Prescription and Practice: Protestantism and the Upbringing of Children, 1560-1700

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 325-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Acute Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
Parental Duty

How children should be brought up is an everlasting question that vexed our forefathers just as much as ourselves. The most obvious difference between most of the thinking and writing that goes on about it today and that of the early modern period is that a largely secular approach has replaced a fundamentally and deeply religious one. So it is natural that the historian of this period should ask how and in what ways Protestantism changed things in this respect. What emerges in facing this issue, in a peculiarly acute form, is the common historical problem of relating prescription to practice. Patrick Collinson has remarked upon the ‘stark contradiction’ between ‘the austere severity of the conduct books and what little can be glimpsed of the real world outside these texts’. It is this contradiction that my paper addresses. I shall approach it as follows. First I will explore the conduct-book advice about parental duty and practice and about children’s obligations to their parents. This provides what we may call the Puritan way of upbringing. I shall relate this to some material from personal sources, like diaries and autobiographies, about what may actually have happened in the home. I will then turn to schooling, which, in its new scale and intensity, can be seen as a crucial social development in Elizabethan and Stuart England, fired in large part by the Protestant evangelizing impulse and its concomitant propaganda of social order. The burgeoning grammar schools, it will be argued, were the principal public instrument of a new and purposeful construction of masculinity.

Two Early Modern Revolts

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common Humanity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
Early English ◽  
Right To Buy

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).

scholarly journals So That It Might Become Clear: The Methods and Purposes of Narrative Abridgement in Early Modern Jain Purāṇic Composition

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 355
Author(s):  
Gregory M. Clines
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Multiple Strategies ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Era

Scholars have long known that Jain authors from the early centuries of the common era composed their own versions of the story of Rāma, prince of Ayodhyā. Further, the differences between Jain and Brahminical versions of the narrative are well documented. Less studied are later versions of Jain Rāma narratives, particularly those composed during the early modern period. This paper examines one such version of the Rāma story, the fifteenth-century Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa by the Digambara author Brahma Jinadāsa. The paper compares Jinadāsa’s work with an earlier text, the seventh-century Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa, authored by Raviṣeṇa, as Jinadāsa explains that he has at hand a copy of his predecessor’s work and is recomposing it to make it “clear”. The paper thus demonstrates the multiple strategies of abridgement Jinadāsa employs in recomposing Raviṣeṇa’s earlier narrative and that, to Jinadāsa, this project of narrative abridgement was also one of clarification.

“Democratic estate”as the cultural nest of the Early Modern Period. Case of Poland

2020 ◽  
pp. 288-297
Author(s):  
Vasily G. Shchukin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Common People ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People ◽  
National Spirit ◽  
The Common ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
The Village

The article describes the phenomenon of the so-called “democratic estate”, which took on the function of a cultural nest. Democracy, in accordance with Russian tradition, dating back to the discourse of the intelligentsia of the XIX century, is identified with the plebeian, motley origin of the inhabitants of the estate. This problem is considered on the basis of the art culture of Krakow at the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX centuries. In the era of modernism, in the wake of the neo-romantic enthusiasm for the problems of the national spirit and the “organic” life of the common people, in western Galicia, which is one of the provinces of Austria-Hungary, such forms of homestead life appeared that could be called exceptional, unique against the background of other manifestations of the democratization of the estate. Cracow artists and then poets and playwrights, discovering the beauty of the village of Małe Bronowice, located near Cracow, and captivated by folk costumes and the beauty of village girls, married them one by one and moved to village huts, but at the same time transformed the latter into real cultural nests. One of these weddings — the poet Lucian Rydel and the daughter of the village headman Jadwiga Mikołajczyk — inspired the outstanding artist and playwright Stanislav Wyspiańsky to create the most famous national drama of the modernist era — the play “The Wedding” (1901). This work, among other things, depicts the tragedy of mutual misunderstanding of the people and the intelligentsia, which impedes the national revival and, ultimately, the restoration of the country’s independence. The author of the article seeks to prove that the “democratic estate” served not only the necessary simplification of the educated stratum of society, but also the introduction of a high, essentially metropolitan culture into the life and consciousness of the lower strata.

The “Famous Places” of Japanese Buddhism: Representations of Urban Temple Life in Early Modern Guidebooks

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-242
Author(s):  
Kevin Bond
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
Bourgeois Culture

This paper examines the commercial and recreational cultures of the urban Buddhist temple during Japan’s Edo or early modern period (1603–1868) as depicted in popular guidebooks to famous places ( meisho ki). Encouraged by advances in travel and communication, and a vibrant bourgeois culture, meisho guidebooks presented religious sites to the common public not as static, immobile spaces catering only to otherworldly spiritual concerns, but as open and elastic geographies simultaneously offering immediate material rewards and leisurely and commercial attractions to visitors. As unique media of local religion, guidebooks reflect how the reputation and allure of popular Buddhist temples among the general public were driven by the commodification of local legends and objects of worship, as well as material pleasures of religious spaces. This paper argues the importance of guidebooks in the production of public knowledge and expectation about religious sites in early modern Japan. These guides reveal material concerns and entertainment not as having been antithetical to the operation of Buddhist institutions, but rather as supports for the spread of Buddhist teachings and popularization of deity worship among the urban populace.

scholarly journals Life Writing "from Below" in Europe: Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB1-LWFB9
Author(s):  
T. G. Ashplant
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Common People ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Popular Classes

The term life writing “from below” is intended to be broad (accommodating) in a double sense: as regards the social status of authors, but also the genre of writing. The phrase “from below” draws on an analogy with the now well-established formulation “history from below” (Sharpe; Hitchcock). In the first instance it refers to authors from low down in a class or status hierarchy. Depending on the society and period in focus, such authors may be slaves, serfs, peasants, crofters, landless labourers, artisans, industrial workers … and may be referred to as—or may designate themselves—plebeians, the labouring poor, the common people, the popular classes, artisans, proletarians, the working class. For the early modern period, James Amelang explains his choice of the term “popular autobiography”:

Seville and Manila: Illegal trade, corruption, and the phenomenon of trust in the Spanish Empire

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eberhard Crailsheim
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Illegal Trade ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Trading Networks

At the beginning of the early modern period, the two port cities of Seville and Manila became bottlenecks in the rich inter-oceanic trade connecting Europe, America and Asia. To control this trade, the Spanish Crown tightly regulated all traffic between these continents and levied heavy taxes on all merchandise. The stricter the regulations became, the more the merchants tried to outwit them through contraband trading and bribery. Within this setting, it was often impossible for merchants to bring cases of non-compliance of agreements to the official courts. Hence, the question arises, how were merchants, lacking an institution in charge of penalizing dishonest commercial conduct, able to find the trust in partners to establish trans-oceanic trading networks? This note argues that the answer lies in the common ground that united certain groups of shared mental models, which enabled the merchants to trust in the social coercive power of these groups and consequently to trust their partners overseas.

People and Things: Power in Early English Development

1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Biddick
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Agrarian Capitalism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
European Development ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early English ◽  
Structural Matrix

Debate over the rise of agrarian capitalism in Europe has established the historiographic chronology, locus, and conceptualization of European development. Proponents of contending schools (the “commercial” or the “political”) have focused on the late medieval through early modern period in England as the crucial time and place of the transformation but argue whether agrarian capitalism derived from economic or political structures (Ashton and Philpin 1985).' Neither school has questioned the common methodology of mapping social and cultural transformation onto a structural matrix. Steps taken by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists to decenter the European narrative of development have faltered at this same structuralist dilemma.

Gender Construction in Early Modern England and the Conduct Books of William Whately (1583–1639)

1998 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 163-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Eales
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Gender Construction ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Male Sex ◽  
Source Of Information

Conduct books, or household manuals offering advice about marriage and the ordering of domestic relationships, attained their greatest popularity in early modern England between the late sixteenth century and the Civil War. Many of these works, including William Whately’s popular A Bride-Bush, which ran into three editions between 1617 and 1623, and William Gouge’s influential Of Domesticall Duties, which first appeared in 1622, originated as sermons and were written by puritan preachers. They are also a valuable source of information about the construction of ideal masculine and feminine behaviour in the early modern period. At the start of A Bride-Bush, which was based on a marriage sermon, Whately asserted ‘I will make the ground of all my speech, those words of the Apostle Paul, Ephes. 5. 23. where hee saith, The Husband is the Wives head.’ Towards the end of the book he noted that the male sex is ‘preferred before the female in degree of place & dignity, as all men will yeeld that read what the Scriptures speake in that behalfe’.

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