Early Modern Spain

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allyson M. Poska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Jewish Populations

During the Early Modern period, the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were unique in many ways. For centuries, they had struggled with significant Islamic and Jewish populations both inside and just beyond their borders. Long after the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews, the presence of newly converted and assimilated peoples informed Spanish culture. Columbus’s voyages to the Caribbean made Castile the head of an expanding American empire that transformed the kingdom politically, socially, and economically. With the succession of Charles I to the thrones of Castile and Aragon and his subsequent election as Holy Roman Emperor (Charles V), that empire grew to include much of northern and central Europe. Charles’s successors would add Portugal and parts of Asia to its possessions. As a result, Spain’s monarchs, institutions, policies, and social norms became critical in the formation of the early modern world.

Women Writing in Early Modern Spain

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Vollendorf
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
European Nation

Women gained access to the written word in unprecedented numbers during the early modern period. They also exercised considerable political influence during Spain’s so-called Golden Age (1492–1700). One important contributing factor was the rise of the vernacular, which occurred during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. Queen Isabella I of Castile (b. 1451–d. 1504) and King Ferdinand II of Aragon (b. 1452–d. 1516) married in 1469. The unification of two of the largest kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula initiated the foundation of the nation-state of Spain. Their state-building policies would come to have a lasting impact on Spain’s social, cultural, and political structures. Under the Catholic Monarchs, the first dictionary of the Spanish language was published by Antonio Nebrija (1492). The emphasis on a common vernacular language was accompanied by the cultural homogenization perpetrated through the persecution of religious heterodoxy. The monarchs’ request for a Spanish Inquisition was granted in 1478, after which local tribunals were established to extinguish heresy. Their financing of Christopher Columbus’s voyages led to the establishment of the Spanish Empire, which later would be expanded under the Habsburg Charles I of Spain (Charles V of Austria). The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 was the first of several attempts to rid the nation of non-Catholics. While the Inquisition initially focused its efforts on Jewish individuals, it later broadened its focus to offenses such as blasphemy, bigamy, and sodomy, as well as to numerous religious heresies as practiced by women (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft), Protestants (e.g., Illuminists), and Moriscos, among other groups. As in the rest of Europe, the advent of Humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation all had a significant impact on Spain and, for our purposes, on Spanish women. Yet, the nation’s unique ethno-religious history was unlike that of any other European nation. Moreover, undergirded by the rise of a transatlantic and trans-European empire and the linkage between the Inquisition and the state, the Spanish early modern period was unlike that of any other European nation. Any consideration of women’s writing in Spain’s early modern period must take into account all of these social, cultural, and political factors that influenced the rise and fall of the Spanish empire.

Motherhood

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia Yonemoto
Keyword(s):  
Family Planning ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Low Fertility ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range

The chapter explores the discourse and experience of motherhood within Japan’s low-fertility regime in the early modern period. In a manner rarely seen elsewhere in the early modern world, Japanese families used various means, from infanticide to adoption, to correlate family size with income. The chapter examines a wide range of primary sources to explore the effects of family planning on motherhood in two dimensions, the biological and the social. It also examines motherhood as a lived experience through the writings of Inoue Tsūjo, Kuroda Tosako, and Sekiguchi Chie.

Death and Dying

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Covington
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead

Beliefs and practices relating to death underwent profound transformations in the early modern period and continue to provoke the interest of widely disparate scholars. Once the purview of demographic, medical, and social historians, the subject of death and dying has also been given literary and art historical treatments as well as treatment from a range of other interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. As Philippe Ariès once noted, if the historian (and one might add the student) “wishes to arrive at an understanding” of what death meant in the past, he or she must “widen his field of vision” to encompass different historical approaches and methodologies—and even then the subject still eludes. (Ariès 1981, p. 16–17; cited under Attitudes and Mentalities). No study of death’s history can escape the shadow of Ariès, even if his two works relating to the theme of death have been criticized for the selectivity of their sources and sweeping conclusions about collective beliefs. But as with many such ambitious and problematic works—Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias are others whose field-changing books come to mind—the influence has been enormous. Working from the perspective of social history and the Annales school of French historians, Ariès tended to focus primarily on the cultural and attitudinal aspects of death, with most of the books in this article reflecting this approach. But the biomedical and demographic aspects are also important, particularly in the context of an age that witnessed a revolution in professionalized medicine and, according to many scholars, resulted in the medicalization and eventually the “secularization” of death. Historians have also been influenced by the contributions of anthropologists, such as Jack Goody on ritual, Victor Turner on liminality, and Arnold Van Gennep on rites de passage (rituals marking the life cycle), all of whom have deepened understandings of the very different approaches to death that people held in the premodern past. Many practitioners of “historical anthropology” thus explored cultural practices and collectively held symbolic systems, each of which carried extensive implications for the study of funerary rites, burial customs, or rituals of remembrance. Indeed, the anthropologist Robert Hertz made such endeavors possible in his own work on funerary rituals and the psychological connections between the living and the dead or between the individual and the community. Such perspectives were also animated by a related turn in the study of memory, with such notable exponents as Pierre Nora and his “sites of memory”; as a result the use of tradition and commemorative ritual as well as an interest in epigraphs and tomb monuments has been applied to the memorializing of the dead with productive results. Most of the sections in this article select works that reflect these different theoretical approaches as they describe how death in the early modern world was an intimate fact of life and one that was confronted communally and with a common, consolatory language and set of rituals, all of which was a healthier way, perhaps, to face death than the medicalized isolation that often surrounds it in the early 21st century.

What Price Sugar? Land, Labor, and Revolution

2008 ◽  
Vol 81 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

[First paragraph]Sugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States. Bernard Moitt (ed.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. vii + 203 pp. (Cloth US $ 65.00)Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. (Paper US $ 22.50)These two books illustrate the fascination that sugar, slavery, and the plantation still exercise over the minds of scholars. One of them also reflects an interest in the influence these have had on the modern world. For students of the history of these things the Schwartz collection is in many ways the more useful. It seeks to fill a lacuna left by the concentration of monographs on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that we know less about the history of sugar than we thought we did. Perhaps in no other single place is such a range of information on so wide an area presented in such detail for so early a period. Ranging from Iberia to the Caribbean and including consumption as well as production of sugar, with a nod to the slave trade and a very useful note on weights and currencies, this volume is a gold mine of information. It considers (briefly) the theoretical meaning as well as the growing of this important crop, contrasting its production in Iberia with that on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, colonized by Iberian powers, and continuing the contrast with São Tomé, off the coast of Africa, and on to Brazil and the Spanish American empire before ending with the British in Barbados. In the transit, it of necessity considers and complicates the meaning of “sugar revolution” and shows how scholars using that term do not always mean the same thing. John McCusker and Russell Menard, for example, tackling a cornerstone of the traditional interpretation of the development of sugar, argue that there was no “sugar revolution” in Barbados; economic change had already begun before sugar’s advent, though sugar may have accelerated it, and yet sugar production was transformed on the island. They also undercut, without quite denying, the significance of the Dutch role in the process. Schwartz, while questioning, lings to the traditional expression if not the traditional outlook, seeing in Barbados “the beginning of the sugar revolution” (p. 10).

Maritime History as Global History

2010 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Maritime Transportation ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Global Exchange ◽  
The Impact

This study aims to provide new insights into the connections between maritime history and global history. It demonstrates the significance of maritime activity as a conduit of global exchange by examining local, national, and international interdependencies and trade networks, and a broad range of time periods, geographical areas, and various sub-divisions of maritime historical research. It is composed of ten essays, with an introductory chapter and concluding chapter. The first five essays discuss the effects globalisation on shipping in the early modern period; the following three discuss maritime transportation and the economics of industrialisation from the nineteenth century to the present day; the next discusses the impact of global entrepreneurialism on maritime history; the penultimate discusses the connections and variables between maritime and global history; and the concluding chapter examines the theoretical assumptions surrounding the two disciplines, using the globalisation of Early Modern Spain as a case study to do so. The study demonstrates that the core strength of maritime history is its essential place in global history, and that the process of globalisation began at sea.

Women’s Religious Actions in the German Sectors of the Early Modern World

Daphnis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 603-619
Author(s):  
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Global Connections

Germans were active in constructing transcultural experiences on a global scale – for better or worse – from Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map on. Most of those who have been studied were men, but women traveled and migrated as well, and they supported those who did financially, institutionally, and emotionally. Their movements and actions have left fewer and more shadowy records than those of men, but a more gender-balanced account of global connections in the early modern period is emerging. This essay examines three ways in which German women’s actions shaped the early modern world in the realm of religion: women’s establishment of religious communities, women’s patronage of overseas missions, and women’s proselytizing, particularly that undertaken by Moravians. All of these built on networks and traditions established in Europe, but ones that already reached across political boundaries in the splintered world of the Holy Roman Empire, or beyond it to co-religionists in Prague, Paris, or Copenhagen.

Divine Illumination, Mechanical Calculators, and the Roots of Modern Reason

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Dear
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Inferential Reasoning ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mechanical Reasoning ◽  
Divine Illumination ◽  
Natural Philosophers

ArgumentTalk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

scholarly journals ‘A Place full of Trade’: Placing an Early Modern Chinese Town in Global Cultural History

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Anne Gerritsen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Town

This article focuses on the history of Wuchengzhen 吳 城 鎮, a small town in the inland province of Jiangxi. It explores the history of the town between 1500 and 1850 in terms of both its local significance as an entrepot for trade in grain and tea and its global connections to early modern Europe, by way of the trade in porcelain. The question this paper explores concerns the juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the idea gained from global historians, that during the early modern period, globally traded commodities like tea and porcelain situate a small town like this in a globalized, perhaps even unified or homogenous, world, and on the other hand, the insight gained from cultural historians, that no two people would ever see, or assign meaning to, this small town in the same way. Drawing on this insight, the history of Wuchengzhen is explored on the basis of different textual (administrative records, local gazetteers, merchant manuals) and visual sources (maps and visual depictions of the town), exploring the ways in which the different meanings of the town are constructed in each. The combination of global and cultural history places Wuchengzhen on our map of the early modern world.

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cressy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Central State ◽  
Isle Of Wight ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Island Communities

This book deals with the peculiarities, privileges, and anomalies of England’s offshore communities, and their relationship to the central state from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of manuscripts and printed sources, it shows how the Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, Anglesey, and lesser island communities maintained distinctive cultural patterns and constitutional legacies, alongside deep involvement in the affairs of the nation. As outliers of English power, the islands were coveted by England’s enemies, yet often neglected by English regimes. They were smugglers’ haunts, pirate havens, and locales of shipwreck, as well as places of religious and political infighting. Differences of language, heritage, distance, and maritime isolation made them difficult to govern. In England’s civil war, they were divided and contested, some serving as refuges for defeated cavaliers, and suffering siege and conquest. Regimes from Charles I to James II used these islands to hold political prisoners, and Charles I himself experienced a year of confinement on the Isle of Wight. Examination of how governments handled difficulties and distractions at the insular margins, and how islanders coped with the centralizing demands of the state, sheds light on the dynamics and application of power across the early modern period. Taking their measure entails an innovative engagement with legal, social, political, constitutional, religious, military, maritime, and economic history.

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