Seventeenth Century Research Articles

Rural Inferno

This article addresses the impact of wildfires on rural peasant communities during the pre-modern period. It demonstrates how and when wildfires started, what was done to limit their occurrence, what economic and environmental consequences followed, and what social safety-nets existed. By using the case of Lower Satakunta (Western Finland) during the seventeenth century, the article reveals that the occurrence of wildfires was strongly correlated with agricultural methods, climate variability, and weather conditions. The environmental consequences often led to substantial loss of forest and agricultural lands and the economic consequences were often such that, without aid from the local community, the future existence of peasant households was impossible. Nevertheless, through the renewed medieval laws on fire support (Sw. brandstod), peasant communities were able to create socio-economic safety nets that helped them withstand and recover from fire disasters.

“In Pursuit of Reform”

The religious and intellectual history of early modern and modern Islam is often reduced to a teleological and Arabo-centric narrative, in which modernity began with Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition or the Nahḍa, the Arab Renaissance. Within this narrative, the succession of Sufism, Islamic reformism, Islamism, and Salafism is seen as a “genealogy of Islamism.” Using a regressive history approach, and presenting the currents of international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century, this article seeks in contrast to illuminate the plurality of possible pathways and the heterogeneous nature of historical moments. Moving backward through time, it attempts to identify ruptures and continuities, and to highlight successive interpretations of medieval authors and concepts (such as salafiyya). In so doing, it endeavors to demonstrate the constructed nature of the received historiographical narrative of late nineteenth-century “Islamic reformism,” as well as that of “Arabic thought in the liberal age.” Historiographical debates on the “neo-Sufism” and Aufklärung of the eighteenth century have led to a better understanding of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a thirst for renewal (tajdīd) flourished in hadith, Islamic law, and Sufism. Recent research on the process of “confessionalization” over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has highlighted the importance of political factors in developments of Islam during the age of the three Empires (Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman).

The politics of voluntariness in modern history: introduction

ABSTRACT The introduction to the theme issue on the Politics of Voluntariness in Modern History starts by discussing the origins and uses of the liberal discourse on voluntariness in the seventeenth century. It was during this period that philosophers and politicians began to present voluntariness as specific to liberalism. By the same token, voluntariness and authoritarian rule have been declared incompatible. This introduction and the papers in the theme issue critically discuss the exclusive linkage of voluntariness and liberalism – an interpretation that fails to capture authoritarian governing in its entirety, while ignoring compulsory and exclusionary practices in liberal societies. This theme issue shows voluntariness to be essential to policies and political practices in both liberal and illiberal societies. Political practices are at the core of our articles: amid a web of actors, institutions, discourses, and expectations, the individual means and capacity to act voluntarily, make choices, and overcome constraints are historically and socially variable. The introduction and the theme issue explore this variability to illuminate how voluntariness operates as a driving force for political practices in liberal and illiberal societies, drawing on case studies from German, Swiss, and U.S.-American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The politics of persuasion: foreign powers and the first Italian newspapers

This article studies the involvement and the relationships between diplomats and the periodical press in Italian cities during the seventeenth century. Newspapers first appeared on the Italian peninsula in the early 1640s: 1639 in Genoa, 1640 in Milan and Florence, 1642 in Bologna and 1645 in Turin. A novelty on the Italian information market, foreign diplomats turned their attention towards influencing newspaper coverage immediately. News editors would often exchange news with ambassadors, but maintaining such relationships was a delicate balancing act for all the actors involved. On the one hand, the news editors own governments certainly not always welcomed too overtly friendly relationships with representatives of foreign powers. On the other hand, not maintaining relationships with these foreign representatives could be detrimental to their own news business as competitors might easily obtain better quality news. This article studies this difficult balance of power and argues that it is crucial to appreciate these dynamics to understand how diplomats address audiences. It seeks to demonstrate these men went much further than spreading printed material to promote their patrons or employers; physical threats and attacks could be equally part of an agent’s tools to influence newspaper publishers to retract or not publish a certain piece of news.

Crafting history in real time: The count-duke of Olivares, the Holy Roman Empire and generalissimo Wallenstein on the Spanish stage (1632–1634)

This essay explores the portrayal of Albrecht von Wallenstein’s downfall on the Spanish stage during the Thirty Years’ War. El prodigio de Alemania (1634), a play written by Calderón de la Barca and Antonio Coello, serves as a topic of study for understanding international politics of the time. The death of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden at the Battle of Lützen (1632) marked a turning point in the career of Wallenstein, who had played a significant role as the general commander during the conflict. The play itself was a product of Prime Minister Olivares’ domestic and international policies and aimed to legitimize specific ideological interests. The essay focuses on the manipulation of theatre as a means of enhancing the reputation of the Spanish monarchy and examines how the construction of the play allows us to comprehend the strained relations between Spain and the Holy Roman Empire during the war. It also scrutinizes the modifications made to the literary product to align with the changing political realities and illuminates the significance of Spanish theatre in crafting historical narratives and propagating political ideologies during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Голодомор і ранньомодерні московські стратегії “виводу еліт” та “випаленої землі”: перегук підходів

The article is devoted to research of the correlation between the mechanism of the Holodomor of 1932–1933 on the one side and the previous Muscovite expansionist strategies related to the integration of the Russian imperia on the other. The aim is to examine the coherence of the early modern Muscovite practices “deportation of elites” and “burnt earth” with the approaches to the organization of the Holodomor. The conceptual strategy of the research bases on the historicism principle, contextual analysis and comparative methods. The scientific novelty. The article is a pioneer research of the above-mentioned problem. The main results of the research. It was figured out that the authority strategies directed to create in the Ukrainian village the conditions which are incompatible with life were not exclusive invention of the Stalin`s regime. These strategies have a old roots in the early modern age and organically continued the traditional practices , transformed to the circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century. In fact the activity of the Stalin`s regime regarding the create of Holodomor only finalized approaches which were previously approbated by Russian imperial elites during the creation of the Russian imperia. The deportation of many peasant in the course of the Holodomor genetically connected with deportation the elites inherent the Muscovy from the fifteenth century. In the Ukraine the Muscovite tsar began to use this approach after the Pereyaslav Council of 1654. The burgers of the some West Ukrainian towns could become victims of the deportation. The real deportations of Cossack officers Muscovy carried out in Ukraine in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is traceable the succession between the practices of Early Modern age and Holodomor in the field of the involvement the representatives of the local population to the legitimation of the deportation. Some elements of Peter I strategies of the “burnt earth”, used in 1708, are precursors the actions directed to the killing by famine in1932–1933. The problem of the millstone and non sanctioned by authority grinding of grain was similarly interpreted by Moscow at the beginning of the eighteenth century and during the Holodomor. The results of the research open the perspective to study the connection between other Muscovite strategies. Keywords: Holodomor, genocide, Russian expansion, strategies of the “deportation of elites” and “burnt earth”, succession.

National History, Resistance, and Cultural Enclosure in Iceland’s Bell

Iceland offers a combination of spectacular natural beauty and Viking history that has made it a popular destination for tourists. The island, which has a population of under 350,000, was visited by almost 700,000 tourists in 2021, according to the Icelandic Tourist Board, and tourism accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the country’s total export revenue (OECD). The island’s Viking heritage, recorded in the medieval sagas and eddas, is central to Icelandic cultural and national identity and has played an important role in attracting tourists. However, the history of the saga manuscripts as material cultural artefacts is also tied to Iceland’s history as a Danish colony. They were originally collected and stored in Copenhagen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and only partly returned to Iceland in 1971, almost two decades after Iceland gained independence from Denmark. The history of the saga texts is the subject of Halldór Laxness’s novel Iceland’s Bell, published in three volumes from 1943 to 1946 at the height of the Icelandic independence movement. Through a discussion of the novel, this essay will show that the Icelandic sagas, both as tangible and intangible cultural artefacts, are central to Laxness’s articulation of a cultural nationalism that is resistant to Danish colonial domination. It will suggest that not only is Iceland’s Bell a novel concerned with the material history of the sagas, but that this history is intricately linked with the island’s seven centuries of colonial domination by the Kingdom of Denmark. It is thus a consciously anti-colonial novel that portrays the violence, in both cultural and material terms, of Danish rule in Iceland and aligns cultural enclosure with colonial domination.

Renaissance Goo: Senses and Materials in Early Modern Apothecary Taxonomies and Soft Matter Science

This essay brings together research in the history of science and soft matter physics to consider how early modern Italian apothecaries organised and communicated their knowledge from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century through an “apothecary taxonomy.” This was based on a what we call a “hylocentric” classification scheme (from the Greek hyle = matter, material, stuff) founded on a tactile understanding of materials. We will investigate how the behaviour of medicines under deformation and flow – their “rheology” – is a previously underestimated organisational principle, and consider the specialist vocabulary these author-practitioners used to describe different liquid and liquid-like formulations. We will also suggest that the rheology of these formulations – which today falls under the domain of “soft matter science” – affected the material culture of apothecary shops, in the arrangement and selection of drug bottles and jars, which presented this knowledge visually to visitors and clients. That soft matter scientists organise the substances they study in similar ways to early modern apothecaries suggests the agency of materials in affecting human categorisations.

The body and the image of God in Bavinck and the Reformed orthodox

Abstract This article examines Herman Bavinck's inclusion of the body in the image of God in comparison with the positions of Reformed orthodox theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It demonstrates that while it is uncommon for earlier figures to consider the body to be properly included within the image, Bavinck's position is not unprecedented and applies lines of reasoning consistent with the tradition's anthropological convictions. First, an embodied imago Dei is advanced by sources such as the Leiden Synopsis and Petrus van Mastricht. Second, the Reformed orthodox in general adhere to the conviction that human beings are a body–soul unity, and that the image of God includes the uprightness of the whole person, positions that lead to the body being related in some way to God's image. Therefore, while Bavinck's account of an embodied image is a unique contribution, it is nonetheless in continuity with the tradition he receives.

A Modern Form of the Sacred

Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation is unlikely to strike most readers as a sacred text. True, the design of the 1997 English paperback edition hints at something mysterious within. The seventeenth century map on the cover, glowing green and only partially visible from the front, disrupts the geographic orientation a map might be expected to provide. The seeming clarity of the title, author, and translator, is likewise unsettled by their placement, suspended above the surrounding white expanse. Yet this trace of eeriness is easily dispelled by the physical book’s assertion of scholarly credentials. “Michigan,” the name of the university press publisher, prominent on the spine and back, also announces itself on the front cover, and the text on the back declares the book an aesthetic and political—but not sacred—project, with three blurbs praising the translator’s achievement and the author’s brilliance. The Library of Congress cataloguing information on the copyright page tells us that Poetics of Relation, Glissant’s third monograph, is first and foremost about his birthplace (Martinique--civilization, language, culture, nationalism, and literature of). Secondarily, according to the cataloguers, it is a book about the French connection (“6. Martinique—Dependency on France. 7. West Indies, French—Relations—France. 8. France—Relations—West Indies.”). Scholarly interpretations of Poetics of Relation are of course more expansive and exploratory than cataloguing’s brevity allows. Still, most who write about this strange and beautiful text focus on poetics and politics, with very few lingering over Glissant’s own claims about the importance of the sacred.

Jeffrey Scott Love, The Reception of “Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks” from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Munich: Utz 2013

Jeffrey Scott Love, The Reception of “Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks” from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Munich: Utz 2013

Exploring Indonesian coastal communities’ responses to the 2019 Ambon earthquake and their preparedness for future disasters

Since the seventeenth century, megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis have occurred and have been recorded in Maluku Province, Indonesia. The Maluku community lives on land of most alluvial soil, areas where tsunamis have occurred, besides the active path of seismic and volcanoes, which has negatively impacted humans during disasters. Therefore, learning from past communities’ responses and experiences is vital to decrease the risk associated with potential future disasters. However, studies about the Indonesian coastal communities’ seismic responses and preparedness at the grassroots level, particularly in Maluku Province, have yet to be done. Thirty survivors of the Mw 6.5 Ambon earthquake in 2019 with over a thousand aftershocks, living in the three coastal villages on Ambon Island, were selected as respondents in the semi-structured interviews. The research results showed that the survivors had various responses to the earthquake and its aftershocks. Religious belief was a critical factor for their capability to encounter calamities, besides social support that has helped them survive. The 2019 earthquake has also enhanced their creativity, engagement, and participation. Some disaster preparedness gaps still exist, although their experiences have taught them to be more aware and prepared for future disasters. The gaps are the early warning system availability, public education and information, risk transfer capability, protection development, humanitarian aid protocols and procedures, and health recovery. With its crucial recommendations, this study strengthens disaster governance in archipelagic countries like Indonesia and adds to the literature on how coastal communities handle multiple seismic disasters.

John Locke: entre a animalidade e a humanidade

The aim of this text is to analyse the arguments that Locke mobilises to demonstrate the difference between animals and humans, from the perspective of personal identity. It is divided into two parts: in the first, the presence of the parrot in Brazil will be evoked, from which Locke draws his example to discuss human identity, a task that will be developed in the second part. We hope to contribute to the debate on the relationship between humans and non-humans, particularly in the English seventeenth century.

The Characterization of the Building Materials Used in the Refectory of the Manzana Jesuítica in Córdoba (Argentina) on the Basis of a Study of Its Historical Background and the Archaeological Evidence

This paper explores the historical and geological background of the refectory of the Manzana Jesuítica in the city of Córdoba (Argentina), as a basis for characterising some of the building materials used in it. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the raw materials, labour, and production methods employed by the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To this end, six fragments containing brick, render, and paint layers were studied by X-ray diffraction and using optical and scanning electron microscopies. Our results show that the ceramics differed solely in terms of their firing temperature, while the mortars were either air lime- or gypsum-based. The paints, mainly lime-based with clays, have similar mineralogical compositions, with some differences in colour due to the presence of goethite. This study demonstrates that the Jesuits, through their strategically situated settlements in the province of Córdoba, developed an economic system for the extraction and transport of raw materials, centred around the use of local resources. This, combined with construction techniques imported from Spain and adapted to local circumstances, was a sign of the adaptability of the Jesuit Order and their lasting influence on the region. Understanding the materials and techniques used by the Jesuits provides valuable insight into the methods of construction employed in historical buildings, offering key perspectives for their conservation. Moreover, it highlights the significance of local resource management in the longevity and preservation of these architectural works.

Frauds on Navy Pay and the Men and Women of Maritime London, c.1620–1740

Abstract During the wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of English sailors had their wages deferred because the government could not come up with the cash to pay them. Instead, Navy sailors were discharged with undated government promissory notes, usually called ‘sailors’ tickets’, which they and their families sometimes had to wait months or years to have paid. This essay traces the way the Navy tried to institutionalize this system, and it also looks at competing ordering projects coming from within the London maritime community that sought to pressure the government to pay the tickets in a timely fashion, to manage overextended credit networks and — in the face of considerable Navy opposition — to make tickets more fungible so they could be used as collateral for debts. One feature of these conflicts was the rise of frauds on sailors’ pay tickets, and over time the Navy endorsed increasingly punitive methods to deal with the problem, most notably various kinds of institutional prosecution. The people indicted for ticket fraud, many of them at the Old Bailey, were predominantly women, and their ‘crimes’ were linked to more legitimate activities long associated with sailors’ female relatives. This essay argues that predatory borrowing by the State and the competing ordering projects to which it gave rise helped to configure as well as to distort social relations and economic opportunity both for women and men within the maritime community.

A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the 
Inter-Imperial Caribbean

Abstract Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a 
circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave societies. This constellation of private rights and public authority, organised around captive taking ventures and slave-holding households, spanned the seventeenth-century Caribbean and produced an inter-imperial legal regime in which the rights of slave owners came to occupy the very centre of visions of regional order.

“Social” terminology in sir John Skene’s lexicography “De verborum significatione”

The process of specification of the social and, in particular, the process of demarcation between the social and the legal spheres in Early Modern European intellectual discourse exhibited both general regularities and elements contingent on the regional specificity of intellectual traditions and institutional practices. In the article, the author examines the Scottish version of this process, with the lexicography of the Scottish civil lawyer Sir John Skene (1549–1617) “De Verborum Significatione” serving as a case in point. The analysis of the social concepts included in the lexicography demonstrates that the heterogeneity of the genesis of strata and groups within the Scottish nobility, as observed by contemporaries, precluded the establishment of a hierarchy of noble titles and dignities within the Scottish kingdom. Consequently, reflection on the nobility as a social phenomenon was also prevented. Conversely, the ascendancy of civil law, with its rigorously delineated subject matter and enduring lexical apparatus, fostered the elaboration of the legal domain. However, this process also impeded the differentiation between the legal and the social. The author demonstrates that numerous concepts that would subsequently be imbued with particular social connotations within the Scottish intellectual tradition during the seventeenth century were nevertheless still regarded as an intrinsic component of the legal framework within the community of the kingdom. When referenced in the Scottish laws and parliamentary acts examined by Skene, these concepts were closely associated with legal privileges, judicial procedure, or the distinctive characteristics of property relations.

“Lascivious Poison?” Street‐songs as a Source for Popular Expression: The Case of Jansenism, c. 1687–1737*

AbstractFamed for its austerity, Jansenism nonetheless prompted a slew of salacious street‐songs throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If historians have increasingly examined early modern urban singing practices, underlining the social porosity and intergenerational hold of many street‐songs, little research has been devoted to unpicking what songs offer to the study of religious history. The aims of this article are two‐fold. First, it seeks to assess the value (and sketch out some limits) to street‐songs as a source in recovering some of the more popular facets of religious controversies — here, the Jansenist movement. Second, and as a corollary of this, the article uses street‐songs to emphasise the political sophistication to popular interest in Jansenism. It suggests that this antedated and ran alongside the convulsionary movement, which has been typically viewed as the apogee of popular engagement with Jansenism. This article first considers how the hold of specific literary themes and popular tunes over generations impacted discussions on the Jansenist debate, before turning to examine the suitability of songs in capturing devotional and theological content, and finally discussing the complexity of the popular political and ecclesiological ideas on the Jansenist movement that the street‐songs conveyed. The article ultimately seeks to underline the value of street‐songs as a source on urban popular religious expression.

The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by multilingual merchants: the case of seventeenth-century Spanish

Abstract This article analyzes an unpublished corpus of 131 letters written in Spanish by four Dutch merchants during the seventeenth-century (1669–1677). The aim of the investigation is to determine whether the variation found in these letters was internal, external, or both, and to study the factors that favored each source. To do so, I will look at vowel variation in this corpus. Since standard vowel variants were being selected in seventeenth-century Spanish, the research questions addressed in this work are the following: Did multilingual merchants acquire the emerging standard of the moment? Did multilingual merchants contribute to the selection of standard variants? Did multilingual merchants acquire the sociolinguistic variation of that period? How did multilingual merchants differ from L1 speakers and why? How did linguistic and social factors influence this variation? The results revealed a great amount of intra- and inter-speaker vowel variation, and this variability was a matter of both internal and external factors. Therefore, this study argues that, while multilingual merchants acquired some of the standard variants that were being selected in the emerging standard Spanish of the seventeenth century, they reported linguistic variation that can be explained considering the context of use and the socio-economic conditions underlying their acquisition of linguistic repertoires.

Comparing the register of seventeenth-century Dutch business letters to private letters: formulaic language and French-origin items

Abstract In this article, we examine, quantitatively and qualitatively, Dutch business letters written by merchants, focusing on formulaic phrases and French suffix borrowing. The letters are part of the Prize Papers, the collection of documents confiscated by the English during times of warfare. We compare these business letters to private letters from the same source, and address the question whether the business letters constitute a particular register. The business letters, written by upper and upper-middle ranked male merchants from the seventeenth century, appear to differ from private letters written by people with a similar social profile. Frequent formulae highly characteristic of seventeenth-century private letters occur to a much lesser extent, if at all, in the business letters. Other formulae, some including Romance origin items (Laus deo, saluut, cordiale), occur more frequently in the business letters. The frequency of verbs with the French-origin suffix -eren is found to be higher in the business letters than in the private letters. Functional explanations are presented for these register differences: formulaic language is correlated with writing experience, and the use of French-origin items may be connected to the common vocabulary used in international trading networks. Similarities in phrasing are also revealed in a qualitative analysis of examples of private and business letters by the same writer. This finding demonstrates how similar private and business letters often were, thus challenging the idea of distinct registers.