scholarly journals Image of the Noble Abdelmelec in Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Fahd Mohammed Taleb Al-Olaqi

<p>There is no ambiguity about the attractiveness of the Moors and Barbary in Elizabethan Drama. Peele’s <em>The Battle of Alcazar</em> is a historical show in Barbary. Hence, the study traces several chronological texts under which depictions of Moors of Barbary were produced about the early modern stage in England. The entire image of Muslim Moors is being transmitted in the Early Modern media as sexually immodest, tyrannical towards womanhood and brutal that is as generated from the initial encounters between Europeans and Arabs from North Africa in the sixteenth century and turn out to be progressively associated in both fictitious and realistic literatures during the Renaissance period. Some Moors are depicted in such a noble manner especially through this drama that has made them as if it was being lately introduced to the English public like Muly (Note 1) Abdelmelec. Thus, the image of Abdelmelec is a striking reversal of the traditional portrayal of the Moors. This protagonist character is depicted as noble, likeable and confident. He is considerately a product of the Elizabethan playwrights’ cross-cultural understanding of the climatic differences between races of Moorish men.</p>

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 318-342
Author(s):  
Flora Cassen

A bitter conflict between the Spanish and Ottoman empires dominated the second half of the sixteenth century. In this early modern “global” conflict, intelligence played a key role. The Duchy of Milan, home to Simon Sacerdoti (c.1540-1600), a Jew, had fallen to Spain. The fate that usually awaited Jews living on Spanish lands was expulsion—and there were signs to suggest that King Philip ii (1527-1598) might travel down that road. Sacerdoti, the scion of one of Milan’s wealthiest and best-connected Jewish families had access to secret information through various contacts in Italy and North-Africa. Such intelligence was highly valuable to Spanish forces, and Philip ii was personally interested in it. However, this required Sacerdoti to serve an empire—Spain—with a long history of harming the Jews, and to spy on the Ottomans, widely considered as the Jews’ supporters at the time. This article offers a reflection on Simon Sacerdoti’s story. Examining how a Jew became part of the Spanish intelligence agency helps us understand how early modern secret information networks functioned and sheds new light on questions of Jewish identity in a time of uprootedness and competing loyalties.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Silvia Evangelisti

Abstract This article examines the narratives of female mystic journeys that were sometimes included in the biographies and the autobiographies of religious women printed in Spain between the mid-sixteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. By showing the ability of women to convert non-Christians in Asia, North Africa and America, and to defend the Catholic faith in Europe, the texts provide the opportunity to examine idealized models of female religious engagement from an unusual angle.


Medieval Europe was a meeting place for the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic civilizations, and the fertile intellectual exchange of these cultures can be seen in the mathematical developments of the time. This book presents original Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic sources of medieval mathematics, and shows their cross-cultural influences. Most of the Hebrew and Arabic sources appear here in translation for the first time. Readers will discover key mathematical revelations, foundational texts, and sophisticated writings by Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic-speaking mathematicians, including Abner of Burgos's elegant arguments proving results on the conchoid—a curve previously unknown in medieval Europe; Levi ben Gershon's use of mathematical induction in combinatorial proofs; Al-Muʾtaman Ibn Hūd's extensive survey of mathematics, which included proofs of Heron's Theorem and Ceva's Theorem; and Muhyī al-Dīn al-Maghribī's interesting proof of Euclid's parallel postulate. The book includes a general introduction, section introductions, footnotes, and references.


1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills

This paper examines an early modern contribution to the literature on stewardship accounting, the Tratado de Cuentas or Treatise on Accounts, by Diego del Castillo, a sixteenth-century Spanish jurist.


Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....


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