious activities, it provides us with an extraordinary perspective on the reciprocal nature of religious patronage at this time. What is especially unusual about Ela's case is that we know much more about what the religious promised to Ela than what she granted to them. Thus Ela Longespee's records tell us the side of the story that is seldom told when we look at records of religious patronage; they reveal the return that donors expected in the late thirteenth century, with increasing precision and urgency. Using a chronological framework, this essay will examine the surviving documents, tell the story of Ela's life, and explore the most interesting dimension of that story: her startlingly explicit reciprocal relationships with religious institutions.

scholarly journals The Jesuitesses in the Bookshop: Catholic Lay Sisters’ Participation in the Dutch Book Trade, 1650–1750

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 163-184
Author(s):  
Elise Watson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Dutch Book ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Institutional Critique ◽  
Public Criticism

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.

The Convent of Santa Clara, the Elite and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Querétaro

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

Materiality, Documentary Authority, and the Circulation of the Katherine Group

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Jenny C. Bledsoe
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Ancrene Wisse ◽  
Textual Community ◽  
West Midlands ◽  
Katherine Group

Written in the decades before Ancrene Wisse, the Early Middle English hagiographies of the Katherine Group depict three virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana. Using touch and eyewitness accounts as measures of proof, the legend equates St. Margaret’s body with the textual corpus inscribed on animal hide. The manuscript’s documentary authority is verified through proximity to the holy body of the saint, and, in a similarly body-centred (and precarious) authority, the anchoress functions as the centre of an ephemeral textual community in the early thirteenth century. The Katherine Group narratives and codicological evidence indicate an anchoritic-lay literary culture operating adjacent to clerical manuscript culture, consistent with Catherine Innes-Parker’s theory about co-existing informal and formal vernacular textual cultures in the West Midlands. This “informal,” or ephemeral, textual community shaped lay literacy and manuscript use, including perceptions about the documentary authority of vernacular textual artifacts.

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