scholarly journals Missionary Men in the Early Modern World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Strasser
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Global Missions ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
National Boundaries

How did gender shape the expanding Jesuit enterprise in the early modern world? What did it take to become a missionary man? And how did missionary masculinity align itself with the European colonial project? This book highlights the central importance of male affective ties and masculine mimesis in the formation of the Jesuit missions, as well as the significance of patriarchal dynamics. Focusing on previously neglected German actors, Strasser shows how stories of exemplary male behavior circulated across national boundaries, directing the hearts and feet of men throughout Europe toward Jesuit missions in faraway lands. The sixteenth-century Iberian exemplars of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, disseminated in print and visual media, inspired late-seventeenth-century Jesuits from German-speaking lands to bring Catholicism and European gender norms to the Spanish-controlled Pacific. The age of global missions hinged on the reproduction of missionary manhood in print and real life.

scholarly journals Money makes the world go round: Shakespeare, commerce and community

Sederi ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 7-29
Author(s):  
John Drakakis
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Financial Activity ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
Economic Practice

In early modern England money was of central importance to areas of social life that are in the modern world separate from the study of economics. The demand for liquid capital and the practical problems associated with the devising of a monetary system that was reliable exercised the minds of philosophers, social commentators, and dramatists. The template for discussion was laid down by Aristotle, who perceived financial activity as part of the larger community and its various modes of social interaction. Copernicus wrote a treatise on money, as had Nicholas of Oresme before him. But in the sixteenth century dramatists turned their attention to what we would call “economics” and its impact on social life. Writers such as Thomas Lupton, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare all dealt with related issues of material greed, usury, hospitality and friendship and the ways in which they transformed, and were transformed by particular kinds of social and economic practice. These concerns fed into the investigation of different kinds of society, particularly turning their attention to their strengths and weaknesses, and in the case of dramatists providing imaginative accounts of the kinds of life that these innovations produced.

Latin American Connections: Recent Work on German Interactions with Latin America

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Mining Operations ◽  
Almost Everywhere ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
German Speaking

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.

The Sixteenth-Century World War and the Roots of the Modern World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Northwest Africa ◽  
Military Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Military

This essay examines several world historical events from an unfamiliar perspective, that of sixteenth-century Morocco. It seeks to provide a new way of conceptualizing empires, one that builds upon recent work, while imagining them differently. As a key player in the struggle over the western Mediterranean, Morocco’s neglected history has much to tell us about both the power and the limits of the military revolution of early modern times. Moreover, Morocco’s success in withstanding Iberian efforts to extend the reconquista to Northwest Africa served to deflect the expansionary energies across the Atlantic and around Africa. More generally, Morocco provides a useful vantage point for thinking about the emergence of the international structures of power that define the early modern world.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
New Science ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
Medieval Islam

This chapter describes the fate of the Oneirocritica after antiquity, with a focus on its reception in Medieval Islam, Byzantium, and early modern Europe. The transmission of the text (in Greek and Arabic) is discussed, with particular attention to the enormous influence exercised on later Islamic dream-interpretation by the ninth-century Arabic translation of the Oneirocritica by Ḥunayn b. Isḥâq. An account of the rediscovery of the Oneirocritica in sixteenth-century Europe is followed by a short coda on the influence of Artemidorus in the modern world, with a discussion of the role played by the Oneirocritica in Freud’s ‘new science’ of dream-analysis.

John Calvin’s Vision of Reform, Historical Thinking, and the Modern World

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
Complex Relationships

Distinctly modern forms of historical consciousness emerged first after the Enlightenment but were anticipated by early modern developments in attitudes towards and strategies for recovering the past. Scholarship has only recently focused on how religious perspectives of the sixteenth century and the demand for alternative visions of religious history contributed to broader developments in early modern historiography. This chapter investigates the role of the past in Calvin’s vision of reform through the lens of his 1543 treatise, Supplex Exhortatio, to show how an early modern version of historical thinking is reflected in and shapes his reforming agenda. Though much of his programme is in continuity with Western reforming traditions, Calvin’s vision involves more conscious and critical engagement with and re-evaluation of the past. Attention to the contours of Calvin’s historical thinking illuminates the highly complex relationships among religious orientations, religious conflicts, and engagements with history in the sixteenth century.

scholarly journals Persons, the ‘Autobiographical Person’ and Cultural Concepts of the Person

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 346-377
Author(s):  
Gabriele Jancke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Cultural Concepts ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Other World ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Analytical Tools

Autobiographical texts have long been seen, from a micro-level perspective, as evidence of the ‘individuality’ of the writer, and, from a macro-level perspective, as evidence of the long-term historical development of European or Western individual-oriented society. However, recent research has undertaken to deconstruct this notion, suggesting that ‘Western’ texts are as deeply embedded in a social world and in social-oriented perspectives as those from other world regions. The individualised person is now recognised as just one among many concepts of the person. This article summarises the research that has been conducted during the past two decades on early modern autobiographical writings, primarily from German-speaking areas of the world. It closely examines the interplay between individual and society in one particular autobiography, that of the Zurich professor of Old Testament Studies Konrad Pellikan (1478–1556). Using the concept of the ‘autobiographical person’, it shows his work to be typical of the autobiographies written by one social group—early modern scholars. By comparing this Christian male scholar with his Jewish and Muslim colleagues, the article aims to attain a transcultural, gendered perspective on autobiography. In an attempt to reach some methodological and theoretical conclusions, a set of analytical tools is proposed to distinguish between the perspectives of authors and of later scholars, and also between (a) real persons and their personhood, (b) ‘autobiographical persons’ and (c) cultural concepts of ‘person’. In this way, the ‘person’ is taken into account by scholars as an analytical category, as well as being a set of real-life practices and conceptual notions used by actors in various social, cultural and historical settings.

scholarly journals Between Nature and Culture : The Integrated Ecology of Renaissance Climate Theories

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Miglietti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Relationship

‘Climate theories’ are often explained away in scholarship as pseudosciences irrelevant to the modern world, or as morally problematic forms of geographic determinism. This chapter instead argues that such theories still offer a valuable lens not only for understanding how early modern people conceptualized the relationship between human culture and nonhuman nature, but also for resituating ourselves with respect to this very same issue. Are we humans above and outside nature, or are we an integral part of it, caught in its dynamics and affected by its internal changes—including those resulting from our own agency? Three sixteenth-century authors (Le Roy, Bodin, La Framboisière) are here brought into dialogue with contemporary thinkers (Descola, Latour) to reappraise the ‘integrated ecology’ of nature and culture proposed by early modern climate theorists.

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