Word: seventeenth
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...despite all this talk of fighting, Pipes is uncomfortable with disorder. Although he mentions the well-known assassination attempts on the tsars in the late 1800s, he neglects the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles when there was no absolute patrimonial power in existence. It doesn't mesh with Pipe's thesis, so he leaves it out. He also takes little notice of the political and social havoc wreaked by the Napoleonic War. Pipes said he is concerned with institutions, not with foreign policies. Finally, Pipes leaves a large hole where the worker should be. Although eighty per cent...
When Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), the leading seventeenth century philosopher and founder of modern pedagogy left Czech lands in 1620 to avoid persecution, fored Germanization and Catholicization, he was invited to become the first president of Harvard; he turned the offer down. What on earth had that obscure place on the other side of the ocean to offer the most prominent Czech intellectual of his time...
...wasn't always like that. There was a time in the early seventeenth century when the upper class, not yet concerted in its Brattle Street redoubt, ruled unopposed. In 1688, 16 of the 20 most prosperous Cantabrigians held elected posts. They were all alumni of Harvard but unlike Crane and many of his political cronies of a later day, being in the majority they didn't have to straddle the Harvard Yard fence. It wasn't political suicide if the politicians sided with Harvard...
...from the Queen's talking parrot on up, plays his or her part in the general corruption; from the torturer devoted to his craft to the amiable, worldly Archbishop; and back down to the scatalogical court washerwoman, who sniffs out royal secrets from the royal laundry--a sort of seventeenth century A. J. Weberman...
...inhuman world of folk lore. Country dwellers recounted weird tales of the Good People, who direct the magnetic currents of the earth, and of gnomes, or earth-spirits--a dark, stocky lot, no more than two and a half feet tall, with sorrowful round faces. Although Scottish peasants, and seventeenth century scholars before them, discussed fairies with grave respect, incredulity has since been the rule among citydwellers. Perhaps a tinge of madness inspired an apparent sympathy for fairies, as well as children, in those writers. Jonathan Cott prefaces his recent anthology of Victorian fairy stories with some ingenious "Notes...