Manliness,Male Virtue and History Writing at the Seventeenth‐Century Ottoman Court

When one compares Ottoman chronicles written in the wake of the failed Vienna campaign of 1683 to those composed prior to 1682 and finally to those completed in 1658 one finds, first, that gendered conceptions were central to the authors' depictions of the era and, second, that the model of manliness and male virtue that the authors conceived changed greatly. To authors writing during the first decade of Mehmed IV's reign (1648–58), male virtue was expressed in self‐mastery, the mastery of subordinates, particularly women, and the control of financial resources. Authors in the period between 1658 and 1682 imagined manliness in terms of bravery – manifested in hunting and waging war, labelled interchangeably ghaza or jihad – and Islamic zeal. After 1682, writers again returned to an understanding of male virtue and manliness centred on self‐control. This article explains the reasons for this change in conceptions of manliness and male virtue by relating it to the dynamic competition between courtly factions patronising literary production. The need to curry favour with these factions was reflected in the writers' choice of literary genre, which intervened discursively to offer different images of the sultan and valide sultan (queen mother).     

The Construction of Gender in Modern Chinese Law: Discrepant Gender Meanings in the Republican Civil Code

This article examines the intersection of law, gender, and modernity during the transitional Republican era (1912–49). It approaches the topic through a critical reading of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–30, and related commentary on the code by Chinese legal experts. By analyzing the gender assumptions embodied in several newly emergent categories of legal regulation, including legal personhood, minimum marriage age, consent, domicile, surnames, marital property, and child custody, the article’s line of questioning reveals how gender meanings helped to shape modern concepts like universality, equality, and freedom. The findings illustrate the ways in which Republican civil law broke with late imperial legal and gender norms tied to Confucian patrilineal ideology and in addition established new legal and gender meanings that helped to consolidate Chinese politics on a republican basis and to reconfigure modern gender difference on a conjugal basis.     

The Meanings of Conversion: Treaty Law,State Knowledge,and Religious Identity among Russian Captives in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

This article examines the role of religious conversion in the rules worked out, on paper and in practice, between the Ottoman and Russian empires for the return of captives following their frequent eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflicts. The author shows that the abolition of ransom led the Ottoman state to take the central role in the liberation of captives in private hands in its territories. For cultural and fiscal reasons, this required the state to define a test for captives’ conversion to Islam, a matter which had previously been communally and religiously defined. The author traces the changing conversion tests used, and the ways they were manipulated by both captors and captives for their own ends, arguing that the legal definition of conversion undermined official trust, and perhaps community trust more broadly, in conversion's social role. This discussion sheds light on the connections between state knowledge, centralisation, and identity, while suggesting that Ottoman state intervention in matters of slavery and conversion, which has previously been seen as a product of the consciously reforming nineteenth-century Tanzimat, emerged earlier as a pragmatic result of Ottoman participation in the international arena.     

Metternich and the Ottoman reform movement

The goal of the paper is to illuminate Metternich's attitude towards possibilities of reform in the Ottoman Empire and the reasons for his interest and practical steps taken in this matter. The paper attempts to provide an accurate account of an important, but until now, entirely ignored, aspect of Metternich's diplomacy and offer further proof that Metternich was not the benighted reactionary depicted in the nineteenth-century historiography, but a conservative keenly aware that the conservative order could survive only if reformed so as to adapt it to the realities of a post-revolutionary age.     

Dominion of the Spirit over the Flesh: Religion,Gender and Sexual Morality in the German Women's Movement before World War I

This article examines the place of religious values in the thinking of leading figures in the mainstream German women's movement in the period before World War I. Focusing on the debate of sexual morality and abortion within the German League of Women's Associations, it argues that the position taken by these women is best understood as a product of their religious commitments, rather than their political ideas. The article seeks to place these women in the historical context of a particular liberal, Protestant, social and intellectual milieu that flourished in the period before 1914.