Seventeenth Century Research Articles

Dictionaries as authorities? The problematic use of Chinese dictionaries by missionaries in the Rites Controversy

ABSTRACT In the seventeenth century, missionaries in China translated a vast array of Chinese works, including classics, official histories, and legal documents. Their translations have been analysed through several perspectives, yet their use of Chinese dictionaries has been largely overlooked. In the context of the Rites Controversy, between the Jesuits on one side and the Dominican and Franciscan friars on the other, precise references to authoritative Chinese dictionaries were made to corroborate their interpretation of Chinese rituals as either religious or secular. This article first describes why and how missionaries started from the early beginning of the mission in the 1580s to write their own bilingual dictionaries based on existing Western and Chinese dictionaries. Then, it considers how the same dictionaries became an important reference when the Rites Controversy erupted in the 1630s. Based on manuscript and printed documents written until 1670, three Chinese characters which became the focus of competing interpretations are discussed: miao as temple versus hall, ji as sacrifice versus offering, and sheng as prophet versus wise man. Besides the problem of biased translations on both sides, we shall show that there was a more fundamental reason which prevented the missionaries from settling their controversy using dictionaries.

The Invention and Early Use of the Mariner’s Astrolabe

The so-called mariner’s astrolabe attracts much attention. There are at least 40 publications, dating between 1917 and 2023 dealing directly with the subject plus many treatises on the history of navigation and nautical instruments that mention or describe the mariner’s astrolabe. Common to most of these publications are statements about the origin and/or first use of the mariner’s astrolabe which are mostly superficial, misleading or simply false. Almost all of them rely on prior publications, that are generally not cited, and if references are given they are wrong, poorly understood or misleading. These publications have meant that myths and baseless assumptions on the early history of European navigation have proliferated. This article tries to take stock of what we really know about the origin and the early use of an instrument widely used in navigation in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The sources of the presumed early dates, myths and assumptions are identified through an investigation of the nomenclature, graphical representations, textual evidence and material evidence relating to the mariner’s astrolabe.

The Last Grand Külliye of Istanbul: The Yeni Valide Mosque Complex and the Little Ice Age

The construction of the Yeni Valide Mosque complex, located on the northern edge of Istanbul’s historical peninsula in the district of Eminönü, began in 1597 under the patronage of Sultan Mehmed III’s mother Safiye Sultan. The project was halted abruptly in 1603 at the foundation phase and stood dormant for almost six decades. Between 1661 and 1663, another royal woman patron, Valide Hatice Turhan, supported the revision and completion of the project. Although scholars have long examined the construction process, architecture, and decoration of the project in detail, I reevaluate our knowledge of the monument based on recent scientific discoveries regarding the climate change phenomenon known as the ‘Little Ice Age’, which reached its peak in the seventeenth century. As we address another major climate change event today, this study provides insight into our understanding of the social, cultural, and historical impacts of such dramatic changes to climate conditions on architectural projects and urban dynamics in the Ottoman Empire.

Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century, by Thomas Matthew Vozar

<i>Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century</i>, by Thomas Matthew Vozar

Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century: Reformed Ministry and Radical Verse

Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century: Reformed Ministry and Radical Verse

Mobility, Print and Trade in Europe: The Case of the Tesini Pedlars (17th–19th Centuries)

This article focuses on the itinerant print trade that actively involved the Alpine Tesini pedlars for more than three centuries (between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries) and that profoundly influenced the cultural, social, and economic history of their home valley. The case study of the pedlars from the Tesino valley, in what is now the Trentino region of Northern Italy, offers a privileged perspective for analysing three interrelated broader questions: the dynamics and effects of mobility in Ancien Régime Alpine societies; the spread of cheap print in pre-modern Europe; and the economic system underlying this large-scale trade. Through the analysis of a corpus of previously overlooked notarial sources, this article aims to unravel the complex financial and credit mechanisms that enabled the Tesini pedlars to succeed, but which in many cases were also the cause of their downfall.

Кореспонденція між князем Василем-Костянтином Острозьким та Криштофом Радзивіллом як джерело

The article analyzes the correspondence of Kyiv voivode V.- K. Ostrozkyi to his son-in-law, an influential Lithuanian politician Kryštof Radziwill. This is almost the only relatively complete complex of the prince's correspondence in Ostroh, which, given the trusting relationship between both participants of the correspondence, allows us to reconstruct his inner world. As one might suspect, he significantly contradicted Ostroh's public persona. For the prince, the correct ("old") "world" remained in the past, in the times before the Union of Lublin from the year 1569. Innovations were perceived by Vasyl-Kostiantyn as a challenge to this world, which violated its traditional foundations and consisted of an attack on regionalism, a reduction in the political role of princes, and attempts to change the confessional picture of the newly created state. The prince believed that the policy of the Rzeczpospolita's leadership toward the Moscow state was ill-conceived. Ostrozkyi argued that constant wars with the eastern neighbor reduced the overall potential of Christian civilization in its confrontation with Islamic civilization, especially with the country which at that time embodied its offensive in Europe, the Ottoman Empire. Ostrozkyi appealed to Radziwill with the expectation of finding support in the confrontation with Jan Zajmoyskyi, an extremely influential crown chancellor and hetman in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It is no coincidence that the Kyiv voivode focused on issues that might have been of interest to the Lithuanian magnate. In particular, these interests included: the attempts of the crown elite, led by J. Zamoyskyi to ignore the interests of the Lithuanian and Ruthenian nobility, unwillingness to pay due attention to defense issues, insufficient allocation of funds for the repair and construction of castle fortifications. Gradually, the correspondence reflects the problem of interfaith confrontation, which was the result of the growth of counter-reformation processes from the beginning of Sigismund III's rule in the Polish-Lithuanian state. Their main emphasis in Europe was on Protestantism (K. Radziwill represented Calvinism), but in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as a result of the Union of Brest in 1596, the Counter-Reformation also acquired anti-Orthodox content. In general, the correspondence of Prince V.-K. Ostrozkyi is a unique source that allows us to reconstruct the main features of the identity of an influential princely stratum, which was significantly influenced by the transformation processes in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Reinventing Sacred Ground Amidst Natural Disaster: The Holy Islamic Tomb in Seventeenth-Century Quanzhou

The Holy Islamic Tomb at Lingshan Mountain in Quanzhou, China, is believed to be the final resting place of two of the Prophet Muhammad’s disciples who were dispatched as missionaries in the early seventh century. While prior scholarship has centred on verifying the tradition’s chronology, this article foregrounds the role of environmental actors in the tomb site’s ascent to prominence. I argue that the holy tomb (shengmu) tradition did not emerge until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, so its invention should be analysed alongside concurrent climate hazards that plagued late Ming China (1368–1644). Uncommon episodes of snowfall, flooding, drought, and associated famines drove Quanzhou’s local communities towards popular religious practices. Muslim visitation practices in Quanzhou, which experienced a restrained period following the decline of Mongol rule, re-emerged into universal consciousness and became integral to the city’s spiritual landscape by aligning with Chinese allegorical narratives. Through this reinvented tradition, the Holy Islamic Tomb was characterized as a site blessed by the heavens during times of cosmic disturbances. Instead of passive assimilation, through which religious identities may be diluted, the active participation of Quanzhou Muslims in local practices empowered them to elevate and honour Islamic traditions within a predominantly non-Muslim society.

The Myth of Westphalian Common Sense: Abjuration and Republicanism in Quilombos's Palmares

The essay addresses a concern that significant dimensions of the consciousness and language associated with modern revolutions have gone missing from discussions related to agency. It centers on Quilombos, who in the early seventeenth century created Palmares as a unique constitutional experiment and yet have been excluded from disciplinary common sense in political and international theories on the matters of modern consciousness, constitutionalism, and republicanism. The essay revisit questions of world-historical events that cast Africans as outside of time. The author counters disciplinary common sense by revisiting the moral statuses of modern political apologias, which are associated with the will to independence, and abjurations, taken to be formative expressions of self-determination. Both modern apologias and abjurations are taken to be the point of origination of modern consciousness associated with the birth of modern republicanism. Quilombo revolution demonstrates that political rationality, which underpins political action, is an expression of cognitive, material, and symbolic conditions due to time. The associated consciousness and actions may simultaneously take place across multiple spaces. This is to say that the expression of political subjectivity, which is a matter of consciousness and language, may in time be more widespread than parochial or national histories suggest. The Dutch and Quilombos revolutions prove this point.

Editar os Pensamentos de Pascal: considerações históricas e análise da edição de Alain Cantillon

The posthumous discovery of Blaise Pascal’s writings on Christianity posed a challenge for his family and friends: how should these writings be edited? The present work makes a brief inquiry into this challenge and offers an overview of the main editions of Pascal’s Pensées since the Seventeenth century, including that of Allain Cantillon, published in 2023. The purpose of the present work, therefore, encompasses the following steps: (I) some historical remarks concerning the task of editing Pensées, (II) an overview of its main editions, and finally (III and IV) a description and analysis of Cantillon’s editorial proposal.

The Ceremony of Receiving Ambassadresses at the Russian Court of the Eighteenth Century

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European system of international relations underwent significant changes, marked by the institutional development of diplomatic services and the establishment of more coherent diplomatic ceremonials. Resident embassies became common, introducing the presence of female relatives of diplomats who actively participated in the life of the diplomatic corps. The growing presence of ambassadresses played a transformative role in early modern diplomatic culture, contributing to the development of gendered diplomatic ceremonials. Drawing on relevant approaches to the study of the ‘new diplomatic history’ and using archival material from the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, this article examines the diplomatic ceremonial of ambassadorial spouses at the eighteenth-century Russian court. It examines the presentation of ambassadors’ wives at court, the implementation of protocol, and issues of etiquette that became sources of contention between ‘ambassadresses’ and the St Petersburg court, as well as methods of conflict resolution. The study of the reception ceremony for ‘foreign ladies’ reveals that, although it was governed by legal norms, it depended heavily on the Russian monarch’s personal attitude towards the ambassador and ambassadress, as well as the country they represented.

"A Dog's Revenge" Comparative Viability of an Early Modern Verbal, Pictorial, and Dramatic Proverb

This article presents a comparative study of three media modalities by which the proverb “a dog’s revenge” is presented in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Latin, German, and English contexts. A proverb can be briefly defined as a short pithy saying in general use. However, when one moves beyond a linguistic interpretation to an analysis of the material, these concise sayings that many people know and use assume an instability similar to aphorisms, sententia, maxims, dicta, or other short forms. By comparing the materials of the short proverbial saying “A dog’s revenge” in Erasmus’ Adages (1532), Mathius Holzwart’s emblem book Emblematum Tyrocinia (1581), and William Shakespeare’s seventeenth century drama, Cymbeline (1611), this article emphasizes the viability of the proverb beyond speech acts. Whether oral, graphic, pictorial, dramatic, or some other medium, focus on a proverb’s materiality shows that the life of a proverb is woven into its citationality in various media and materials, not just speech. Unpacking the tension between the signified meaning of proverbial speech and its material form also reveals the potential inviability, or death of the proverb through alternate uses, forgetfulness, or disuse.

Old Frisian Studies in the Seventeenth Century: The Oxford Manuscripts

Abstract The Bodleian library at Oxford is one of the most important repositories of manuscripts and early printed books documenting the study of Old Frisian in the seventeenth century. Together with primary texts, two copies of the incunable print of the Frisian land laws, Codex Aysma and transcripts of the now lost Codex Unia, the collection includes annotations and glossaries by three pioneers of Old Frisian philology: Franciscus Junius (1591–1677), Jan van Vliet (1622–1666) and Thomas Marshall (1621–1685). This contribution explores Junius’s and van Vliet’s appraisal of the Old Frisian texts, their plans for an edition, and their interest in the narrative aspects of texts, such as the Statutes of Magnus and the Book of Rudolf. By analysing van Vliet’s and Junius’s annotations in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Junius 109 and Marshall 60, it becomes apparent that these seventeenth-century philologists studied Old Frisian texts not only for lexicographical reasons or to compare Frisian with the other Old Germanic languages, but also for their fascinating historical and literary qualities.

The use and disappearance of vegetal fibres in clay–sand mixtures in furnace walls in pre-seventeenth-century iron smelting sites in the Chūgoku region (Japan)

This paper investigates the importance of the presence of vegetal fibres within clay–sand mixtures in Japanese furnace walls in iron smelting sites in the Chūgoku region during the antique and medieval periods. This presence is all the more interesting as these fibres disappeared with the advent of tatara, the traditional Japanese iron smelting process, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Understanding this disappearance is a major challenge in the study of the evolution of iron reduction in Japan. The data from archaeological excavations, despite a few scattered clues, are not yet able to give us a sufficiently clear picture of the presence or absence of these fibres in the clay–sand mixture that makes up the furnace walls. Therefore this study highlights the need for systematic research by the creation of a database combined with further analyses and experiments to understand the role fibres might have had in the iron smelting process and why they disappeared from the tatara process in Japan.

Cheesemaking in Cheshire 1550–1750

This article supports a material turn in agricultural and food history by focusing on the utensils and equipment, along with the embodied practices involved in cheesemaking. The period of interest is the long seventeenth century when rich source material is available in the form of probate inventories—lists of the movable goods owned by deceased persons, mainly adult males, and widows. Our laboratory will be Cheshire, an English county that for 200 years, from the mid-seventeenth century, dominated the cheese supply of London and the industrial towns and cities of the north of England. We use 1600 inventories transcribed by Cheshire local historians, a significant portion of which mention cheese and cheesemaking. We argue that the making and marketing of Cheshire cheese was distinctive but that there was nothing inevitable about its success.

Emperor Maximilian’s winged putto leaning on a walker – and on Dürer’s monogram

In the bas-de-page decoration by Jörg Breu the Elder of a leaf in the Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I (fol. 78r), a cheerful winged putto is gracefully propelling a walking frame. Both the rolling structure aiding its first steps and the presence of wings cry out for an explanation, especially as the two are shown together.Unlike most other depictions of a child with a walker, this putto is neither a personification of an age of man, nor a reference to a specific infant. Among its precedents, it is worth mentioning the marginal decorations of prayers of intercession, especially the relevant depiction in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy.The structure of the walker in Maximilian’s prayer book is counterfunctional: its wooden slats together form a capital A and capital D. By modelling the walker on Dürer’s monogram, Jörg Breu was, on the one hand, thanking his mentor for his inspiration, and on the other, fulfilling the wish of Konrad Peutinger – and indirectly of the emperor – that the decoration of the prayer book be completed in the manner commenced by Dürer.While there are also classical precedents for the motif of the walker as a device aiding the acquisition of knowledge, later examples are particularly relevant to the sustentaculum modelled on Dürer’s monogram. In the seventeenth century, the metaphor of the “first step” and the concept of “giving and receiving support” frequently conjured up the theme of master and pupil; at this time, the child learning to walk with the aid of a walker was repeatedly alluded to in the context of the study and practice of art. This notion also comes across in the etching by Rembrandt known as ‘Het Rolwagentje’: here too, learning to walk independently refers to the process of mastering art, with the obligatory first steps being to practise drawing nudes and to copy the works of the master.In the depiction of the putto, its hesitant steps imply slowness, while its wings suggest speed. This ambivalence is also the essence of the adage festina lente, which was of particular relevance to Emperor Maximilian; the theme was probably suggested by Peutinger. Other references to the emperor are the figure of Hercules stepping on a snail, in the lower right margin of the same sheet, and the crane depicted on its verso.

The Seventeenth Century, Part I

The Seventeenth Century, Part I

Directors’ positive duty to act in the interests of the entity: shareholders’ interests bounded by corporate purpose

ABSTRACT Directors’ duty to act in good faith and to act in the best interests of the company relates to the interests of shareholders held in the company as a separate legal entity. The obligation to act in the best interests of shareholders is potentially bounded by corporate purpose as the office requires directors to act in accordance with the constitution and Companies Act. The origin of the duty is traced to the emergence of permanent capital in the business corporation and the resulting new oaths sworn by directors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Charitable Corporation v Sutton considered in that historical context. The analysis illustrates that the duty is not owed to shareholders collectively at any time, but rather to the company as a separate entity from its shareholders. The interests of shareholders are held in the company as its capital base. The duty is considered in relation to the even longer-standing obligation that officers of corporations act faithfully to ensure compliance with the corporation’s charter. The article concludes that the re-inclusion of purpose provisions in company constitutions combined with recognition that the modern company is an entity rather than contractual could significantly influence the application of the good faith and best interests duty.

The Impact of Domestic Japanese Politics on the English East India Company in Japan, 1613–1623

Abstract The English East India Company’s (EIC) enterprise in Japan (1613–1623) is widely recognized as a failure. Scholars of the English-speaking world have emphasized the lack of vendible commodities, the EIC traders’ mismanagement, and Japanese hostility towards Christianity. Nevertheless, these narratives often overlook the political and strategic interests of Japan, in the era of political uncertainty after the long warring-states period. This paper re-examines the EIC traders’ records against recent studies on Japanese politics. The careful observations of political movements surrounding the Siege of Osaka (1614–1615) reveal how the EIC traders were involved in the dynamics of Japanese history. Within the framework of mercantile connections supported by “mutual benefits,” the present study demonstrates how the EIC gradually faced difficulties as the Japanese interests shifted, thus arguing that not only European overseas activity but also the active endeavor of the Asian counterparts significantly influenced global interactions of the early seventeenth century.

"Before His Head was Cold": Puritan Piety and the Pipe Organ

It is well known that musical activity in colonial New England was quite low; this was in no small part caused by the Puritan emphasis on the unaccompanied singing of psalms in their churches. What is often neglected when discussing Puritan musical activity is how Calvinism’s grip on Puritan theology loosened throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaving room for changes to worship traditions. The same Puritans who destroyed pipe organs across England in the seventeenth century started building these instruments in their New England meeting houses towards the end of the eighteenth century. This paper uses primary sources to compare the Puritan theology of the Westminster Confession to statements of belief from Boston’s most progressive Congregationalist churches in the late eighteenth century. Such comparisons, when paired with a timeline of rhetoric surrounding instruments in worship music, connect doctrines of separation to the destruction of organs and doctrines of unity to the reinstatement of organs.