STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING THE EXPERIENCE OF EARLY MODERN EUROPEANS

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAYMOND A. MENTZER
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Geographic Concentration ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Relationship

Archives of the scientific revolution: the formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. Edited by Michael Hunter. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 216. ISBN 0–8511–553–7. £45.00.The peasantries of Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Edited by Tom Scott. London: Longman, 1998. Pp. xi + 416. ISBN 0–582–10131-X. £19.99.Civil society and fanaticism: conjoined histories. By Dominique Colas. Translated by Amy Jacobs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xxx + 480. ISBN 0–8047–2736–8. £14.95.The quest for compromise: peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna. By Howard Louthan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 185. ISBN 0–531–58082-X. £35.00.Each of the four volumes at hand examines a different yet vital aspect of European society between the late middle ages and the beginnings of industrialization. The field is far too diverse and the approaches too complex to expect a commonality among these works, excepting a shared temporal and geographic concentration. Still, the themes and subjects reveal some of the issues that have captured recent attention and show how scholars propose to go about exploring them. They suggest the interests of historians of early modern Europe, their distinctive perspectives, and varying methodologies. The collective reach extends from deciphering the papers and manuscripts left by participants in the scientific revolution to an exploration of the immense yet largely reticent peasant world, an attempt to establish the origins and trace the development of today's ongoing discussion over civil society and fanaticism, and finally a study of four peacemakers who urged religious moderation at the imperial court of Counter-Reformation Vienna. Put slightly differently, these studies raise fundamental questions about the sources upon which scholars depend, the nature and utility of historical models, and the relationship between contemporary concerns and our collective past, whether they be issues of civil society or irenic accommodation.

scholarly journals Between Religion and Economics: Towards a Shift of Paradigm in Early Modern Economic Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. p79
Author(s):  
Eleonora Belligni
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Family Economy ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Family ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

At the beginning of the early modern age, philosophers, religious and political thinkers writing on economics had to deal with categories that were still based on the religious certainties of the medieval West, and with a paradigm built on Aristotelian dialectic between oikos (the family economy) and chrèmata (wealth). From this frame, articulated and innovative investigations on the contemporary economic world were born in the late Middle Ages of Europe: but up until the late seventeenth century, at least, the Aristotelian paradigm remained a rigid cage for most of the writers. Yet, both the impact of some theoretical work on the relationship between religion and economy, and some significant changing in European scenario started to break this cage. Evidence of a shifting of paradigm could be detected even in Counter-Reformation authors like the Italian Giovanni Botero.

‘Everyone Should Be Like the People’: Elite and Popular Religion and the Counter Reformation

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the GermanVolkskundetradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

Présence de la Scupture Funéraire de la fin du Moyen-âge et des Débuts de L'époque Moderne Dans L'œuvre Narrative de Samuel Beckett: Du Motif Artistique Religieux à Sa Laïcisation Scripturale

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-217
Author(s):  
Claire Lozier
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Moyen Âge ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Moyen Age

This article examines the relationship between the character-narrators of Beckett's , , , , and funerary sculpture of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In the German Diaries, Beckett expresses his admiration for this particular form of religious sculpture, in which the dead are represented as “senile,” “humble,” and “collapsed,” and perceives its kinship with his own world. The first part of this article explores the affinities between Beckett's supine characternarrators and prone funerary statues. The second part analyses the process of secularization that Beckett's writing inflicts on this religious artistic motif.

Thinking with the Saint: The Miracle of Saint Januarius of Naples and Science in Early Modern Europe

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Paolo de Ceglia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
North And South

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the way in which early modern science questioned and indirectly influenced (while being in its turn influenced by) the conceptualization of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, a phenomenon that has been taking place at regular intervals in Naples since the late Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, a debate arose that divided Europe between supporters of a theory of divine intervention and believers in the occult properties of the blood. These two theoretical options reflected two different perspectives on the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. While in the seventeenth century, the emphasis was placed on the predictable periodicity of the miraculous event of liquefaction as a manifestation of God in his role as a divine regulator, in the eighteenth century the event came to be described as capricious and unpredictable, in an attempt to differentiate miracles from the workings of nature, which were deemed to be normative. The miracle of the blood of Saint Januarius thus provides a window through which we can catch a glimpse of how the natural order was perceived in early modern Europe at a time when the Con­tinent was culturally fragmented into north and south, Protestantism and Catholicism, learned and ignorant.


The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Kelly ◽  
Cormac Ó Gráda
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Little Ice Age ◽  
Temperature Series ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
As Effects

The supposed ramifications of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures straddling several centuries in northwestern Europe, reach far beyond meteorology into economic, political, and cultural history. The available annual temperature series from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century, however, contain no major breaks, cycles, or trends that could be associated with the existence of a Little Ice Age. Furthermore, the series of resonant images, ranging from frost fairs to contracting glaciers and from dwindling vineyards to disappearing Viking colonies, often adduced as effects of a Little Ice Age, can also be explained without resort to climate change.

Rewinding Civil Society: Conceptual Lessons from the Early Modern Guilds

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-102
Author(s):  
Bert De Munck
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
Religious Intolerance ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Individual

Traditionally it is assumed that “modern” civil society originated in the associations, clubs, and public sphere of the eighteenth century as a result of the “liberation” of the individual from the “shackles” of absolutism, religious intolerance, and the patriarchal family. However, recent research goes further back in time. Scholars such as Robert Putnam (sociologist), Antony Black (political scientist), and Katherine Lynch (historian) associate the origins of civil society with the heyday of confraternities and guilds in the late Middle Ages. This has serious consequences for our understanding of the characteristics and functions of civil society. Given that confraternities were permeated by religious devotion and crafts were inextricably bound to the (often undemocratic) political establishment, fundamental questions arise about the importance of religion in civil society and the role of associations in the political participation of individuals. This article suggests that several long-term trends can be observed when broaching civil society from the perspective of guilds (or brotherhoods). In early modern guilds, the fraternal ideals related to mutual aid and equality appear to have gradually disappeared. Craft guilds stopped being “brotherhoods” and “substitute families” and transformed into formal and bureaucratic juridical institutions, while retreating into a sphere separate from household and family.

Die geschriebene Stadt

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Teresa Schröder-Stapper
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City

The Written City. Inscriptions as Media of Urban Knowledge of Space and Time The article investigates the function of urban inscriptions as media of knowledge about space and time at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period in the city of Braunschweig. The article starts with the insight that inscriptions in stone or wood on buildings or monuments not only convey knowledge about space and time but at the same time play an essential role in the construction of space and time in the city by the practice of inscribing. The analysis focuses on the steadily deteriorating relationship between the city of Braunschweig and its city lord, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and its material manifestation in building and monument inscriptions. The contribution shows that in the course of the escalating conflict over autonomy, a change in epigraphic habit took placed that aimed at claiming both urban space and its history exclusively on behalf of the city as an expression of its autonomy.

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