This article describes the sources for, and the origins and uses of, the creole languages in the Dutch colony of eighteenth‐century Suriname – those created and spoken among slaves on the ...plantations, among the free black Maroons in the jungle villages and among the mixed population (freed/slave, Christian/Jewish, French/Dutch, etc.) of the town of Paramaribo. The rich sources derive especially from plantation managers and Moravian missionaries, at their best working with black or coloured collaborators. These creoles, both the English‐based Sranan and the Portuguese‐based Saramaccan, allowed generations of Africans and Surinamese‐Africans of diverse background to discuss matters of family, health and religion, to tell stories, to establish intimacy and mount quarrels with each other, to consider relations with masters and settlers, to plot resistance and sometimes to construct a past history. The uses of the creole languages by settlers are described, including their limited employment for religious conversion. The article concludes with the Dutch and Sranan poems published in the seventeen‐eighties by a Dutch settler married to a mulatto heiress, poems casting in doubt hierarchies of colour.
Medical pluralism flourished in the 18th century in the Dutch colony of Suriname. White physicians and surgeons, trained in European medicine, existed along with Indigenous priest/healers and ...herbalists, slave priest/diviners, and healers of African origin, their diverse practices played out on the plantation itself. While decrying the “superstition” of slave healers, physicians began to take note of their plant remedies, such as the local bark used to reduce fever discovered by the celebrated diviner Quassie. Some slave healers were trained in European surgical practices. The Suriname government acted against the slave “poisoners,” who were feared by slaves as well, but they did not act against other non-European healers.
Au 18e siècle, le pluralisme médical a prospéré dans la colonie hollandaise du Suriname. Alors que les médecins et chirurgiens blancs formés en Europe y côtoyaient les prêtres/guérisseurs et herboristes Autochtones, les prêtres/devins esclaves, et les guérisseurs d’origine africaine, leurs diverses pratiques ont influencé la colonie. Tout en décriant les « superstitions » des esclaves-guérisseurs, les médecins ont commencé à s’intéresser à leurs remèdes à base de plantes médicinales, tel que l’écorce d’un arbre local utilisé pour réduire la fièvre, découvert par le célèbre devin Quassie. Certains esclaves-guérisseurs ont aussi été formés aux techniques chirurgicales européennes. Bien qu’il ait réprimé les esclaves « empoisonneurs », craints par les esclaves eux-mêmes, le gouvernement colonial du Suriname n’a toutefois pas agi contre les autres guérisseurs autochtones et noirs.
This article introduces Joan Kelly's foundational article, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" originally published in 1977. Kelly's work was a striking product of a focus on early modern women that ...began to emerge in Renaissance studies in the early 1970s, and it led to a historical renewal that is perhaps analogous to the humanist endeavour to recover classical manuscripts. Kelly's article had an impact on generations of feminist scholarship. It suggested new possibilities and directions of inquiry and set a new intellectual agenda. (Quotes from original text)
Leon (Judah Aryeh) Modena was a major intellectual figure of the early modern Italian Jewish community--a complex and intriguing personality who was famous among contemporary European Christians as ...well as Jews. Modena (1571-1648) produced an autobiography that documents in poignant detail the turbulent life of his family in the Jewish ghetto of Venice. The text of this work is well known to Jewish scholars but has never before been translated from the original Hebrew, except in brief excerpts. This complete translation, based on Modena's autograph manuscript, makes available in English a wealth of historical material about Jewish family life of the period, religion in daily life, the plague of 1630-1631, crime and punishment, the influence of kabbalistic mysticism, and a host of other subjects. The translator, Mark R. Cohen, and four other distinguished scholars add commentary that places the work in historical and literary context. Modena describes his fascination with the astrology and alchemy that were important parts of the Jewish and general culture of the seventeenth century. He also portrays his struggle against poverty and against compulsive gambling, which, cleverly punning on a biblical verse, he called the "sin of Judah." In addition, the book contains accounts of Modena's sorrow over his three sons: the death of the eldest from the poisonous fumes of his own alchemical laboratory, the brutal murder of the youngest, and the exile of the remaining son. The introductory essay by Mark R. Cohen and Theodore K. Rabb highlights the significance of the work for early modern Jewish and general European history. Howard E. Adelman presents an up-to-date biographical sketch of the author and points the way toward a new assessment of his place in Jewish history. Natalie Z. Davis places Modena's work in the context of European autobiography, both Christian and Jewish, and especially explores the implications of the Jewish status as outsider for the privileged exploration of the self. A set of historical notes, compiled by Howard Adelman and Benjamin C. I. Ravid, elucidates the text.
ABSTRACT
This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of ...globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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