Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles

Abstract

The article introduces and contextualises this special issue on ‘Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles’, which comprises a series of essays that draw on the activities, research findings and insights of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network, ‘Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior, 1500–1700: The Case of Decorative Textiles’. Critically evaluating the results of the network’s findings, the paper situates them within a broader investigation of the role of decorative textiles in shaping the experience of domestic interiors in the past and present, and explores new ways of reading such objects in the context of the household. It examines the historiography and current range of approaches to the study, interpretation and exhibition of historic textiles, and analyses the insights offered by bringing together different disciplinary and professional perspectives. It argues for the key significance of these textiles for both historical and modern perceptions of the domestic interior and for the importance of collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches to researching them in order to understand how they functioned in the early modern period and to inform new directions for their display and presentation in the present.     

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images,Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This article examines the role of images as evidence and sources of knowledge in the early modern Hispanic world, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Visual materials played a central role in the production of knowledge, scientific and imperial, and served as key instruments for addressing the considerable challenges of distance and place posed by the geographical expanse of the empire. Historiographically, the article highlights the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world and connects it to imperial and administrative practices; it highlights trans-regional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and it points out deep connections between earlier and later colonial periods. Methodologically, the essay explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world led to the creation of an enormous pictorial archive that deserves the same level of scholarly attention and rigor that has been lavished on the textual archive.     

Nomadism in the Modern World

A Soviet specialist on the economic geography of Afghanistan and the arid zone examines contemporary processes characteristic of nomadism: the changing relationships between nomadic and settled populations and the pressures that induce nomads to adopt a settled mode of life. The gradual transformation of the nomadic economy is viewed as historically inevitable, but the problems involved in the settling process vary in different regions and depend to a large extent on the physical and economic setting of the region.     

Sarah and Her Sisters: Letters,Emotions, and Colonial Identities in the Early Modern Atlantic World

This article uses letters by indigenous converts to explore how early modern Moravian missions in the Atlantic imagined themselves as emotional communities. Moravian missions were the most successful Protestant mission enterprise in the Atlantic and established numerous missions across several empires and vastly different indigenous cultures. By comparing the letters from indigenous converts across the Atlantic rim (North America, Caribbean and Greenland) I argue that indigenous people used the medium of the written letter to participate in an imagined emotional community of Moravians while at the same time they negotiated inescapable social and gendered differences in very specific colonial contexts.     

Introduction: Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World

Summary

This essay is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World’. The essay reviews why Iberian intellectual history, particularly liberal political thought, has been neglected in English-language scholarship. It offers suggestions for the incorporation of Portuguese and Spanish language texts into the broader canon. The essay then outlines persistent debates common to the study of liberalism in both Iberian and other national contexts, in an effort to instigate a dialogue between intellectual historians of Spain and Portugal and their counterparts elsewhere. It concludes with a consideration of the geopolitical forces, cultural trends, and social conditions that encouraged the forging of transnational liberalism in the early nineteenth century.     

全球史观与近代早期世界史编纂

全球史是20世纪下半叶在美国兴起的一个史学流派,目前在西方乃至世界正在产生越来越大的影响。当今世界的全球化趋势、后现代学术的发展、东西方之间日益紧密的学术交流,是全球史产生的国际环境和学术背景。全球史以人类社会整体发展进程为叙述对象,超越西方史学以国家为单位的叙事传统,从学术发生学的角度颠覆“欧洲中心论”,以不同人群、社会、民族、国家之间的互动为切入点,开辟了考察世界历史的新视角,建立了编纂世界通史的新框架,具有鲜明的时代特点和理论启发性。但全球史忽视对各个社会内部发展动力的考察,表现出理论欠缺。“世界横向联系”历来是我国世界通史研究的薄弱环节,而全球史正好弥补我们的不足,因此在我国有重要的借鉴意义。笔者结合修订吴齐本(吴于廑、齐世荣主编的《世界史》)近代早期部分的工作,介绍在编纂世界通史过程中尝试借鉴全球史方法和理论的体会。     

Perfectly absent: the emergence of the Modern Greek perfect in Early Modern Greek

Abstract

This paper traces the emergence of the Standard Modern Greek perfect ?χω + infinitive in the Early Modern Greek period. It shows that the construction appears in written sources towards the very end of the seventeenth century. Special attention is given to ‘phantom’ perfects, which can be found in editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary and non-literary texts as well as in the bibliography and which distort the picture of its emergence.     

Moving Words: Christian Language and the Modern World

Within the anthropology of Christianity, much attention has been paid to the convergence of Christianity with modern understandings of language. In this essay, I review scholarship that traces the historical connections between modern and Christian views of language, particularly in British colonial attacks on Hindu language practices, and I examine two recent ethnographies that offer different vantage points on the variety of ways in which contemporary Christians use language in a self-consciously modern way.