Policies and Institutions of the Oboi Regency 1661–1669
During the 1660's four Manchus dominated the Chinese empire from the court at Peking. These four, Soni, Suksaha, Ebilun, and Oboi, had been appointed in the “Imperial Will” of the late Shun-chih Emperor to serve as Regents during the minority of the K'ang-hsi Emperor. For the first five years of the Regency these Manchus governed collectively. After 1666, however, one of the Regents, Oboi, managed to concentrate power in his own hands and to eliminate the influence of the other Regents. In the years of 1667–69, the young K'ang-hsi Emperor, assisted by his grandmother (the Grand Empress Dowager) and several Manchu advisers, sought to assert personal control over the Ch'ing state and to eliminate the ambitious Oboi. Eventually, in June, 1669, the Emperor arrested Oboi and put an end to his faction of relatives and supporters.
Communication and Imperial Control in China: Evolution of the Palace Memorial System, 1693-1735
Montesquieu used the term feudalism. Sentences such as the following (p. 29) could well be replaced with an abbreviated and clearer version: 'In a fully developed stratified society, high status persons are privileged to enjoy almost unimpeded access, low status folk have only impaired access, to the community resources and are hedged about by socially sanctioned restraints which can often be circumvented only by the payment of dues, rents, or taxes either in labor or in kind.' Romanized versions of Chinese names and words are given in Karlgren's reconstructed Archaic version as well as in Wade-Giles, in the belief that the former 'helps us to recover some of the sensuous texture of that ancient world and enables us to give the ancient names something approaching, however imperfectly, their original sound' (p. xvi). Readers may judge how far examples such as ** Giwo-Kung (TtiKung) or ** Miwen-tjok (Min-chu) succeed in achieving this objective; and the result is to produce a text which is pretentious, ponderous and irritating to the sinologist, and all but incomprehensible to those who are unfamiliar with Karlgren's work and its drawbacks. Owing partly to this feature and to its layout, the glossary is clumsy to use, despite Mrs T'ung's excellent calligraphy; and it could have been reproduced with far greater economy. Bibliographical information is scanty. A glance at the gilded cover of the book suffices to remind us once again that all that glitters is not gold.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of