scholarly journals Comparing Comparisons in Muslim Polemical Writings from Christian Iberia and Exile: Muḥammad al-Qaysī’s Kitāb Miftāḥ al-Dīn and the Anonymous Tratado de los dos caminos

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mònica Colominas Aparicio
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Arabic Characters ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Historical Practice

Comparison figures prominently in the polemics of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula in premodern and early modern times. Its pervasiveness as a figure of thought in their sources raises the question of variety in regard to comparison—that is, the multiple expressions of comparison as well as its numerous uses—particularly in the field of polemics. This paper discusses the functions of comparison in polemics as a necessary first step to advance current knowledge of comparison as a historical practice in the making of one’s identity and the definition of groups and individuals. The discussion will focus on writings by Muslims who lived in Christian Iberia. It will focus particularly on two anti-Christian polemics: that by the Tunisian author Muḥammad al-Qaysī in an as-yet unstudied Aljamiado copy (Spanish in Arabic characters); and the Tratado de los dos caminos (Treatise of the Two Roads), an early-seventeenth-century work of Islamic doctrine by the so-called “Refugee in Tunisia”. The analysis of these two works will address the most important common points and differences between their respective polemical comparisons.

Protestant Rivalry — Metaphysics and Rhetoric in Germany c. 1590–1620

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Middle Ages

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I. The matter of Bitu

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Late Fifteenth

In late medieval and early modern times West Africa was one of the principal suppliers of gold to the world bullion market. In this context the Matter of Bitu is one of much importance. Bitu lay on the frontiers of the Malian world and was one of its most flourishing gold marts. So much is clear from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings, both African and European. A review of this body of evidence indicates that the gold trade at Bitu was controlled by the Wangara, who played a central role in organizing trade between the Akan goldfields and the towns of the Western Sudan. It is shown that Bitu cannot be other than Bighu (Begho, Bew, etc.), the abandoned Wangara town lying on the northwestern fringes of the Akan forest country, which is known (from excavation) to have flourished in the relevant period. In the late fifteenth century the Portuguese established posts on the southern shores of the Akan country, so challenging the monopolistic position which the Wangara had hitherto enjoyed in the gold trade. The Portuguese sent envoys to Mali, presumably to negotiate trade agreements. The bid was apparently unsuccessful. The struggle for the Akan trade in the sixteenth century between Portuguese and Malian interests will be treated in the second part of this paper.

Buddhism in the re-ordering of an early modern world: Chinese missions to Cochinchina in the seventeenth century

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Monastic Communities ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Chinese Seafarers ◽  
The Silk Road

AbstractIn the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation in early modern maritime Asia may compare to religions like Islam and Christianity, and deserves further study.

The Later Habsburg Concept of Statecraft

1966 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 92-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Jenks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
William Iii ◽  
The Masses

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.

La otredad: ¿real o inventada? El caso de las brujas

1999 ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Elia Nathan Bravo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Empirical Content ◽  
Extreme Situation ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The One ◽  
In Virtue Of

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. On the one hand, it offers a general analysis of stigmas (a person has one when, in virtue of its belonging to a certain group, such as that of women, homosexuals, etc., he or she is subjugated or persecuted). On the other hand, I argue that stigmas are “invented”. More precisely, I claim that they are not descriptive of real inequalities. Rather, they are socially created, or invented in a lax sense, in so far as the real differences to which they refer are socially valued or construed as negative, and used to justify social inequalities (that is, the placing of a person in the lower positions within an economic, cultural, etc., hierarchy), or persecutions. Finally, I argue that in some cases, such as that of the witch persecution of the early modern times, we find the extreme situation in which a stigma was invented in the strict sense of the word, that is, it does not have any empirical content.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-196
Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Somatic Psychology ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.

The Role of War in Modern Inflation

1977 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl J. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World War ◽  
Price Inflation ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Paper Currency ◽  
Deficit Financing ◽  
Early Modern Times

Wars in early modern times, although frequent, generated little price inflation because of their limited demands on real resources. The invention of paper currency and the resort to deficit financing to pay for wars changed that situation. In recent centuries wars have been the principal causes of inflation, although since World War II programs of social welfare unmatched by offsetting taxation have also fueled inflationary flames.

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