In Search of the Truth. A History of Disputation Techniques from Antiquity to Early Modern Times. By Olga Weijers. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013. Pp. 341. $60.00.

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-115
Author(s):  
John T. Slotemaker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times

The Justification of War and International Order

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
International Order ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Pertinent Literature ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times

The history of war is also a history of its justification. The contributions to this book argue that the justification of war rarely happens as empty propaganda. While it is directed at mobilizing support and reducing resistance, it is not purely instrumental. Rather, the justification of force is part of an incessant struggle over what is to count as justifiable behaviour in a given historical constellation of power, interests, and norms. This way, the justification of specific wars interacts with international order as a normative frame of reference for dealing with conflict. The justification of war shapes this order and is being shaped by it. As the justification of specific wars entails a critique of war in general, the use of force in international relations has always been accompanied by political and scholarly discourses on its appropriateness. In much of the pertinent literature the dominating focus is on theoretical or conceptual debates as a mirror of how international normative orders evolve. In contrast, the focus of the present volume is on theory and political practice as sources for the re- and de-construction of the way in which the justification of war and international order interact. The book offers a unique collection of papers exploring the continuities and changes in war discourses as they respond to and shape normative orders from early modern times to the present. It comprises contributions from International Law, History and International Relations and from Western and non-Western perspectives.

The Revolt of the Mice

Reinardus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 81-93
Author(s):  
Wilt L. Idema
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times

Abstract The tale of the war of the mice against the cat has a history of several thousands of years. First known from ancient Egypt, it was wide-spread in Classical antiquity, would remain popular in the Near East until modern times, and also was widely known in Europe in medieval and early modern times in paintings, prints, songs, and mock-epics. In China the most popular tale on the antagonism of mice and cats was the tale of their underworld court case. Starting from the first half of the nineteenth century, some versions of that tale also include an account of the war between the two species. Only one stand-alone treatment of the theme is known from an edition of the 1920s. In Japan the theme of the war of the mice against the cats also makes its first appearance in print in the first half of the nineteenth century. No direct foreign influence can be discerned in the emergence of this theme in either country.

Foreigners in Pre-Modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-135
Author(s):  
Peter Strohschneider ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Meaning Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
Heating Up

The essay draws on the concept of ‘asymmetric counter-concepts’ as developed by Reinhart Koselleck starting with twin-formulas such as ‘the familiar and the unfamiliar’ which are generally used to establish collective des­ignations of the self and others and which institutionalize the axiological and the epistemological. These counter-concepts can have different semantic temperatures. The focus is on the underlying meaning-production schemes which produce value-asymmetries. The essay tries to show that a process of heating up these value-asymmetries is only one side of the history of such asymmetric counter-concepts from medieval to modern times. Simultaneously a cooling down can be observed in written texts from different periods; examples include the 12th century Rolandslied and the 16th century Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Full negation eliminates uncertainties and value insecurities. But the complexities and contingencies that emerge since Early Modern times then lead to losses of negatability (Negierbarkeitsverluste), which in turn render gains in unfamiliarity. The modern experience of the foreign is indeterminate otherness instead of determined negation that characterized pre-modern alterity. Modern societies therefore need to mediate between validity and contingency under the circumstances of plurality. Interpretational demands and uncertainty about the relevant interpretive frames increase. Foreignness is then experienced as unfamiliarity. This presupposes intellectual attitudes like irritability, curiosity, and willingness to learn. The modern concept of ‘culture’ then is proposed as a comparative pattern where only unavoidable structural asymmetry remains. It explains cultural differences and the experience of foreignness through heterogeneity. Using this specifically modern pattern, there is no longer a legitimate value slope between one’s own position and its negation. The distinction is then between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Three Women Writers and the “Jesuit Sublime”: Or, Jesuits in Love

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Wilt
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Elizabeth Inchbald ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Frances Trollope ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times

AbstractThe return of the repressed “Catholic” has been lurking at the edge of English literary consciousness since early modern times, especially in the shorthand form of the plotting Jesuit. In its combined familiarity and mystery, grandeur and meanness, legitimacy and treason, “the Jesuit” even constitutes a figure for the Sublime. Novels by Thackeray, Kingsley, and Shorthouse locate the Jesuit in the political history of the nation, as the seducer of young noblemen. But this essay studies lesser-known novels by Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Trollope, and Mary Arnold Ward in which the plotting Jesuit, himself an object of allure in his un-Anglican “reserve” and his pre-Reformation Englishness, is suborned by his own humanity into the forbidden sublimities of love. As political threat and psychological object of desire, the Jesuit-in-love also represents Anglicanism's flirtation with Catholicism and with Queerness, his defeat/conversion sealing its commitment to its heterosexual priesthood and its post-Catholic modernity.

The Indo-Roman Pepper Trade and the Muziris Papyrus

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico De Romanis
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South India ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
South Indian ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Trade ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Commercial Relationships

This book offers an interpretation of the two fragmentary texts of the P. Vindobonensis G 40822, now widely referred to as the Muziris papyrus. Without these two texts, there would be no knowledge of the Indo-Roman trade practices. The book also compares and contrasts the texts of the Muziris papyrus with other documents pertinent to Indo-Mediterranean (or Indo-European) trade in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. These other documents reveal the commercial and political geography of ancient South India; the sailing schedule and the size of the ships plying the South India sea route; the commodities exchanged in the South Indian emporia; and the taxes imposed on the Indian commodities en route from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. When viewed against the twin backdrops of ancient sources on South Indian trade and of medieval and early modern documents on pepper commerce, the two texts become foundational resources for the history of commercial relationships between South India and the West.

Interaction and boundary work: Western merchant colonies in the Levant and the Eastern Churches, 1650–1800

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-176
Author(s):  
Cornel Zwierlein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Close Distance

European merchants in their factories (‘nations’) in the Eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman rule were not really colonizers; in early modern times, they were somehow privileged guests. However, they deserve an important part in a long-term history of types of ‘close distance’ and forms of segregational coexistence. Different from recent studies that stress a strong overall interaction, understanding, sharing, and exchange between Europeans and Ottoman subjects, it is proposed to distinguish three levels: (1) The daily commercial interaction of Western Europeans with their Ottoman counterparts; (2) the stronger involvement in some politico-religious struggles (the 1724 schism in the patriarchate of Antioch serves as example): also here, one has still to distinguish between real interest in the religious cause and other activities as credit lending; (3) the care for and maintenance by the Europeans of their own Western national culture abroad: these cultural activities served more to (eventually unconsciously) perform ‘boundary work’ and to close up the ‘nation’. These early modern forms of close distance and segregation were only isomorphic but not homologous with later highly conscious colonial and modern imperial forms of contact between ‘West’ and ‘East’ as in the nineteenth-century European settlements in Istanbul.

‘Schutz und Schirm’: Screening in German During Early Modern Times

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rüdiger Campe
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Technological Systems ◽  
Legal Entity ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Electronic Display ◽  
Early Modern Times

Rüdiger Campe analyzes the term Schirm (screen) and its various fields of application in early modernity before it designates the optical device called screen in the new media. If Jagd-Schirme, or hunting blinds, were complex means of visual concealment that also configured deadly forms of projection, Schirm was also located in the legal sphere, where it designated an exceptional administrative and military protection that also allowed for the projection of a legal entity that would otherwise not exist within the ordinary structures of power. How can one comprehend the return of the term within the language of electronic display? Campe elucidates Friedrich Kittler’s notion of ‘implementation’ as a concept for how such early modern practices of the screen can be seen as discontinuous with the modern history of the optical screen in one respect and continuous in another. ‘Implementation’ means to identify certain functions—such as protection and projection—for possible technical development but also to construct autonomous technological systems capable of assuming such functions.

Die Juden in den biihmischen Liindern. Vortriige der Tagung des Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee (27, 29 Nov. 1981), München/Wien: R. Oldenbourg Verlag. 1983 (Bad Wiesseer Tagungen des Collegium Carolinum, ed. Ferdinand Seibt). Pp. 369.

2004 ◽  
pp. 377-379
Author(s):  
Frank Golczewski
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
German Population ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times

This chapter focuses on a collection of papers from the Collegium Carolinum, which was edited by Ferdinand Seibt. The Collegium Carolinum is a serious scholarly society, mainly concerned with the study of the history of the lands that became Czechoslovakia in 1918. While the German population of those territories and the history of the First Czechoslovak Republic are its primary interests, this volume is a departure from both subjects. It deals with the history of the Jews in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia — the lands of the Bohemian crown. While some of the articles on early modern times deal with the same issues, the coverage lessens towards the end of the existence of an organized Jewry in Czechoslovakia.

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