‘Self‐confidence and Self‐Conceit Render Men Fools’: Seventeenth‐Century ‘Self‐’ Compounds, Puritan Discourse and Early Modern Subjectivity☆

Previous articleNext article FreeIn an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800Nir ShafirNir ShafirUniversity of California, San Diego Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is the story of a holy land in the Middle East—but not the one you might expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Damascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj—that is, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina—has been a well-established part of Muslim religiosity for centuries.1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the hajj's importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally undertook the journey.2 Yet the hajj's aura of timeless sanctity also hinders scholars from understanding its historicity. How did the hajj complement and compete with other forms of Muslim religiosity, such as saint worship/Sufism? Can we speak of an "Ottoman" hajj, and what significance did this pilgrimage carry for the many non-Muslim subjects of the empire? Approaching the hajj from the shrines of Damascus, no longer so holy today, rather than Mecca and Jerusalem's hallowed sites, allows us to scratch away a bit of the gilding of enduring holiness and find a history of choices and contingencies, controversies and contestations.3I argue in this article that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries an Ottoman holy land emerged that comprised the traditional sanctuaries of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, as well as the lands of greater Syria. Following the conquest of the Arab lands in the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty turned Damascus into both the center of an Ottoman imperial cult around the grave of the medieval theosophist Ibn ʿArabī and the empire's primary logistical hub for the hajj in response to the challenges of its religious and political competitors. As tens of thousands of Rūmī—that is, Turkish-speaking—pilgrims used the new infrastructure to stream into and through Damascus, the hajj also became an extended pilgrimage to visit the numerous tombs of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Non-Muslims too began to use the same infrastructure to partake in their own pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its environs, which they also referred to as the hajj. These overlapping claims to the hajj brought Rūmīs, Arabs, Christians, and others into competition and collaboration over the significance of the Ottoman holy land.As the logistical hub for the hajj, Damascus offers a view onto how religion was shaped by the forms of mobility available at the time, especially due to the development of material infrastructure. I take inspiration from recent scholarship, specifically that on the hajj, that has emphasized how new technologies of travel, such as steam and jet power, transformed Muslim religiosity by expanding its geographical horizons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 These works, with their focus on modern technologies, refrain from commenting on the premodern period, yet their insights can be applied to early modern forms of mobility. An unexpected complement to these studies is the recent book by James Grehan on everyday religion in greater Syria during the early modern period. He argues that an "agrarian religion" centered on saint worship flourished in rural parts of the Middle East among both Muslim and Christian communities. Although not explicitly framed as such, Grehan's argument is about mobility and materiality. According to Grehan, a shared religious practice of saint worship emerged from the timeless patterns of rural life and the inability of the "high" Islam of scholars and jurists to move into the countryside. Only the technological and infrastructural transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered the shocks needed to dismantle the material conditions underpinning saint worship, bring the high tradition of legalistic Islam to all areas, and make Muslim and Christian peasants realize that they belonged to distinct religious traditions.5 Grehan deserves credit for pushing scholars to pay attention to the difference between urban and rural religious life in the early modern Middle East. However, we should not assume, as Grehan does, that increased circulation inevitably homogenizes devotional practice and obliterates saint worship.6 As Nile Green has demonstrated, modern technologies like steamships and steam-powered printing presses actually fed a florescence of religious practices centered on saintly miracles.7 Moreover, I disagree with Grehan's presumption that premodern Ottoman society, even in rural areas, was static and immobile. People (and objects) traveled on camels, horses, and on foot rather than on steamships and trains, but the empire was always on the move, and these movements redefined its religious landscape. While the mode in which people traveled remained largely the same, there were particular circuits and forms of mobility unique to the Ottoman Empire; the road from Damascus was one of these.The second part of this article's argument is that the regime of circulation built on the road from Damascus gave rise to a specifically "Ottoman" lived religion in general and a shared culture of pilgrimage in particular. The hajj became a central component of the lived religion of many of the Ottoman Empire's inhabitants, Muslim and non-Muslim. Christian subjects of the empire, for example, came to refer to their pilgrimage to Jerusalem as the hajj, even integrating the honorific hajji—that is, someone who completed the hajj—into their names and titles. Asking how the hajj became "Ottoman," in turn, opens a number of related questions for the study of religion. How did the Ottoman hajj differ from earlier iterations, given that the ritual itself did not change? What is the role of the state in the creation of common religious practices? And how does the religious practice of one community—in this case, the Muslim practice of pilgrimage—come to be a shared aspect of the lived religion of a diverse and multiconfessional early modern empire?To speak of an "Ottoman" hajj also requires probing the analytical valence of the word "Ottoman." In its most restricted sense, the word applies only to the actions of the ruling dynasty, the eponymous house of Osman. In the early modern period, the word was used largely in this limited sense, both by the dynasty itself and its observers. Modern historians, however, employ a more expansive definition of "Ottoman," in which the word is a blanket term that applies to anything and everything that occurred within the empire's boundaries. Moreover, many implicitly extend this idea conceptually and assume that every subject within the empire's boundaries also possessed a shared "Ottoman" mentality or culture, which in turn drove their political and intellectual choices.8 The mechanisms for the dissemination of a common Ottoman culture or mentality are rarely articulated, however. Most often, historians point to the actions of the state as creating an Ottoman culture. For example, the sociologist Karen Barkey argues that the Ottoman state intentionally promoted a policy of religious tolerance, one that broke from earlier and supposedly narrower iterations of Islam.9 Even if we accept Barkey's assertions of a state policy of ecumenicalism, they do not necessarily help explain how cultural practices like the hajj came to be shared by all the empire's subjects at the community or individual level. Like many premodern empires, the Ottoman government did not attempt to homogenize its diverse population under a single imagined culture. While the state actively intervened in the daily religious practices of Muslims and the institutional structure of Islamic law, it never contemplated the creation of shared "Ottoman" religious practices among its subjects.10 How then did the hajj become "Ottoman"?To understand how the hajj became a practice that left its mark on nearly all Ottoman subjects, we have to rethink our understandings of empire. Historians today, especially those focusing on the Ottomans, have often understood empire to be a set of institutions that govern by replicating or projecting the rules and culture of the imperial center onto its provinces.11 In other words, empire is regarded as a synonym for the state. Other scholars highlight the inherent social diversity of empires, using empire largely as a foil to the linguistic, ethnic, or religious homogeneity of the nation-state.12 I treat empire differently in this article. I see empire as a specific assemblage or network of heterogenous human and nonhuman actors connected in myriad relationships.13 The specific elements of the network, and their arrangement, varied in time and place. Thus, the "Ottoman" hajj was different from the "Mamluk" hajj, for example, not because the ritual radically differed but because it brought together an alternate set of material and social elements: the movement of Rūmī Muslims to the Arab provinces, the kilns of Iznik and Kütahya that produced the empire's ceramics, and especially the lines of pilgrim infrastructure centered in Damascus, among others. The shared "Ottoman" culture of the hajj was not the intentional construction by the state but an unintentional by-product of the interaction of these elements, a network that could only have existed with the empire's expansion and sustained presence.14This article traces the network that brought about the creation of an Ottoman hajj and holy land. Damascus functions not as the site of a fine-grained local study but as a gateway that illuminates the various connections streaming through it. My argument brings together a constellation of actors, both human and nonhuman, that connect to form a larger picture. Moreover, since I focus on the transformation of what Nancy Ammerman has termed "lived religion," I draw the reader's attention to the creation of an Ottoman pilgrimage culture from everyday practices rather than in theological works.15 The article jumps from Egypt to Hungary and the many places in-between, but it begins with the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Damascus in 1516, which first provided the Ottoman dynasty the possibility of administering the hajj. The centrality of the hajj in Ottoman religious life was far from assured, however, in these initial years. I situate the dynasty's first operations in Damascus in a wide array of other forms of state-sponsored Muslim religiosity available to the dynasty, such as the creation of a set of imperially sponsored saintly tombs. I then turn to the Ottoman state's eventual commitment to the hajj and its massive investment in the physical and textual infrastructure of pilgrimage. The hajj became progressively important in the daily lives of Rūmī Muslims from the empire's heartland, and it even expanded to incorporate visitation to tombs and shrines. Christians too used the same infrastructure to turn their pilgrimage to Jerusalem into what they themselves referred to as the hajj. The last section examines how this network led to a shared Ottoman culture of the hajj and also to competing claims by Arabs, Rūmīs, and Christians as to who could define the Ottoman holy land.Holy Lands, Old and NewUpon his return to Damascus, fresh from the victories against the Mamluks in 1517, Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) set out immediately to thank a saint.16 The sultan seems to have attributed his victory to the omens and intercession of Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240)—an Andalusia-born Sufi theorist whom the Ottomans believed had prophesized the rise of the dynasty in a pseudepigraphic work, Al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya—and thus decided to build an imperial tomb at the site. Sultan Selim ordered that the residences, bathhouses, and an already standing mosque in the Ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood be bought from their owners and quickly demolished. Within three months, a congregational mosque had been erected around the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī.Even today, Ibn ʿArabī is a notorious figure. Thanks to his pantheistic theories of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd), he is regarded as either the greatest Sufi master or the master of the infidels.17 The residents of Damascus, however, knew little of Ibn ʿArabī before the Ottomans' entry. Despite the fact that it had been well known that he had died in the city, travelers who sought out his grave state that it was being used as a rubbish dump in the fourteenth century. In 1499, one apparently had to scale the wall of a bathhouse in order to access the neglected graveyard housing Ibn ʿArabī's unvisited tomb.18 Other observers, such as Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546), the future imam of the mosque built at Ibn ʿArabī's tomb, tell us that the site was already the tomb of a certain Ibn al-Zakī.19While they knew little of Ibn ʿArabī, the residents were at the center of their own holy land, populated by the graves of local saints and holy men, many of them being ṣaḥāba, the companions of the Prophet. This Syrian holy land had been built up over centuries; the oldest surviving collection of the faḍā'il (virtues) of the area comes from the mid-eleventh century and reflects the traditions and stories that had been collected up to that moment about Syria's sacrality.20 The arrival of the Crusaders—who built at least four hundred chapels and churches in the Levant over the course of their two-hundred-year presence—prompted the resacralization of greater Syria.21 As the Ayyubids (under Salāh al-Dīn, r. 1174–93) and the Mamluks (under Baybars, r. 1260–77) reclaimed this land, they quickly began a campaign of creating a new Muslim holy land in southern Syria. Rulers, military men, and common townsfolk took part in rediscovering, often in an inspired dream, the locations of the tombs of early Islamic figures and heroes from the wars against the Crusaders and then contributing to their construction and upkeep. Older, smaller pilgrimage sites, such as the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, were greatly expanded, and non-Muslims were banned from entering them. Churches and monasteries were converted into Sufi lodges; revenues from villages that previously supported monasteries and churches were seized and reendowed to support the new shrines.22 Whereas earlier holy sites had predominantly stressed biblical events and urban locales, this new wave of shrine building saw the establishment of the graves of a wide variety of early Islamic figures, learned scholars, and military heroes throughout both the urban and rural landscape. Geographies and pilgrimage guides (pilgrimage to shrines, that is) of the period, like those of al-Idrīsī (d. 1165) and al-Harawī (d. 1215), included these shrines and sites. While the Crusader incursion might have spurred the renewed sacralization of the lands of Syria, the spread and establishment of shrines by themselves was part of the growing shift in the middle to late medieval period toward an Islam centered on saints and holy men—that is, Sufism.23The Ottoman government's warmhearted embrace of Ibn ʿArabī and its intervention in the sacred landscape of Damascus were not acts intended for the locals but rather for its competitors in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Iran. In the post-Mongol Turco-Iranian world, especially on the frontiers of Anatolia and the Balkans, there was a constant potential for holy men and saints' descendants to raise the flag of rebellion in their fortress-like lodges and become contenders for political power.24 Only a few years before his conquest of the Mamluk lands, Sultan Selim had quelled a serious rebellion in central and eastern Anatolia by the Kızılbaş followers of the Safavid Shah Ismail, a man who had used his holy ancestry to found a state in the late fifteenth century. Even cities like Cairo were not exempt from this particularly Turco-Iranian idiom of political sainthood. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ottoman conquest, a new holy man from Anatolia, Ibrāhīm al-Gulshanī (d. 1534), started gathering a following and consolidating power in Cairo.25 In these uncertain times, the Ottoman government took a distrustful stance against many Sufi orders and instead decided to turn Ibn ʿArabī into a "nondenominational grand master of spirituality from whose esoterism all Sufi orders could get inspired, and ideologized, in defense of the Sunni faith and its political patrons."26This type of experimentation was found in other early modern Islamicate empires throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) developed a sort of Sufi order in which he was the holy shaykh and his courtiers and subjects were disciples.27 Later, when the Mughals conquered the Deccan, they the shrines of the Muslim The built massive tomb in around their in creating a cult of the around the other Sufi The Ottomans too with this throughout the sixteenth century, for example, a tomb shrine for Sultan on the Arab observers, however, saw the Ottoman government's of Ibn ʿArabī's tomb as an attempt by Muslims from the to and even the hajj and the holy sanctuaries of Mecca and The residents of Damascus referred to the many Ottoman as In its most sense, Rūmī a and someone who and came from the lands of the central lands of the Ottoman between the in the and the in the have of the medieval from however, is actually a of his or from the lands of This early modern at with its in both the medieval and modern In the medieval period, the both the and in the and fourteenth centuries, it began to refer to Muslims in the This and was by the development of Ottoman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into an and of competing with a that the Rūmī from that of the more or In the nineteenth century, however, the it applied to subjects of the empire, which is its In local Arab residents of Damascus saw the as with only a of Islam and its to build a tomb over the grave of Ibn ʿArabī being the of their of the of the events by the Ibn a number of omens for the future of Ibn ʿArabī's new the the bought the and to the general and that the had The as they the a and the the the man who the sultan to build the mosque and tomb in the first Only a had also were at the foot of Ibn ʿArabī's grave as the their to it into a holy site. they erected a a traditional of over the tomb and more but only under the of being of what the people might and that no one find out about While the sultan to the and a for a Ibn ʿArabī, the people of Damascus of high due to the and the of in their an of the Safavid one when an of the and the was into the by his to its As the shrine they from a building that a had that these had been from the tomb of saint the of the an to the of Ibn Selim and the Rūmī the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī on the of The of is the central of the hajj, when the stream onto the of and for the this a hajj Ibn Ṭūlūn that the Ottomans were to the hajj with pilgrimage to the new tomb of Ibn ʿArabī, as they had the pilgrimage to the and to against the significance or the might have with their of was however, because the of the Rūmīs, was so that he could not the and the of even with a In other words, he the a were to the and were throughout the sites of the the of the and were given out in the by the As he the it for a moment that he had built the shrine of a of holy on the eastern of the it was an it was at the employ of the of it spread among the the and the men of state. it was that it was the of one of the bathhouses, which became with and when the they believed it to be holy only did the to the locals but also few of the and of the to the were that as residents decided to because of the high brought on by the Ottoman Ṭūlūn a the when he was the and of the mosque at Ibn ʿArabī's While he with the that what is for few of his came to visit in his new The of the land to visit the tomb when he came to the more traditional tombs at the He was left with the Rūmīs, who had it their to visit the tomb during their and like a certain who came with his to the tomb to to be by one should us that it was not a that the Ottoman government both and into the hajj and the the Islamic world, there were a wide variety of that and saintly power, and the same the construction of Ibn ʿArabī's a cult centered on Ibn ʿArabī was not so Ibn take on Ibn ʿArabī's tomb the that the religious of the Ottomans immediately following the Other Arab scholars of the period a of the religious and the cult of Ibn the tomb and the cult among Rūmī scholars in as Rūmī scholars a of Ibn ʿArabī, for the saint needed to be among all the scholars in the imperial Although the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained a for Rūmī Damascus and the Arab lands become the center of a different holy Ottoman Ottoman government for a different of a state that did not on the creation of imperially tombs of holy men and The tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained but the dynasty instead to become a of and a of Islam centered on following Islamic the course of the sixteenth century, it and in congregational in every and and that Muslims them as it to a particular of religiosity on practices such as and the The dynasty undertook these actions to itself from its imperial competitors like the and as had their own of shrines and but also with an toward the it had at greatest in a Sunni for the empire in its of the the of Mecca and that it had from the Even with these sites at their Ottoman in the hajj were a of for of the sixteenth For example, only toward the of the sixteenth century did the dynasty support for the tomb of Sultan in Hungary and order its shaykh to move to Mecca and focus his and on the grave of the to the the of Arab the government's shift toward the hajj was a In of over a hundred years the conquest of the Arab lands, the (d. a book in of The of the of the Ottomans were to other dynasty, or to set a number of and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known by their of of the or the of the house of The had their of Rūmī which them the site of an about the of imperial and in the Arab the Ottoman dynasty as a of both religious and a view to the the Ottoman and a century Whereas they had been as they were of especially to their massive investment in the religious sites of the hajj and the people who lived how they of thousands of on the of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Hebron, so so that they were never This was in to the on the military to the of the from The was by no an the from the seventeenth century that the and became and These imperial were by from the of the the which lands, and from both Muslims around the empire and of the dynasty The government also the around and Jerusalem, renewed of the area around the built and and all the in and hajj was a every which if not of thousands of through and massive infrastructure needed to be developed to bring to Mecca and Moreover, the pilgrimage had to be so that at the time in Mecca to the of the the left Damascus or there was not a to traveled on or horses, and a few were in However, the which included the many and that came traveled by The most was the between Damascus and Medina, the pilgrim were to the Syrian had been used during the Mamluk period, it no or infrastructure to to other than the few Thus, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty began a of in the Syrian hajj The first was a

Sirrah, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeare's plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheu's opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus.

1 64Reviews Richard W. Bailey, ed. Dictionaries of English. Prospects for the Record of Our Language. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987. viii + 161 pp. This volume assembles the papers read at the Colloquium on English Lexicography, held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in August 1985. It is dedicated to Professor Jürgen Schäfer, who died soon after his return to West Germany. The organizer of the conference and editor of the volume, Richard W. Bailey, in his introduction describes the theme of the nine articles included as celebrating the tradition in English dictionaries and questioning it at the same time. In the opening paper, "The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary: The End of the Alphabet," Robert W. Burchfield outlines those lexicographical features that he took over unchanged from the OED in order to preserve the unity of the work in the supplementary volumes. In two respects, however, he deliberately deviated from the OED's lexicographical policy: Murray insisted on aiming at an average of one quotation per century for any given meaning. But such a policy would have been entirely inadequate for a proper presentation of the proliferating new vocabulary of the present century. We have moved toward a policy of including at least one quotation per decade. We have also been far less reticent about the inclusion of sexual vocabulary and have not held back when presenting illustrative examples of such words (19). The tradition of the Oxford English Dictionary is then contrasted with the approach adopted by Frederic G. Cassidy in the compilation of the Dictionary of American Regional English. In his paper, "The Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary ofAmerican Regional English: Some Differences of Practice," Cassidy stresses that "the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is first in basing a historical dictionary on a combination of atlas-style field collecting and collecting from written sources" (24). The data collected from field studies make DARE an extremely precious source for further sociolinguistic studies. They also give DAREs usage Reviews165 labels a degree of objectivity that is unparalleled in other dictionaries . E. S. C. Weiner's paper on "The New Oxford English Dictionary : Progress and Prospects" provides a very interesting report of the New OED project but leaves no doubt that "any program of revising and expanding the pre-1700 material on a systematic basis . . . will necessarily come relatively low on the New OED project's list of priorities" (43). This is exactly the topic of the following two papers by T. F. Hoad and Jürgen Schäfer. Hoad, in his paper on "Developing and Using Lexicographical Resources in Old and Middle English," shows how the established lexicographical tradition could be developed further. The available resources for Old and Middle English could be used to specify the restrictions with respect to particular literary forms or genres, registers, and dialects. They should also be exploited more fully in the historical description of word-formational processes. From Old and Middle English we proceed to Early Modern English ("Early Modern English: OED, New OED, EMED"). No one was better qualified to assess the OED's shortcomings in recording the Early Modern English word stock than Jürgen Schäfer, whose two-volume publication on all the monolingual glossaries and dictionaries published before 1641 we are still awaiting. According to him the most pressing tasks for future data capture for the Early Modern English period are the recording of unrecorded words and hapax legomena, antedatings , and more information on the frequency of words. The need for more information on the status of words is one of the recurrent themes in the papers under review. That such a need is perceived so strongly is undoubtedly due to the predominance of sociolinguistics and pragmatics in language research. And yet it might not have been perceived so clearly without a well-established tradition of recording the spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and meaning of lexical items. Such additional information is indispensable when national variants of English are concerned. Richard Allsopp in his contribution, " 'Like If Say You See a Jumbie or a Duppy': Problems of Definitional Differentiae in a Complex of Anglophone Cultures," does not limit himself to discussing the difficulties of...

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Having spent some time examining attitudes to the use of English in the sixteenth century and some of the ways in which the medical profession used it and the lexicographers recorded it, we now turn our attention to the works which have been the special subject of this study and to the work which best records the vocabulary of these books, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). We have now seen that the bulk of the sixteenth-century medical terminology in its pages probably did not come from the dictionaries of the period, and it is also probable that these dictionaries did not make a serious attempt to record this terminology. It seems possible therefore that we do not now understand the emergent terminology of the profession sufficiently well. However, the primary focus of an investigation into the recording of a particular semantic domain in the sixteenth-century lexicon must inevitably be the OED, and only secondarily those sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century dictionaries which were the source of some of its information. If the OED is inaccurate or misleading, in what ways and to what extent is it so? What are its actual deficiencies? This also leads inevitably to questions about the way in which the OED was put together, and to the ways in which it utilized its sources.

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine sixteenth century Netherlands business organisation and accounting practices, then the most advanced in Western Europe, to test Sombart's theory that scientific double entry bookkeeping was an essential prerequisite for the development of modern capitalism and the emergence of the public corporation during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than being a development of Paciolian bookkeeping, double‐entry bookkeeping in sixteenth century Netherlands was grounded in northern German (Hanseatic) business practices.Design/methodology/approachSixteenth century Dutch business records and Dutch and German bookkeeping texts are used to establish that north German Hanseatic commercial practices exercised the greatest influence on The Netherlands' bookkeeping practices immediately prior to the development of the capitalistic commercial enterprise in the first years of the seventeenth century.FindingsContrary to Sombart's thesis, scientific double‐entry bookkeeping was rarely used in sixteenth century Netherlands, which became Europe's most sophisticated commercial region during the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. Instead, extant commercial archives and the numerous sixteenth century accounting texts suggest that Hanseatic business practices and agents' (factors') bookkeeping were the dominant influence on northern Netherlands' business practices at this time. The organisation and administrative practices of Netherlands' businesses prior to the seventeenth century, especially their decentralised structure and lack of a common capital, were founded on Hanseatic practices that were considerably different to the best Italian practice of the time.Research limitations/implicationsNorth German influences on Dutch accounting and business practices have significant implications for social theories of the development of capitalism, notably that of Bryer, that assume the use of a scientific (capitalistic) form of double‐entry bookkeeping was essential to the development of capitalism from the seventeenth century. This is tested in a subsequent paper which examines the accounting practices of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie or VOC) which was founded in 1602 at the very cusp of modern capitalism. The research presented here was partially constrained by the scarcity of transcriptions of original sixteenth century bookkeeping records.Originality/valueThe vigorous debate in the accounting history literature about the dependence of modern capitalism upon a scientific (capitalistic) form of double entry bookkeeping prompted by Sombart has been mainly concerned with England. This paper introduces into the debate material which documents the accounting and business practices of the most commercially advanced region of Europe in the late sixteenth century and the influence of Dutch bookkeeping texts.

Previous articleNext article FreeDoctor Faustus and the Art of Dying BadlyMaggie VinterMaggie VinterCase Western Reserve University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFaustus:Lucifer and Mephastophilis! Ah, gentlemen, I gave them my soul for my cunning.All:God forbid!Faustus:God forbade it indeed, but Faustus hath done it.1What, exactly, has Faustus done? How has he come to act against the command of God? The moral and theological framework of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has proven notoriously hard to fix. Critics have plausibly interpreted the play through a variety of religious and philosophical lenses, from Calvinist predestinarianism to free-thinking iconoclasm.2 And turning to the text scarcely clarifies Faustus’s theological context and devotional milieu. Heaven is never represented on stage, and characters describing it tend to demonstrate the distorting effects of human perception more effectively than they invoke the divine. Faustus jostles against Catholics and Protestants, the godly and the godless, social superiors and inferiors, and angels and devils, all of whom offer different, and sometimes shifting, interpretations of the cosmos. These voices agree on almost nothing. Nothing, that is, except that Faustus’s bad actions will end in damnation.That Marlowe should emphasize the bald fact of Faustus’s badness over the religious context from which it emerges is all the more surprising because badness has traditionally been conceived in terms of privation or distortion. Augustine influentially defined evil as a departure from God.3 The Good is a unitary, positive attribute of divinity, which stands as both the source and the model for all goodness on earth. The Bad, as such, is nothing. Rather, different badnesses represent different, ever-multiplying perversions of the Good. This negative characterization of evil found new expression in the sixteenth century through the theology of Luther and Calvin, who offer broadly similar accounts of agency after the fall. The human will is at once entirely derivative and, when not illuminated by grace, irredeemably vicious.4 When Marlowe emphasizes Faustus’s depravity while obscuring the divinity it rejects, he perversely presents the consequence without the cause, the flawed reflection without the object that it mirrors.Perhaps, though, representational perversity is the point. In this article, I argue that theories of parody can help us understand such free-floating badness. From Julius Caesar Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridicula in 1560, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, parodic techniques have generally been understood as derogatory in intent.5 However, Giorgio Agamben suggests a fruitful alternative approach when he argues that parody might not simply deflate its target but could also function as a strategy for representing mysteries obliquely.6 To assess the value of Agamben’s ideas, I analyze Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus alongside another sixteenth-century dramatization of dying badly, William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1570). Both plays certainly use derogatory parody to ridicule characters who, at the last, are unable to relinquish worldly things. But they also suggest that parody can function as an investigative and representational tool, akin to a negative theology, that helps us to explicate obscured divinity through avowedly imperfect imitations. Marlowe and Wager share Calvin’s interest in depravity, but they reverse his emphasis.7 Instead of simply asserting that human will is irredeemably vicious, they ask what viciousness can reveal about the scope and limits of human agency or about the gap between fallen perception and divine truth. In particular, parody in their plays becomes a tool for analyzing and representing the approach to death, when the disjuncture between a person’s earthly and spiritual state can appear especially stark and especially in need of resolution.Furthermore, a focus on the affinities between parodic techniques and privative understandings of bad action can clarify the changing fortunes of religious theater in the sixteenth century. Between the publication of Enough Is as Good as a Feast around 1570, the writing of Doctor Faustus in the late 1580s or early 1590s, and the virtual prohibition on religious language onstage under the “Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players” in 1606, a growing group of religious thinkers came to understand dramatic representation as an inherently blasphemous practice.8 While there is no necessary link between antitheatricality and predestinarian accounts of the will, both discourses share a common concern with how imperfect human imitations approach an unseen, perfect original. Moreover, many of the same Protestant thinkers who elaborated Augustine’s account of evil to deny the possibility of good works independent of God’s grace also engaged in polemic against drama.9 Enough Is as Good as a Feast can help explain this slippage, since it indicates how hard it is to inoculate any representation of a religious subject from charges of profanation. By the end of the play, the derogatory potential of parody subsumes its use as an investigative strategy, and all forms of mimesis risk being revealed as blasphemous. Wager himself seems to have become disenchanted with religious theater, since he abandoned dramatic writing toward the end of the 1570s even as he remained “active in the Anglican ministry well into the 1580s.”10This context suggests that in writing Doctor Faustus, Marlowe was engaged not so much in secularizing religious forms as in reviving a dead genre abandoned by its original practitioners as unsatisfactory. His play, I argue, offers an implicit rejoinder to antitheatrical condemnations of drama. Marlowe appears to agree with the polemicists that dramatic mimesis necessarily offers a distorted, deficient version of what it imitates. But the theater’s representational badness reflects the ingrained badness of human performances generally, all of which are necessarily failed imitations of an inaccessible model. We are all doing what Faustus is doing. By foregrounding the validity of parody as a representational strategy for figuring otherwise unapproachable mysteries, and by attending to the forms of human agency that make such representation possible, Marlowe implies that drama is compatible with theological investigation precisely because of its blasphemous potential. The play encourages us to expand Scaliger, Bakhtin, and Agamben’s understandings of parody to theorize performances on the Elizabethan stage and beyond.Parody, Beside and BelowThe impulse to parody is ancient. The word itself derives from the Greek term parodos, which was probably initially used to describe any variant poem or song written beside an older work but took on particular connotations of comedy by the time Aristotle used it in the Poetics.11 Although the word (transliterated into Latin as parodia) and the concept disappeared from rhetorical manuals by the fifth century, a vigorous European tradition of adapting privileged genres or subjects for new ends persisted through the Middle Ages.12 The Coena Cypriani, celebrations of feasts of the fool, and drunkards’ and gamblers’ masses all manifest a particular appetite for burlesque revision, especially of sacred models. While modern critics have disagreed over the significance of these texts, Martha Bayless is persuasive when she emphasizes their diversity and cautions against any grand theory of medieval parody as prima facie orthodox or heterodox.13 The technique was everywhere, capable of advancing many ends.By the early modern period, though, parodies (especially of religious subjects) were attracting more controversy. Sixteenth-century discussions of parody focalized broader debates about the aesthetic and moral value of imitative art. Humanists revived parodia as a rhetorical term but altered its connotations to imply that imitation of a serious subject necessarily derogates that subject. In 1560, Scaliger influentially defined the word as “Rhapsodia inversa mutatis vocibus ad ridicula sensum retrahens” [rhapsody turned upside down, redirecting the sense toward amusing things with altered words].14 Where the Greek prefix para had suggested juxtaposition, Scaliger describes inversion and institutes a hierarchy between serious literature and comic travesty. Though ridicula may neutrally connote an amusing subject in Latin, Margaret Rose suggests Scaliger’s early modern English readers largely understood parody as derogatory.15 Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1616), for instance, describes parody as what would make something “absurder then it was.”16And this revaluation of parody was not confined to rhetorical theory. Over the same period that Scaliger’s construction of parody started to gain more widespread acceptance in literary contexts, religious reformers came increasingly to reject comic adaptations and inversions of religious motifs as blasphemous by definition. The Henrican state suppressed festivals of boy bishops in 1541, objecting that “boys do sing mass and preach in the pulpit … rather to the derision than any true glory of god, or honour of His saints.”17 In 1583, Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses condemned surviving festivals of the Lord of Misrule in similar terms as “horrible prophanation[s] of the Sabboth.”18 Significantly, Stubbes’s objection to misrule immediately follows his more famous condemnation of theater on the grounds that “the blessed word of God, is to be handled reverently, gravely, and sagely with veneration to the glorious Majesty of God, which shineth therein, and not scoffingly, floutingly, and jybingly as it is upon Stages in Playes and Enterludes” (236). Stubbes’s direct intellectual inspirations are the antitheatrical Church Fathers, including Augustine, whom he cites in his own support (237). However, when he denies the possibility of any genuinely sacred theater, he evokes an older Platonic logic that sees all imitation as inherently duplicitous. Plato’s Republic depicts Socrates condemning the tragic poet as “in his nature three removes from the king [i.e., God] and the truth, as are all other imitators.”19 For Stubbes, the problem is not that playwrights sometimes choose to mock God. Rather, he suggests that it is impossible to talk about God on stage without mockery. Any attempt to represent a religious truth dramatically, no matter what the motive, will necessarily fall into blasphemy. Imitation is parody.Modern critics trying to account for the character of parody in the early modern era, or to explain the hostility it increasingly inspired, have most often drawn on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.20 Bakhtin essentially accepts Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridiculing inversion but revalues ridicule as a folk challenge to elite monoculture and a spur to social and aesthetic change. Parody provides “the corrective of laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages, styles, voices; to force men to experience beneath these categories a different and contradictory reality that is otherwise not captured in them.”21 It defamiliarizes the object of representation and anticipates the development of novelistic heteroglossia by revealing the power of language as language (60–61). Applied to Elizabethan theater, Bakhtin’s account would align dramatic parody of religious models with subversive and secularizing impulses. Though elements of Bakhtin’s historiography have been questioned, the theoretical framework he proposes has remained powerfully influential and (superficially, at least) feels consonant with the iconoclastic, scoffing Marlovian persona evoked by documents like the Baines note.22Descriptions of parody as inversion, however, are by themselves inadequate to explain texts like Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Doctor Faustus. These plays sometimes exploit the deflationary capacity of imperfect imitation but at other points employ dramatic parody to explore theological problems or even to model orthodox behavior. As a corrective to Scaliger and Bakhtin, we might consider Agamben’s strikingly different claim that “parody does not call into question the reality of its object; indeed, this object is so intolerably real for parody that it becomes necessary to keep it at a distance … parody holds itself, so to speak, on the threshold of literature, stubbornly suspended between reality and fiction, between word and thing.”23 Departing from Scaliger—and effectively dismissing the dialogical play celebrated by Bakhtin as mere “fiction”—Agamben instead follows Plato in focusing on the relationship between the representation and the distanced reality it purports to stand for. However, he crucially revalues Platonic concepts. Where Plato asserts the hierarchical inferiority of representations, Agamben notes the prefix para implies a horizontal arrangement of original and copy. And where Plato rejects mimesis on the grounds of its imperfection, Agamben argues that avowed distortion has a sacralizing effect. When parody draws attention to its inability to display an object directly, it reverently casts that object as a mystery. Viewed in this light, the “liturgy of the mass, the representation par excellence of the modern mystery, [is] parodic,” and medieval scatological reworkings are respectful elaborations, rather than profanations, of liturgical form (42). Agamben rejects Bakhtin’s suggestion that parodies contest privileged forms and ideas from below and claims instead that they offer esoteric avenues to otherwise inaccessible truths.24 Reworking the terms that Stubbes uses to condemn the theater, we might say the scoffing, flouting, and jibing of players does not misappropriate or dampen the light of God’s majesty shining within his word, so much as it veils that light so that it can be looked on indirectly, without the risk of blindness.Although Bakhtin and Agamben’s accounts of parody are markedly different, I do not think we necessarily need to choose between them in all cases. Parody is capable of being deployed for many purposes and of appearing in many forms and many locations. It can emerge reverently beside or profanely below the object it mimics.25 Superimposing these two theoretical models, moreover, might be particularly helpful for understanding sixteenth-century texts. During this period, the reemergence of parodia as a topic of explicit consideration in rhetorical studies and the increased religious scrutiny of representation combined to render parody’s true position especially uncertain. Moreover, this uncertainty seems to have been recognized by at least some Elizabethan writers, who responded to it in markedly different ways. The ambiguous place of parody contributes to Stubbes’s distrust of scoffing mimesis. But to other writers struggling to depict ambiguous or dangerous subjects, the very instability of parodic forms might prove useful. To see just how useful, I now turn to representations of the bad death.Dying like a ProtestantIn many Christian traditions, death is something you do. Popular ars moriendi texts present death not just a misfortune to be suffered but also as a discipline to be studied or an action to be performed.26 From its inception in the fifteenth century, this homiletic literature of the good death troubled easy distinctions between activity and passivity and considered complex interactions between divine and human will.27 However, questions of how to die well became charged in new ways after the Reformation. The art of dying, like other devotional practices, became a site of sectarian controversy. Protestant reformers challenged many Catholic rituals such as the anointing of the sick and intercessory prayers.28 And polemicists from both confessions politicized the moment of death through highly publicized accounts of victorious martyrdoms29 and propagandistic accusations that dying leaders of rival sects had despaired or recanted.30 More fundamentally, popular predestinarian theologies threatened the conceptual basis of conduct books. The deathbed renders this theoretical challenge especially pressing, first, because the dying person’s diminished mental and physical capacity can make problems of human will more apparent and, second, because the moment of death was commonly understood to unmask the true distribution of agency between the human and the divine. Death reveals whether a person was always already saved or damned, and this revelation has two effects that are somewhat in tension with one another.31 On the one hand, it demonstrates the importance of grace to salvation and the insufficiency of human endeavor. On the other hand, it encourages a reconceptualization of individuals’ earthly actions as direct expressions of their ultimate spiritual status. Their earlier moral vacillations must be retroactively reclassified either as true expressions of their election (or depravity) or as temporary and misleading departures from their essential nature. Sectarian disputes and doctrinal innovations did not destroy the genre of ars moriendi; indeed more, and more were by both Catholics and over the sixteenth and than But altered the nature of the moriendi from a broadly for the good work of a Christian to a site of over what both a Christian and a work could disputes about also had for the form of religious drama. The link between deathbed conduct and drama is in the of which itself as a how of to … in of a the approach to death the in ars moriendi texts by who between good and bad impulses. Elizabethan Protestant to this tradition to account for the that spiritual is William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast how this The play is a of a by earlier medieval had and claims that in the 1570s and predestinarian some focus to Their “the for a tragic within the of moral of the earlier a comedy into its of spiritual and the that there are between homiletic and earlier plays is in focusing on he the to which these plays or even the forms they as they new doctrinal Is as Good as a Feast on the between the by the Man and he himself with a and with his help is a and a As the to the Man is by God’s to with and a but he to On his deathbed he to a will but he the the and is by a between the saved and the that is but obscured for much of the toward appear he offers God the of all will not the death of as hath to the true I the from the I for to Enough which to in and and all other I do Man is a as such by his in this he scarcely like claims to with And his that God has the true implies a in position and about through the is by the term which implies that Man godly through to the word by itself does not prove Man is in bad of worldly and spiritual language is especially in texts focusing on things. Sixteenth-century for religious and documents had devotional while sometimes in religious devotional The in offers an to Wager’s the godly at the of his religious by a will to his and and even for the of The need for the godly to with the in in to for the of the fallen to themselves with spiritual character such as Man in the of a impulse the same as And the questions about whether the two can be end of the play they Wager uses a parody of the of the good death to the apparent between saved and with a is because it reveals a more The dying Man his through of godly behavior. he is by and However, most of them are the even a concern for his spiritual like he is with his However, Man a will that would help his to as she rather than support of The its as Man is from a spiritual simply as a once he himself of God’s initially of Man had like one of the by the end of the play his of godly is itself a of his Enough Is as Good as a Feast rejects the apparent of godly and in will to a hierarchy between The worldly death is as a failed imitation of the godly This of worldly and in which the parodies the the where the in the earlier of the play that Man is then then are that and goodness to the same and become to the For the between dramatic models on a and a predestinarian becomes perfect and of to predestinarian His moral indicates how earthly uncertainty of election the between the saved and the damned, while his fall into explicit parody the of that the of the the implicit understanding of parody Wager increasingly variant imitations as not comic but and then encourages the to retroactively an of inferiority to earlier implicit understanding of parody Agamben’s is by one more like first, to through seems like a for it appears like a departure from true Christian the ridicule evoked by death is to his earlier what had beside becomes is there is any necessary to this or Enough Is as Good as a Feast to suggest that all imitations are parodic and even can be as it is hard to what imitation could accusations of and to have a turn by religious writers from the turn in as I Wager may have Faustus these like older forms to new doctrinal and parody to between and However, his play from Enough Is as Good as a Feast in it is that there are to Where Enough the with Doctor Faustus to in terms of privation that the distorting effects of human for how the Good is or by Faustus and to appear more like a of uncertainty than a link to the The often as the version of the play, to Faustus’s perception of Christian through that the To the then I the And In the context of Faustus’s can be almost as a of negative theology that the divine through what it is any attempt to Faustus’s simply as a blasphemous inversion is by the variety of ways that he divine truth. Man a bad Faustus of dying His imitations of religious never their on a divine original. alternative to rather than that could But in their diversity and their to explicate their to that they focus attention toward what fallen human Faustus may even a of not to but to choose between different to parodic to death in Doctor Faustus a investigation of the and of Wager’s of parody with depravity into a condemnation of all Marlowe’s of between parodic religious and what can be for imitation or even because its distortion of its or Faustus in the to Enough Is as Good as a from parody as inversion to parody as Marlowe the play by as the of dramatic and then whether mimesis can be either as a or as a tool for representing religious The Faustus as an intellectual and the privileged of the sixteenth-century As Marlowe’s by two of the word and the of the as their The fact that Faustus has to for instance, he has and can its because Faustus it to any positive While he that the scope of its is by “the of his own seems by the he already and His does not into new but other of and the religious he from the mass that to the as he his with Significantly, Faustus’s performances initially stand

Ontwerpen en bouwen in de Hollandse stad

BOOK REVIEWS 341 Though Wallace limits his discussion to the above-mentioned philological and historical matters (and in so doing he produces a first-rate work of scholarship), his book has more general significance. The evidence he provides is relevant to the problem of the connection between medieval thought and the rise of modern science; the problem of the process by which Galileo arrived at his later scientific discoveries and theories that made him famous; and the problem of the philosophical roots, content, and character of Galileo's work. Finally, I should note the rather curious fact that the logical structure of the content of these notebooks is very similar to the logical structure of the content of Galileo's mature work, the Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, as it has emerged from my own studies into the latter. MAURICEA. FINOCCHIARO University of Nevada, Las Vegas Maurice Crosland, ed. The Emergence of Science in Western Europe. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Pp. 201. $18.00. The chapters that make up this book were originally papers presented at the meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in the summer of 1974. Some of the chapters should be of interest to historians of philosophy for the information they provide concerning relations that existed between (anachronistically) science and philosophy. The chapters cover the period between the late sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century and deal with aspects of science, scientists, and institutions in specific countries. The first five pieces concern themselves with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the possible exception of Knight's chapter on German Romantics, "Naturphilosophie," these papers are likely to be of most interest to readers of this journal. Crosland begins the volume with a name-dropping introduction that attempts to discuss the question of doing history (of science, in particular) in geographical or nationalistic fashion. The papers following more often do a better job of providing a rationale for their method of approach. A. G. Keller's "Mathematicians, Mechanics and Experimental Machines in Northern ltaly in the Sixteenth Century" treats of the Renaissance artist-engineer tradition. He provides a readable account of some views of the relation betwen theory and practice that were then prevalent. Tanaglia, Guidabaldo dal Monte, and Savorgnan are discussed and interestingly quoted, but there is little analysis of the concepts these men employed. Still, the paper provides a survey of ideas with which historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuryphilosophy ought to be familiar. "Science in the Italian Universities in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," by C. B. Schmitt, is the start of an interesting and correcting picture of the role of universities during this seminal period. Schmitt deals, for the most part, with institutional and curricular matters, but these have implications for those who still write under the influence of Randall's work on methodology. It is a good survey of universitymovements and contains many suggestive hints that are not developed in this paper. The details concerning the lack of any significant role for theology in the universities, and concerning the debate over certainty in mathematics versus the syllogism are just two topics in Schmitt's paper that philosophers would find important. M. B. Hall's paper, "Science in the Early Royal Society," presents details and quotations from members dealing with method. The paper is marred by an extremely uncritical use of 342 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY rationalism and empiricism that leads to an unhelpful analysis of the methodological controversies in which the Society engaged. The quotations (e.g., from Wallis [p. 65] and Pardies [p. 66]) often show the confusion, complexity and sheer prejudice of these people rather than the simple-minded commitment to empiricism upon which Hall seems to insist. I found the analysis of the Hooke-Newton controversy in terms of rationalism versus empiricism quite unhelpful and failing to do justice to Newton's theological and Cartesian background (pp. 71-72). Nor has Hall progressed any in her understanding of Spinoza beyond the unsympathetic and misguided footnotes appearing in Volumes I and 2 of the edition of the Oldenburg Correspondence . Still, the piece contains information that philosophers dealing with seventeenth-century figures should be...

Gujarat was concentric to the early modern Indian Ocean world. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the fine tuning of long distance trading systems. In South East Asia, the Indo-Portuguese trade network flourished in the sixteenth century, followed by the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth. Equilibrium was established between European and Asian traders, both indispensable to the other. Profitable trade in pepper and spices in the eastern archipelago was based on cotton textiles from Gujarat. In the sixteenth century, Cambay stretched out two arms—towards Aden and Malacca. Commercial connections included ports like Acheh, Kedah, Tenasserim, Pegu, Pase, and Pidie. In the seventeenth century, Surat’s mercantile marine facilitated the consolidation of Gujarati trade. This chapter shows how Gujarati merchant diaspora was intrinsic to the intricate patterns of trade practices and traditions of the Indian Ocean.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the heraldry of the nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was influenced by local, Polish, and other European heraldic traditions. The coat of arms became one of the most important elements representing the culture and identity of the nobles. It reflected their family and marital ties, titles, positions, and other important aspects in the life of the nobility. The coats of arms that have survived to this day act as a reminder of the past lives of their holders. The article explores the heraldry of the noble Gruževskis (Grużewski) family from Samogitia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and its actualisation in the twenty-first century in the manor estate in Kelmė that was formerly owned by this family. The analysis revealed that the Gruževskis, a Polish noble family, who moved to Samogitia in the sixteenth century, enriched the heraldic tradition of the region’s nobility with the Lubicz coat of arms originating in Poland. The Lubicz coat of arms depicts a white horseshoe on an azure field with two crosses, one cross inside the horseshoe and the other outside with a crest of three ostrich feathers. The article looks at the heraldic seals held by the members of the Gruževskis family be­tween the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the seventeenth-century coat of arms of Jurgis Gruževskis in the joint coat of arms in Kelmė Evangelical Reformed Church, and the eighteenth-century coat of arms of the Gruževskis family above the entrance to the manor house they used to own. It has been observed that the members of the Gruževskis family preserved their coat of arms from the sixteenth century up to the second half of the eighteenth century and that it was passed down from generation to generation. The analysis of the records shows that the family’s heraldic tradition featured both single-field and combined coats of arms. The emergence of the former in the seventeenth century is traced back to Jurgis Gruževskis. Today, the Kelmė Regional Museum is one of the main memory institutions that preserve and actualise the legacy of the noble Gruževskis family. While the coat of arms of this family is not forgotten by the museum and receives relatively comprehensive attention, there are few attempts to provide more detailed information or more critical insights about it. The heraldry of the former owners of the manor estate is usually presented using easy-to-understand visual resources such as illustrations, stands, interactive materials, and souvenirs. It is believed that visitors could be offered a more detailed picture of the heraldic traditions of the Gruževskis family and a more critical approach to these traditions could be developed by drawing upon a relatively extensive range of heraldic sources and scholarly materials. The possibility of showcasing the copies of the sources featuring the family’s heraldic traditions or developing thematic educational activities is to be considered.

Reviewed by: The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary—A Memoir by John Simpson Enid Pearsons (bio) The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary—A Memoir by John Simpson. New York: Basic Books, 2016. Pp. xvi + 364. $27.99. ISBN: 978-0-465-06069-6. Anyone who thinks that the longtime chief editor of the revered Oxford English Dictionary (OED) might have written a stuffy or plodding autobiography will be happily disappointed. John Simpson’s The Word Detective comes alive from the very first sentence of the introduction, in which the author makes known his desire, since his earliest days as a “cub lexicographer,” to “pick away at the stereotypes imposed on lexicographers” by the general public, the media, and even lexicographers themselves. From an American perspective, it could be said that Simpson actually fits the stereotype of a British lexicographer: A student of English literature “at university” (when not engaged in such classic English pursuits as cricket and field hockey), he gravitated to literature of the Old, Middle, and Early Modern English periods, and in graduate school became a full-fledged medievalist. In this he was much like the chief editor of the OED at the time, the medievalist and college rugby player Robert Burchfield, whom Simpson was destined to succeed. But the book begins even earlier, with Simpson’s first encounter with Hilary, a young woman likewise bound for university to study English literature, who years later—and in retrospect, inevitably—would become his wife. It is the proper beginning for a book that, as one might almost guess from the tripartite title, is really three books in one: an introduction to lexicography for the uninitiated, a history of the OED during the most crucial period in its existence since completion of the first edition in 1928, and a personal memoir of a life in language and (though Simpson is not one to show emotion, at least in print) in love. Lexicographic professionals may be drawn to this book primarily as the ultimate insider’s account of a crucial transitional period for the Oxford English Dictionary, and indeed for the entire field of lexicography. When Simpson arrived from graduate school in 1976 to work on the Supplement to the first edition of the OED under Burchfield, lexicographic methods had scarcely changed since the nineteenth century. Old timers like me might even feel a twinge of nostalgia at his description of the process of sorting through citation cards, looking up references, drafting entries by hand, and marking up galleys. By the time [End Page 134] Simpson retired, both the writing of dictionaries and the using of them had become largely a matter of sitting at a computer screen—though with the oceans of data that now exist, more intellectually absorbing and challenging than ever. From the outside this might look like a simple and inevitable matter of adopting new technology as it came along. But it was neither simple nor inevitable. There were times when, but for vigorous and forward-looking leadership by Simpson and others, the OED might simply have been left to sit on the shelf as a monument to the scholarship of previous centuries. Guiding this massive work through a period of rapidly evolving technology could be compared—though this is not how Simpson puts it—with steering a supertanker through constantly shifting shoals. The risk of running aground was great. From 1985 to 1993, Simpson and his longtime OED comrade Edmund Weiner (yet another medievalist) served as co-editors of the dictionary. Among other things, they coordinated production of its second edition (OED2), in which novel computer techniques and tens of thousands—probably hundreds of thousands—of hours of keyboarding and proofreading were marshaled to synthesize the first edition with the four-volume Supplement and 5,000 entirely new words and senses. In 1993, at Weiner’s instigation, Simpson became chief editor. It was the dawn of the Internet age, and over the next twenty years Simpson, with Weiner as his deputy, oversaw the transition of the OED to that medium and the launching of the next grand plan...

The aim of the present brief study is to review selected Medieval English lexical representations of the noun judge ‘one who tries cases and interprets the laws’ (MED) and their semantic development in the history of English (cf. OE domsettend, dempster, worulddema). The study uses standard databases, such as Bosworth−Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (B−T), Clark Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (CASD), Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC), Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), The Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (ICoMEP), Middle English Dictionary (MED), the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Scottish National Dictionary (SND), Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), A Thesaurus of English Word Roots (TEWR), Collins Dictionary (CD) and Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MWD). A preliminary search for the terms in question confirms either their decline shortly after being first recorded in Old English (cf. domsettend, gesetla, worulddema) or their survival into the Middle or Early Modern English periods (cf. doomer, doomsman, judger). Only two nouns, judge and jurist, have survived beyond Medieval English and are frequent in current use.