“WITHOUT THE CAMP”: LEPROSY AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITING

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Edmond

FOUCAULT WAS PROBABLY RIGHT WHEN he argued in the first chapter of Madness and Civilization that the asylum replaced the lazar house at the end of the Middle Ages, but he exaggerated in claiming that leprosy had disappeared from the western world. The decline of leprosy in early modern Europe did not mean that fear of it vanished or that Europe lost all contact with the disease. From the sixteenth century it became involved in the debate about the origin of syphilis, which at first was widely believed to be a new form of leprosy. A later, converse theory claimed that leprosy was a common terminal stage of syphilis, particularly in hot climates (Leprosy in India 353). This was given circulation and respectability at the turn of the nineteenth century by William Jones when he wrote that “The Persian, or venereal, fire generally ends in this malady” (qtd. in Crook and Guiton 91). The Collected Works of this distinguished Orientalist were published in 1799 and widely discussed. Britain’s steady colonial expansion in the late eighteenth century had brought renewed contact with leprosy and the consequent fear of its reintroduction into Europe. Although the disease had remained available to writers as a figure for horror throughout the early modern period, it was to take on renewed force in the century or so following the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798).

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (123) ◽  
pp. 305-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Carey

One of the bitterest fruits of human conflict is the resort to massacre. From the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, combatants have regularly attempted to defeat their enemies through acts of indiscriminate killing. The history of early modern European colonial expansion is replete with such incidents. The remembering and recounting of them has become the stuff of historical and political controversy. The aim of this article is not to review these painful episodes, but to examine the sixteenth-century context in which these resorts to massacre occurred; to focus on one particular atrocity that achieved some notoriety in Ireland in the early modern period; and to suggest that a now largely forgotten episode, at Mullaghmast in County Kildare in 1578, was part of a pattern of conquest which implicated not only the soldiers and settlers who served in the Gaelic localities, but also the upper echelons of the English administration in Ireland. This pattern was accompanied by an apologetic ideology of civility and savagery best reflected in a central text, John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581). Derricke’s Image provides us with sufficient evidence to suggest that indiscriminate slaughter was an accepted tool in the effort to subdue Gaelic Ireland. Indeed, Derricke’s text adds weight to the conclusion that the atrocity at Mullaghmast in 1578 implicates no less a figure than Sir Henry Sidney, the quintessential renaissance English official in Ireland. Mullaghmast is important not only because it demonstrates the officially sanctioned brutality of the conquest, but also because it raises the question of how memory and history are constructed.


1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knud J. V. Jespersen

There is general agreement among scholars of military history on the main features of military developments during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period. A brief sketch of the broad outlines of these developments may therefore suffice as a preface to an investigation of Danish knight service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The decisive factor in the medieval army was the fully armoured, lancebearing mounted knight. The battlefield was totally dominated by the combat technique of these bands of qualifizierten Einzelkämpfern, offensive combat at close quarters. The remaining forces, in contrast, functioned merely as auxiliaries to the main arm - the heavy mounted knights.


Author(s):  
Sverre Bagge

There is a continuous tradition of historical writing from the Middle Ages to the present day in all three of the Scandinavian kingdoms, as well as in Iceland, though admittedly it began later (not until the early fourteenth century) in Sweden than in the other countries. The works dating from the Middle Ages have already been discussed. Those of the Early Modern Period are of interest as evidence of learning and for an understanding of how “history” was viewed at the time, and also because they contain a number of documents from the Middle Ages whose originals have been lost. However, the beginning of modern scholarly historical writing is usually dated to the early nineteenth century, in Scandinavia as in the rest of Europe. The professionalization of history, which started in Germany, quickly spread to Scandinavia. Throughout Europe, this professionalization was related to a national revival that typically placed great emphasis on a nation’s medieval past....


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-125
Author(s):  
Dawid Barbarzak

The ancient myth about Hercules’ expedition to the island of Erythea, his combat with Geryon and setting the Pillars was adopted by the authors of Iberian chronicles from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The paper responds to the question of how the myth was being changed by the authors and what their political or genealogical aim related with the historical period was. The analysis of ancient sources and the comparison with chosen Iberian chronicles proves that the character of Hercules was intentionally adapted for creating old dynastic genealogies, a model of good king or founding myths of Spanish cities (as Cádiz and A Coruña). For similar reasons, Spanish colonial expansion changed also the idea of the Pillars of Hercules which were not perceived as the boundary of the Mediterranean anymore but became a gate to the New World.


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
CARLO MARCO BELFANTI

This paper aims at offering a reconstruction of the salient features of the most important formal institution introduced by European states in the Early Modern Period with the aim of recognizing and protecting the intellectual property of the inventors. Such institutions went under different names – ‘Privilegio’ in Venice, ‘Patent’ in England, ‘Privilège’ in France, ‘Cedula de privilegio de invençion’ in Spain – and, in general, took the form of the concession of a special prerogative to the inventor by the sovereign or the republic, by virtue of which he could exploit, in economic terms, his own invention through holding a monopoly. The article starts with the origins of the privileges for invention, of which the first examples are to be found in the Middle Ages, but whose official ‘genesis’ is commonly identified with the Venetian law of 1474. The fundamental characteristics of the Venetian system, which was later imitated by other European states, are analysed. In the following section, the adoption of this model by those other states – Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands – is illustrated. In fact, the majority of these would make legislation on intellectual property an instrument of mercantilist policy, under the same conditions as prevailed in Venice. Further, we will examine some of the opportunities that the diffusion of these measures offered to those involved and the way in which they – as craftsmen, merchants, and speculators – took advantage of the business of privileges. Finally, before concluding, some thoughts on the changes made in the policy of privileges given the transformations that took place in the course of the eighteenth century, in order to understand the ‘adaptive’ capacity of these institutions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-396
Author(s):  
Lucinda H. S. Dean

Marriage was a prominent ‘life-stage’ ritual linked to achievement of the hegemonic manly state in the early modern period: it was associated with self-control and was seen as a stabilising force against the ‘follies of youth’. James IV (1488–1513), James V (1513–1542) and James VI (1567–1625) came to the throne as minors and their weddings provided particularly potent opportunities for shaping their identity both at home and abroad. Clothing was a crucial element of the social dialogue performed by both men and women in late medieval and early modern Europe. Dress, of the royal person and of others, was a mode of display in which all three monarchs invested heavily at the moment of their weddings. By offering a comparative analysis of the investment in sartorial splendour and the use of dress and personal adornment through a gendered lens, this article demonstrates how clothing and adornments were used to make statements about both manhood and royal status by three sixteenth-century Stewart kings attempting to secure their place in the homosocial hierarchy.


2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.


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