Toleration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Horton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
Important Idea ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Degree Of Restraint

Toleration emerged as an important idea in the seventeenth century, receiving its fullest defence in John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Initially developed in the context of attempts to restore peace in a Europe convulsed by religious conflicts, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it came to be extended to the accommodation of disputes about racial, sexual and social differences. Toleration is widely thought to be an essential element of a free society, especially one marked by moral and cultural pluralism, and it figures particularly prominently in the political theory of liberalism. The paradigm example of toleration is the deliberate decision to refrain from prohibiting, hindering or otherwise coercively interfering with conduct of which one disapproves, although one has the power to do so. The principal components of the concept of toleration are: a tolerating subject and a tolerated subject (either may be an individual, group, organization or institution); an action, belief or practice which is the object of toleration; a negative attitude (dislike or moral disapproval) on the part of tolerator toward the object of toleration; and a significant degree of restraint in acting against it. Philosophical arguments have mostly concerned: the range of toleration (what things should or should not be tolerated?); the degree of restraint required by toleration (what forms of opposition are consistent with toleration?); and, most importantly, the justification of toleration (why should some things be tolerated?).

Crypto-Christianity and Religious Amphibianism in the Ottoman Balkans

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-67
Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Economic Incentive ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Ottoman Balkans ◽  
Tax Payers ◽  
The Church

Christianity—secret adherence to Christian religious practices by people who outwardly professed Islam—is known to have occurred in several parts of the Ottoman Empire; this essay concerns the crypto-Christians of Kosovo, who were very unusual in adhering to Roman Catholicism. Distinctions are made here between crypto-Christianity and a range of other practices or circumstances that have been partly confused with it in previous accounts: the fact of close social coexistence between Muslims and Christians; the existence of religious syncretism, which allowed the borrowing and sharing of some ritual practices; and the principle of ‘theological equivalentism’ (the claim, made by some Muslims, that each person could be saved in his or her own faith). These things were not the same as crypto-Christianity, but they involved different kinds of religious ‘amphibianism’, creating conditions in which crypto-Christianity could survive more easily. The story of Catholic crypto-Christianity in Kosovo and northern Albania begins with reports from Catholic priests in the seventeenth century. Contributory factors seem to have been the economic incentive for men to convert to Islam to escape the taxes on Christians, and the fact that women (who were not tax-payers) could remain Christian, as Christian wives were permitted under Islamic law. This essay then traces the history of the crypto-Catholics of Kosovo, who survived, despite the strong official disapproval of the Church, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Russian aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Terras
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Architecture And Music

Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, or in the sense of an explicitly stated theory of art, appeared in Russia no earlier than the seventeenth century, under the direct influence of Western thought. It developed in connection with the adoption of European art forms. Russian contributions in terms of original styles in all forms of art, as well as of certain aesthetic notions which may be credited to Russia, came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and must be understood in context with European art and aesthetic thought. Russian art, music and literature, as well as the aesthetic notions guiding them, get their Russianness from the political and social background, a major factor in literature, and from a carrying over of traits found in Russian folk art, folk music and folklore, as well as in religious texts, iconography, architecture and music, whose Orthodox version is sharply distinct from their equivalents in the Roman Catholic West.

Wang Fuzhi (1619–92)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison H. Black
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Wang Fuzhi

A seventeenth-century neo-Confucian and Ming loyalist, Wang Fuzhi is best known for his nationalism and his theories of historical and metaphysical change. His classical commentaries and other writings, not published until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, present an exceptionally comprehensive and vigorously argued synthesis and critique of China’s intellectual tradition. His ideas on topics such as politics, cosmology and knowledge have fascinated readers of widely differing philosophic persuasions.

Renaissances and Reformations

Why History? ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 105-153
Author(s):  
Donald Bloxham
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
General Nature ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Renaissance Italy

The chapter begins with History’s place in Renaissance Italy. Then it shows how the historiographies of various states were influenced by tendencies in Italian humanism, as well as by the Reformation. France is accorded special attention, then more briefly England and parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Then the chapter addresses the historiographical battles that corresponded to the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were battles of ecclesiastical History, centring on ancient sources. The polemical nature of some of the disagreements reinforced existing scepticism about the reliability of historical knowledge. Yet an increasingly bipartisan critical methodology developed, based on a combination of humanist philology and new palaeographical techniques, with established religious hermeneutics playing their part. Here the dictates of self-serving confessional History as Identity sometimes stood in tension with the demands of a proceduralist History as Methodology even as all sides agreed on the importance of History as Communion. The chapter concludes by addressing a ‘scientific’ seventeenth century for whose dominant intellectual figures historical enquiry supposedly had little use. Like previous chapters, this one addresses conceptual concerns of a general nature as they arise. Different sorts of contextualization are addressed, along with their implications for thinking about the past. Particular consideration is given to how a heightened attention to historical contextualization could be reconciled with ongoing demands for the relevance of History as Lesson for the present. Topical reading was one established solution, but another was resurrected with the ancient doctrine of similitudo temporum.

The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 603-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark C. Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This essay examines the transformation from undifferentiated frontier to geographic region of that part of northeast Asia controversially referred to as Manchuria. This transition—from space to place, as it were—long has tended to be seen primarily in terms of the extension of colonial interests into China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, as I shall argue, the invention of this place began much earlier, in the seventeenth century, and owed substantially to the efforts of China's Manchu rulers, who claimed it as their homeland, the terre natale of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Even as the area was joined to the larger empire, Qing emperors took care to invest what I define as “Greater Mukden” with a unique identity.

“Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Noonan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
English Culture ◽  
Considerable Discussion ◽  
Over Time

In the violence over Protestant marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s much of the debate centered on two towns, Portadown and Drumcree. Students of seventeenth-century Irish history will note that those towns were sites of some of the most infamous stories of rebel atrocities in the 1641 uprising. The continuity of such images reinforces the notion that ethnic and religious conflicts are immutable and perhaps inevitable. A certain fatalism surrounds the acrimony of Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, English and Irish arising from the conviction that such conflicts have raged, as if unchanging, over centuries. However, when viewed over time, the struggles between such groups are dynamic rather than static and have helped construct how each group sees the other and how it identifies itself. In the dynamism surrounding Anglo-Irish relations a number of important turning points can be identified. One of the most important is of course the seventeenth century, particularly the 1641 uprising. More than thirty years ago W. D. Love noted how for three centuries Irish historiography and Anglo-Irish intercourse had been molded by the events of the mid-seventeenth century and had compelled historians to support or deny the charges made by each side about the events of the 1640s. In trying to understand the searing nature of those events, and how they came to frame political as well as historical debates from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a number of historians have noted the importance of Sir John Temple and his propagan distic piece, The Irish Rebellion. Temple's work offered not just an interpretation of the 1641 uprising but a portrait of the two peoples, English and Irish, as basically and permanently incompatible—a thesis that has had remarkable staying power. Published in 1646, Temple's work was a departure from the Tudor and early Stuart canon on Ireland. While Temple borrowed much from earlier commentators such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, his analysis differed from them and set out in a new direction by defining the Irish as ethnically distinct. Spenser and Davies suggested that the problem of Ireland arose not from the land, or even its people (although Spenser devoted considerable discussion to the ways Irish customs undermined English success), but from foolhardy or poorly executed English policy. Even though the late Tudor and early Stuart commentators saw the Irish as barbaric, the Irish were thought to be amenable to the benefits of English culture and rule, although their reformation might require draconian measures. Even the divisive issue of religion was not thought insurmountable. Davies and Spenser argued that a religious reformation begun after peace and stability had been secured in Ireland would succeed. In contrast, Temple viewed the 1641 revolt as conclusive evidence that the Irish were irredeemable and posed a deadly threat to England and its people.

scholarly journals Iudei et ceteri …

Aschkenas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-244
Author(s):  
Markus J. Wenninger
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Social Differences

AbstractThis study analyzes the formulation »Jews and (other) merchants« as it appears in sources from the 9th to the early 11th centuries. It addresses Michael Toch’s thesis with an aim to clarify the historical meaning of such formulations. By doing so, this study sheds light on how specific social differences between Jewish and non-Jewish merchants arose, while economic activities among both groups remained the same. Both Jews and non-Jews traded in the whole Frankish Empire and beyond. Both groups, therefore, took part in the lucrative as well as extensive slave trade, which was an essential element of the long-distance trading of the early Middle Ages.

Loon, lust, liefdadigheid : Verdienen aan het schrijven van toneelteksten door de eeuwen heen1

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-97
Author(s):  
Nina Geerdink ◽  
Jeroen Salman ◽  
Remco Sleiderink ◽  
Rob van der Zalm
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The One

Abstract Throughout the centuries, many literary authors were engaged in writing theatre plays. Although there are many studies about the theatre business in general from Medieval Times to the present, the perspective of the playwright’s profits is seldom taken into consideration. This article presents both a survey of author’s options to gain an income in the world of theatre and an analysis of the discourse about this advancement. More specifically, on the basis of a comparison of cases from the seventeenth century on the one hand and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the other, this article argues that, despite the fact that for playwrights, as much as for other literary authors, it was a taboo to be open about economic profits, developments in the organization of institutional theatre created temporary openings for (public debate about) financial rewards.

Writing the History of Merovingian Gaul

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-76
Author(s):  
Agnès Graceffa
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Political Realities

The Merovingian period has long been contested ground on which a variety of ideologies and approaches have been marshaled to debate the significance of the “end” of antiquity and the start of the Middle Ages. Particularly important to these discussions has been the role of this period in shaping national identity across western Europe; interpretations of the Merovingians have varied as political realities have changed in Europe, going back, in some cases, as far as the late medieval period. This chapter focuses mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but offers examples as early as the seventeenth century as to how the Merovingian period has been harnessed for a large number of purposes and how these sometimes polemical interpretations have encouraged or stymied our understanding of this period.

‘I think myself honestly decked’: Attitudes to the Clothing of the Rural Poor in Seventeenth-Century England

Rural History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANAE TANKARD
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
The Self ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
John Evelyn ◽  
The Way

Abstract:This article explores attitudes to the clothing of the rural poor in seventeenth-century England. It begins with an analysis of the representation of rural clothing in country themed ballads, showing how ‘homely’ country clothing was used to construct an image of a contented and industrious rural population. It then considers how such popular literary representations influenced the way that diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn recorded their encounters with the rural poor. The final part of the article looks at attitudes of the rural poor to their own clothing, drawing on evidence from a range of documentary sources as well as the autobiographical writings of Edward Barlow. In contrast to the stereotypical depiction of the rural poor recorded by ballad writers and elite observers, the article will show that for the actual poor clothing could serve both as an expression of the ‘self’ and as a potent marker of social differences and moral and material inferiority.

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