Introduction

Author(s):  
Joanna Innes ◽  
Michael J. Braddick

The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, and a later phase concerned with the history of political economy, and particularly the shifting discourse of happiness which, he argued, informed it. It then explores recent interest in the history of emotions, distinguishing a variety of approaches to that subject. Reviewing three broad approaches taken by the contributors to the volume, it goes on to suggest that the history of emotions is most stimulating when seen as a focal point for different kinds of history rather than as a discrete subject of enquiry. A further implication is that a variety of forms of expertise need to be brought to bear.

Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Arabica ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 399
Author(s):  
Thomas Philipp

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani

The history of political-economic thought has been built up over the centuries with a uniform focus on European and North American thinkers. Intellectuals beyond the North Atlantic have been largely understood as the passive recipients of already formed economic categories and arguments. This view has often been accepted not only by scholars and observers in Europe but also in many other places such as Russia, India, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. In this regard, the articles included in this collection explicitly differentiate from this diffusionist approach (“born in Western Europe, then flowed everywhere else”).


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