The Early Modern Sensorium: The Rosary in Seventeenth-Century Rome†

My purpose in this article is to explore the relationship between emotion and the senses in relation to the rosary and rosary confraternities in seventeenth-century Rome, with a particular emphasis on the experience of women.The rosary is well suited to an approach grounded in sensory methodology, as it is defined both as a prayer and as an object. As a object it was always kept close to the body. Praying the rosary was not only tactile (each bead was handled during prayer) but also auditory, as the prayer was said aloud. Scented rosaries were also common, adding an olfactory component to the ritual. The sense of sight was also important: as confraternities of the rosary obtained their own chapels, large altarpieces of the Madonna of the Rosary were commissioned as visual aids to prayer. Artists incorporated haptic and olfactory prompts into these images, knowing that the audience would be praying in front of them. The rosary, therefore, constituted a ‘sensorium’, defined here as the intertwining and interdependence of multiple sense modalities.The complex interaction in the rosary between prayer, bead and the scenes from the mysteries, developed gradually from older tradition of prayer beads, which is summarised here.     

Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism and Religio-Philosophical Dynamism in the Port City of Quanzhou in Seventeenth-Century China

This paper is a response to Guotong Li’s article in which she argues that Li Zhi (1527–1602), He Qiaoyuan (1557–1633), and Li Guangjin (1549–1623) constituted a fellowship exemplified by their openness toward Islam and endorsement of maritime trade. Adopting a socio-intellectual approach, this paper rebukes the claim that the three scholars can be considered a fellowship. It demonstrates that their varying attitudes toward Buddhism and Islam should be considered in relation to their disparate intellectual dispositions. The paper also calls for a more prudent usage of the term “fellowship,” and examines the Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism revival in the mid-Ming, increasingly the dominant intellectual current in Quanzhou. Through an exploration of how Quanzhou Cheng-Zhu scholars participated in overseas trade as well as their literary commemoration of merchants, the paper supplements Guotong Li’s study of the city’s maritime trade with evidence broader than these three scholars and their Muslim connections. Together, it subscribes to the age-old Confusion tenet of “harmony with diversified views” (he er butong), thereby presenting a nuanced picture of Quanzhou.     

Local Histories in Global Perspective: A Local Elite Fellowship in the Port City of Quanzhou in Seventeenth-Century China

The Great Mosque of Quanzhou, as a distinctive community center, bound its residents through religious, professional, and educational ties; it also linked the mosque community to other communities with bonds of shared Muslim identity and minority status. The Great Mosque was rebuilt in 1609 under the supervision of the Confucian scholar Li Guangjin. This significant event is evidence of a local elite fellowship in seventeenth-century Quanzhou consisting of three well-known Confucian scholars—Li Zhi, Li Guangjin, and He Qiaoyuan—who had close ties to their Muslim neighbors. They left meticulous records of merchants, particularly Muslim traders. This paper focuses on the fellowship among the three men in order to investigate Quanzhou’s connections to the broader world of global commercial and religious networks and to look more closely at local community life.     

The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement — essentially visual in character — about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement — this visual identification — became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world.     

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.     

The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth-Century Rural Low Countries

Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex-disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled database of adult burial information for 293 rural localities and small towns in the seventeenth-century Low Countries, explicitly comparing mortality crises against ‘normal’ years. In contrast to expected results, we find no clear female mortality advantage during mortality spikes and, more to the point, women tended to die more frequently than men when only taking into account those years with very severe raised mortality. Gender-related differences in levels of protection, but also exposure to vectors and points of contagion, meant that some of these female advantages were ‘lost’ during food crises or epidemic disease outbreaks. Responses to mortality crises such as epidemics may shine new light on gender-based inequalities perhaps hidden from view in ‘normal times’ – with relevance for recent work asserting ‘female agency’ in the early modern Low Countries context.     

长城重镇 军事与建筑的双料明珠

山海关长城始建于明洪武十四年（1381年）。建关设卫以来．历经洪武、成化．嘉靖,万历．天启、崇祯六朝283年的修筑．形成了境内长城南起渤海之滨的老龙头．北至与抚宁交界的九门口．