Frances E. Dolan. Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture. (Haney Foundation Series.) 280 pp., figs., notes, index. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. $59.95 (cloth); ISBN 9780812252330. E-book available.

Isis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-606
Author(s):  
Barbara Hahn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
The Past

The Convent of Santa Clara, the Elite and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Querétaro

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane S. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Many ◽  
At Home

Sephardi identity has meant different things at different times, but has always entailed a connection with Spain, from which the Jews were expelled in 1492. While Sephardi Jews have lived in numerous cities and towns throughout history, certain cities had a greater impact on the shaping of their culture. This book focuses on those that may be considered most important, from Cordoba in the tenth century to Toledo, Venice, Safed, Istanbul, Salonica, and Amsterdam at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Each served as a venue in which a particular dimension of Sephardi Jewry either took shape or was expressed in especially intense form. Significantly, these cities were mostly heterogeneous in their population and culture — half of them under Christian rule and half under Muslim rule — and this too shaped the Sephardi worldview and attitude. While Sephardim cultivated a distinctive identity, they felt at home in the cultures of their adopted lands. The book demonstrates that Sephardi history and culture have always been multifaceted. The book's interdisciplinary approach captures the many contexts in which the life of the Jews from Iberia unfolded, without either romanticizing the past or diluting its reality.

scholarly journals DE-CENTERING CHINESE HISTORY

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-201
Author(s):  
John E. Herman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Chinese Perspective ◽  
Qing History ◽  
Chinese Texts ◽  
Cultural Tensions ◽  
Seismic Impact

What would Chinese history look like if we were to examine it from the perspective of the peoples living along China's periphery? How might a non-Chinese perspective challenge the dominant themes in Chinese historiography, themes which represent Chinese history as a linear narrative arising from the Central Plain and its original inhabitants, the Han Chinese? If, for example, we rely solely on Chinese sources to tell us about Chinese-Jurchen/Manchu relations during the first half of the seventeenth century, we will have privileged Chinese sources, affirmed the authority of the Chinese perspective, and suppressed voices that might offer an alternative perspective. Only an aggressive deconstruction of such “authoritative” Chinese texts can expose biases and logical inconsistencies, unpack cultural tensions that demand more rigorous scrutiny, and tease out into the open silenced voices from spaces buried deep in the text. Those historians who engage in such a methodological approach, however, run the risk of being accused of applying fanciful postmodernist conjecture or presentist interpretations to the past. This is why the recent (since the 1980s) addition of Manchu language sources to our examination of Qing history (1636–1912) has had such a seismic impact on the field.

scholarly journals Making the States’ Translation (1637): Orthodox Calvinist Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

In the study of the history of biblical scholarship, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize biblical philology as a force which, together with the new philosophy and the new science of the seventeenth century, caused the erosion of universal scriptural authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. A case in point is Jonathan Israel's impressive account of how biblical criticism in the hands of Spinoza paved the way for the Enlightenment. Others who have argued for a post-Spinozist rise of biblical criticism include Frank Manuel, Adam Sutcliffe, and Travis Frampton. These scholars have built upon longer standing interpretations such as those of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Hazard. However, scholars in the past two decades such as Anthony Grafton, Scott Mandelbrote and Jean-Louis Quantin have altered the picture of an exegetical revolution inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712). These heterodox philosophers in fact relied on philological research that had been largely developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such research was carried out by scholars who had no subversive agenda. This is to say that the importance attached to a historical and philological approach to the biblical text had a cross-confessional appeal, not just a radical-political one.

Writing and the Hermeneutics of Posthumous Publication

2018 ◽  
pp. 279-293
Author(s):  
Gavin Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines Greville’s understanding of the afterlife of a man and his writings, and attempts to look at Greville’s afterlife in terms of that understanding. Greville was an author deeply interested in the past who aimed his writings determinedly at a posthumous readership: what is the relation between these two guiding perspectives, and what was the impact on Greville’s hermeneutics of his experience of Sidney’s posthumous publication and reception? The chapter first looks at what sort of hermeneutic activity seems to be expected and prepared for by Greville (how does the past have meaning for the present? how may the present have meaning for the future?). It then examines the broad outlines, and some particular details, of the posthumous dissemination of his works in the seventeenth century.

‘The Barke Is Bad, but the Tree Good’ : Hispanophilia, Hispanophobia and Spanish Honour in English and Dutch Plays (c. 1630-1670)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rena Bood
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Foreign Influence ◽  
Black Legend

In the seventeenth century, Spain featured prominently on the English and Dutch stages. Although this foreign influence has been overlooked in the past, especially in the Dutch context, scholars have recently broadened the scope of their analysis to Spain, but the tendency to focus on the image of the Spaniard in predominantly Hispanophobic terms remains widespread. This ‘Black Legend Spaniard’, demonizing the Spanish as the enemy, shows only one side of the coin. Taking the ‘typically Spanish’ characteristic of ‘honour’ as an example, this chapter explores how Spanish characters are presented on the English and Dutch stages, evincing that ‘honour’ was not only an exponent of a vengeful Spanish nature and that such characters could also be viewed as a source of inspiration.

Meeting Lydgate’s Ghost: Building Medieval History in Seventeenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 251-271
Author(s):  
Mimi Ensley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
British Library ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Medieval Romance ◽  
English History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Resources

Abstract This article examines a manuscript poem composed by the seventeenth-century author John Lane. Writing in what is now London, British Library, Harley MS 5243, Lane revives the medieval poet John Lydgate in order to re-tell the story of Guy of Warwick, famous from medieval romance. In Lane’s poem, Lydgate returns from beyond the grave to proclaim the historicity of Guy’s legend and simultaneously preserve his own reputation as a chronicler of English history. While some scholars suggest that Lydgate’s popularity declined in the post-Reformation period due to his reputation as the ‘Monk of Bury’, and while it is true that significantly fewer editions of Lydgate’s poems were published in the decades after the Reformation, Lane’s poem offers another window into Lydgate’s early modern reputation. I argue that Lane’s historiographic technique in his Guy of Warwick narrative mirrors Lydgate’s own poetic histories. Both Lane and Lydgate grapple with existing historical resources and compose their narratives by compiling the accreted traditions of the past, supplementing these traditions with documentary sources and artefacts. This article, thus, complicates existing scholarly narratives that align Lydgate with medieval or monastic traditions, traditions perceived to be irrecoverably transformed by the events of the Reformation in England.

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