‘For whom the bell tolls’: Listening and its Implications

2010 ◽  
Vol 135 (S1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
David R. M. Irving
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Music ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Alternative Set

ABSTRACTThis response highlights the cultural specificity of the ‘work-concept’ and questions the tripartite scheme of listening proposed by John Butt. It offers an alternative set of listening categories, and makes reference to the issues of early-modern class structures and the role of music in religious devotions. The argument is supported by critiques of historical vignettes that include the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's transcription of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot's demonstration of French music to a Chinese audience in the mid-eighteenth century.

The will to give: charitable bequests, inter vivos gifts and community building in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1800

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELISE VAN NEDERVEEN MEERKERK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Will ◽  
Charitable Bequests

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of different social groups in early modern Dutch towns in organising and financing poor relief. Examining both the income structure of Dutch urban poor relief organisations and voluntary donations and bequests by citizens reveals what motivations lay behind their involvement, and how and why these changed over time. In the seventeenth century, ‘middle groups’ donated more often and higher mean amounts, reflecting their efforts to contribute to urban community building. In the eighteenth century, the elite became relatively more involved in charitable giving. Also, the urge to give to one's own religious group seems to have increased in this period.

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

From German-speaking Catholics to French carpenters: Strasbourg guilds and the role of confessional boundaries in the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners in the eighteenth century

Urban History ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANNA SONKAJÄRVI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
German Speaking

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the importance of religion as a factor influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners from – and inside – the guilds in eighteenth-century Strasbourg. We consider the different notions of theétrangeras socially constructed and circumstantial. Together with factors such as social status, family ties, gender, systems of patronage, wealth, language and the citizenship rights of a town, religious and denominational boundaries constituted a major factor for influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners in the early modern society. The construction and preservation of such boundaries are explored here through the examples of the carpenters' and the shipmen's guild found in the eighteenth-century multiconfessional city of Strasbourg.

scholarly journals Michael Alberti and the Medical Therapy of the Internal Senses

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-266
Author(s):  
Andreas Rydberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
The Right ◽  
Therapeutic Perspective ◽  
German Physician

Abstract In the first half of the eighteenth century, the German physician Michael Alberti was responsible for hundreds of dissertations and other works in medicine. While the bulk of the production reflected the dominating medical topics of his time, he also developed an original focus on the internal senses and their effects on bodily health and disease. Depending on whether internal senses, such as imagination and memory, were cultivated in the right way or not, they could work as powerful remedies or as equally powerful triggers of disease and even death. This article explores this little known strand of early modern medicine in three steps. First, it shows that Alberti’s medicine took form in intimate connection to the Stahlian brand of Pietist medicine. As such, it further elaborated an existing strand of medicine that was intimately connected to German Pietism. Second, it analyses in some detail the role of the internal senses from a pathological and therapeutic perspective as well as examining what kind of persona the physician ought to embody. Lastly, it raises larger questions regarding how to understand this strand of early modern medicine. Rather than approaching it from the perspective of disciplinary history, the article seeks to reconstruct it as a part of what has sometimes been referred to as the early modern cultura animi tradition.

Professional Lobbying in Eighteenth-century Brussels: The Role of Agents in Petitioning the Central Government Institutions in the Habsburg Netherlands

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Griet Vermeesch
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The Other ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Government Institutions

Abstract Historians have underscored the crucial importance of petitions both in early modern political practice and for relations between rulers and ruled. However, little is known about how formal requests were actually presented to rulers or the role of professional lobbyists. This article describes these individuals, using materials from a well-documented case, namely the court agents who were active in recommending petitions to the central government councils in eighteenth-century Brussels. Via these officially appointed lobbyists, citizens could obtain access to central figures in the decision-making process and express their personal grievances, desires and needs. This article argues that the efforts which court agents had to exert in order to present and recommend such petitions hint at the time- and money-consuming nature of petitioning. Court agents were supposed to offer their services free of charge to poor people, but opportunities for petitioning were in all probability less open to households of modest means. On the other hand, the court agents surely broadened the opportunities for petitioning in general, as—in exchange for a fee—anyone could draw on their expertise and contacts in government circles so as to be heard. Although patronage remained highly important throughout the eighteenth century, government accessibility increased in a more egalitarian manner, due to the work of these agents.

The decline and displacement of custom in early modern Spain

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-472
Author(s):  
Aniceto Masferrer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

SummaryThis article aims to describe the reasons for the decline of customary law in the early modern era. Confining the discussion to a limited geographical setting – the Iberian Peninsula – the arguments I used might be easily applied to other European jurisdictions. Part I presents an explanation of the predominance of custom in the medieval Spanish legal traditions. Part II describes the general features of the law in the early modern era, since they contributed – to a greater or lesser degree – to the demise of custom. Part III focuses more specifically on the theoretical and practical reasons for the decline and displacement of custom in early modern Spain. Part IV describes the consequences of the Decrees of Nueva Planta (1707-1718), approved by Felipe V in the context of the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1714), regarding the development of the notion and role of custom in the eighteenth century. The article concludes with some reflections, emphasising that although customs do not easily co-exist with the state or a strong political power, neither do they entirely perish.

scholarly journals Tobacco-Taking and Identity-Making in Early Modern Britain and North America

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Angela McShane
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Revolutionary America ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
Material Evidence

Abstract This article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on the role of snuff- and tobacco boxes, which uniquely provided white middling-sorts on both sides of the Atlantic with a socialized canvas upon which significant statements of status, personality, and sensibility could be made. However, a closer study of these objects during America's revolutionary period reveals stark contrasts in the social, political, and gendered meanings ascribed to tobacco-taking between Britain and America. The material evidence, it is argued, suggests that for men, and especially for women in revolutionary America, snuff- and tobacco-taking became almost synonymous with loyalty to the republic.

Music in the Margin of Indifference

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Church ◽  
Modern Status

This chapter considers the role of a specific Lutheran idea of freedom in the emancipation of sacred music from liturgy during the early modern period. It proposes that the Lutheran appropriation of the classical notion of ‘adiaphora’, as a stance of indifference towards practices and objects not essential for salvation, opened up a quasi-autonomous space for musical elaboration, within which music could gradually acquire its modern status as a self-sufficient artistic practice. The eighteenth-century tradition of Passion performances in Protestant Germany offers a rich test case for this process of ecclesiastical divestment, in particular J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion of 1727, which made claims for music that clearly outstripped its functional remit, and Carl Heinrich Graun’s immensely popular setting of Karl Wilhelm Ramler’s Der Tod Jesu of 1755, which consolidated the genre’s move from the liturgy to the concert hall. Yet this migration outside the church walls by no means provides straightforward confirmation of a standard secularization narrative of Western modernity. Rather, in absorbing and retaining crucial aspects of sacrality, these musical repertories and practices reveal the rootedness of the modern aesthetic sphere in that Lutheran margin of indifference.

scholarly journals Devotion, Paintings, and the House: The Collections of Ercole and Giuseppe Branciforti, Princes of Scordia (Palermo, 1687–1720)

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Valeria Viola
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Structural Nature

This paper interrogates familial devotion and its relationship with parts of the house other than the chapel. In detail, it aims to problematize the issue of the devotional/non-devotional use of paintings inside the house by moving the focus from this dual opposition to the active role of canvases, broadly defined. Informed by Jacques Derrida’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s writings, this paper argues for the structural nature of the paintings inside the house and their meaningful correlation with both the arrangement of the domestic interior and the practices of people experiencing those spaces. To do this, the paper challenges the overwhelming attention paid by early-modern scholars to Northern and central Italy and investigates a precise case study, i.e., Palazzo Scordia in Palermo (Sicily). The research draws upon primary sources and amongst these, upon two detailed inventories of furniture referring to two subsequent generations of an aristocratic clan residing in Palermo between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, i.e., Ercole and Giuseppe Branciforti, princes of Scordia.

scholarly journals The Lulav: Early Modern Polemical Ethnographies and the Art of Fencing

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 493
Author(s):  
Ahuvia Goren
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Cultural Transfers

In recent years, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of scholarship in general and, more specifically, to the emergence of critical historical and anthropological literature from and within ecclesiastical scholarship. However, few studies have discussed the Jewish figures who took part in this process. This paper analyzes the role played by historiographical and ethnographical writing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian Jewish–Christian polemics. Tracing various Christian polemical ethnographical depictions of the Jewish rite of shaking the lulav (sacramental palm leaves used by Jews during the festival of Sukkot), it discusses the variety of ways in which Jewish scholars responded to these depictions or circumvented them. These responses reflect the Jewish scholars’ familiarity with prevailing contemporary scholarship and the key role of translation and cultural transfers in their own attempts to create parallel works. Furthermore, this paper presents new Jewish polemical manuscript material within the relevant contexts, examines Jewish attempts to compose polemical and apologetic ethnographies, and argues that Jewish engagement with critical scholarship began earlier than scholars of this period usually suggest

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