“Sinarum gentes … omnium sollertissimae”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thijs Weststeijn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
The World ◽  
Intermediary Role ◽  
Collaborative Efforts

This chapter presents a penetrating survey of the multilayered cultural exchanges between China and the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It highlights the intermediary role of the Low Countries in transacting cultural products between two ends of the world. The author pays particular attention to a group of leading Dutch Jesuits who travelled to China, then called the Middle Kingdom, and transferred the newly acquired knowledge of Chinese language, philosophy, arts, and history to the Dutch Republic. Their collaborative efforts in translating Confucian classics disclosed a carefully reinterpreted version of Confucianism, filtered through the Christian truth, which in turn aroused a number of later translations and commentaries bouncing between ancient Chinese wisdom and post-Renaissance humanism.

scholarly journals Violence in post-apartheid South Africa and the role of church and theology

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
C.F.C. Coetzee
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Church

South Africa is known as one of the most violent countries in the world. Since the seventeenth century, violence has been part of our history. Violence also played a significant role during the years of apartheid and the revolutionary struggle against apartheid. It was widely expected that violence would decrease in a post-apartheid democratic South Africa, but on the contrary, violence has increased in most cases. Even the TRC did not succeed in its goal to achieve reconciliation. In this paper it is argued that theology and the church have a great and significant role to play. Churches and church leaders who supported revolutionary violence against the apartheid system on Biblical “grounds”, should confess their unbiblical hermeneutical approach and reject the option of violence. The church also has a calling in the education of young people, the pastoral care of criminals and victims, in proclaiming the true Gospel to the government and in creating an ethos of human rights.

“A Few More or Less Make No Difference”

2018 ◽  
pp. 193-241
Author(s):  
Molly A. Warsh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
The World ◽  
Pearl Fishing ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
The City

This chapter considers how pearls’ subjective beauty, their complex and mysterious origins, and their powerful association with mastery of the seas allowed them to remain a powerful heuristic device for the expression of ideas about mutability, worth, and the nature of different places and peoples around the world. As empires moved to objectify profit and regulate the role of subjects in new ways, pearls continued to serve as a useful index (elenco in Spanish, a word Pliny the Elder employed to denote an elongated pearl but that, by the early seventeenth century, had come to stand for the very impulse to order and compartmentalize that the jewel provoked) of peoples’ highly independent and contingent calculations of worth. Through a consideration of crown-sponsored pearl-fishing interventions in the Scottish Highlands and along Swedish rivers close to the city of Gothenburg, this chapter traces how pearls continued to facilitate the expression of distinct approaches to resource husbandry at scales personal and imperial. The chapter further explores the late-seventeenth-century market for pearls in London and the jewel’s unstable political and economic value as expressed in private correspondence as well as in portraits of women and enslaved bodies whose value was considered impermanent and for purchase..

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Nicolas Malebranche ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Universe

Nicolas Malebranche, a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe.

PHARMACY FOR THE BODY AND SOUL: DUTCH SONGBOOKS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

2008 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 217-286
Author(s):  
Natascha Veldhorst
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Josquin Des Prez ◽  
Adrian Willaert ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Body And Soul

Mention sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch vocal music and the knowledgeable music lover usually thinks immediately of the brilliant polyphonic creations of famous Flemish masters like Josquin des Prez, Adrian Willaert and Orlande de Lassus. And they did indeed write compositions that still appeal to the imagination. Take Josquin’s polyphonic, chirping El Grillo, a relatively simple but effective piece that can entice even the most a-musical twenty-first-century student into the world of the Renaissance. Those familiar with the Baroque will recall Jan Pietersz Sweelinck, the organist of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam and a composer of bewitching instrumental and vocal music, including his four books of polyphonic Pseaumes de David (1604–21) to the texts of Clément Marot and Theodore Bèze, which are still being performed regularly. Perhaps, too, the French, Latin and Italian arias by Constantijn Huygens from his Pathodia sacra et profana (1647). But it is then that the singing seems to stop in the Low Countries. The names of the composers, at least, are barely known beyond our borders.

scholarly journals Mellem Klosteret og Verden

2020 ◽  
Vol 82 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Mette Birkedal Bruun
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Notion ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The University

The article presents Armand-Jean de Rancé’s reform of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe. It positions Rancé’s ascetic programme within the wider devotional culture of seventeenth-century France, and explores in three registers the inherent dynamic between withdrawal from the world and engagement with the world. The first register concerns the abbot’s biography, the argument being that the familial, societal and ecclesiastical ircles inhabited by Rancé before and after his conversion are more closely connected than has been traditionally seen. The second is dedicated to the position of La Trappe in contemporary society and a discussion of the continuous traffic across the monastic wall of texts, guests, rumours and myths. The third involves an examination of the role of withdrawal and engagement in Rancé’s reform and its ascetic programme, showing how the abbot expounds the central notion of solitude as a place, a condition and a strategy. The article presents key insights from the author’s doctoral thesis, which was defended at the University of Copenhagen in June 2017.

Finally Learning to Live

2021 ◽  
pp. 227-240
Author(s):  
Fabian Andrés Llano
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Tourism ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Identity Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Reflection ◽  
Ways Of Life

The role of the social sciences in the post-pandemic period will be to promote new ways of life. Given the threat posed to the human species, it is necessary to promote cultural exchanges that allow us to learn to live from inclusion. The new sociabilities and solidarities can converge in possibilities of recognizing different identities and symbolic repertoires that are generally excluded and marginalized. One way of reactivating these discussions and recognising these heritages and marginalities can be proposed through cultural tourism to reaffirm life. It is not a question of mass tourism that puts humanity at risk, but rather the promotion of literature, art, and religion, which can show the world forms of resistance, solidarity, and humanity in times of crisis. This cultural tourism requires the involvement of the intercultural and the heritage as the axis of articulation of historical reflection, with the aim of reactivating symbolic reparations under a cultural recognition of construction of identity processes.

‘THE CRUELL PRESSURE OF AN ENRAGED, BARBAROUS PEOPLE’: IRISH AND ENGLISH IDENTITY IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POLICY AND PROPAGANDA

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHLEEN M. NOONAN
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
English Culture

Seventeenth-century English men and women, caught in the upheaval of the Civil War, sought to understand what it was to be English and sought to grasp England's proper role in the world. One of the ways in which they did this was through their encounters with other people. The Irish had a long history of interaction with the English, but in the middle of the seventeenth century their role in defining Englishness became acute. Late Tudor and early Jacobean commentaries on Ireland had stressed the superiority of English culture while acknowledging some virtues of Ireland and its people that would make it amenable to beneficial transformation by the English. In the middle of the century, occasioned by the events of the 1641 uprising, this ameliorative view of the Irish gave way to the view that English and Irish were incompatible. Earlier studies have emphasized the role of religion in the discordant relationship between the two peoples in the seventeenth century. This essay maintains that the shift in attitude had as much to do with ethnicity as it did with religion and considers the central role of John Temple and his treatise The Irish rebellion in changing English attitudes on both a national and local level. The study suggests that Temple's view became the dominant one for more than 200 years because of the demographic changes within the Irish community in London and puritan concerns about a godly community that occurred at the time Temple set forth his ideas.

‘Defying the Powers and Tempering the Spirit.’ A Review of Quaker Control over their Publications 1672–1689

1982 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
The Press ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The role of the press in the history of post-Restoration nonconformity has gone largely unexplored. Indeed, the study of the press in the late seventeenth century has suffered from a lack of serious attention by historians and from a certain narrowness of vision in the otherwise excellent bibliographical work on the period. Bibliographers have tended to study books and printers in isolation from the world that the objects of their study inhabited. Historians have a tendency to see the press as mirroring the struggle for the growth of representative democracy and as playing an important part in national political and religious history only at times of maximum crisis, such as 1659–60 or 1679–81. Historians of Quakerism, although aware that the early Quakers made extensive use of printing, have neither detailed the extent of that involvement nor assessed its implications on a wider level. This article is written in an attempt to remedy, to some extent, these deficiencies.

scholarly journals Trading States, Trading Places: The Role of Patrimonialism in Early Modern Dutch Development

1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Adams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Small Population ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The World ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Waves

The decline of Iberia in the sixteenth century shook the foundations of world trade and politics, undermining Spain's Asian and American trade monopolies and creating the international opening that spurred other European states and merchants in the contest for overseas markets. After the waves had subsided in the seventeenth century, the world system had been reconfigured. The United Provinces of the Netherlands had become the first truly global commercial power—the first hegemon. The rise of the Netherlands to the position of world hegemony is at first glance startling. The seven provinces had a relatively small population (some 1.5 million inhabitants in 1600, compared to 10 million in Spain and Portugal, and 16 to 20 million in neighboring France), and had formed part of the Low Countries, an uneasily aggregated group of seigneuries, cities, and provinces under Spanish rule until the 1570s.

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