Seroras and Local Religious Life in the Basque Country and Navarre, 1550–1769

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Scott

In the early modern period, Basque women who could not or did not want to follow the traditional paths of monasticism or secular marriage had a third option. They could become seroras, or celibate laywomen licensed by the diocese and entrusted with caring for a shrine or parish church. Seroras enjoyed significant social prestige and their work was competitively remunerated by the local community; yet despite their central place in the local religious life of the early modern Basque Country and Navarre, the seroras have attracted almost no historical study. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it summarizes the social and spiritual context that allowed for women to experiment with the more unorthodox religious vocations like that of the seroras; and secondly, it draws from extensive primary documentation concerning the seroras in order to outline the main features of the vocation, by extension differentiating them from better-known categories of the semi-religious life such as the beguines, Castilian beatas, or Italian tertiaries.

Author(s):  
Amanda L. Scott

This book explores the intersections between local community, women's work, and religious reform in early modern northern Spain. The book illuminates the lives of these uncloistered religious women, who took no vows and were free to leave the religious life if they chose. Their vocation afforded them considerably more autonomy and, in some ways, liberty, than nuns or wives. The book recovers the surprising ubiquity of seroras, with every Basque parish church employing at least one. Their central position in local religious life revises how we think about the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women. By situating the seroras within the social dynamics and devotional life of their communities, the book reconceives of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also shows how these devout laywomen were instrumental in the process of negotiated reform during the Counter-Reformation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-122
Author(s):  
Björn Moll

Abstract This article focusses on the discourse surrounding ›projectors‹, autoentrepeneurs, who made plans for innovations of any kind and tried to have potential financiers promote them, from the Baroque to German Romanticism. While the role of projectors in the history of science has been the object of historical study, there is a lack of research regarding the concept’s trajectory and its semantic variation. In the early modern period, the necessity of innovation was emphasized, but also the contingency of project proposals. During the Enlightenment, the tradition of the approval of project-making continued, but projects became detached from projectors. In the late 18th century, the idea of speculation and the fantastic transformed within the area of creativity, due to the primacy of imagination and genius. What happened to the talk about projectors and their ways of self-fashioning after the disappearance of the social figure? What enabled authors to refer to projectors and how was their role historically discussed? Projectors served as a topos of insanity or deception or a sign of unprofessionalism (as shown in examples by Goethe and Schiller). Romanticism carried with it the positive connotations of the project, but also reinterpreted its negative aspects, such as the value of incompletion, insanity and alternative ways of work.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Gwynne Mapes ◽  
Andrew S. Ross

Abstract In this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and ‘elite authenticity’ (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019). Utilizing a dataset comprised of 150 Instagram posts, drawn from three different acclaimed chefs’ personal accounts, we examine the ways in which these celebrities emphasize local/sustainable food practices while simultaneously asserting their claims to privileged eating. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we document three general discursive tactics: (i) plant-based emphasis, (ii) local/community terroir, and (iii) realities of meat consumption. Ultimately, we establish how the chefs’ claims to egalitarian/environmental ideals paradoxically diminish their eliteness, while simultaneously elevating their social prestige, pointing to the often complicated and covert ways in which class inequality permeates the social landscape of contemporary eating. (Food discourse, elite authenticity, normativity, social class, locality/sustainability)*


Author(s):  
Irene Fosi

AbstractThe article examines the topics relating to the early modern period covered by the journal „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“ in the hundred volumes since its first publication. Thanks to the index (1898–1995), published in 1997 and the availability online on the website perpectivia.net (since 1958), it is possible to identify constants and changes in historiographical interests. Initially, the focus was on the publication of sources in the Vatican Secret Archive (now the Vatican Apostolic Archive) relating to the history of Germany. The topics covered later gradually broadened to include the history of the Papacy, the social composition of the Curia and the Papal court and Papal diplomacy with a specific focus on nunciatures, among others. Within a lively historiographical context, connected to historical events in Germany in the 20th century, attention to themes and sources relating to the Middle Ages continues to predominate with respect to topics connected to the early modern period.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEMMA ALLEN

AbstractThis article reveals how the ambassadress became an important part of early modern diplomatic culture, from the invention of the role in the early sixteenth century. As resident embassies became common across the early modern period, wives increasingly accompanied these diplomatic postings. Such a development has, however, received almost no scholarly attention to date, despite recent intense engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of early modern diplomacy. By considering the activities of English ambassadresses from the 1530s to 1700, accompanying embassies both inside and outside of Europe, it is possible not only to integrate them into narratives of diplomacy, but also to place their activities within broader global and political histories of the period. The presence of the ambassadress changed early modern diplomatic culture, through the creation of gendered diplomatic courtesies, gendered gift-giving practices, and gendered intelligence-gathering networks. Through female sociability networks at their host court, ambassadresses were able to access diplomatic intelligence otherwise restricted from their husbands. This was never more true than for those ambassadresses who held bonds of friendship with politically influential women at their host or home court, allowing them to influence political decision-making central to the success of the diplomatic mission.


Aschkenas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Torben Stretz

Jewish-Christian relations in village or small-town societies during the early modern period were framed by coexistence and conflict on three major fields of encounter: the rural economy, the practice of religion, and the social relations within the local communities. This study provides case studies of these three aspects by drawing on evidence for the two counties of Castell and Wertheim in Franconia. Analysis of three expulsion proceedings and their different outcomes allows us to add a fourth perspective to this typical picture of integration and segregation, the question of how political rule was enacted and communicated. The conditions of Jewish settlement and community life were always precarious and had to be renegotiated on a regular basis. Negotiations were influenced by the diplomatic skills of individual Jews, by the interests of the community or its leading members, of the rulers and their local representatives.


Author(s):  
Marcia Yonemoto

The chapter explores the discourse and experience of motherhood within Japan’s low-fertility regime in the early modern period. In a manner rarely seen elsewhere in the early modern world, Japanese families used various means, from infanticide to adoption, to correlate family size with income. The chapter examines a wide range of primary sources to explore the effects of family planning on motherhood in two dimensions, the biological and the social. It also examines motherhood as a lived experience through the writings of Inoue Tsūjo, Kuroda Tosako, and Sekiguchi Chie.


2020 ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Scott

This chapter provides a brief synopsis of the presence of Navarrese delegates at the Council of Trent, then moves on to an overview of the Diocese of Pamplona's most important Tridentine era synod meeting and a representative sampling of reform episodes as they played out on the ground. To understand the inconsistencies in enforcement concerning the seroras, reforms concerning the seroras must be left in their original context. Mirroring the diocese's attention to clerical misbehavior, the chapter thus approaches reform of the seroras through the lens of male reform, and especially pastoral residency. The diocese's concentration on professionalizing the lower clergy and directing lay devotion into appropriate channels reveals much about the diocese's unstated policy against interfering with the seroras: that is, the diocese identified reforming the lower clergy as the key to a successful reform program, and everything else was secondary. Other aspects of local religious life that did not mesh with official Tridentine reform ideals were allowed to slide to make way for more urgent reforms. In this context, the diocese judged that licensing the seroras was the easiest way to control the vocation, allowing ecclesiastical authorities to turn their eye to more pressing matters such as wandering abbots, violent hermits, and “repulsive” parish priests.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-525
Author(s):  
Robert A. Maryks

The strong resistance of Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556), first superior general of the Society of Jesus (1541–56), to the promotion of his confrères to ecclesiastical offices of (arch)bishops and cardinals because such posts were contrary to the spirit of religious life, requires a brief explanation. Ignatius’s opposition was codified in the Jesuit Constitutions with a requirement that each professed Jesuit promise not to accept such dignities. Nonetheless, Loyola and his successors were occasionally pressured to acquiesce to possible papal appointments of different Jesuits to such offices. This issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies focuses on six of approximately forty-nine cardinals (the definition of Jesuit cardinal can be sometimes tricky for the early modern period). These six represent different historical periods from the late sixteenth until the early twenty-first centuries and different geographical areas, both of origin and of operation (they did not always coincide): Péter Pázmány (1570–1637), Johann Nidhard (1607–81), Giovanni Battista Tolomei (1653–1726), Johann Baptist Franzelin (1816–86), Pietro Boetto (1871–1946), and Adam Kozłowiecki (1911–2007).


Itinerario ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (01) ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Cátia Antunes ◽  
Susana Münch Miranda

While this special issue raises a significant number of questions, constraints have dictated that only some of these questions are actually answered. The pioneering work presented consequently remains a modest attempt to initiate a more general discussion about the causes and the social and economic consequences of business failure in the early modern period, particularly with regard to colonial enterprises.


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