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25694 results in Religion: general interest

Page 180 of 1285

  • 5 - Departure from India and Residence in Persia (Letters 293–327)

  • from THE LETTERS
  • Edited by Scott D. Ayler
  • Book:
    The Letters of Henry Martyn, East India Company Chaplain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    29 March 2020
    Print publication:
    15 November 2019, pp 497-572

  • Summary

    To David Brown

    Cawnpore. Sept. 17, 1810

    Dearest Sir,

    Herewith you will receive the first seven chapters in Persian and Hindoostanee, though I suppose you have ceased to wish for them. The Persian will only prove that Sabat is not the man for it. I have protested against many things in it; but instead of sending you my objections, I inclose a critique by Mirza, who must remain unknown. I am somewhat inclined to think the Arabic not quite so hopeless. Sabat is confident, and eager to meet his opponents. His version of the Romans was certainly not from the old one, because he translated it all before my face, from the English; but then, as I hinted long ago, he is inaccurate, and must not be depended upon. He entirely approves of my going to Bassorah with his translations, and the old one, confident that the decision there will be in his favour. In hopes of getting away in November from Calcutta, I shall make every exertion to leave this the 1st of next month, though no budgerows are to be had. So now, dear Sir, take measures for transmitting me with the least possible delay, detain me not, for the King's business requires haste. My health in general is good, but the lungs not strong. One loud dispute brings on pain.

    Yours ever affectionately,

    H. Martyn

    Addressed to: The Rev'd David Brown. Calcutta

  • No extant original. Text found in Wilberforce (II), p. 317.

  • Nathaniel Sabat, a Muslim convert to Christianity and Martyn's primary language assistant for the Persian and Arabic translations.

  • Mirza Mohammed Ali Fitrut, Martyn's chief assistant for the Hindoostanee translation.

  • The quality of Sabat's Arabic had apparently been attacked as well as his Persian work (see note for Letter 292).

  • Modern Basra, Iraq.

    • To Daniel Corrie

    Allahabad. October 3, 1810

    Thus far are we come in safety, but my spirits tell me that I have parted with friends. Your pale face as it appeared on Monday morning is still before my eyes, and will not let me be easy till you tell me you are strong and prudent.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane
  • Book:
    Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    19 March 2020
    Print publication:
    15 November 2019, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    The historian, with all respect and understanding for the office, cannot permit this way of seeing – the form of questioning and judging that needs only decide between orthodoxy and heresy – to intrude if he wishes to understand the intellectual and religious life of that time in its variety of views, in its tensions and contradictions, and hence in its symptoms and causes of change. (Herbert Grundmann, ‘Heresy Interrogations’ [see p. 126 in this volume])

    Over the nearly fifty years since his death in 1970, Herbert Grundmann’s formative influence on the field of medieval religious history has become increasingly evident. Renowned for his innovative and scrupulous research into the beliefs, ideas, practices and processes that shaped religious worlds from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, Grundmann revealed entirely new vistas of the medieval past. Generations of scholars have since approached their research from vantage points shaped by his arguments, whether those points of view were attained via personal contact, by reading his many publications or inherited through doctoral work and other secondary scholarship. Central to this gradually widening circle of influence were his German students, whom he mentored up until his death.

    By the last decades of the twentieth century, this secular, source-based and cultural-historical approach had rippled through French, Italian, British and other European scholarship, producing in its wake research on a wide range of topics: monasticism, education, literacy, universities, theology, apostolic life, women's religious communities and expression, heresy and inquisition, popular or lay religious life, apocalyptic thought and prophecy and so on. American scholars inspired by Grundmann's methods soon generated their own studies of the medieval religious landscape, in turn introducing their own doctoral students to the ‘Grundmann’sche’ model. That Grundmann opened his door to foreign graduate students both at home and at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica suggests awareness of, and perhaps a sense of kinship with, these far-flung circles of medieval scholarship.

    By the time of this publication, Grundmann's influence has been incorporated, whether consciously or not, into the research of hundreds of medievalists around the globe. Yet, for those without skill in reading German, the precise and subtle distinctions of Grundmann's arguments have been largely inaccessible. The 1995 English translation of his masterwork Religiose Bewegungen into Religious Movements of the Middle Ages was an invaluable contribution to that audience and generated new waves of engagement with Grundmann's complex and wide-ranging theses.

  • 5 - Oportet et Haereses Esse: The Problem of Heresy in the Mirror of Medieval Biblical Exegesis

  • Edited by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane
  • Book:
    Herbert Grundmann (1902–1970)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    19 March 2020
    Print publication:
    15 November 2019, pp 180-215

  • Summary

    The assertion that heresy must exist, that it has to be present, might sound to many theologians today all too ‘modern’, as suspiciously conciliatory or resigned, a fatal capitulation to the unfortunate ‘pluralism’ of opinions. Or it might have seemed so, had not the Apostle Paul written exactly that in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11, verse 19. Paul had heard complaints from all directions on problems and disputes in the young Hellenistic Christian congregation of Corinth, where he himself had worked for a year and a half on his second missionary journey. Some years later he learned that differences of opinion had split that congregation, even concerning the common celebration of the Last Supper. ‘I have heard’, the Apostle writes from Ephesus (probably in the year 54 or 57), among other recommendations, ‘that there are divisions among you, and I believe it at least in part; for there must certainly be (parties) (among you), so that the just, the reliable, the tested will be openly with you.’ In the Latin Vulgate text it is: ‘Audio scissuras esse inter vos, et ex parte credo, nam oportet et haereses esse, ut et qui probati sunt, manifesti fiant in vobis.’ Luther translated: ‘Ich höre, es seien Spaltungen unter euch, und zum Teil glaube ich’s. Denn es müssen Rotten unter euch sein, auf daß die, so rechtschaffen sind, offenbar unter euch werden.’ In Galatians 5.20 Luther translates the word with Rotten, listing those who were involved in a long series of damnable works of the flesh from adultery and whoring to murder, drunkenness, overeating and the like, along with disturbance, conflict and hatred; in the Vulgate the word at this point is sectae. Similarly, as the word Rotten in the sense of a ‘gang’ is unknown in our language since Luther's time (and causes one to think of the rebellious Rotte Korah in Numbers chapter 19), the newer edition of the German Bible has replaced it [in 1 Corinthians] (though not in Galatians) with Parteien (‘parties’), so that it now reads: ‘there must be parties among you’. The phrase almost sounds contemporary, until one remembers that this translates the word – haereses. But surely Luther chose that word on purpose rather than translating it as Ketzerei, as it had usually been understood – or perhaps misunderstood – until then.

  • Conclusion

  • Wesley A. Kort
  • Book:
    Textuality, Culture and Scripture
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 December 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2019, pp 107-120

  • Summary

    This book has addressed two related questions. The first and more general question is carried by the title of Wilfred Cantwell Smith's book, What Is Scripture? Smith intensifies his question by positing a human propensity to “scripturalize,” and he concludes, from the recurrence of scriptures in diverse human cultures, that “no theory of language is complete that does not include, and serve to elucidate, scripture.” It is hoped that this book offers some answers to his question and responds in a helpful way to his request for a more general theory of language and textuality that would account for the widespread standing and role of scriptures for persons and peoples.

    The second and more specific question, which turns attention to the scriptural standing and role of the Bible, is whether or not the divide between two kinds of contemporary readers or readings of it can be reduced. How can those who read it as they would read any other ancient text and those who read it as having particular and even unique relevance to and effects on their lives be brought more closely together?

    In this conclusion I shall, while keeping in view my response to the first question, comment further on the second and more specific of these questions, namely, the divide between two ways of regarding the Bible. An important point to keep in mind, as we return to this question, is that the gap that I illustrated by describing an exchange during a Bible study hour between the pastor and the woman should not be solved by discounting one or the other of the two sides. Both approaches carry legitimate claims that should be affirmed and brought into closer relation to one another. As I have suggested, the falling out of these two sides is anticipated by the dual nature of texts themselves. Texts are compounds of two elements, and recognizing the dual or compound nature of texts will question the assumption that the two ways of reading the Bible are irreconcilable. When we recognize the relation of the two views of the Bible to the two sides of texts, we can appreciate more fully Calvin's insistence that one can know Christ only in and by scripture because Christology has some analogical relations to the compound nature of biblical texts.

  • 2 - Calcutta and Early Ministry at Dinapore (Letters 68–135)

  • from THE LETTERS
  • Edited by Scott D. Ayler
  • Book:
    The Letters of Henry Martyn, East India Company Chaplain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    29 March 2020
    Print publication:
    15 November 2019, pp 165-288

  • Summary

    To unidentified recipient in England1

    [c. May 1806]

    My long and wearisome voyage is concluded, and I am at last arrived in the country in which I am to spend my days in the work of the Lord.2 Scarcely can I believe myself to be so happy as to be actually in India; yet this hath God wrought through changing climates, and tempestuous seas. He has brought on his feeble worm to the field of action, and will, I trust, speedily equip me for my work. I am now very far from you all, and as often as I look around and view the Indian scenery, I sigh to think of the distance that separates us. Time, indeed, and reflection, have, under God, contributed to make the separation less painful, yet still my thoughts recur with unceasing fondness to former friendships, and make the duty of intercession for you a happy privilege. Day and night I do not cease to pray for you, and I am willing to hope that you also remember me daily at the throne of grace. Let us not, by any means, forget one another; nor lose sight of the day of our next meeting.3 We have little to do with the business of this world. Place and time have not that importance in our views that they have in those of others; and therefore neither changes of situation nor lapse of years should weaken our Christian attachment. I see it to be my business to fulfill as an hireling my day; and then to leave the world. Amen. We shall meet in happier regions. I believe that those connexions, and comforts, and friendships, which I have heretofore so desired, though they are the sweetest earthly blessings, are earthly still.

  • No extant original. Text found in Sargent, pp. 148–9. Identified only as a ‘beloved Christian friend’, the recipient is possibly Sargent himself.

  • Martyn landed in Calcutta on 15 May 1806. See full summary of voyage in Letter 68.

  • I.e., in eternity.

    • To Malachy Hitchins

    Aldeen Gardens, Serampore, East Indies. May 30th, 1806

    My Dear Sir,

    I have found no difficulty in remembering the promise I made you of writing on my arrival in Bengal.

  • 1 - Wax versus Wood: The Material of Votive Offerings in Renaissance Italy

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 35-50

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Since antiquity, people have recorded moments of divine intervention in their lives by leaving votive objects at religious shrines. In particular, there is a very long (and ongoing) tradition of offering anatomical models of eyes, ears, breasts, limbs, etc., in recognition of a healing located in a specific part of the body. In Renaissance Italy, anatomical votive objects – usually moulded in wax – remained popular, but they had to compete with several other votive trends, including colourful paintings on wooden boards depicting miracles. This chapter will assess these votive choices and seek to cast light on how materiality affected religious experience during the Italian Renaissance.

    Keywords: candles; ex-votos; Renaissance; shrines; wax

    The dichotomy suggested by my title is a false one. In Renaissance Italy, as elsewhere, many kinds of objects were left at shrines by the faithful who wished to record and give thanks for the graces that they had received. Propped up against a saint's tomb or heaped around a venerated image one might expect to see sacks of grain, candles, rosaries, strings of coral, crucifixes and – at the more lucrative shrines – an array of reliefs or statuettes wrought in gold and silver. These heteroclite gifts are referred to as ‘votive offerings’ because they were presented, whether explicitly or not, as the fulfilment of a promise or a vow, in Latin ‘ex voto’. While the language of the vow was transactional, gifts were not always weighed in terms of their financial worth. Some offerings derived their value and significance from having been present on the devotee's body at the moment of the cure or delivery from danger: discarded crutches; a bloodied shirt that had been worn during a near-fatal attack; the handcuffs or shackles from which a captive had escaped. Others represented those moments of miraculous intervention by means of objects or images: the wooden boats that commemorated survival at sea; anatomical models, most commonly made of wax, papier mâché or metal, that referred to the part of the body that had been healed; or painted votive tablets that depicted both devotee and intercessor within the unfolding scenario of the miracle

  • 5 - Christian Materiality between East and West: Notes of a Capuchin among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 103-118

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This essay presents the Théâtre de la Turquie, a work compiled by an anonymous Capuchin missionary (‘Michel Febvre’) based in the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth century. Published in French in 1682, the Théâtre offers an intriguing glimpse of how Catholic missionaries used religious materiality as a prism through which to make sense of the religious diversity of the Ottoman world. Moreover, writers like Febvre also drew on the evidence of Eastern Christian religious practices as a way of defending Roman Catholicism against its Protestant critics. The essay uses the Théâtre to reflect on the geography, chronology and afterlives of the ‘paradox of Christian materiality’ described in Bynum's 2011 study.

    Keywords: Ottoman Empire; Eastern Christianity; Capuchins; missionaries; Catholic Reformation; Islam

    The historian of Eastern Christianity encounters several challenges when exploring the world of religious materiality, some of which are rather different from those facing scholars of Latin Christendom. This is because the study of religious materiality relies in fundamental ways on the existence of what might be called an infrastructure of preservation, that is, a constellation of social practices, mechanisms and institutions that favour, or at least facilitate, the survival of the material record of religious experience into the modern day. Museums are a case in point. Whereas the development of a market for objects of curiosity in early modern Europe culminated in the establishment of institutions whose sole purpose was to house, study and, above all, protect a wide array of material culture, such repositories only emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. And when they finally appeared, their collections tended to showcase ancient artefacts that spoke to the tastes of Europeans or, conversely, focused mainly on the Islamic heritage of the Middle East.

    To be sure, the study of archaeology and visual culture has gone some way towards addressing this problem: gravestones, icons and even ecclesiastical vestments have been the subject of fruitful studies. In 2011, the annual Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposium – which plays a key role in defining the agenda of the field of Byzantine studies – focused its entire programme on one aspect of religious materiality, namely the cult of saints.

  • 8 - ‘Watching myself in the mirror, I saw ʿAlī in my eyes’: On Sufi Visual and Material Practice in the Balkans

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 151-174

  • Summary

    Abstract

    After the expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the fifteenth century, sizeable numbers of dervishes emigrated to the newly conquered territories in the Balkan peninsula. Reacting against the increasing institutionalization of Sufi orders, these itinerant antinomian dervishes embraced a variety of unconventional and socially liminal practices, including ascetic acts that are practised to this day. This chapter discusses such Sufi material-visual practices with particular reference to the memorial services for the Prophet Muḥammad's grandson Ḥusayn and other members of his family during the sacred days of ʿĀshūrāʾ and Sultan Nawruz. These include special ritual practices such as piercing dervishes’ bodies with swords or iron spikes aimed at taming the base soul (nafs).

    Keywords: Sufi; dervish; Balkans; ʿĀshūrāʾ; Sultan Nawruz; training the soul

    Muḥammad is ʿAlī, ʿAlī-Muḥammad,

    ʿAlī is Muḥammad, ʿAlī-Muḥammad, Allah!

    ʿAlī is Muḥammad, ʿAlī-Muḥammad.

    Ilāhī (Devotional song).

    In his Mashāʿir al-shuʿarāʾ (Biographies of the poets) the sixteenth-century judge and poet ʿĀshik Chelebi (d. 1571–72) from Prizren in Kosovo described a dervish of the Ḥaydarī sect, named Baba ʿAlī Mest as having worn earrings, a collar around his neck and chains on his body, as well as a ‘dragon-headed’ hook under his belt and a sack. Following the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century, sizeable numbers of dervishes, mostly of heterodox origin like ʿAlī Mest, emigrated to the newly conquered territories in the Balkan peninsula. As a reaction to the increasing institutionalization of Sufi orders, these itinerant antinomian dervishes, sometimes referred to as qalandars, embraced a variety of unconventional and socially liminal practices. Travelling alone or in bands, they deliberately inverted social hierarchies and explicitly violated Islamic law as a form of religious and social protest.

    Some of these dervishes performed special ascetic practices that were profoundly physical and material in character. These included ritual self-laceration, and piercing their own bodies with swords or iron spikes. Such self-mortification left marks on the body that stood as material-visual reminders of the dervishes’ exertions and communicated their spectacular and theatrical actions to wider audiences. The concomitant display of animal attributes also reflected the dervishes’ own animal-like force. It acted not only as a means of liberation and a critique of social controls but, above all, served as a prime tool in the dramatic attempts to discipline, control and tame their own ‘animal’ or base souls (nafs).

  • Epilogue

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 247-256

  • Summary

    Ever since John Toews’ essay ‘Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn’ in the American Historical Review in 1987, cultural historians have seen themselves as turning, re-turning and turning beyond. Recently the turning has speeded up, sometimes propelling us from one turn to another so quickly that we hardly have time to consolidate the advantages of a new emphasis. Nonetheless, turn we must, and surely this volume, ably compiled by Suzanna Ivanič, Mary Laven and Andrew Morrall, represents in two elements of its very title (‘materiality’ and ‘world’) what might be considered the most important new directions of the past twenty years: the material turn and the global turn.

    In a productive re-evaluation of what we should focus on in studying culture, anthropologists, art historians, historians, sociologists and students of religion have turned not to reject textual evidence but to add to it what they variously call ‘thing theory’, ‘the material turn’ and ‘object-oriented ontology’. Building on the ideas of the anthropologist Alfred Gell, whose most influential work on the agency of objects appeared just after his untimely death in 1997, and the approach of sociologist Bruno Latour, who seemed to reject many current ideas of a division between subject and object, this turn propelled scholars to new definitions of what they studied. For art historians, the new theories broadened what was once understood as art (painting, sculpture and sometimes decorative or decorated objects such as cabinets and altarpieces) to include all crafted things and indeed some (such as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades) that are not reworked by an artist or craftsman but simply relocated and relabelled. For students of religion, the focus involved a move away from the study of doctrines (which not all so-called ‘religions’ seem to have) to consideration of practices, performances and rituals (which seem to be found in some form in all societies, perhaps even primate ones). The approach thus avoided a reduction of ‘religion’ to a set of beliefs, an approach that had been rejected somewhat confusedly as ‘Protestant-izing’, by scholars going back at least to Wilfred Cantwell Smith.

  • 6 - The Materiality of Death in Early Modern Venice

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 119-136

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This essay examines two interconnected dimensions of the materiality of death in early modern Venice: the complex attitudes of the living to corpses, and the significant role which material objects played in the transition between deathbed and burial place. Certain funerary and exhumation practices suggest that the physical body lost its significance at the moment of death; others demonstrate that the material body retained a religious and social importance after death. Objects – often recycled or ephemeral – sustained a connection between the deceased individual and the wider community. This study argues that the meanings attached to the body changed as its material form decayed following death, and that these meanings held a particular force in a transitional period shortly after death.

    Keywords: burial; catafalques; corpses; Counter-Reformation; death masks; Exhumation

    Human bodies were particularly important ‘things’ in the early modern material world. But bodies, of course, were something more than mere material things, and the nature of their materiality was contested and debated. The complexity of views of the material body was galvanized by the mutability of bodies, whether through ageing, behaviour, body care or death. Religious beliefs and religious change shaped understandings of bodily materiality. Dead bodies raised particular questions. How did the body and its meanings change after death? How could the physical place of the dead body be reconciled with religious, political, social and family needs?

    This essay examines two interconnected dimensions of the materiality of death in early modern Venice: the complex attitudes of the living to corpses, and the significant role which material objects played in the transition of the body from deathbed to burial place. Certain funerary and exhumation practices suggest that the physical body lost its significance at the moment of death, and that attention shifted to the fate of the soul. Yet other practices indicate that the dead body retained an importance for the Catholics who comprised the vast majority of the population of early modern Venice. The significance of material remains is highlighted by the careful consideration which was given to where bodies were buried, as well as by practices such as embalming.

  • 7 - Living with the Virgin in the Colonial Andes: Images and Personal Devotion

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 137-150

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Although deeply preoccupied with idolatry, Spanish missionaries saw religious images as effective tools of conversion in the Andes. This paper studies the dissemination of the cult of the Virgin Mary in the colonial Andes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The discussion focuses on a Marian devotion, Our Lady of Copacabana, and explores its place in the shaping of Andean Catholicism. Studies of this devotion have centred on contemporary accounts of its origins and propagation, and on the artistic and technical characteristics of images meant for public worship. Through the study of personal inventories and dowries found in notary records, this paper focuses on images for personal devotion. I argue that the cult of the Virgin of Copacabana was at once profoundly Andean and cosmopolitan.

    Keywords: conversion; race relations; body; silver; Peru; Andes;

    The story of the first encounter between Europeans and Andeans, which ended with the capture of the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, in 1532, provides us with a wealth of material with which to think about the interaction between people, objects and religion. At their first meeting, a Spanish friar presented Atahualpa with a religious book, an object that did not capture the Inca's attention. For Atahualpa the book had no significance, since the Inca civilization had no alphabetic writing and therefore had no familiarity with this type of object. Associating sacredness with text was an operation entirely alien to the Andeans. Atahualpa, several accounts of this first meeting assert, was handed the book and, after a brief inspection, seemed to conclude that it was an inert and speechless and therefore meaningless, object, so he dismissed it and threw it on the ground. The Spanish, who knew as much about the Inca as the Inca knew about them, took offence at Atahualpa's failure to perceive the inherent value of the book, and responded with a brutal, unexpected attack against Atahualpa and his retinue. As a result, dozens of soldiers were slain, and Inca Atahualpa was made captive. Some months later, having paid the Spanish a huge ransom and after accepting baptism, the Inca was garrotted.

Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019
  • This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.

  • 9 - Religious Materiality in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 177-192

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Looking closely at objects in Rudolf II's Kunstkammer in Prague (1577–1612) reveals the complex interactions between religion and the natural world. The coconut shell, rhinoceros horn and bezoar stone that made up a liturgical cup in the collection were thought to protect against poisonous liquids and its inscription with a psalm drew attention to the notion of ‘thirsting’ for God. Text or images could make references to religion, but sometimes beliefs were lodged within the material. Similarly, precious stones were considered to represent divine power. This chapter examines these meanings of materiality in so-called ‘religious objects’ at the Habsburg court.

    Keywords: Prague; natural philosophy; Kunstkammer; collections; religion; material Culture

    This chapter examines objects for what they can reveal about early modern religion. It does so in an unexpected context: the early modern Kunstkammer was a setting normally considered as a space of art and science, not one designed for devotion. It provides a unique perspective on religious materiality. Looking at the collection of Rudolf II as a whole and focusing on two individual artefacts kept within it, this chapter examines how religious meaning was transformed during an object's life, through the processes of its creation, adaptation and collection. In doing so, it reveals how religious materiality was affected and thought about in ways which were specific to the early modern period. It considers how natural philosophy connected matter to the divine, and it shows how global trade contributed to an ever-diversifying religious material culture.

    Located in Prague's castle district, on top of the hill above the Vltava river, protected from floods by its position, and closed from public view, was the most extensive Kunstkammer collection of the early modern period. From 1577 to 1612, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) assembled a vast collection of objects, art, materials, animals and instruments. Karel van Mander, a Dutch painter and art historian, wrote in 1604 that one ‘has only to go to Prague […] to the greatest art patron in the world at the present time, the Roman Emperor Rudolf the Second; there he may see[…] a remarkable number of outstanding and precious, curious, unusual and priceless works’.

  • 3 - Powerful Objects in Powerful Places: Pilgrimage, Relics and Sacred Texts in Tibetan Buddhism

  • Edited by Andrew Morrall, Mary Laven, Suzanna Ivanic
  • Book:
    Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    04 November 2019, pp 67-84

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Since the advent of Buddhism, the remains of the Buddha and of those who have embodied his message have been considered powerful. In Tibet, relics, including texts understood as embodiments of speech, have been the focus of popular devotion. Often connected to particular sites, these powerful objects appear in biographies of spiritual masters and pilgrimage guides, and are still revered today. Prized for their protective and healing powers and deemed capable of bringing disgrace to those who mishandle them, relics have also functioned to restore sacredness to Buddhist sites following their destruction and reconstruction. This chapter explores examples from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tibetan sources as well as contemporary practices to highlight this form of religious materiality that presents remarkable parallels with Christian practices.

    Keywords: Buddhism; pilgrimage; relics; Tibet

    Around 1440 the Tibetan princess, Chokyi Dronma, was sent as a bride to the neighbouring kingdom, the polity of Southern Lato. She would have preferred a religious life, but she had no option but to follow the wish of her father, the King of Gungthang, and the custom of her time. As in early modern Europe, in fifteenth-century Tibet marriage alliances were important to guarantee stable political relations and maintain peaceful relations in a politically fragmented world. According to her biography (Plate 3.1) Chokyi Dronma had spent her childhood in her homeland, the Kingdom of Mangyul Gungthang in south-western Tibet, where she had led a very devout and scholarly life with the support of her mother, and had learnt to respect books. After arriving in her new home as a bride, she discovered a collection of holy scriptures that had been taken there from her homeland – a gift or, more likely, war booty. Distressed at finding them in a neglected condition, she took care to restore them. These items were more than passive objects to her; these literary artefacts affected her in the most intimate way and exercised significant moral pressure on her as sacred objects. She believed they had the power to give blessing to her and the community and that their mistreatment was profoundly inauspicious. She accordingly restored the collection, provided the customary cloth to wrap them, and ensured that there was a caretaker to look after them and perform rituals in their honour.

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