Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1177/0971945820966440
U. Bhattacharya
In a tropical monsoon country like India, embankment construction is a particular kind of necessity, an obligation imposed by nature. It is a defence against depredation caused by the force of water for which collective action was necessary. What necessitated dams or dykes to be built was the seasonal volatility of the rivers, especially the Ganges or Brahmaputra, which were significant because of their size. Embankment construction was thus a major public work activity in an era when such undertakings by the state and society were limited by financial resources and the availability of expertise. But there was a difference in approach to embankment construction and the state support given to such public enterprise, over time. While the eighteenth century had a positive approach and did not see the embankments as mere physical structures designed to cope with floods but as organic parts of tracts of land, the nineteenth century experts tended to view embankments as hindrance to natural irrigation and the cause of rather than the remedy to violent inundations. This was the opinion of experts with greater knowledge and resources at their disposal. Nineteenth century experts on embankment maintenance regarded the Permanent Settlement as the benchmark of the early colonial state’s decisive intervention in this respect and thought that the obligation of previous governments to maintain embankments should be taken as of practically no significance at all. The settlement of the character of the Permanent Settlement ‘must obviously change the whole nature of such obligations’. This article does not agree with this point of view. The article looks at the nature of this important public work activity with focus on its history in the second half of the eighteenth century and also examines how the nineteenth century experts historically reviewed the necessity of embankments as those had existed in the past.
{"title":"Embankments and Inundation in Bengal: An Early Colonial Transition","authors":"U. Bhattacharya","doi":"10.1177/0971945820966440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0971945820966440","url":null,"abstract":"In a tropical monsoon country like India, embankment construction is a particular kind of necessity, an obligation imposed by nature. It is a defence against depredation caused by the force of water for which collective action was necessary. What necessitated dams or dykes to be built was the seasonal volatility of the rivers, especially the Ganges or Brahmaputra, which were significant because of their size. Embankment construction was thus a major public work activity in an era when such undertakings by the state and society were limited by financial resources and the availability of expertise. But there was a difference in approach to embankment construction and the state support given to such public enterprise, over time. While the eighteenth century had a positive approach and did not see the embankments as mere physical structures designed to cope with floods but as organic parts of tracts of land, the nineteenth century experts tended to view embankments as hindrance to natural irrigation and the cause of rather than the remedy to violent inundations. This was the opinion of experts with greater knowledge and resources at their disposal. Nineteenth century experts on embankment maintenance regarded the Permanent Settlement as the benchmark of the early colonial state’s decisive intervention in this respect and thought that the obligation of previous governments to maintain embankments should be taken as of practically no significance at all. The settlement of the character of the Permanent Settlement ‘must obviously change the whole nature of such obligations’. This article does not agree with this point of view. The article looks at the nature of this important public work activity with focus on its history in the second half of the eighteenth century and also examines how the nineteenth century experts historically reviewed the necessity of embankments as those had existed in the past.","PeriodicalId":42683,"journal":{"name":"MEDIEVAL HISTORY JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0971945820966440","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44346077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1177/0971945820956917
Prasannan Parthasarathi
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"Prasannan Parthasarathi","doi":"10.1177/0971945820956917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0971945820956917","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42683,"journal":{"name":"MEDIEVAL HISTORY JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0971945820956917","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42827713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1177/0971945819848619
Antoni Grabowski
Alberic of Trois-Fontaines was a thirteenth-century Cistercian and a well-read chronicler. He wrote about the happenings taking place in Europe, from Ruś to Wales. Among many subjects, he was especially keen on finding out the origins of the families and the genealogical relations. He not only summarised chronicles but undertook independent research on the topic of genealogies of rulers and nobles. The extent of his writing on this subject shows that it was one of his main interests. While his knowledge about the family connections was sometimes appreciated, it was also perceived as full of mistakes. There was almost no discussion about the meaning of the various genealogies presented by Alberic. This is regrettable, as Alberic expresses a very interesting idea in the text: the common ancestry for the whole European nobility. In the article I point out Alberic’s probable sources of information, the role genealogical matter had in the chronicle. Finally I discuss the inspirations for the special treating of genealogy in the chronicle pointing at Peter of Poitiers’ example.
{"title":"Alberic of Trois-Fontaines’ Genealogies","authors":"Antoni Grabowski","doi":"10.1177/0971945819848619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0971945819848619","url":null,"abstract":"Alberic of Trois-Fontaines was a thirteenth-century Cistercian and a well-read chronicler. He wrote about the happenings taking place in Europe, from Ruś to Wales. Among many subjects, he was especially keen on finding out the origins of the families and the genealogical relations. He not only summarised chronicles but undertook independent research on the topic of genealogies of rulers and nobles. The extent of his writing on this subject shows that it was one of his main interests. While his knowledge about the family connections was sometimes appreciated, it was also perceived as full of mistakes. There was almost no discussion about the meaning of the various genealogies presented by Alberic. This is regrettable, as Alberic expresses a very interesting idea in the text: the common ancestry for the whole European nobility. In the article I point out Alberic’s probable sources of information, the role genealogical matter had in the chronicle. Finally I discuss the inspirations for the special treating of genealogy in the chronicle pointing at Peter of Poitiers’ example.","PeriodicalId":42683,"journal":{"name":"MEDIEVAL HISTORY JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0971945819848619","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42048602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1177/0971945820970175
Tyler W. Williams
Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 304. ISBN: 9780199489558.
{"title":"Book review: Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century","authors":"Tyler W. Williams","doi":"10.1177/0971945820970175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0971945820970175","url":null,"abstract":"Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 304. ISBN: 9780199489558.","PeriodicalId":42683,"journal":{"name":"MEDIEVAL HISTORY JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0971945820970175","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43329517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-11DOI: 10.1177/0971945819895895
A. Schottenhammer
At least officially, the Chinese government showed little to no interest in the Asia-Pacific region. We also know very little about Chinese state interference except for attempts to fight against piracy in the Southeast Asian waters. This article will consequently address and survey a neglected aspect of China’s maritime history, namely China’s (indirect) relationship with the Viceroyalty of Peru, its capital Lima (= Ciudad de los Reyes), and its port of Callao, and with the ‘silver centre’ in the Spanish Indies—the Villa Imperial (= Potosí), in the hinterlands of the Viceroyalty of Peru. These active, but at first sight less obvious and frequently neglected parts of the trans-Pacific trade, I would like to call ‘the other New World’. The article introduces a variety of micro-historical bottom-up insights into connections between two places that at first sight seem related to each other only through the shipments of huge quantities of silver from the Cerro Rico in Potosí via Acapulco and Manila to China, in exchange for Chinese silks and porcelains, looking specifically at some micro networks, contraband, informal, accidental, and undesired exchanges. It offers preliminary results and a general framework and survey of trade connections, routes and information on the variety of Chinese products that reached Peru.
至少在官方层面上，中国政府对亚太地区几乎没有兴趣。除了试图打击东南亚海域的海盗活动外，我们对中国政府的干预也知之甚少。因此，本文将探讨和调查中国海洋史上被忽视的一个方面，即中国与秘鲁总督府、其首都利马（Ciudad de los Reyes）和卡拉奥港的（间接）关系，以及与西印度群岛的“白银中心”——秘鲁总督府腹地的帝国别墅（=Potosí）的关系。跨太平洋贸易中这些活跃但乍一看不那么明显且经常被忽视的部分，我想称之为“另一个新世界”。这篇文章介绍了对两个地方之间联系的各种微观历史自下而上的见解，乍一看，这两个地方似乎只是通过从波托西的塞罗里科经阿卡普尔科和马尼拉向中国运送大量白银来换取中国的丝绸和瓷器而相互关联的，以及不希望的交换。它提供了初步结果、贸易联系、路线的总体框架和调查，以及到达秘鲁的各种中国产品的信息。
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Pub Date : 2020-05-01DOI: 10.1177/0971945819895896
A. Classen
Recent discussions have centred intensively on the question how to establish new cultural–historical perspectives that are no longer Eurocentric. Mediaevalists and Early Modernists have strongly endeavoured to grasp and to realise Global Mediaeval and Early Modern Studies, but despite many efforts, we are not easily getting away from traditional approaches, especially because many of our sources do not lend themselves quite so easily for that task. Whereas previous scholars have turned their attention primarily towards crusader and pilgrimage accounts, and then also towards some travelogues (Marco Polo), within the German context one early fifteenth-century text stands out that allows us to open the window wide towards a more global perspective, Hans Schiltberger’s Reisebuch. This experienced tremendous popularity in the German-speaking lands far into the late seventeenth century, illustrating the life of a slave who was traversing many countries in the Middle East and even Northern Asia in military service. This account can in fact be regarded as a unique contribution in terms of the author’s worldview and experiences. He was, involuntarily, one of the first European to report so extensively about those countries located east of the Holy Land and to discuss their political and military history.
{"title":"Global Travel in the Late Middle Ages: The Eyewitness Account of Johann Schiltberger","authors":"A. Classen","doi":"10.1177/0971945819895896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0971945819895896","url":null,"abstract":"Recent discussions have centred intensively on the question how to establish new cultural–historical perspectives that are no longer Eurocentric. Mediaevalists and Early Modernists have strongly endeavoured to grasp and to realise Global Mediaeval and Early Modern Studies, but despite many efforts, we are not easily getting away from traditional approaches, especially because many of our sources do not lend themselves quite so easily for that task. Whereas previous scholars have turned their attention primarily towards crusader and pilgrimage accounts, and then also towards some travelogues (Marco Polo), within the German context one early fifteenth-century text stands out that allows us to open the window wide towards a more global perspective, Hans Schiltberger’s Reisebuch. This experienced tremendous popularity in the German-speaking lands far into the late seventeenth century, illustrating the life of a slave who was traversing many countries in the Middle East and even Northern Asia in military service. This account can in fact be regarded as a unique contribution in terms of the author’s worldview and experiences. He was, involuntarily, one of the first European to report so extensively about those countries located east of the Holy Land and to discuss their political and military history.","PeriodicalId":42683,"journal":{"name":"MEDIEVAL HISTORY JOURNAL","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0971945819895896","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49626409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-28DOI: 10.1177/0971945819895412
Elham Shams, Farzaneh Farrokhfar
The paintings of demons attributed to Muhammad Siyah Qalam, which are primarily in album H. 2153 in the Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul, have been the centre of debate for many years. Basic questions are asked concerning their provenance. Demons performing human actions have raised several problems of interpretation and form the analytical focus of this article. Searching a certain historical period, the article seeks a socio-political reality that can be connected with these paintings. Iconographic elements and authentic Chinese paintings known to be sources of inspiration provide the possibility of discussing the Aq Qoyunlu era in the late fifteenth century as the social context, a time when the rising power of Sufism caused resentment in the court. Notes regarding Sufis written in the official chronicle during the reign of Yaqub Aq Qoyunlu, Tārikh-e-ĀlamĀrāy-e-Amini, relate to certain of the paintings and have not been mentioned prior to this article.
穆罕默德·西亚·卡拉姆（Muhammad Siyah Qalam）的恶魔画主要出现在伊斯坦布尔托普卡皮宫博物馆（Topkapi Palace Museum）的H.2153相册中，多年来一直是争论的焦点。人们对它们的出处提出了一些基本问题。表演人类行为的魔鬼提出了几个解释问题，并构成了本文的分析重点。本文通过对某一历史时期的考察，寻求与这些绘画相联系的社会政治现实。众所周知，作为灵感来源的图像元素和真实的中国绘画提供了讨论15世纪末阿克-库云鲁时代作为社会背景的可能性，当时苏菲派的崛起引起了宫廷中的怨恨。雅库布·阿克·库云鲁统治时期的官方编年史中关于苏菲的笔记，Tārikh-e-Ālam 256; rāy-e-Amini，与某些绘画有关，在本文之前没有提及。
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Pub Date : 2020-04-28DOI: 10.1177/0971945819865232
Giulia Bellato
Hugo Falcandus, the author of the Liber (or Historia) de Regno Siciliae (1154–69), is a contentious figure among historians of the twelfth century. Often disgruntled and embittered, he wrote about the reigns of two Sicilian kings, William I and II, in a text rife with classicising references and personal judgements. Most unusually for a medieval writer from this period, his Liber appears free of any religious elements or framework. This article conducts a search for God in Falcandus’s work and challenges the view that the divine element is entirely ignored by this author. By doing so and through a comparative approach, it also aims at re-contextualising his writings within the production of texts on secular power and authority taking place in the twelfth century. It will show that the apparent lack of a religious framework is a result of the author’s political vision and that Falcandus is a product and a representative of broader ideological changes sweeping through medieval Europe during his time.
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