Terrible Turks, Bedouin Poets, and Prussian Prophets: The Shifting Place of Islam in Herder's Thought

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Almond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Literature ◽  
German Nation

In an examination of the varied responses to the Muslim Orient by the eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder, I try to locate the multiple identities he displayed in his treatment of Turks, the Koran, Arab thought, and the doctrines of Islam. What emerges is a series of different voices, employing different registers of language: a Christian response to Islam as a rival revelation-based monotheism (but, at the same time, a more sympathetic Protestant privileging of “Muhammadanism” as a belief system preferable to “papism”); a poetic register, in which “Muhammadans” move from spiritual ignorance to a status of aesthetic desirability; a philological response to the Muslim Orient, one whose emphasis on the Middle Eastern origins of European literature would assist Herder's project of the reprovincialization of Europe; and a nationalist vocabulary, one that would see the rise of Islam as a model for the emergence of Herder's German nation but that would also, paradoxically, express a Turcophobia that demonizes the Ottomans into the other of civilization.

The Private Eye in Old Canton

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Wills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Doing Business ◽  
Indian Origin ◽  
Eyewitness Reports ◽  
Private Eye ◽  
Official Records

Private memoirs are among the most descriptive documents we have of individual experiences in Canton. While subjective in nature, these European eyewitness accounts offer a diversity of views and of information regarding Canton. The five individuals considered in this chapter—Robert Pitt and William Hickey, Pehr Osbeck and Pierre Poivre, and Charles de Constant—provide glimpses of the Canton Trade that are generally not found in more official records. They represent a diversity of backgrounds: two hard-living young Englishmen, two plant-collectors, one a Lutheran chaplain and the other a failed priest, and a French-Swiss of good family encountering the worst times in Canton. Their observations contribute to the larger picture of the trade, and they remind us of the variety of visions that make up the human condition, whether at home or far away. Finding additional eyewitness reports could considerably enrich our understanding of the trade and expand our interpretations of the importance of that trade. For example, from botanizing as a hobby to the great efforts to grow tea in India, we can link eighteenth-century ‘natural history’ to the new nineteenth-century phases of plantation agriculture in ways that could be of world-historical importance. Also valuable would be more mention of merchants of Middle Eastern and Indian origin doing business at Canton, especially if figures could be found on their trade.

A Motley Company: Differing Identities among Euro-Africans in Eighteenth-Century Elmina

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATALIE EVERTS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The Other ◽  
African Identity ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Kinship System ◽  
Akan Culture

Euro-Africans along the Gold Coast figure as a somewhat obscure minority in contemporary European literature. Perhaps this can be attributed to the kinship system of the coastal Akan that dominated the structure of Gold Coast society and accounted for the integration of Euro-Africans into the local lineages. In Akan culture, children belonged to the abusua or matrilineal family of their mothers, either as free members or as slaves. A different recruiting mechanism was also in operation in the other fundamental institution of the southern Akan polities, the asafo companies. Elmina boys were recruited by their father's asafo, and as a rule, male Euro-Africans had to do without the patrilineal affiliation to these prestigious power associations. The dearth of these ties encouraged a certain minority of Euro-Africans to initiate their own ‘company’, which might be considered a kernel in the development towards a Euro-African identity.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Natives, Religion, and Race in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Over Time

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.

A Comparison of Wolff’s and Kant’s Receptions of Emanuel Swedenborg

Kant-Studien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura Follesa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Emanuel Swedenborg ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The One

Abstract Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum, the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.

The Smugglers' Trade: A Neglected Aspect of English Commercial Development

1952 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 131-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. D. Ramsay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Technical Skill ◽  
The Other ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Illicit Trade ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Victorian Age

Some share—fluctuating and uncertain, but assuredly significant—of English foreign trade in modern times is to be credited to smugglers, who were ever busy in evading customs regulations and prohibitions. Mere administrative watchfulness and thoroughness could never do more than damp their activities; it was only the triumph of free trade in the early Victorian age that deprived them of their livelihood, and until then they were able to match by increase of cunning and of organization the ever more elaborate network of the customs system—its spies, its coastguards and its cutters as well as its routine officials at the ports. The smuggler flourished right down to the end of the period of protection, despite sporadic seizures by the revenue officers. In the first half of the nineteenth century, French wines, brandies and luxury textiles were being punctually shipped across the Channel in the teeth of prohibitions. In the other direction, we know, for instance, of the existence in the same period of so remarkable á phenomenon as the muslin manufacture of Tarare, near Lyons, which relied for its raw material upon the assured supply of English yarn owled abroad. But it was probably the eighteenth century, when customs regulations were at their most burdensome and complicated, that marked the classic epoch of illicit trade, the period in which the technical skill of both breakers and defenders of the law might earn the highest rewards.

COMMUNICATING EMPIRE: THE HABSBURGS AND THEIR CRITICS, 1700–1919

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Power Base ◽  
The One ◽  
At Home

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Addition ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Separate Discipline

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”

Dziedzictwo dawnej Rzeczypospolitej w języku pierwszego polskiego przekładu poematu „Metai” Kristijonasa Donelaitisa

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-400
Author(s):  
Jolanta Mędelska
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Journalism ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Influence Of Substrate ◽  
The One ◽  
Made In

The author analysed the language of the first Polish translation of the eighteenth-century poem “Metai” [The Seasons] by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a Lithuanian Lutheran pastor. The translation was made in 1933 by a socialist activist and close associate of Józef Piłsudski, Kazimierz Pietkiewicz. The analysis showed that the language of the translation is peculiar. On the one hand, this peculiarity consists in refraining from archaizing the translation and the use of elements that are close to the translator’s style of social-political journalism (e.g., dorobkiewicz [vulgarian], feministka [feminist]), on the other hand, the presence at all levels of language of peculiarities characteristic for Kresy Polish language in both its territorial variations. These are generally old features of common Polish, the retention of which in the eastern areas of the Polish Rzeczpospolita was supported by the influence of substrate languages, later also Russian, or by borrowing. This layer was natural in the language of the translator, born in Ukraine, who spent part of his life in Vilnius, some in exile in Russia. This is the colourful linguistic heritage of the former Republic of Poland.

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