Ritual Brotherhood Across Frontiers in the Eastern Adriatic Hinterland,Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Ritual brotherhood, or pobratimstvo, is attested by a range of sources dealing with the Adriatic hinterland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Read one way, pobratimstvo shows us a border society characterized by cohesion and tolerance, where Christian and Muslim frontiersmen find ways to overcome religious and political boundaries, recognizing their common interests and shared values. Read another way, however, the same institution (and sometimes even the same documents) also offers an insight into the persistence of frontier conflict and the pervasiveness of its violence, drawing attention to other, no less bloody divisions between predators and victims. In teasing out some of the possible meanings and uses of ritual sworn brotherhood on this early modern frontier, I attempt to give due weight to the complexities of a specific place and culture. But the problems highlighted by the institution of pobratimstvo are more widespread: the troubling ambiguities of friendship, with its quality of simultaneously including and excluding; the boundaries between affection and interest, or between camaraderie and desire; the obligations (and the potential resentment) conferred by gifts; the moral dilemmas posed by cross-cutting obligations.     

16-18世纪英国宪制和宪制思想演进

英国16-18世纪宪制的演变比较曲折。内战前混合宪制已形成多年,其相应思想长期流行并影响后世。17世纪中期共和国的兴衰和分权制有名无实,给后人留下经验和教训。贵族寡头权力垄断和内阁制的形成发展,增强了18世纪英国混合制的特色。     

16～17世纪西欧社会的"猎巫"

16～17世纪巫术案件在西欧大量出现,期间大量的巫师被投进监狱,其中很多人被烧死在火刑柱上。16～17世纪时的西欧进入了转型时期,当时的西欧社会正处于极度的无序之中,而对"猎巫"的研究可以加深我们对西欧社会转型问题的理解。     

Political Modernity and Secularization: Thoughts from the Japanese Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Although some politics and international relations discourses continue to maintain that there is a causal link between secularism and political modernity, religious studies, anthropology, and history research over the past decade has been rather merciless in debunking this idea as one of the tropes of Western imperialism. This article considers at how Japanese political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engaged this trope, and how that engagement contributed to the particular relationship between religion and governance that emerged in the modern Japanese empire (1868–1945). The article argues that developments in the Confucian political thought of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), particularly in the works of Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) and Aizawa Seishisai (1792–1863), contributed significantly to the capacity of Japanese thinkers and politicians to creatively engage the role of religion in Western imperialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

18～19世纪英国志愿医院兴起初探

在18、19世纪的英国,很多志愿医院为穷人提供免费医疗救济.英国志愿医院是伴随着市民社会的出现而诞生的,体现了人道主义和基督教精神,是慈善事业与自治传统相结合的产物,给予了穷人大量的帮助.