Early Seventeenth Century Research Articles

The Image of the Turk in the Orthodox Polemical Literature of the Late Sixteenth – Early Seventeenth Century

The article discusses the practice of using the image of the Turk as “the Other” by Orthodox polemicists from the late 16th century till the first quarter of the 17th century. The conquest of Byzantine, the status of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch and the Eastern Church under the Ottomans, the eschatological dimension of “Turkish domination” – this is an incomplete range of issues that have been the subject of debate between supporters and opponents of The Union of Brest. The reason for that was the process of remembering Byzantine roots, as a form of attribution of Orthodox identity. The legitimacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople was a matter of organizational capacity of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church in the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth. An important role in this was played by the eschatological picture of the world in the texts of the polemicists – the authors emphasized the exceptional role of Rus` in defending the true faith because the Ruthenian Church was persecuted and poor. Another equally important process is the construction of the “Pole-Catholic’s” hostile image through the narrative of “Turkish domination” by Orthodox polemicists. The Khotyn military campaign (1620–1621) and the restoration process of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church hierarchy forced the Orthodox hierarchs to abandon the use of the narrative of the positive experience of “Turkish domination” and to join the creation of the idea of “Cossack bastion” (the Cossacks as defenders of not only the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth but of the entire Christian faith). The model of the “Cossack bastion” lasted until the second half of the 17th century, when the Kyiv clergy was finally disappointed in the Cossacks as an anti-Muslim force due to the hetmans’ attraction to military-political alliances with the Ottoman Empire.Manuscript received 20.03.2020

John Locke and Samuel Rutherford on the distance between paternal care and fiduciary trust

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to link Locke’s use of “fiduciary trust” to the early seventeenth century debates about the limits of Charles I’s sovereignty. Specifically, this paper points to a striking congruence between Locke and Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex (1644). Anticipating similar formulations in the Second Treatise, Rutherford argues that unlike domestic relationships, which are governed by natural paternal affections (care), sovereign authority is unnatural and artificial. In stark contrast to prominent royalist positions of that day, Rutherford argues that fathers do not have the right to kill their sons and wives, specifically linking the source and limit of their authority to natural love and affection. This distinction sharply distinguishes paternal authority from fiduciary trust. The former is governed by the natural law and is derived from the implicit or psychic trust that emerges between those in loving relationships; the latter is a product of positive law and is built on a presumption of distrust. Locke builds on these arguments, particularly with regard to conjugal society. While co-parents will typically be bound together by care and affection, the risk of the husband’s neglect or overreach required that formal trust-mechanisms be put in place to assure the rights of the child (and wife) were not infringed. Like paternal authority, Locke’s conjugal society is another example of why political authority cannot be predicated on care.

Paleoclimate of the Little Ice Age to the Present in the Kankakee Valley of Illinois and Indiana, USA Based on 18O/16O Isotope Ratios of Freshwater Shells

ABSTRACT The cooling associated with the Little Ice Age (LIA) had differential severity across the globe. Within the American Midwest, the local impacts of this cooling have not been established. Our purpose here is to determine its local effects and establish the impacts on the environment encountered at a seventeenth century Native American village in Illinois, USA. We obtained oxygen and carbon stable isotope ratios of freshwater mussel shells from this early seventeenth century site, occupied during one of the coldest periods of the LIA. These data were compared to the oxygen and carbon ratios of freshwater shells from a nineteenth century cabin as well as modern shells. Results demonstrate that shell stable oxygen isotopes capture environmental conditions at the three sites and suggest more arid conditions during the LIA and increased precipitation into the present. Findings also may capture the extensive alteration of the Kankakee region’s drainage between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as contemporary global warming. Overall, this study illustrates the value of archaeological data to past and contemporary climate studies.

Imagined interiors – imagined collections

Cabinet paintings showing an (art) collection in an interior developed as a genre in the early seventeenth century in Antwerp. The depicted collection could be the actual art collection in an imagined, idealized interior, or, more metaphorically, it could also be an imagined, fictional collection of paintings, sculptures, scientific instruments, silverwork, textiles, and naturalia such as flowers or shells. Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625) and Pieter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), among others, used this genre in a series illustrating the five senses. These imagined interiors also influenced the caprices by Panini and Piranesi of a cityscape that is a collage of buildings, ruins, and archaeological fragments. In this essay, we relate these fictional representations of collections – objects as well as architectural and archaeological fragments – with the collections and scenography of (house) museums. We consider two house museums in particular: the house of the architect and collector Sir John Soane in London and the Museum of Innocence by writer Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul. House museums traditionally expose collections aside from a museological scenography but in their historical, domestic setting – “frozen” in another context and epoch. The two selected cases, however, were initially conceived as museums and contain an eclectic collection, presented as a pastiche, with a domestic setting that is strongly theatrical or even artificial.

ЛЕКСИКО-ГРАММАТИЧЕСКИЕ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ СУБДИАЛЕКТА ШИАК В КОНТЕКСТЕ ЯЗЫКОВОГО КОНТАКТА В АКАДИИ

В статье представлены грамматические и лексико-семантические особенности субдиалекта шиак в контексте языкового контакта в историческом регионе Акадия(Канада), выявленные в ходе корпусного исследования. Анализу подвергаются функциональные возможности предлогов, в том числе вынесение предлогов в конец предложения; семантические характеристики наречий-интенсификаторов; вариативное использование вопросительных частиц -ti / -tu при образовании вопросов; специфика диалектной глагольной системы, включая инфинитивные формы, а также правила спряжения глаголов. The article explores the dialectal features of Acadian French in New Brunswick (NB), Canada. Acadia has been developing as a region with distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics since the early seventeenth century (1605) after Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Du Gua de Monts discovered Port-Royal (modern-day Nova Scotia). It encompasses the Atlantic provinces including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and partially Quebec (Gaspesie, Cote-Nord and Iles de la Madeleine). The study focuses on a variety of French known as chiac (or chiaque), spoken in the province of New Brunswick. Despite its limited geographical distribution (south-east of NB), chiac proves to be of interest for research: it is highly variable, mostly spoken, and lexically, semantically, phonetically, and even grammatically influenced by English. Furthermore, it shows signs of language mixing. The author argues that the presented functional and lexical features are partially due to the longlasting language contact in Acadia and a specific sociolinguistic situation within the region. The source of evidence for the present study comes from the analysis of the oral corpus Chiac-Kasparian H99 and the mini-corpus Kasparian-Leger H2004 provided by Dr. Sylvia Kasparian, Head of the Textual Data Analysis Laboratory (Laboratoire d’analyse de donnees textuelles), University of Moncton. The corpus consists of transcribed spontaneous conversations of the inhabitants of the south-east of New Brunswick. The provided linguistic material comprises an unannotated text corpus, accompanied by partial sociolinguistic data about the speakers, including age, gender, place of study, place of residence, and status of participants to each other. Therefore, our first research step was to carry out the content analysis and subsequently interpret the results. At the initial stages of analysis, the authors annotated the text corpus which enabled them to highlight several distinctive characteristics of chiac, both as a subdialect of Acadian French and as a contact-induced variety, including signs of semantic transformation in both French and borrowed adverbs; dialectal interrogative morphemes -ti / -tu, and preposition stranding. Moreover, the authors postulate variability in verb forms, conjugation system, and functioning of auxiliaries. It must be noted, that the study relies on the theoretical and empirical body of work conducted by L. Peronnet, S. Kasparian, G. Chevalier, R. King, M. Roy, A. Thibault.

The social life of Bartolomeo della Nave’s art collection in Seicento Venice

Abstract Information on the life of the Venetian merchant Bartolomeo della Nave (1571/79?–1632) is scarce, but what is known is that he exhibited one of the most outstanding art collections in Venice in the early seventeenth century. This essay considers the places from which della Nave acquired some of his works, brings together visitor accounts of the collection, and examines della Nave’s innovative methods of displaying art in his home, which was frequented by visual artists, architects and writers. Itinerary accounts, visual quotations and poetic evocations chart the vivid afterlives of della Nave’s works – not only in Britain, where many of them travelled after his death, as has been well treated in the literature – but in Venice, where most of them originated.

“Learn to Restrain Your Mouth”: Alchemical Rumours and their Historiographical Afterlives

Abstract From around 1700 onwards, a number of sensationalist claims regarding adepts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to appear in alchemical literature. They eventually made their way into standard works of historiography and continue to be repeated as factual. Yet the source for these rumours, a poem attributed to Martinus de Delle, supposedly a chamberlain of Emperor Rudolf II, has largely escaped scrutiny. The only surviving manuscript version currently known is here edited and translated in full for the first time. In the introductory essay, we call into question the existence of De Delle. Through scrutiny of the portrayals of alchemists within the poem, we propose that the author may have been an assayer in Prague. We then draw attention to the roles and effects of rumours within both the history and historiography of alchemy and argue for the importance of taking alchemical gossip seriously.

Los inicios de la ciencia moderna en el Caribe Neogranadino: Pedro López de León teoría y práctica en la cirugía de la Cartagena del Siglo XVII

La pregunta de quién fue el cirujano sevillano Pedro López de León y qué significó el manual de medicina y cirugía que escribió en Cartagena de Indias a comienzos del siglo XVII, es el objetivo central que persigue nuestro trabajo. A través de la reconstrucción de su vida, de las reflexiones en torno a su obra y de un análisis de los referentes bibliográficos que usó, resaltaremos la notoriedad trasatlántica que alcanzó en el esfuerzo por desarrollar el conocimiento científico de la medicina moderna en un puerto central del Caribe en el comercio Atlántico en la edad Moderna.

Exploration and Experimentation on the Weight and Density of Substances in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: Introduction

Exploration and Experimentation on the Weight and Density of Substances in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: Introduction

Ambiguous Memories of the Reformation: The Case of Norway

Abstract The Reformation came to Norway along with Danish annexation of political and ecclesiastical power. For this reason, Norwegian history writing seldom appreciated the history of the Norwegian Reformation, and preferred to look further back to the history of the Middle Ages in search of national, as well as religious, roots of Norwegian Christianity. This was already the case in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Norwegian historical writing. In nineteenth century historical research, the strategy was underpinned by focussing on the medieval period of Christianization: Norwegian Christianity was imported from the West, from England. Here, the Pope was not at all important. Instead, some key Reformation values were addressed in a kind of “proto-Reformation” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The King was the ruler of the church; native, Old Norse language was used and promoted; and the people (strongly) identified themselves with their religion.

Rabbi Moshe Zacuto and the Kabbalistic Circle of Amsterdam1

AbstractBorn in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, Moses Zacuto (Moshe Zacut) belongs among the most prolific Jewish figures of his time. He is best known for a wealth of creative work in a wide variety of fields: poetry and drama, halacha, as well as extensive Kabbalistic writings. Zacuto also had a special interest in magical manuscripts and the uses of divine names, which he collected into a lexicon known today asShorshei HaShemot. Zacuto left Amsterdam while young and lived in Eastern Europe before moving to Italy. In this article, we demonstrate that Zacuto had already begun to construct this vast lexicographical project in Amsterdam, and that those beginnings are best understood against the background of the magical and Kabbalistic manuscripts available in early seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

War of the Whales: Climate Change, Weather and Arctic Conflict in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract Beginning in 1580, average annual temperatures across the Arctic cooled amid the regional onset of the 'Grindelwald Fluctuation', a particularly cold but volatile period in the Little Ice Age. By contributing to socioeconomic trends that raised the cost of vegetable oils, climatic cooling encouraged European merchants to establish rival whaling operations around the frigid archipelago of Svalbard, roughly halfway between Norway and the North Pole. From 1611 until 1619, European whalers depended on temporary encampments set up along the shores of bays in the islands of Svalbard, and eventually the nearby island of Jan Mayen. When regional sea ice registered the climatic trends of the Grindelwald Fluctuation by besetting these bays, whalers from different European nations and companies coped by cooperating with one another. Yet when the volatility of the Grindelwald Fluctuation in the already variable climate of Svalbard and Jan Mayen drew ice away from the bays, violence often broke out between rival whalers and their escorting warships. Shifting environmental circumstances therefore played a previously ignored role in inciting and mitigating violence in the first decade of the Spitsbergen whaling industry. These relationships can offer new perspectives on the future of geopolitical competition in a warming Arctic.

Commodities and the Import Trade in Early Plantation Ulster

As a new wave of British settlers moved into Ulster following the plantation there in the early seventeenth century, ports, towns, markets and fairs were both established and further developed. The survival of the port books for Londonderry, Coleraine, Carrickfergus and the Lecale ports of County Down for the years 1612–15 offers detailed information of goods imported into Ulster which affords us insights into the consumer habits and preferences of the British settlers now living in that province. While it was hoped by some that the introduction of a new market and trade culture would have a ‘civilising’ effect upon the Gaelic Irish, evidence of consumer preferences tells a somewhat different story, which a study of Ulster’s import trade and settler society in early Plantation Ulster can illustrate.

The Image of Guru Nanak in Dadu-Panthi Sources

This essay examines the issue of Guru Nanak’s inclusion in the mid-to-late seventeenth-century devotional text prepared by the Dadu-panthi savant, Raghavdas, the Bhakt-māl or Garland of Devotees. This text follows by some decades the similarly titled Bhakt-māl of Nabha Das. However, while Nabha Das excludes Guru Nanak, Raghavdas’ Bhakt-māl embraces him and includes a much more diverse seventeenth- and pre-seventeenth-century saintly clientele that was particular to both northern and southern India. The essay is one of the first to examine this text in Sikh studies and tease out the reasons which may have prompted Raghavdas to include Guru Nanak. In the process, it attempts to understand early non-Sikh bhakti views of the Sikh Gurus while also providing fresh looks at Sikh numbers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and at the diverse and multi-ideological environment of northern India from the early 1600s onward. It also suggests Raghavadas’ familiarity with the poetry of his near contemporary ideologue, the great Sikh scholar Bhai Gurdas Bhalla.

Refined Radiocarbon Chronologies for Northern Iroquoian Site Sequences: Implications for Coalescence, Conflict, and the Reception of European Goods

This article presents results to date of the Dating Iroquoia project. Our objective is to develop high-precision radiocarbon chronologies for northeastern North American archaeology. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling of 184 AMS radiocarbon dates derived from 42 Northern Iroquoian village sites in five regional sequences in order to construct new date estimates. The resulting revised chronology demands a rethinking of key assumptions about cultural process in the region regarding the directionality and timing of processes of coalescence and conflict and the introduction of European trade goods. The results suggest that internal conflict may have preceded confederacy formation among the Haudenosaunee but not the Wendat, as has been previously assumed. External conflict, previously thought to have begun in the early seventeenth century, began more than a century earlier. New data also indicate that the timing and distribution of European materials were more variable between communities than acknowledged by the logic underlying traditional trade-good chronologies. This enhanced chronological resolution permits the development and application of archaeological theories that center the lived experiences and relational histories of Iroquoian communities, as opposed to the generalized thinking that has dominated past explanatory frameworks.

Garments, Signatures, and Ottoman Self-Fashioning in the Imperial Periphery: Moldavian Voyvode Ştefan Tomşa II and Ottomanization in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract The paper examines the strategies of self-representation pursued by Moldavian Voyvode Ștefan Tomșa II (r. 1611-1615, 1621-1623). From his ascension to the throne, Tomșa faced accusations of wholesale adoption of Ottoman customs and fashion, and even conversion to Islam. While Romanian scholars have largely dismissed these claims as a product of hostile propaganda, the paper argues that—while remaining an Orthodox Christian—the voyvode deliberately emphasized his affinity to the Ottoman cultural idiom and presented himself to his subjects as a member of the Ottoman ruling class. By examining the nexus between Tomșa’s career, material objects he commissioned, and chancery innovations during his reign, the paper looks into the process of Christian Ottomanization in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.

English Misadventures in the Red Sea and the Tangled Web of Jurisdiction, Sovereignty and Commerce in the Early Seventeenth Century

This article analyses the first three English ventures into the Red Sea from 1608–1614 under the auspices of the East India Company's fourth, sixth, and eighth voyages. These ventures experienced a variety of disasters from shipwreck, captivity, mutiny, and the deaths of crewmembers. The sixth voyage, commanded by Henry Middleton, experienced the worst of the disasters. Middleton ran afoul of Ottoman officials in the port city of Mocha in Yemen and was taken in chains to the regional capital of Sana'a. He eventually escaped and returned to the Red Sea to seek revenge by blockading the port and committing acts of piracy. Middleton's actions reverberated back to Istanbul and London, where the main point of contact between England and the Ottoman Empire, the Levant Company, was forced to deal with the fallout in order to maintain its presence in the Sultan's dominions. The article argues that, despite the failures of these voyages, they reveal a great deal about the nature of overlapping jurisdictions and sovereignty in the early modern world, and furthermore they provide an important window into the evolution of corporations into entities capable of putting together empires amongst these disparate jurisdictions.

New Evidence for Ben Jonson’s Epigrammes (ca. 1612) in Bodleian Library Records

New Evidence for Ben Jonson’s <i>Epigrammes</i> (ca. 1612) in Bodleian Library Records

Recogito-in-a-Box: From Annotation to Digital Edition

Through the combination of two popular approaches in the Digital Humanities – digital editions and semantic annotation – this tutorial will present simple ways to create, analyse and export semantic annotations from texts and images, and publish them online. It will introduce intuitive, user-friendly, open-source tools interwoven in an integrated workflow from Recogito – a free online semantic annotation tool developed by the Pelagios Network – to documents encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. With this tutorial, users interested in semantic annotation and digital editions will learn how to benefit from Recogito’s automatic recognition of named entities, and how to refine them manually, checking the place references against historical gazetteers. They will learn how to create annotations ex novo, check or modify annotations identified by Recogito, and discover how the geo-annotations produced on the text can then be plotted on a digital map. Finally, users will learn how to use Recogito’s export options and, in particular, the TEI format, which will become the starting point of a TEI-based simple minimal edition. As a case study, it the tutorial will focus on the semantic and geographic annotation of an early Argentinian chronicle called Historia de la Conquista del Rio de la Plata, better known as La Argentina Manuscrita, written by Ruy Diaz de Guzman in the early seventeenth century. Publisher's Note This article has been published in both Spanish and English. To download the Spanish version, click the Download link and select PDF (Es). Este articulo ha sido publicado en ingles y espanol. Para la version en espanol, haga clic en el enlace descargar y seleccione PDF (ES).

Authoring and Publishing in the Age of Manuscripts: the Columbia University Copy of an Ottoman Compendium of Sciences with Marginal Glossing

Abstract This study examines an early-seventeenth century copy of a popular book in Ottoman Turkish originally composed by Nevʿī Efendi (d. 1599) in the early 1570s. With around 150 extant copies available in almost every major Islamic manuscript collection across the world, Nevʿī Efendi’s compendium, or the “fruits,” of sciences (Netāyicü’l-fünūn) deserves to be called an early modern bestseller among the Ottoman reading public. The particular copy of the work located at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Or. 360) is a notable one with numerous minhu records (i.e., marginal glosses one could trace back to the author) written in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. In this article, besides situating Nevʿī Efendi’s work in the broader genre of taṣnīf al-ʿulūm (classification of sciences) in the Ottoman as well as the broader Islamicate realm of learning, I will pay closer attention to discussing the minhu notes that present intriguing insights into the questions of what a published work meant in the age of manuscripts, and how the continuous interventions on the text made by the author, and possibly by the copyists and readers, enrich as well as shuffle the “authentic” contents of the “published” version.