Violence Against and Amongst Jews in An Early Modern Town: Tolerance and its Limits in Portsmouth, 1718–1781

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Warner

In 1811, William Robinson, a purser's steward in the royal navy, deserted, having served six long and brutal years at sea. Years later, he wrote his memoirs, under the colorful title of Jack Nastyface. In it he recorded the many indignities inflicted on the sailors of his day. He did so in terms designed to horrify polite men and women, toward which end he dwelled at considerable length on floggings, keel-haulings, and the like. He was, however, perfectly prepared to tolerate the indignities that sailors inflicted on a group even more marginal than themselves: the Jews who made an uncertain living peddling slops and trinkets outside the royal dockyards. In one passage, Robinson fondly remembered how a sailor had avenged himself on one such peddler, known disparagingly as “Moses.” The sailor, assisted by several of the crew, succeeded in appropriating a new suit of clothes; “Moses,” sputtering with rage, was forced to leave the ship “amidst the grins and jeers of the whole crew, who were much diverted and pleased to think that any of their shipmates had tact enough to retaliate so nicely on a Jew.”The incident, at first blush, bears all the marks of anti-Semitism. It suggests that “Moses” was singled out precisely because he was Jewish; as such, it fits nicely with the claims of a new and very pessimistic generation of scholars. These scholars, in true academic tradition, have expressed a great deal of disappointment over the work of their predecessors.

2018 ◽  
pp. 85-123
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine

Studies seeking to understand the emotional and psychological dynamic of the witch-hunts have most often focused on why someone accused of witchcraft might confess to this crime. To understand how the witch was imagined in early modern culture and thought, we also need to pay attention to the many trials that did not end in a death sentence. The notion of resistance is thus crucial in understanding the crime of witchcraft. This chapter explores how men and women sought to defend themselves on trial, and how witnesses presented evidence. It argues that there were variegated and sometimes conflicting identifications in establishing someone as ‘good’ as opposed to ‘evil’, identifications which were inextricably bound to cultural understandings of gender, age, and social standing. Approached this way, understandings of what constituted witchcraft and the ‘witch’ appear far more contested and unstable than has previously been suggested.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.


Author(s):  
Pierre Iselin

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.


2020 ◽  
pp. 51-78
Author(s):  
Diana Pereira

Over the last decades there was a growing interest in religious materiality, miraculous images, votive practices, and how the faithful engaged with devotional art, as well as a renewed impetus to discuss the long-recognized association between sculpture and touch, after the predominance of the visuality approach. Additionally, the neglected phenomenon of clothing statues has also been increasingly explored. Based on the reading of Santuario Mariano (1707–1723), written by Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), this paper will closely examine those topics. Besides producing a monumental catalogue of Marian shrines and pilgrimage sites, this source offers a unique insight into the religious experience and the reciprocal relationship between image and devotee in Early Modern Portugal, and is a particularly rich source when describing the believers’ pursuit of physical contact with sculptures. This yearning for proximity is partly explained by the belief in the healing power of Marian sculptures, which in turn seemed to be conveniently transferred to a myriad of objects. When contact with the images themselves was not possible, devotees sought out their clothes, crowns, rosary beads, metric relics, and so forth. Items of clothing such as mantles and veils were particularly used and so it seems obvious they were not mere adornments or donations, but also mediums and extensions of the sculptures’ presence and power. By focusing on the thaumaturgic role of the statues’ clothes and jewels, I will argue how the practice of dressing sculptures was due to much more than stylistic desires or processional needs and draw attention to the many ways believers engaged with religious art in Early Modern Portugal.


SUHUF ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Ali Fakhrudin

Knowledge of  qirā’at  until now has only been regarded as under-standing the various methodologies used in reciting the Quran. There has been very little research into analyzing the implications of recitative differences in terms of their purpose, although the many versions of qira’at rightly give rise to differing exegesis. This paper seeks to examine the implication of Qur’anic recitation in those religious verses that concern gender relations. There are many religious verses that address gender differences but this paper only examines verses connected with the opposite sexes shaking hands and permission for women to work outside the home.  This second verse is mentioned because until now there has often been the viewpoint that women ought not work outside the home as long as men and women shake hands at the beginning and end of business matters. For that reason, this paper is very suitable for analysis as a reminder that very rarely is there a person who interprets the Qur’an from an angle of familiarity with various qira’at.


Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino

The last three chapters of this book present specific case studies showing concrete examples of the issues to which probabilism was applied. These chapters bring the theoretical and theological discussions on probabilism into the daily life of early modern men and women, and they demonstrate the fundamental role probabilism assumed in early modern Western culture. This chapter focuses on the question of the validity of East Asian marriages, which were institutionally, legally, and culturally very different from the European West. As Catholic missionaries and theologians confronted these differences, they found probabilism immensely useful for rethinking, updating, and adapting to this new context traditional notions concerning the nature of marriage both as a sacrament and as a legal contract.


Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham

Orthodox Radicals explores the origins and identity of Baptists during the English Revolution (1640–1660), arguing that mid-seventeenth century Baptists did not, in fact, understand themselves to be part of a larger, all-encompassing “Baptist” movement. Contrary to both the explicit statements of many historians and the tacit suggestion embedded in the very use of “Baptist” as an overarching historical category, the early modern men and women who rejected infant baptism would not have initially understood that single theological move as being in itself constitutive of a new group identity. Rather, the rejection of infant baptism was but one of a number of doctrinal revisions then taking place among English puritans eager to further their ongoing project of godly reformation. Orthodox Radicals thus complicates our understanding of Baptist identity and addresses broader themes including early modern religious toleration, the mechanisms by which early modern groups defined and defended themselves, and the perennial problem of historical anachronism. By combining a provocative reinterpretation Baptist identity with close readings of key theological and political texts, Orthodox Radicals offers the most original and stimulating analysis of mid-seventeenth century Baptists in decades.


This collection of twelve original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history explores the many ways in which early modern books were subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. The essays discuss the processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation and posthumous publication that resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author’s name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book’s identity or contents. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication (including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy) and of authors and booksellers (including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, Thomas Burnet, Elizabeth Rowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Maundrell, John Nourse; Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Tillotson, Isaac Watts and John Wesley).


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

The Conclusion ties together the book’s main arguments about Crispus Attucks’s place in American history and memory. We do not know enough about his experiences, associations, or motives before or during the Boston Massacre to conclude with certainty that Attucks should be considered a hero and patriot. But his presence in that mob on March 5, 1770, embodies the diversity of colonial America and the active participation of workers and people of color in the public life of the Revolutionary era. The strong likelihood that Attucks was a former slave who claimed his own freedom and carved out a life for himself in the colonial Atlantic world adds to his story’s historical significance. The lived realities of Crispus Attucks and the many other men and women like him must be a part of Americans’ understanding of the nation’s founding generations.


Author(s):  
Eli Coleman

There is a growing recognition among clinicians that any type of sexual behavior can become pathologically impulsive or compulsive. There is quite a bit of debate about terminology for this condition, the diagnostic criteria, assessment methods and treatment approaches. In the absence of clear consensus, clinicians are struggling with how to help the many men and women who suffer and seek help from this type of problem. This chapter will review the author’s assessment and treatment approach. Clinicians will need to keep abreast of the literature as new research evolves and follow the continued debate around this controversial area.


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