The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World


Book Description

The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World is a collection of fourteen articles focusing on debates concerning the nature of “rites” raging in intellectual circles of Europe, Asia and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The controversy started in Jesuit Asian missions where the method of accommodation, based on translation of Christianity into Asian cultural idioms, created a distinction between civic and religious customs. Civic customs were defined as those that could be included into Christianity and permitted to the new converts. However, there was no universal consensus among the various actors in these controversies as to how to establish criteria for distinguishing civility from religion. The controversy had not been resolved, but opened the way to radical religious scepticism. Contributors are: Claudia Brosseder, Michela Catto, Gita Dharampal-Frick, Pierre Antoine Fabre, Ana Carolina Hosne, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Giuseppe Marcocci, Ovidiu Olar, Sabina Pavone, István Perczel, Nicholas Standaert, Margherita Trento, Guillermo Wilde and Ines G. Županov.




Manuscript, Print and Memory


Book Description

The ancient Tamil poetic corpus of the Caṅam ("The Academy") is a national treasure for Tamilians and a battle-ground for linguists and historians of politics, culture and literature. Going back to oral predecessors probably dating back to the beginning of the first millennium, it has had an extremely rich and variegated history. Collected into anthologies and endowed with literary theories and voluminous commentaries, it became the centre-piece of the Tamil literary canon, associated with the royal court of the Pandya dynasty in Madurai. Its decline began in the late middle ages, and by the late 17th century it had fallen into near oblivion, before being rediscovered at the beginning of the print era. The present study traces the complex historical process of its transmission over some 2000 years, using and documenting a wide range of sources, in particular surviving manuscripts, the early prints, the commentaries of the literary and grammatical traditions and a vast range of later literature that creates a web of inter-textual references and quotations.




Lexicon of Tamil Literature


Book Description

Lexicon of Tamil Literature is a reference-dictionary of Tamil literature of South India from its early beginnings more than 2000 years ago until the present time (ca. 1980). It includes in the order of Roman alphabet names and short biographies of authors, lists of their works, anonymous literary works and most important matters of Tamil prosody, rhetoric and poetics. Whenever available, bibliographic data are given with individual entries in selection. Brief contents and evaluative statements are given with literary works of greater importance, whether ancient or modern. An introduction is included. The work is the first of its kind in a non-Indian language. It is an indispensable source of data and work of reference for Tamil literature in particular, and for the totality of Indic literatures in general.




Islam Translated


Book Description

The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions—from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.




Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World, Volume One


Book Description

This interdisciplinary work, the first of two volumes, presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the ninth century to the early modern period. Themes include theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. Overall, the books argue that, throughout the period of study, the Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. The two volumes are the first to use the Indian Ocean World as a geographical and conceptual framework for the study of disease. It will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.




Missionsberichte aus Indien im 18. Jahrhundert


Book Description

Betr. Missionstätigkeit d. Franckeschen Stiftungen.




Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature


Book Description

There is a number of problems connected with the study and teaching of any Oriental literature in general and of Tamil literature specifically which have to date been mostly ignored, although they are indispensable for solid knowledge and correct interpretation and understanding of the literature in question. These include problems of authenticity and authorship, of transmission and tradition, writing tools and materials, of relationship of orality to literacy, of Sanskrit to Tamil, the prehistory of Tamil written literature, the numerous texts that have been lost, scholarly lineages and the rediscovery of ancient Tamil literature etc. The book deals with all these problems as well as with some specific Tamil cultural phenomena such as the concept of "threefold Tamil" or the relationship of literature ('marked') to grammar ('marker'), with the derivation of the term "Tamil" and with the history of Tamil literary historiography. It will be indispensable as an introduction to the study of the more than 2000 years of Tamil literary history. By addressing questions which have thus far been almost completely neglected, it has also decisive impact on the interpretative comprehension of Tamil literature and on the teaching of this very rich heritage of verbal art.







Genealogy of the South Indian Deities


Book Description

For the first time, the work Genealogy of the South Indian Deitiesof the first Protestant missionary to India, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719), is made accessible to an English readership. Originally published in 1713, the text reveals Ziegenbalg's ethos in the emerging European Enlightenment and his willingness to learn from the South Indians. The text contains the original voices of knowledgeable South Indians from various religious backgrounds and presents South India in a vivid, direct and unfiltered way. In this volume Daniel Jeyaraj edits and presents the German original in an English translation. This is followed by a detailed textual analysis, a glossary and an appendix. This book is invaluable for anyone interested in reliable information about the interactions of Europeans with Hindu and Tamil religion and culture.