Bread provisioning and retail dynamics in the southern Low Countries: the bakers of Leuven, 1600–1800

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRECHT DEWILDE ◽  
JOHAN POUKENS

ABSTRACTThe central argument of this article is that current historical research into early modern retail growth and practices has focused too narrowly on the retail of durables (perhaps with the exception of colonial groceries) and on retailers' guilds. The role of food-producing and/or food-retailing guilds hitherto has received less attention. Research into retail practices has not connected to an older (but still lively) research tradition in which the consumption of basic foodstuffs received the bulk of attention. We argue that if selling bread is approached as a ‘system of provision’, competing retail circuits and the different ways in which subsequent subsistence crises affected each of those circuits offer an additional explanation (next to well-documented changes in demand) for the inclusion of other basic provisions, colonial groceries, clothing, and even durables in the assortment of traditional food-producing and food-retailing guild masters, in this case the Leuven bakers.

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.


Grotiana ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Wouter Druwé

Abstract In his ‘Inleidinge tot de Hollantsche Rechtsgeleertheyt’, Hugo Grotius introduced the concept of wrong-by-construction-of-law (‘misdaed door wetsduidinge’), the idea that civil law could assign liability to someone who had not committed any fault, i.e. merely because of his or her ‘capacity’ or ‘quality’ as a parent, as an owner of an animal, as an inhabitant of a building, or as an employer or shipowner. This contribution situates Grotius’s views on qualitative liability within the wider Netherlandish learned juridical context of his time, and especially studies the role of fault (‘culpa’) and presumptions of fault in the learned theories on qualitative liability. Apart from printed treatises and volumes of consilia, this contribution also takes into account hitherto unstudied handwritten lecture notes of the late medieval and early modern university of Leuven.


2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSIE SPEAKMAN SUTCH ◽  
ANNE-LAURE VAN BRUAENE

This article discusses the propagation of the devotion of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary in the Low Countries around 1500. The central argument is that the secular goal of the promoters of the devotion was to create a large spiritual and emotional community in support of the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty and its ideology of peace and territorial unity. To this end a whole array of old and new media was exploited. The article analyses the dynamics of this devotional communication and gives special attention to the role of miracles, vernacular theatre and the printing press.


1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Adams

The decline of Iberia in the sixteenth century shook the foundations of world trade and politics, undermining Spain's Asian and American trade monopolies and creating the international opening that spurred other European states and merchants in the contest for overseas markets. After the waves had subsided in the seventeenth century, the world system had been reconfigured. The United Provinces of the Netherlands had become the first truly global commercial power—the first hegemon. The rise of the Netherlands to the position of world hegemony is at first glance startling. The seven provinces had a relatively small population (some 1.5 million inhabitants in 1600, compared to 10 million in Spain and Portugal, and 16 to 20 million in neighboring France), and had formed part of the Low Countries, an uneasily aggregated group of seigneuries, cities, and provinces under Spanish rule until the 1570s.


2011 ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
M. Voeikov

The paper deals with the problem of the establishment of capitalism in Russia in the late 19 - early 20th centuries. Using a wide array of historical research and documents the author argues that the thesis on the advanced state of capitalism in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century does not stand up to historical scrutiny, and the role of the famous Emancipation reform of 1861 appears to be of limited importance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Stephanie Dropuljic

This article examines the role of women in raising criminal actions of homicide before the central criminal court, in early modern Scotland. In doing so, it highlights the two main forms of standing women held; pursing an action for homicide alone and as part of a wider group of kin and family. The evidence presented therein challenges our current understanding of the role of women in the pursuit of crime and contributes to an under-researched area of Scots criminal legal history, gender and the law.


POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Hannah Rieger

Abstract The Middle Low German Beast Epic Reynke de Vos (1498) is about two legal proceedings against the fox Reynke, who is charged by the other animals with the tricks he played on them. When he is sentenced to death, Reynke defends himself by delivering speeches that are constructed as described in ancient rhetoric. Part of those speeches is Reynke’s lie about his treasure, which he would give to the lion if he pardoned him. Reynke describes three pieces of jewellery as part of this made-up possession, one of which is a mirror. When Reynke describes it, he also tells Aesopic fables that are carved into its wooden frame. His fictional artefact, especially the interplay of its specific material and the content of the fables told, has a poetological level. In his description, Reynke hybridizes the political discourse of the early modern period, in which the virtue of prudentia becomes more and more important, with the rhetorical competence to deliver speeches and tell fables. In his fiction of the mirror he draws up a poetological draft that combines the role of a rhetor in court with his well-known properties of being clever and cunning. By describing the artefact, Reynke shows how to use rhetorical strategies, especially to tell fables, as an instrument to gain acceptance and to acquire political influence.


2020 ◽  
pp. 51-78
Author(s):  
Diana Pereira

Over the last decades there was a growing interest in religious materiality, miraculous images, votive practices, and how the faithful engaged with devotional art, as well as a renewed impetus to discuss the long-recognized association between sculpture and touch, after the predominance of the visuality approach. Additionally, the neglected phenomenon of clothing statues has also been increasingly explored. Based on the reading of Santuario Mariano (1707–1723), written by Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), this paper will closely examine those topics. Besides producing a monumental catalogue of Marian shrines and pilgrimage sites, this source offers a unique insight into the religious experience and the reciprocal relationship between image and devotee in Early Modern Portugal, and is a particularly rich source when describing the believers’ pursuit of physical contact with sculptures. This yearning for proximity is partly explained by the belief in the healing power of Marian sculptures, which in turn seemed to be conveniently transferred to a myriad of objects. When contact with the images themselves was not possible, devotees sought out their clothes, crowns, rosary beads, metric relics, and so forth. Items of clothing such as mantles and veils were particularly used and so it seems obvious they were not mere adornments or donations, but also mediums and extensions of the sculptures’ presence and power. By focusing on the thaumaturgic role of the statues’ clothes and jewels, I will argue how the practice of dressing sculptures was due to much more than stylistic desires or processional needs and draw attention to the many ways believers engaged with religious art in Early Modern Portugal.


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