scholarly journals The common and the rare: a review of Early Modern Dutch plant food consumption based on archaeobotanical urban cesspit data

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 553-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merit M. A. Hondelink ◽  
Mans Schepers
2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Jan Siegemund

AbstractLibel played an important and extraordinary role in early modern conflict culture. The article discusses their functions and the way they were assessed in court. The case study illustrates argumentative spaces and different levels of normative references in libel trials in 16th century electoral Saxony. In 1569, Andreas Langener – in consequence of a long stagnating private conflict – posted several libels against the nobleman Tham Pflugk in different public places in the city of Dresden. Consequently, he was arrested and charged with ‘libelling’. Depending on the reference to conflicting social and legal norms, he had therefore been either threatened with corporal punishment including his execution, or rewarded with laudations. In this case, the act of libelling could be seen as slander, but also as a service to the community, which Langener had informed about potentially harmful transgression of norms. While the common good was the highest maxim, different and sometimes conflicting legally protected interests had to be discussed. The situational decision depended on whether the articulated charges where true and relevant for the public, on the invective language, and especially on the quality and size of the public sphere reached by the libel.


2019 ◽  
Vol 244 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coast

Abstract The voice of the people is assumed to have carried little authority in early modern England. Elites often caricatured the common people as an ignorant multitude and demanded their obedience, deference and silence. Hostility to the popular voice was an important element of contemporary political thought. However, evidence for a very different set of views can be found in numerous polemical tracts written between the Reformation and the English Civil War. These tracts claimed to speak for the people, and sought to represent their alleged grievances to the monarch or parliament. They subverted the rules of petitioning by speaking for ‘the people’ as a whole and appealing to a wide audience, making demands for the redress of grievances that left little room for the royal prerogative. In doing so, they contradicted stereotypes about the multitude, arguing that the people were rational, patriotic and potentially better informed about the threats to the kingdom than the monarch themselves. ‘Public opinion’ was used to confer legitimacy on political and religious demands long before the mass subscription petitioning campaigns of the 1640s.


Author(s):  
MICHAEL AYERS

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the relation between the concepts of rationalism, Platonism, and God. This book is intended as a contribution to the exploration and exposition of the common ground of the great early modern rationalist theories. It examines contemplation and control in Cartesian philosophy and analyses the priority of the perfect in the philosophical theology of the continental rationalists. It also provides commentaries on the relevant theories of philosophers Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz.


Last Acts ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter

The introduction outlines a theoretical framework for the book. Through a brief survey of critical approaches to Hamlet, it considers the common alignment of early modern drama with mourning and argues that new critical perspectives emerge if we focus on the experience of the dying subject instead. William Perkins’s 1595 tract, A Salve for a Sick Man, illustrates how death was understood around Shakespeare’s time. By situating Perkins’s text in relation to ancient Stoicism and twentieth-century phenomenology, the introduction explicates what is distinctive about the understanding of dying found in the ars moriendi tradition and argues for the theoretical sophistication and continuing influence of the genre.


2019 ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
Susan Marks

This chapter continues the discussion of early English social criticism with a consideration of two uprisings of the early modern period: Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and the Midland Rising (1607). These uprisings were formidable instances of organised resistance to enclosure and related changes, and the texts which have come down to us concerning them connect that resistance to a belief in the original equality of all human beings, the common humanity of rich and poor, and the fundamental right of everyone to live (including the right to buy essential provisions at a fair and affordable price).


1979 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 129-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Morgan

Some four hundred years ago this month Stephen Limbert, master of Norwich School, stood before the gates of the Great Hospital and addressed his well-turned Latin phrases to an audience almost as eminent as that gathered here today. Elizabeth I and her mobile summer court were on progress, and Norwich, the second city of the kingdom and capital of a region that was both the agricultural and manufacturing heartland of England, was determined to impress its monarch with both its loyalty to the Tudor dynasty and its contribution to the common weal—so it hired an impecunious London hack, sometime soldier and court hanger-on, Thomas Churchyard, to write the script. In part, at least, this no doubt accounts for the frequently reiterated commonplaces of Elizabethan propaganda embodied in such of those pageants and speeches as survived the intermittent downpours that sent both Her Majesty and her municipal hosts scurrying for cover on more than one occasion during her visit. Neither did Master Limbert's disquisition differ in its enthusiasm for Elizabethan rule from those of his metropolitan confrère. ‘It is reported’, he told Her Majesty, ‘that Aegypte is watered with the yerely overflowing of the Nilus, and Lydia with the golden streame of Pactolus, whyche thing is thought to be the cause of the greate fertilytye of these countries: but uppon us, and farther, over all Englande, even into the uttermoste borders, many and maine rivers of godlynesse, justice and humilitie, and other inumerable good things … do most plentifully gush out … from that continuall and most aboundaunt welspring of your goodnesse … With what prayses shall wee extoll, with what magnificent wordes shall we expresse, that notable mercie of your Highnesse, most renowned Queene’, sentiments that earned the former Norwich schoolmaster the Queen's invitation to kiss her ungloved hands, and sentiments that direct our attention to the symbols and image-creating aspects of the political culture of renaissance England.


2008 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Visconsi

This article provides an account of the emergence of the common law jurisdiction over blasphemy, arguing that the blasphemy laws first developed in Rex v. Taylor had an explicitly secular purpose. Instead of understanding this crucial decision as an emblem of the early modern fusion of church and state, this article reads Sir Matthew Hale's axiom that "Christianity is parcel of the laws of England" as a step toward the emergence of an English civil religion.


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