Abstract Hachijo Island, part of the Izu-Ogasawara Islands, is situated near major plate boundaries, including the Nankai Trough, Sagami Trough, and Izu-Ogasawara Trench, making it highly susceptible to tsunamis triggered by earthquakes in these regions. Despite this vulnerability, limited tsunami research has been conducted in the area. This study aimed to uncover the tsunami history of Hachijo Island through geological surveys and numerical modeling, providing insights into potential tsunami sources. The field investigation at west coast revealed an event layer characterized by rounded gravels which is comparable to previously recognized tsunami deposits in this area. Radiocarbon dating results indicate that these deposits formed after the seventeenth century. Based on the dating results together with sedimentary features such as cracks, the 1703 Genroku earthquake and tsunami is more likely because geological evidence fits the historical descriptions. Numerical simulations for the 1703 Genroku tsunami were conducted to evaluate the fault source responsible for the tsunami deposits. The runup height observed at west coast could not be reproduced using a previously proposed fault model. This research developed several revised fault models by changing parameters to reflect their influence on Hachijo Island. Among these, one model successfully reproduced the impact of tsunamis on both Hachijo Island and surrounding regions. The geological records of Hachijo Island provide key constraints for tsunami source modeling and highlight the importance of remote island data in tsunami hazard assessments. This study improves our understanding of tsunami risks in regions and provides a refined model to guide future research and disaster mitigation strategies.

ABSTRACT The parish of Ashton-under-Lyne near Manchester had only three rectors for nearly the whole of the seventeenth century: Henry Fairfax from 1619 to 1643; John Harrison from 1643 to 1662; and Thomas Ellison from 1662 until his death in 1700. Key moments during their tenures reveal the parish as a microcosm of the changing ecclesial situation across England, from aspects of Jacobean and Caroline ‘godly’ nonconformity to the politico-religious divide between ‘Presbyterians’ and ‘Independents’ during the 1640s and 50s and post-Restoration Nonconformity. Nevertheless, local issues and relationships are often as significant as wider events, pointing to the ways in which studies of individual parishes complicate as well as confirm our understanding of national issues. In addition, a previously unremarked archival source resolves uncertainties surrounding Fairfax’s departure, debunking the myth that he was ejected as a Royalist, and that Harrison was imposed on the parish by Parliamentarian soldiers.

This article examines the constitution of the first volume of the Portefeuilles Vallant in order to show how the logic of comparison shaped its development. By bringing together both contemporary documents and older pieces, Vallant appears to have devised an archival framework that encourages both synchronic and diachronic readings. The deliberate diversity of the materials, sometimes selected in a heterogeneous manner, broadens the field of inquiry while raising questions about the centrality of comparison in the original project. The analysis of successive inventories and the continuation of the archival work by the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés suggest the existence of a collective enterprise. However, the organization of the collection remains fragmentary: the seemingly fortuitous juxtaposition of certain documents makes it difficult to assert with certainty that comparison constituted Vallant’s guiding principle. Moreover, the absence of explicit evidence from Vallant himself prevents a full reconstruction of his initial intent. The article thus brings to light the tensions between documentary diversity and conceptual coherence, while underscoring the heuristic value of this collection for the history of archival practices and comparative methods in the seventeenth century.

The aim of the study is to identify and analytically interpret the key problems involved in understanding religious transformations of the early modern period, as well as to determine the explanatory potential and limitations of the principal historiographical models applied to their analysis. The methodological strategy is based on the principles of comparative analysis, contextualisation, and historicisation. Comparative analysis is employed to juxtapose different interpretative models in a regional perspective, demonstrating the asynchronous and polycentric nature of religious change. Contextualisation is used to interpret religious phenomena within specific social and political settings, thereby avoiding excessive generalisation. Historicisation provides a critical examination of the very terms and categories employed, revealing their dependence on scholarly traditions and academic paradigms. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the systematisation and comparative assessment of the leading interpretative approaches to early modern religious transformations, which are typically examined in isolation. The study demonstrates that different models operate with distinct definitions of “religiosity,” thus producing incompatible trajectories for explaining religious change. It also highlights the polycentric and asynchronous character of early modern religious processes and proposes an integrative perspective capable of accounting for their multilayered structure. Based on the analysis, the study concludes that religious transformations of the early modern era constitute a multidimensional and uneven process that cannot be fully explained within the confines of a single interpretative model. A comparison of intellectual, institutional, social, and cultural approaches shows that each employs different criteria for defining religiosity and therefore constructs incompatible chronological and analytical frameworks. Taking methodological diversity into account makes it possible to describe more accurately the complexity of religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to reject uniform explanatory schemes in favour of a multilevel analytical perspective. Keywords: religious transformations, early modern period, religiosity, interpretative approaches, confessionalisation.

Many treatises on gynaecology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe the uterus as the cause of women’s diseases, according to a perspective inherited from the Hippocratic Corpus and Aretaeus. Simultaneously, however, and in a more positive view much indebted to Galen, its position, form and functions were presented as the admirable work of a wise nature that does nothing at random. In this paper, I aim to analyse the tension resulting from the coexistence of these two perspectives in Luis Mercado’s, Rodrigo de Castro’s, and Zacuto Lusitano’s treatises on women’s diseases and how the tension between the two is articulated with these authors’ views on sexual difference. Common to the three is an evident effort to aggrandise the subject of their treatises and to present women’s medical care as a particularly challenging area of expertise in which the medical author is a key authoritative character.

ABSTRACT The legacy of Africans in India continues to be presented as a checkered past with the backdrop of the slave trade for the seventeenth century rise of Afro-Indians, or communities known by the labels Sidi or Habashi, in the then political scene. Behind the veil of the political and economic movements of the period, lie the embedded histories of translocation. This article explores the cases from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in Konkan, along the west coast of India to open the conversation on the unique socio-cultural nexus burgeoned by the local Sidi rule. The discussion presents the Sidi rulers in Konkan bringing together the religious, political, and social currents from their original African homes and localizing some along the Konkani littoral. With a brief review of extant historic data on the Sidis, archival material such as personal correspondence, and fragments of material culture in Konkan, this article seeks to chart the trajectory of destabilised Sidi presence. Amidst the waves of relocation, an idea of “Hābasāna” takes root under the auspices of the Sidi Nawabs of Janjira, where the discussion will reflect moments of memorialisation and affective histories of landscape through the lens of the displaced Sidi families in modern times.

ABSTRACT This previously unpublished interview with György Kurtág and his late wife Márta, conducted on November 27, 2018, a few weeks after the premiere of Kurtág's opera Fin de partie at La Scala in Milan, is about the creation and interpretation of the work. The Kurtágs talk about their early experiences with opera, from well-known stories (such as their private opera sessions in their youth with György Ligeti) to lesser-known aspects of Kurtág's first attempts at the genre. They also talk about how and why Beckett became important to them and how the compositional process of Fin de partie went from initial ideas to orchestration. They express their mostly negative opinions about the first performance and discuss the concept of performance in general. The concept of translation as a conceptual framework for opera composition emerges at one point, as does the relationship between language and music. To reflect the critics’ opinion about the similarity of Kurtág's method of setting texts to music and that of the composers of the early seventeenth century, Kurtág analyzes a short scene from Monteverdi's Orfeo. The conversation is a vivid testimony to Kurtág's compositional thinking and the deep and collaborative nature of their relationship.

Abstract The article argues that medical responses to plague were a cause of the ‘psychoactive revolution’ during the long seventeenth century. Focusing on four metropoles in the Baltic and North Sea region, it shows that the commodification of sugar, opiates and tobacco during the last century of the Second Great Pandemic correlates both with outbreaks of plague in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Stockholm and with the intra-regional prescription of these intoxicants in popular and authorized plague physic. In so doing, it argues for the importance of household consumption practices in driving the psychoactive revolution and points to the importance of women as well as men in the popularization of intoxicants. By tracing the popularization of sugar, tobacco and opium from c.1600 rather than c.1800 and considering their dietary uptake in relation to material changes in plague physic, it identifies an under-appreciated set of consumer motives informing household consumption practices: not least the need to allay fear, pain and bodily and mental disorder. The article concludes by introducing the concept of ‘accustomization’ as the way in which contemporary observers explained how reactive consumption in the face of epidemics could become habitual, recreational and forms of dependency over time.

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex relationships between Spaniards and Guaraní peoples in the Río de la Plata province during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It challenges prevailing historiographical narratives regarding a purportedly “harmonious miscegenation” and questions the characterisation of Spanish colonisation in Paraguay as founded upon kinship relations between Spaniards and Guaraní. Through rigorous archival analysis, the study demonstrates that colonial documentation reveals profoundly asymmetric power relations regulated through slavery, servitude, and sexual violence. The research critically evaluates the deployment of the Spanish term “brother‐in‐law” ( cuñado ) in translating Guaraní concepts, determining that this terminology indicated colonial domination rather than genuine kinship bonds. The analysis recovers Indigenous voices expressing resistance to Spanish control whilst genealogical reconstruction of a Guaraní family illuminates the devastating effects of colonisation. This article proposes new methodological approaches for understanding the contributions of Indigenous history and colonial practices affecting Indigenous peoples.

Five income registers documenting transactions of the seventeenth century at the Jesuit College in Luxembourg have been found to be partially covered by fragments of a manuscript containing Henry of Langenstein’s commentary on the Sentences from Paris and the academic year 1371–1372. The discovery includes eight parchment bifolia and approximately 20 paper folios, a sizeable fragment of a previously unknown copy of a significant text for both the University of Paris and the new University of Vienna at the end of the fourteenth century. The recoverable text includes portions of book I, questions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, as well as book II, question 1, by one of the founding figures of the Faculty of Theology at Vienna.

Feminist biblical criticism of Proverbs 1–9 has decried the figure of “Dame Folly” as reinforcing pejorative stereotypes of women that blame women for “the world’s sin and corruption.” To be sure, in the history of Christian biblical interpretation, Proverbs has been read in precisely this way—and with tragic consequences. In fact, Proverbs was used as fuel for the witch-hunting craze that infected the Christian West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its particular focus on women as being especially “addicted” to heresy and “evil superstitions.” Nonetheless, as this essay demonstrates, a reading which denigrates all women universally as blameworthy is not really native to post-exilic Judaism or biblical literature in general before the Hellenistic period. Instead, it emerges with the influence of Hellenism and the misogynist stereotypes endemic to Greek literature, mythology, and even philosophy that distort and blur the lens through which Hellenistic Jews (and later Greco-Roman Christians) read their Scriptures. Through a reading of Proverbs in its own language, its own post-exilic Jewish world, and its own literary context, this essay both recovers the wise women of Israel, so esteemed and valued in post-exilic Judaism, and uncovers the identity of the real fool of Proverbs 9.

The essay examines a libretto of Catone in Utica by Metastasio, performed in 1752 in Mazzarino (Caltanissetta) with music by Egidio Romualdo Duni and «diversi maestri napoletani». The copy, preserved in the Municipal Library of Piazza Armerina (Enna), attests to the enduring operatic activity in the private theatre built in Mazzarino at the end of the seventeenth century by Carlo Maria Carafa, previously documented only by a libretto of Gli equivoci nel sembiante by Alessandro Scarlatti (1688). The new source serves as a valuable document both for reconstructing the itineraries of artists who, in the eighteenth century, spread the language of the Neapolitan school in peripheral or secondary centres, and for identifying the transmission channels that carried texts and musical scores from Naples to Sicily. The libretto also helps to understand the mechanisms and rhetoric of musical patronage on the island, thanks to the list of noble patrons (the family of Ercole Michele Branciforte, Prince of Scordia), who appear in the libretto as sponsors of individual cast members. Furthermore, it provides new information about the tenor Domenico De Amicis and his daughter, Anna Lucia — the renowned soprano whose debut, previously dated to 1754 in Florence as a comic singer, must consequently be moved back by two years.

This essay examines the role of ecclesiastical discipline within the Dutch Reformed Church of the seventeenth century as a tool of religious, moral, and social control, highlighting the gender and class inequalities embedded in its application. Through the analysis of the consistory records of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, it explores cases of censorship that reveal a harsher attitude toward women, particularly in matters of sexual misconduct or religious nonconformity. The study shows how the consistory’s authority extended beyond the spiritual sphere, shaping social relationships and deeply affecting the reputation and honor of community members. In this perspective, ecclesiastical discipline emerges as a pervasive form of power –both religious and sociopolitical– through which acceptable behavior was defined and patriarchal order reinforced within Dutch Reformed society.

Identified at an early date, autonymy has always been an important theme in the discourse of Indian Sanskrit grammarians. But this phenomenon also aroused the interest of other ancient Indian language theorists, and rightly so. In the section of the Vaiyākaraṇabhūṣaṇasāra devoted to the object(s) of noun ( nāmārthanirṇaya ), Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa comments on two kārikās taken from Bhaṭṭojī Dīkṣita’s Vaiyākaraṇasiddhāntakārikā relating to autonymy. It is not a mere gloss: the seventeenth century grammarian seeks above all to reaffirm the authority of the theses developed within the Pāṇinian school by refuting doctrines defended in other circles. This is an opportunity for us to study the dimensions of the autonymic phenomenon around which the ‘new’ debates crystallize. For between Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya and Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa’s Vaiyākaraṇabhūṣaṇasāra are the ins and outs of the autonymy issue the same? What is at stake at Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa’s time? These are the main questions this paper tries to provide answers to.

Although the study of Christian hagiography still primarily targets ancient and medieval texts, the early modern hagiography has recently been established as a distinctive research topic. Its focus is not only on the transformations of the post-Tridentine hagiography of the Roman Catholic Church, which effectively appropriated the cult of the saints as its important identifier. In this respect, the early modern texts seem to have dissolved the conventional association of hagiography with Catholicism: the analyses of surviving early modern texts demonstrate that the Protestant churches—while still critical towards the cult of saints as they knew it from late medieval devotional practices— did not reject the concept of sanctity or hagiography as such. Martyrology in particular seems to have been very frequent in all early modern Christian denominations, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; indeed, research on Czech early modern hagiography of non-Catholic provenance has concentrated on texts about Jan Hus, or other Czech supporters of religious reforms who died violent deaths. However, literary works such as a series of twelve Czech short texts published anonymously at the early seventeenth century under the title “Hystorye o bratru Janovi Palečkovi” (The histories of Brother Jan Palček) show that the equation of early modern Czech Non-Catholic hagiography with martyrology is unjustified. Indeed, the series employs many textual practices and topoi of (late) medieval Christian hagiography, and although its main character is not called a saint, it still bears distinctive features of the concept of Christian sanctity. The article aims to argue that the series can be interpreted as an example of non-martyrological hagiography of a Protestant Reformation type.

One powerful idea of the Ancién Régime suggested that meritorious judges could prevent judicial abuse, while innate deficiencies linked to low social origins or questionable occupations caused corruption. This concept of merit included schooling and compliance with royal law, but this was only one fledgling aspect among others. Merit also strongly referred to the noble and pure Christian lineage of judges and their forebears, who had served community, king, or the faith in honorable occupations and deserved rewards. Merit in this sense provided judges with the proper character to act virtuously in the magistracies. The idea also derided as corruptible people of mixed ethnic origins, questionable social descent, and those who garnered money in humble occupations. For this reason, many theologians or jurists underlined the dangers of selling office appointments to unmerited candidates. The “judicial pluralism” provided the rules for the innate corruption and explains to an extent the divergence between royal law and the judicial practices. However, in the late seventeenth century, the discourse on innate corruption began to decline, as the Crown increasingly promoted trained and obedient ministers of proven experience rather than those of high birth. The present article focuses on this period until the reign of Carlos III (1759-1788) that saw the rise of performative corruption.

<em>Saimon</em> are recitations read as part of Onmyōdō or Shugendo rituals. They are of particular interest because of their contents are not based on canonical Buddhist or Shinto lore but rather on sources of yin-yang divination like the fourteenth-century <em>Hoki naiden</em>. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, <em>saimon</em> became a central feature of village ritual, both in collective village festivals and in household rites, and as such, they reached the ears of many. This article offers annotated translations of two saimon that were used by village ritualists (<em>tayū</em>, <em>negi</em>) in small mountain settlements in Oku Mikawa (Aichi Prefecture). These translations are based on manuscripts from tayū archives and date from the seventeenth century. A textual analysis demonstrates that while these two <em>saimon</em> tell the stories of different deities, they display a number of shared motifs and traits. I argue that these commonalities reflect the continued relevance and performance of <em>saimon</em> in Oku Mikawa and confound attempts to draw clear historical boundaries between “medieval” and “early modern” religion.

This article explores the longstanding connection between a local version of a widespread cultural phenomenon – sea and lake serpents – and the community that cares for it. Legends and observation narratives, memorates, from the seventeenth century onwards concerning this lake serpent are analysed. The study further discusses how these narratives constitute the best-known Swedish version of lake serpents, the Great Lake Monster in the province of Jämtland, as an intermediary in connecting humans, history, landscape, and societal transformations, and how these narratives convey a sense of place. These intimate links position the Great Lake Monster as a protective spirit of the locality, a genius loci. Centred around one key question – “In what ways do Great Lake Monster narratives express connections between people, history, landscape, and place?” – the article shows how early interpretations of this phenomenon were shaped by life embedded in the everyday interaction with nature and the landscape. With the older legends functioning as a formative foundation for the later shaping of the idea as a cryptid, or “hidden animal”, I argue that they can be viewed as bridging the shared idea of the lake serpent on the Frösö runestone, Jämtland, Sweden, and the cryptozoological tradition of an observed animal in the lake.

Abstract This article is about an unknown manuscript belonging to Thomas van Erpe, also known as Erpenius (d. 1624), a Dutch Arabist and orientalist. His Ms. Dd.3.82 preserved at Cambridge University Library was recorded as an Arabic booklet for centuries. But current research suggests otherwise; it is a booklet of Muslim prayers partially copied on Indonesian treebark paper (dluwang), including not only Arabic but also Malay and Javanese phrases and terms. Through a comparative study, it becomes clear that Dd.3.82 was copied based on a widely circulated Persian text entitled Jawāhir-i Khamsa by Muḥammad Ghawth (d. 1562/1563), commonly used in Shaṭṭāriyya Sufi order. On this subject, this article may revise the literature and provide readers with a new proposal that Shaṭṭāriyya came to Indonesia through Erpenius’s Dd.3.82 and long before ʿAbd al-Raʾūf of Singkel (d. 1693), who was often considered the importer of the Shaṭṭāriyya order during the last decades of the seventeenth century.

A Green Marvell: Seventeenth Century Draining of the Fens and “Salmon-Fishers Moist” in <em>Upon Appleton House</em>