Moving Cloth

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-154
Author(s):  
George Oppitz-Trotman
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
International Context ◽  
Vital Importance ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Fine Clothes ◽  
Early English ◽  
First Time ◽  
Recorded Performances

Clothes were the most important and expensive properties of an early modern theatre company. The first recorded performances of English professional actors on mainland Europe occurred in the context of a major crisis in the international cloth trade and efforts to form an international Protestant alliance. Known for their extravagant and luxurious clothing, the English Comedians took advantage of existing routes developed for the export and import of cloth. Extant dramatic adaptations of English plays associated with their tradition reflect the vital importance of textile stock to their performances and reception. Their reputation for sartorial extravagance involved the English Comedians in discourses of national loss: in the Holy Roman Empire, as in England, imported fine clothes were linked repeatedly to a diminishment of national treasure. Meanwhile, their comic tradition made extravagant use of the symbolic and physical properties of clothing. Although the formative importance of cloth economies to the early English professional theatre has been widely recognized, this chapter puts that dynamic into an international context for the first time.

New Light on Secular Polyphony at the Court of Holland in the Early Fifteenth Century: The Amsterdam Fragments

1992 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob C. Wegman
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Regional Government ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Middle Dutch ◽  
First Time

Around 1400, the northern Netherlands were little more than a loose collection of quarrelling principalities, unified to some degree by their common language, Middle Dutch. Formally this unruly area was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the German emperor's political weakness laid it wide open to the territorial ambitions of the Burgundian dukes. Under their rule, the Netherlands saw centralized regional government for the first time in their history. But it was not until the sixteenth century, when their Spanish Habsburg successors were increasingly regarded as foreign oppressors, that anything like a unified sovereign Dutch state came within sight.

scholarly journals Fall of the Peacemakers: Austria’s Protestant Nobility and the Advent of the Thirty Years’ War

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-158
Author(s):  
Peter Thaler
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
International Context ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Article Analyse ◽  
Religious Schism

This article examines the prelude to the Thirty Years’ War in Austria. It places the country’s estate system in an international context and evaluates the implications of the religious schism for the relationship between monarchs and nobles. Thwarted in their efforts to enforce confessional orthodoxy in the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburgs were determined to retain control of their patrimonial lands. The analysis reveals the careful strategy of Catholic restoration pursued by the dynasty as well as the increasing radicalization of Protestant opposition, and the consequential futility of the last major attempt at defusing the confessional conflict in the Habsburg Monarchy. The fundamental differences between noble and dynastic ideologies of state made compromise all but impossible. Cet article analyse le prélude à la guerre de Trente Ans en Autriche. Il propose de situer la société d’ordres du pays dans son contexte international, et d’évaluer les conséquences du schisme religieux pour les relations entre les monarques et les nobles. Bien que leurs efforts pour imposer l’orthodoxie confessionnelle au sein du Saint Empire aient échoué, les Habsbourgs restaient déterminés à maintenir leur contrôle sur leurs territoires héréditaires. L’analyse révèle la prudence de la stratégie menée par la dynastie, visant à rétablir le catholicisme ; elle met également en lumière la radicalisation croissante de l’opposition protestante ; et elle démontre l’échec de cette ultime tentative majeure de désamorcer le conflit confessionnel au sein de des territoires des Habsbourgs. Ce sont les désaccords idéologiques fondamentaux, opposant une conception de l’État noble à une conception dynastique, qui ont rendu le compromis quasi impossible.

The idea of God’s chosenness of the Czechs in the “Annals of Bohemia” by Giovanni de’ Marignolli

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-28
Author(s):  
Ivan Riedel
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Intellectual Environment

The article is devoted to the analysis of the «Annals of Bohemia» written by the cardinal Giovanni de’ Marignolli, an outstanding literary monument of the Charles IV era, in which the Czechs are first portrayed as God’s chosen people. The goal of the chronicle is to write the history of the Czech people in the world historical process. Based on his own etymological and ethnogenetic assumptions, the chronicler calls the Slavs «a sunny and glorious people», who are called upon to turn the Holy Roman Empire into a paradise on Earth. At the same time, the author singles out the Czechs of all the Slavs, setting them in opposition to the Poles and the Slavic peoples professing Orthodoxy. The emperor Karl is portrayed in the chronicle as «the new Messiah», the head of all real Christians, in whose person the Czech people’s sense of existence is fully realized. This monument has not been previously paid deserved attention, due to its historical unreliability, but its main side is not factual, but ideological. The de’ Marignolli’s chronicle is of great interest to any researcher, since it had a strong influence on the Czech court intellectual environment of the turn of the 14-15th centuries and through this on the ideology of the Hussites. Such concentrated messianism is found in the Czech chronicles for the first time.

Lordship and Administration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Interconnected Networks ◽  
Territorial States

The Holy Roman Empire, and especially Upper Germany, was notoriously politically fragmented in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A common way to interpret this fragmentation has been to view late medieval lordships, particularly those ruled by princes, as incipient ‘territories’, or even ‘territorial states’. However, this over-simplifies and reifies structures of lordship and administration in this period, which consisted of shifting agglomerations of assets, revenues, and jurisdictions that were dispersed among and governed by interconnected networks of political actors. Seigneurial properties and rights had become separable, commoditized, and highly mobile by the later middle ages, and these included not only fiefs (Lehen) but also loan-based pledges (Pfandschaften) and offices, all of which could be sold, transferred, or even ruled or exercised by multiple parties at once, whether these were princes, nobles, or urban elites. This fostered intensive interaction between formally autonomous political actors, generating frictions and disputes.

Plutarch's Rhythmic Prose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Prose Rhythm ◽  
First Time

Greek literature is divided, like many literatures, into poetry and prose; but in the earlier Roman Empire, 31 BC to AD 300, much Greek (and Latin) prose was written in one organized rhythmic system. Whether most, or hardly any, Greek prose adopted this patterning has been entirely unclear; this book for the first time adequately establishes an answer. It then seeks to get deeper into the nature of prose-rhythm through one of the greatest Imperial works, Plutarch’s Lives. All its phrases, almost 100,000, have been scanned rhythmically. Prose-rhythm is revealed as a means of expression, which draws attention to words and word-groups. (Online readings are offered too.) Some passages in the Lives pack rhythms together more closely than others; the book looks especially at rhythmically dense passages. These do not occur randomly; they attract attention to themselves, and are marked out as climactic in the narrative, or as in other ways of highlighted significance. Comparison emerges as crucial to the Lives on many levels. Much of the book closely discusses particular dense moments, in commentary form, to show how much rhythm contributes to understanding, and is to be integrated with other sorts of criticism. These remarkable passages make apparent the greatness of Plutarch as a prose-writer: a side not greatly considered amid the huge resurgence of work on him. The book also analyses closely rhythmic and unrhythmic passages from three Greek novelists. Rhythm illuminates both a supreme Greek writer, Plutarch, and three prolific centuries of Greek literary history.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
German Nation ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

The Bounds of Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Italian Nationalism ◽  
To Come

Scholars have long believed that ‘medieval’ universalism was supplanted by ‘Italian’ nationalism over the course of the fourteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the humanists were often more concerned with the fate of Italy, or of individual cities, than of mankind as a whole, they did not waver in their belief that the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed universal dominion. Only at the very end of the Visconti Wars, when the Empire was seen to threaten the peace and liberty of the peninsula did ‘Italianness’ at last begin to come to the fore. Yet this is not to say that their universalism was unvarying. Depending on whether they chose to view it more as the successor of the ancient imperium Romanum or as an instrument of providence, they could paint it in idealistically ‘Roman’ colours, or endow it with a more ‘hegemonic’ tinge.

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