Many regions of the world define what is outside of their normative and accepted practices to be taboo and therefore, these foreign practices face condemnation. However, through expanding ones view of the world and myriad divergent regional practices, one is better able to perceive different regions of the world as not superior or inferior to one another yet equal but different. In his Travels (1360CE), explorer John Mandeville details various practices of the foreign peoples he had encountered in his travels around the world; many of these rituals would be highly denounced by the European readers for whom Mandeville writes this book. Though Chapter 22 of Travels does not contain an explicit mention tolerance as a primary motivation for the work, the reader’s comprehension of perceivably heinous yet permissible acts in these foreign lands sketches alternate models of normative behavior. Sixteenth century European members of popular cultures, such as Ginzburg’s Menocchio, apply their interpretative filter the reading and synthesize notions that are more reflective of their popular lifestyle. Mandeville’s accounts of foreign cannibalism, disfigured peoples, idolatry and an emphasis on nature face popular interpretation in the sixteenth century that formulates a defiant and tolerant worldview in response to the imposing cultural center/defining of superior culture by the Council of Trent.
Mandeville’s account of foreign cannibals attributes a newfound significance to the act in that it intends on limiting the suffering of an inevitable victim of sickness. Whereas most in Europe perceive cannibalism as an abhorrent act of carnal violence, others such as the island of Dondia view it as a charitable act of preventing one from unnecessa...
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...igher culture, who the side of a popular culture?” This question illuminates the faults of the Council of Trent in regards to tolerance in that by defining a cultural center; there will always be groups outside of the center. These groups divergent from the established center became the popular culture. Mandeville’s travels shed light on how unusual accounts of foreign ritual collaborate with popular culture to form a new system of tolerance, one that the Catholic Inquisition would neglect in considering the equal standing of a co-existing popular culture.
Works Cited
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Jones, Doug. “Voyages of Discovery.” Lecture at Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, March 18, 2014.
Mandeville, John. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011.
Every society has it’s own cultural traditions and norms. Many of the traditions are passed down from generation to generation for so long that they become the norms of the culture. The Wari’ are no different than anyone else in that their traditions become cultural norms. In Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society, Beth A. Conklin travels to the Wari’ people in order to study illness and death from both before and after they had foreign contact. While there she finds herself going into depth on the lifestyle of the Wari’ people and how their norm of cannibalism came about and how it was phased out by the outside world.
"Inquisition." In New Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by Berard L. Marthaler, 485-491. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2003.
The work begins with Section I, ‘The Background’ which consists of a general overview in medieval women’s social and religious history. The first section delineates the basic societal framework for Western European women in the High Middle Ages and outlines the cultural forces at work in shaping their lives. The second part of this section reviews the changes in religious consciousness concerning sacramental practices and fasting, from the Church Fathers to the late medieval hagiographers. It should be noted here that although more careful attention is given to the practice of ‘fasting,’ especially in the latter portion of the work which I will be examining in more detail, the ‘feasting’ in question more generally denotes the ‘love feast’ of the Eucharist than the fe...
Clifford R. Backman, The Cultures of the West: A History. Volume 1: To 1750. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Europeans during the 16th Century had made unique technological and intellectual advancements, they expanded their knowledge and continued to spread their dominance across the world. These advancements perpetuated the idea that their race was superior to other races and that they had the right to hold other groups of people accountable for what they saw as transgressions. Europeans felt the need to control and make sure that all groups of people were following their moral state of conducts. In History of A Voyage to the Land Of Brazil, Jean De Lery introduces the main motivation of the Europeans journey to the Americas by emphasizing that it was influenced by Christian values ( Lery 3). This shows how the concept of Christianity is important
When describing native Brazilian people in his 1580 essay, “Of Cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne states, “Truly here are real savages by our standards; for either they must be thoroughly so, or we must be; there is an amazing distance between their character and ours” (158). Montaigne doesn’t always maintain this “amazing” distance, however, between savages and non-savages or between Brazilians and Europeans; he first portrays Brazilians as non-barbaric people who are not like Europeans, then as non-barbarians who best embody traditional European values, and finally as barbarians who are diametrically opposed to Europeans.
The study of anthropology has undergone several transformations in the theoretical standpoints in its pursuit to understand human differences. During the discipline’s early history, these theories revolved around the indigenous people that Europeans encountered during their explorations. One of these shifts is illustrated in the variation in the declaration of the Enlightenment philospher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who stated, “Man is born free, and everywhere in chains” and Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor’s assertion that “Life in the Uncivilized World is fettered at every turn by chains of custom”. Through the utilizations of the resources of Morberg, Perry, Trouillot, Moore, and McGee and Warms, I will illustrate that these two quotes reflect the inherited and current cultural environment within Europe. At the time of their construction and exemplify the transformation of the view of primitives as unrepressed by societal institutions to being constrained by irrational customs in anthropological theory.
Fiero, G. K. (2011). The humanistic tradition, Book 3: The European renaissance, the Reformation, and the Global Encounter (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
The Inquisition, though it did not become the true instrument of torture and oppression popularized in movies and books until after the Reformation, began during the Middle Ages, in response to the unorthodox religious practices of a variety of different groups throughout Europe. The most threatening of these sects were the Cathars, who lived in what is now southern France. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what frightened the Church fathers most about this group, especially as those people who condemned the Cathars wrote the only surviving records and it was popular at the time to vilify anyone who held radically different religious views. As a result, all manner of horrible rituals and beliefs were associated with the Cathars, the milder of which included, as mentioned in a thirteenth-century chronicle, such apocrypha as “they said also, in their secret doctrine, (in secreto suo) that that Christ who was born in the visible, and terrestrial Bethlehem, and crucified in Jerusalem, was a bad man, and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine.”[1] In addition, they were accused of eating children and participating in orgies. But it is important to remember that during the Middle Ages, people often framed social problems in religious terms. The surviving confessions of Cathars charged with religious heresy reveal the religious establishment attempting not only to quell resistance to its authority, but also to prevent the breakdown of society as the Church perceived it to exist, whether the danger lay in loose sexual mores, a refusal to swear an oath, or less than orthodox religious views. At stake were a social hierarchy and a system of control that regulated everyday life and power r...
The epoch of Medieval European history concerning the vast and complicated witch hunts spanning from 1450 to 1750 is demonstrative of the socioeconomic, religious, and cultural changes that were occurring within a population that was unprepared for the reconstruction of society. Though numerous conclusions concerning the witch trials, why they occurred, and who was prosecuted have been found within agreement, there remain interpretations that expand on the central beliefs. Through examining multiple arguments, a greater understanding of this period can be observed as there remains a staggering amount of catalysts and consequences that emerged. In the pursuit of a greater understanding, three different interpretations will be presented. These interpretations, which involve Brian Levack’s “The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe,” Eric Boss’s “Syphilis, Misogyny, and Witchcraft in 16th-Century Europe,” and Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s “The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th centuries:
Howe, Helen, and Robert T. Howe. A World History: Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Volume 1. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1992. 533.
In Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of Crusades, eds. M. Gervers and
For instance, his music manifests development of free standing instruments. However, it is tricky to create a relation between music and art just the same way it is hard to relate the Reformation and Counter Reformation period of that time. Additionally, the Council of Trent ruled that, art ought to be free from sin and rather, it should aim at bringing individuals closer to church and to the love of god. However, the music in Baroque’s does not bring individuals closer to the love of God, as it brings them closer to the love of
The voyages recorded the practice of cannibalism, but these records were very ambiguous. For example, Cook saw “the body of a dead woman floating on the water” and found some human bones in the food basket. Cook questioned the natives. They answered, “the bones of a man” and asked Cook, “have you eat the flesh?” Cook then wondered that the South Sea people practiced cannibalism. However, it was not that simple. Anne Salmond said, “in the Society Islands it was the gods rather than people who consumed the spirits of enemies.” It was very possible that Tupaia actually considered cannibalism to be “blasphemous.” Nevertheless, the Europeans failed to understand this complex ideology behind
The Catholic Church’s message and influence has spread across all of Europe, the Americas and even into the majority of Asia and Africa. The central issue with spreading a rather westernized religion such as Catholicism, is incorporating other country’s ideas and culture into the faith. There is no easy way to merge Catholic doctrine with other country’s culture due to the fact that some beliefs just do not assimilate with each other seamlessly. Therefore, the modern church’s daunting issue today is representing a westernized faith to other countries while simultaneously including every culture’s traditional aspects.