Eighteenth Century Research Articles

Studi Literatur tentang Faktor-Faktor yang Mempengaruhi Kemunduran Pendidikan Islam

Uu's research investigates changes and setbacks in Islamic education from its heyday to contemporary times. The research methodology used is a Literature Study/Library Study approach, by collecting data from various sources such as digital libraries and the internet. Analysis was carried out on the factors that influenced the decline of Islamic education, including the tendency of excessive philosophy, lack of appreciation for scientists, internal and external conflicts, as well as the impact of Mongol attacks and the Crusades. The results of the research showed that the decline of Islamic education had significant impacts such as stagnation in motivation, a decline in the quality of education and intellectual thinking and a narrowing of the curriculum in madrasas. However, efforts to purify Islamic teachings in the eighteenth century gave hope for a more progressive renewal of Islamic education

Barrack-Building, Mapping, and Settlement in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

The history of residential army barracks in Ireland has in recent years become a focus for more concerted study. 1 While a number of works focused upon individual barracks have been published over the years since the 1970s, 2 the first substantive consideration as to why a permanent country-wide network of barracks was built in Ireland in the late 1690s and early eighteenth century was first published in 2012. This work assessed why these barracks were built, how they were paid for, and ultimately what purposes they served. 3 Since then, additional work has been undertaken with regard to a more comprehensive identification and inventorying of over 360 such barracks built between 1690 and 1922. 4 However, while some consideration has been given to the impact of the building of a country-wide network of barracks upon cartographic practice, 5 there has been little to no assessment of the impact that such residential army barracks had upon patterns of settlement. It is the aim of this article to assess these interlinked elements of barrack-building, mapping, and settlement patterns in relation to each other in an eighteenth-century context, with a particular focus upon barracks built in County Armagh. 6

FamilyTreeDNA Group Project Administrator Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract. Several scholars have in the past hypothesized a northward movement of Hunnic contingents which ultimately reached Scandinavia on the basis of archaeological and philological evidence, an event which should be detectable in both ancient and modern DNA if true. Here I report that when analyzing a combination of ancient and modern DNA samples from across Eurasia one can detect a westward movement from the Altai-Sayan region to Europe which ultimately reached southern Sweden, and also accurately date this migration event to the 4th and 5th centuries CE with the help of carbon-14 dating and estimated TMRCAs of certain Y-DNA lineages. It is possible to identify these individuals and groups as Huns by analyzing their Y-chromosomal and autosomal DNA in combination with burial context. The significance and implications of this become clear when looking at the philological evidence which suggests that the Huns had a formative and lasting impact on the development of the peoples, cultures and beliefs of Scandinavia Keywords: Attila, Huns, Scythians, Y-DNA, Xiongnu

A Global Social History of Princes, Courts and Elites

AbstractRoyals abound in global history. Kings were served at court by domestic, administrative, and military elites who connected the centre to the provinces. Contemporary observers as well as modern historians have often stressed the contrast between oriental despots and limited monarchs in the West, downplaying structural resemblances. This article moves beyond clichés commonly ascribed to East and West, and asks to what extent social practices of court life were shared across early modern Eurasia. Then it reviews the profound changes in European court life during the long eighteenth century. Can parallel reform movements be found in other parts of Eurasia? Finally, it moves from comparisons to connections, by tracing fundamental shifts in the relationships between European royals and royals across the globe from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. This longue durée examination questions common views about European exceptionalism and corrects persistent clichés about rising middle classes and declining nobilities.

Encyclopedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America

Abstract: This article examines the history of encyclopedias in North America and Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to foreground wider shifts in knowledge formation and organization caused by a growing perception of information overload. Tracing the Enlightenment manifestations of this concept, which is more typically seen as characteristic of twenty-first century digital culture, the article considers how attempts by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith to establish an intellectual model of the division of labor in Scotland migrated to and were reworked in the early United States. This transition is explored through analysis of the Philadelphian publisher Thomas Dobson's Encyclopaedia; or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature (1788–98), which reprinted and added to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1787–97). Dobson's Encyclopaedia is situated in the context of: older traditions of synoptic writing practiced by figures like Cotton Mather, which retained a belief in the possibility of all-encompassing knowledge collection; emerging experiments by eighteenth-century encyclopedia makers with presentation and structure, designed to better order complex bodies of information and accommodate new data; and current debates around information democracy and management centered on Wikipedia, which indicate key points of change and continuity in the extended history of the encyclopedia form's struggle to be both comprehensive and up-to-date.

Literary Adaptation and Digital Humanities: Laurence Sterne and Sterneana

Abstract: Literary afterlives occupied a significant place in the cultural life of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. Laurence Sterne's work, especially Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey , attracted diverse and extensive adaptation in various forms and media, collectively known as "Sterneana." Digital Humanities initiatives have provided unprecedented opportunities for exploring literary afterlives, bringing obscure and rare materials to light that enrich understanding of adaptation as a broad phenomenon and its role in this period. This article discusses online resources that bring Sterne-related material to new audiences, focusing on Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, a dataset hosted by Cambridge Digital Library.

Maria: Eine Geschichte in Briefen: Ein Spiel herausgeberischer Simulationen?

ABSTRACT Margarethe ‘Meta’ Wedekind was one of the ‘Universitätsmamsellen’, a group of eighteenth–century German women who had access to a privileged academic education. In addition to numerous translations, in 1784 Wedekind published the epistolary novel Maria: Eine Geschichte in Briefen. What is striking about this text is that both its ‘author’ and ‘editor’ remain anonymous. This article argues that Meta Wedekind resorts to two main strategies to publish the novel: the so-called ‘Herausgeberfiktion’, and anonymity. Furthermore, this type of publication was likely inspired by Sophie La Roche’s famous novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771).

Paul Gerhardt in America 1743–2007

Abstract: German Hymnwriter Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676), often described as the most important Lutheran hymnwriter other than Martin Luther, has had an impact in America. His hymns helped shape the faith and ministry of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711–1787), often described as the “father” of the Lutheran church in America. His hymns helped Lutherans to face the crisis of World War I. Since the eighteenth century Gerhardt hymns have appeared in North American Lutheran hymnals. Even today they appear in both Lutheran hymnals and the hymnals of other Christian groups. Lutherans observed the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1907 with celebrations for laity and clergy featuring Gerhardt’s hymns. Many articles in church periodicals described Gerhardt and his hymns. The 400th anniversary of his birth in 2007 gained some attention, in church publications and academic conferences, but generally less attention than in 1907.

Dublin-Printed Elegies of the 1720s

Surprising numbers of small-scale printers were active in Dublin in the 1720s. The period of relative calm that followed the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 enabled trade of all kinds to flourish in Ireland and the number of booksellers active in Dublin increased considerably during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. But so did the number of readers: their wants were supplied partly by books and pamphlets imported from England but also by material printed in Dublin. The range of such material was wide and included not only books and proclamations but large amounts of local verse, much of it printed on single-sided broadsheets. An interesting category of this Dublin-printed material is the verse elegy, over a hundred examples of which survive. This article provides an overview of the existing corpus of Dublin-printed elegies before considering two of them in detail. One is a loyalist elegy for King George I and the other an elegy for the hero of the Irish Jacobites, the Duke of Ormond. The article describes these two very different elegies and the cultures from which they sprang.

ГІСТОРЫЯ ПРАКТЫКІ АМПУТАЦЫЙ У СУВЯЗІ З ВАЕННЫМІ ДЗЕЯННЯМІ. ЧАСТКА 2. РАМЯСТВО АМПУТАЦЫЙ З КАНЦА XVIII СТАГОДДЗЯ ДА ЦЯПЕРАШНІХ ЧАСОЎ

The beginning of the Industrial and French Revolutions has marked the radical hanges in the methods of warfare. The introduction of mass conscription and the continuous improvement of weapons during the following centuries had a significant impact on the structure and nature of combat injuries, and on the practice of limb amputations accordingly. At the same time, advances in medical technology and great discoveries such as antiseptics and antibiotics contributed considerably to the evolution of this surgical practice. This part of the article examines the development of the art of amputation in connection with warfare from the end of the XVIII century to the present day.

PARS PLANA LENSECTOMY AND SUSHRUTA’S CHEDANA FOR CATARACT: A REVIEW

Jacques Daviel, a French ophthalmologist, is considered the father of cataract surgery for his revolutionary idea of extracapsular lens extraction technique, which was introduced in the eighteenth century. Prior to his concept, couching was prevalent in the millennia. Sushruta Samhita, a text dated between 800 BC - 1000 BC, has some descriptions of surgical technique with an extraocular expulsion of the lens with a Pars Plana incision/puncture. A proper analysis of Sushruta Samhita and its description of cataract surgery is necessary to understand the significance played by this ancient Indian surgeon in the evolution of present-day ophthalmology and the days of yore.

Manuskrip Arab sebagai Argumen Islam Asia Tenggara

This article is a critical review of Peacock's book on “Arabic Literary Culture in Southeast Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”. The book reflects the author's attention to the marginalization of the Arabic texts that are composed in the 17th and 18th century Southeast Asia, or for a Southeast Asian audience, and the Arabic texts that were read and copied in the region. Peacock based his analysis on a corpus of Arabic manuscripts in Southeast Asia from different collections in Banten, Jakarta National Library, and others. Peacock argues that in term of Islamic studies, scholars should not regard Southeast Asian Islam as peripheral, regardless its geographical position remotely from the Middle East. One of Peacock’s important arguments is that the royal court became the major centre for the writing and reading of an indigenous Southeast Asian Arabic literature before nineteenth century.

Ambivalent egalitarians? Pietists and the pedagogy of the “Pariah” in modern South India during the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT The pedagogy of the colonising British in nineteenth-century India was critical of traditional Indian education for various reasons. The proselytising pedagogists who viewed the cultural practice of caste as a major stumbling block to their evangelising mission continued to confront the practice, which appeared to have stood on a footing of social equality based on professional attributes. The colonial and missionary agencies often claimed that traditional Indian education revolved around the notion of social reproduction that emboldened caste-centric professions. Consequently, the colonial pedagogists, who were rooted in the principles of pietism, a Protestant movement in seventeenth-century Germany, introduced a new form of education for mind, heart, and hand. In India, the pietist pedagogy since the eighteenth century sought to replace traditional Indian education with Anglo-vernacular-religious education. It also created a controversial discourse of equality among Pariah, a generic term used to refer to all those who were believed to have been excluded from school education. This article shows how pietist pedagogists, widely known for their sense of religious supremacy and racialised pretensions, blended education and the pietist idea of equality before God to “refine” the subaltern social groups. In this way, the colonial pietist pedagogists acted as ambivalent egalitarians in the field of schooling.

Political economy of peace and war

This essay discusses two questions: (i) what has been the dominant influence on international relations, economics, or politics, and (ii) what economic or political relations are most conducive to war and peace? The first pits those who claim that it is the political relations of states which shape their economic relations against those who claim that it is the economic relations of states which shape their political relations. This leaves open the question of what kind of economic or political relations are most conducive to peace and war. Economists have mainly seen economics as pacifying otherwise belligerent political structures, but this was not true of Marxist-Leninists, for whom ‘capitalism means war’. Political scientists have generally advocated supranational structures to tame the ‘international anarchy’, but this is not true of those peace theorists for whom the international structure can be self-policing if its constituent parts are democratic. This essay explores the different historical phases of these debates, spanning from the eighteenth century till today. It concludes that politics has always been dominant in setting the economic agenda and that democracies are drifting towards an economic system similar to that of the despotisms they condemn.

François de Foix de Candalle: Euclidean authorship in the sixteenth century

This article discusses the work of François de Foix de Candalle and its importance for the early modern Euclidean tradition. It provides an outline of Foix's life, education and career, and it describes in particular his editions of the Elements published in 1566 and 1578. Those editions made substantial additions to the text, increasing the number of ‘books' from fifteen to eighteen: by far the largest addition to the Euclidean text since late antiquity. The article goes on to discuss Foix's intentions and his practices as an editor, and the reception of Foix's Elements. His book XVI remained in print in various languages well into the eighteenth century, making Foix an important and influential contributor to the early modern tradition of the Elements, whose work helps to illustrate the fluidity of that tradition as well as the character of early modern mathematical editorship more generally.

Five centuries of consanguinity, isolation, health, and conflict in Las Gobas: A Northern Medieval Iberian necropolis.

Between the 8th and 11th centuries CE, the Iberian Peninsula underwent profound upheaval due to the Umayyad invasion against the Visigoths, resulting in population shifts and lasting demographic impacts. Our understanding of this period is hindered by limited written sources and few archaeogenetic studies. We analyzed 33 individuals from Las Gobas, a necropolis in northern Spain, spanning the 7th to 11th centuries. By combining archaeological and osteological data with kinship, metagenomics, and ancestry analyses, we investigate conflicts, health, and demography of these individuals. We reveal intricate family relationships and genetic continuity within a consanguineous population while also identifying several zoonoses indicative of close interactions with animals. Notably, one individual was infected with a variola virus phylogenetically clustering with the northern European variola complex between ~885 and 1000 CE. Last, we did not detect a significant increase of North African or Middle East ancestries over time since the Islamic conquest of Iberia, possibly because this community remained relatively isolated.

Cartographies of warfare in the Indian subcontinent: Contextualizing archaeological and historical analysis through big data approaches

Some of the most notable human behavioral palimpsests result from warfare and its durable traces in the form of defensive architecture and strategic infrastructure. For premodern periods, this architecture is often understudied at the large scale, resulting in a lack of appreciation for the enormity of the costs and impacts of military spending over the course of human history. In this article, we compare the information gleaned from the study of the fortified cities of the Early Historic period of the Indian subcontinent (c. 3rd century BCE to 4th century CE) with the precolonial medieval era (9-17th centuries CE). Utilizing in-depth archaeological and historical studies along with local sightings and citizen-science blogs to create a comprehensive data set and map series in a “big-data” approach that makes use of heterogeneous data sets and presence-absence criteria, we discuss how the architecture of warfare shifted from an emphasis on urban defense in the Early Historic period to an emphasis on territorial offense and defense in the medieval period. Many medieval fortifications are known from only local reports and have minimal identifying information but can still be studied in the aggregate using a least-shared denominator approach to quantification and mapping.

The Conjuring Girdles of King Solomon and Doctor Faustus in Early Modern Material Magic

Abstract The article concerns conjuring girdles in early modern material magic, particularly in Central Europe during the long eighteenth century (c. 1660–c. 1820). Magicians in ritual circles could wear such girdles on the body as belts or sashes to conjure and command angels, spirits, and demons. Emphasis in the article is on anonymous German manuscript books of learned magic dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, with pseudepigraphal attributions to King Solomon and Doctor Faustus. These manuscripts explain the design, text, imagery, materials, measurements, production, and applications of conjuring girdles. The article also discusses what is known about their compilers, end-users, and readers during a period marked by hybridizing, variability, and democratization in material magic. The article includes three illustrations in books of learned magic with designs for conjuring girdles (Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Ms. Hist. Nat. 80; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Mag. 6 [no. 51]; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Mag. 133 [no. 27]); and two conjuring scenes from the legends of Doctor Faustus and his apprentice Christoph Wagner.

On the question of domestic slaves in late medieval and early modern Zoroastrianism

Abstract This article collects and analyses passages about male and female domestic slaves in the Persian Rivāyats. The Rivāyats consist of correspondence between Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries ce. In these letters, Parsis sought the opinions of Iranian Zoroastrians on various doctrinal and ritual issues. The passages in question cover a range of subjects, including the issue of converting household slaves to Zoroastrianism, their participation in domestic religious ceremonies, the exposure of their dead bodies in the towers of silence, and marrying female slaves. These references to slaves challenge the conventional narrative that pre-modern Zoroastrians were oppressed, marginalized, and poor communities. This narrative has overshadowed these pieces of evidence and has caused them not to be studied seriously. This paper seeks to go beyond this traditional reconstruction by examining these texts based on their context. The passages reflect the actual socio-religious issues of Zoroastrians, especially Parsis, and demonstrate their participation in the slave-owning milieu of late medieval and early modern Gujarat and Iran rather than mere anachronistic elements or rhetorical tools reflecting a scholastic treatment of a defunct legal question.

Attitudes to Pedlars and Street Traders in Late Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Commercial Hatred’ or Anti-Jewish Prejudice?

Abstract The late eighteenth century saw intense debate over the status of pedlars. In 1785, Pitt imposed a tax on shopkeepers and attempted to placate them by suggesting that he would ban the economic competition they faced from pedlars. It was only thanks to the support of manufacturers that pedlars were saved from economic destitution. Following the eventual repeal of the legislation, the spotlight moved to the itinerant tradesmen of London. The work of Patrick Colquhoun, a magistrate, highlighting Jewish street traders in London, led to proposed legislation which would have identified all Ashkenazi Jews in England and created a board with the power to levy a tax on the Jewish community. This article seeks to explain the complexity and inadequacy of the pedlars’ licensing legislation. It considers both economic and class conflicts and the anti-Jewish prejudices behind both debates. The article argues that the national debate over the tax on shopkeepers was a question of economic conflict and that anti-Jewish stereotypes played a limited role. In contrast, it argues that the debate over tradesmen in London was heavily influenced by anti-Jewish sentiments which were particularly powerful in the City of London. The debates highlight both the nature of economic conflict in late eighteenth-century England and the way in which anti-Jewish prejudice led to the proposal of legislation identifying and stigmatising the Jewish community.