“So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave”: Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia

2006 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheilagh Ogilvie
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Political Economic

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people's private lives.1 In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the emerging early modern state sought to “civilize” and “rationalize” its subjects' behavior in order to facilitate well-ordered government and a capitalist modernization of the economy.2 Whether viewed favorably as an essential stage in a beneficent “civilizing process” or more critically as an arbitrary coercion of popular culture in the interests of elites, social disciplining is increasingly regarded as central to most aspects of political, economic, religious, social, and cultural change in Europe between the medieval and the modern periods.3

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Europe

There were few subjects that animated people in early modern Europe more than lying. The subject is endlessly represented and discussed in literature; treatises on rhetoric and courtiership; theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence; travel writing; pamphlets and news books; science and empirical observation; popular culture, especially books about strange, unexplained phenomena; and, of course, legal discourse. For many, lying could be controlled and limited even if not eradicated; for others, lying was a necessary element of a casuistical tradition, liars balancing complicated issues and short-term pragmatic considerations in the expectation of solving more problems than they caused through their deceit....

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe

The introduction outlines previous definitions of the modern state as well as historians’ current explanations of state formation in early modern Europe and England. It demonstrates that earlier scholars have focused almost entirely on the state’s ability to engage in active warfare and have thus neglected an important aspect of the monopoly of violence, the restriction of non-state or illegitimate violence. The introduction also explores the medieval background of the coroner system, the mechanism designed to regulate violence in England and explains why the system had failed to achieve its proposed ends prior to the sixteenth century.

Sex and Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-119
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Classical Philology ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Independent Field ◽  
Moral Perspective ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Europe

This chapter looks at examples of scholars who, in the early eighteenth century, worked on texts that were highly controversial from a moral perspective. The focus is on Pieter Burman’s edition of Petronius (1709) and Bentley’s work on Horace. Looking at this material from a perspective of textual criticism allowed Burman and Bentley to avoid delving too deeply into passages of a sexually loaded nature. Nevertheless, political and scholarly opponents of both men tried to blacken their reputation by connecting their research interests with their private lives. It is demonstrated that the association of textual critics with immorality was a commonplace in early modern Europe and that the tensions between in particular Burman and his opponents reveals a struggle to make classical philology a more independent field of enquiry versus other disciplines, such as theology.

Criminality, Social Control, and the Early Modern State: Evidence and Interpretations in Scandinavian Historiography

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Österberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Power And Influence

People in the Icelandic Sagas, and with them the narratives themselves, are impelled by powerful human passions: love, hate, pride, envy, fidelity. This is easy to see and easy to explain. In stories that are intended to captivate their audience, it is vital to spellbind listeners of both sexes and all ages with the excitement of eternal existential problems.Yet there are other features in the sagas that modern cultural analysis has considered less dependent on the requirements of the literary genre and thus more revealing expressions of the Scandinavian mentality. These include the legalism that pervades the sagas (see, e.g., Gurevich 1985; Hastrup 1985; Byock 1988). One is struck by the extent to which people think and argue in legal terms. This applies to men in conflict, to men demonstrating their power and influence.

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