Prices in Toledo (Spain): Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 269-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
David González Agudo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Price Index ◽  
Great Increase ◽  
Precious Metals ◽  
Food Prices ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Demographic Growth ◽  
Over Time

Differences in material conditions are a determinant that explains the little divergence between northwestern and southern Europe. This article approaches the evolution of prices in early modern Toledo (Spain). The price index includes new items such as housing and employs different baskets over time, reflecting changes in consumption patterns. During the city’s golden age, prices grew faster than in London, Paris, or Amsterdam. Wine, urban rent, and food prices experienced a great increase, coinciding with demographic growth and the arrival of the American precious metals. Prices slowed in the first half of the seventeenth century, throughout Castile’s demographic and economic decay.

The Accidents of the Soul

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-82
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medical Diagnostics ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Diagnostic Medicine ◽  
Over Time

“The Accidents of the Soul” asks which disciplines were seen to provide a knowledge of the passions in the early modern period, and how that map of the disciplines changed over time. It opens by noting the relatively minor position the passions held in a received philosophical “science of the soul,” itself divided between physics and metaphysics. As “accidents of the soul”—that is, contingent qualitative alterations in the soul—the passions lay at the margins of philosophical knowledge: they were seen as subject to too much particularity and contingency to belong to what one author called “certaine science.” They belonged instead to the “low” sciences, the practical sciences, fields that study human actions and that therefore were seen to produce a merely probable knowledge of particulars: fields like rhetoric, politics, poetics, ethics. The passions also belonged to medicine insofar as diagnostic medicine was understood as an art: in medicine, “accidents” are symptoms and the phrase “accidents of the soul” belongs to medical discourse insofar as it takes account of the particularities of the passions as part of a regimen of health. The chapter situates the seventeenth-century treatises on the passions in relation to various kinds of discourse on the passions all seen as promoting forms of probable knowledge on the model of medical diagnostics: physiology and “characterology,” most notably. It ends with a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello as a text that probes the limits—and the dangers—of this probable knowledge of the passions.

scholarly journals The Witch-cleric Stereotype in a Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Context*

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Rowlands
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Innocent People ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Wide Perspective ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This article enhances our understanding of the development and dynamism of early modern witch stereotypes by focusing on the stereotype of the witch-cleric, the Christian minister imagined by early modern people as working for the devil instead of God, baptizing people into witchcraft, working harmful magic and even officiating at witches’ gatherings. I show how this stereotype first developed in relation to Catholic clerics in demonology, print culture and witch-trials, then examine its emergence in relation to Protestant clerics in Germany and beyond, using case studies of pastors from the Lutheran territory of Rothenburg ob der Tauber from 1639 and 1692 to explore these ideas in detail. I also offer a broader comparison of beliefs about Protestant witch-clerics and their susceptibility to formal prosecution with their Catholic counterparts in early modern Germany, showing that cases involving Protestant witch-clerics were part of a cross-confessional phenomenon that is best understood in a comparative, Europe-wide perspective. In addition to showing how the witch-cleric stereotype changed over time and spread geographically, I conclude by arguing that three distinct variants of this stereotype had emerged by the seventeenth century: the Catholic ‘witch-priest’ and Protestant ‘witch-pastor’ (who were supposedly witches themselves) and the overzealous clerical ‘witch-master’, who was thought to do the devil’s work by helping persecute innocent people for witchcraft. Despite these stereotypes, however, relatively few clerics of either confession were tried and executed as witches; overall, patriarchy worked to protect men of the cloth from the worst excesses of witch persecution.

Ambassadors and Administrators: The Role of Clerics in Early French Colonies in Guiana

Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-277
Author(s):  
Gayle K. Brunelle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Precious Metals ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
Fierce Competition

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

Between Court and Village: The Evolution of Aristocratic Spaces in Early Modern Spain

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-54
Author(s):  
Santiago Martínez Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town ◽  
Over Time

In May 1561, King Philip II informed the town hall of Madrid that he had chosen their town as the site for his royal residence and court. That year, the city was swiftly transformed into the Catholic king’s court and the heart of his vast monarchy. It also became the principal political and cultural space for the nobility. Yet the greatest noble houses, particularly those in Castile, were initially resistant to the establishment of a sedentary royal court and continued to exercise and represent their status at their own traditional courts. Increasingly, however, they were obliged to reside in Madrid in order to ensure direct access to the king’s grace and favour. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Spanish aristocracy became courtiers through necessity rather than conviction. In response to this situation, and without neglecting their noble estates and interests, they created their own spaces at court, and over time were able to colonize the royal capital and convert it into their own natural habitat.

Friendly Credit and its Dangers

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-123
Author(s):  
Laura Kolb
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Flexibility ◽  
Over Time

This chapter reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness alongside early modern letter-writing manuals. In the early seventeenth century, popular epistolary manuals began to include examples of letters begging for money and letters denying or extending loans. These fictional epistles offer a repository of stock phrases and rhetorical moves useful for eager borrowers and unwilling lenders alike, two positions most of the books’ users would occupy at one point or another over the course of their lives. Letter-writing guides teach their users the necessity of self-contradiction over time: of now adhering to one set of values and practices, now to another. Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s plays analyze their protagonists’ inability to do precisely this. In Merchant and A Woman Killed, tragedy or near-tragedy results from the failure to exercise the social flexibility necessary for balancing the demands of love with those of thrift.

Das Bild vom ›Kornjuden‹ als Antifigur zum frühneuzeitlichen Prinzip der ›guten narung‹ und der ›moral economy‹

Aschkenas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jütte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Food Prices ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Religious Intolerance ◽  
Rainy Weather ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Anti Jewish

Subsistence crises due to famine occurred frequently in early modern Europe. A poor harvest caused by rainy weather was often the trigger for such disaster. But people also looked for scapegoats who could be blamed for the shortage of grain. From the seventeenth century onwards the so-called »corn Jew« became a popular stereotype in diatribes which often had an anti-Jewish undertone. Concomitantly, a new type of anti-Semitic medal made its appearance. These were the so-called »Korn Jude« (Corn or Grain Jew) medals. Most of these medals were struck in Germany and were issued in various forms over a period of almost a century. Two artists seem to have turned the creation of such medals into a veritable hallmark: Christian Wermuth (1661–1739) and, a little later, Johann Christian Reich (1740–1814). This article discusses how the distribution and circulation of the »Korn Jude« medals coincided with periods of rising food prices and famine. It will be shown that these medals were designed to perpetuate the myth about the Jews’ responsibility for these hardships and to portray the Jew as a diabolic speculator, particularly in the grain market. They reflect, however, also older traditions of religious intolerance.

Conversion as a Communal System of the Protestant Atlantic World

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 759-762
Author(s):  
Kristen Block
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Colonial Settlement ◽  
Over Time

Katharine Gerbner's wide-ranging and provocative book connects a broad range of scholarship on religion and race in the Protestant Atlantic world prior to the Great Awakening. It is organized around her concept of an emerging ideology of “Protestant Supremacy,” which she argues was the first step toward White Supremacy. This ideology came out of evangelizing failures in the seventeenth-century colonial Americas as Protestant slaveholders reframed their own values on religious and secular freedom in the context of colonial settlement and the growth of African slavery. This argument is entirely convincing and innovative in its comparisons of sometimes separate denominational scholarship. In my comments, I hope to reflect on Gerbner's use of the word conversion, a keyword in her book's title and one that many religious historians employ in their own work. Gerbner outlined her views in the introduction to her book (pages 6–12), but a fuller version of her arguments can also be found in her 2015 article published in History Compass, “Theorizing Conversion: Christianity, Colonization, and Consciousness in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” Her engagement with scholarly definitions rightly focuses on the malleability of what defined conversion in this eighteenth century Protestant Atlantic world—both when comparing different denominations and as a process that changed over time in conversation with things like slavery. She retains the word since the baptism and conversion of enslaved Africans prompted European Protestants to rethink their definition of Christianity, and particularly prompted them to find new ways to exclude non-whites. She also argues that using the term conversion helps to validate the actions and self-articulated changed identity of African-descendant converts as they engaged with majority white cultures hostile to their inclusion in the Christian community.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

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