She Said, He Said: Situated Oralities in Judicial Records from Early Modern Rome

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 403-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Everyday Talk ◽  
Oral Expression ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
Early Modern Rome

Abstract In practice, early modern culture was for most Europeans more oral than written. Yet spoken words, especially those of ordinary people, are, for scholars, tantalizingly elusive. Testimonies, recorded verbatim, in judicial proceedings for the city of Rome and other Italian jurisdictions offer rich repositories of oral expression uttered by women and men of diverse ages and social positions. Yet to explore these documents as terrains of speech and oral culture, we must attend closely to the processes by which these words were assembled and transcribed. Everyday talk that we hear in the trials was deeply situated: in the intricate hybridity of oral/written cultures that characterized much of the early modern world; in the layered oral and written formats of judicial process; and in the social and gendered circumstances of the speakers. These frames shaped the orality that we see in the trials, but did not obliterate individual agency in speech.

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.

The Wages of Sin

2021 ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Nations ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Unique Ability

For these Christian histories, humanity endured punishment for its sins in the first half of the twentieth century. Bad ideas, rooted in a failure to adhere to biblical Christianity, bore horrifying fruit. These textbooks condemn liberalism as the root of evil forms of government—socialism, fascism, and totalitarianism—with little distinction among them. They use this period to define fundamental dichotomies—evil socialists versus godly capitalists, deplorable liberals versus admirable conservatives. Efforts to negotiate peace or maintain it—the Peace of Versailles, the League of Nations, and the United Nations—were reprehensible, reflecting a misplaced desire to remediate the human condition. The United States even made such efforts in the New Deal, which these curricula repudiate. Humanism penetrated modern culture through education, particularly in the social sciences. Evangelicals’ understanding of biblical prophecies gave them a unique ability to weigh and condemn the evils of the modern world.

The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 533
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza ◽  
Brendan Dooley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

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.

Experiments in the Courtroom: Social Dynamics and Spectacles of Proof in Early Modern English Witch Trials

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (01) ◽  
pp. 152-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orna Alyagon Darr
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Court System ◽  
Exclusive Jurisdiction ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Scientific Experts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
Criminal Charges ◽  
Legal Proof

This article presents the composite social context surrounding the “experiments” that were used to prove witchcraft accusations in early modern England. It demonstrates that legal proof was not imposed by elite legislators and judges, or fashioned in accordance with the voice of scientific experts, but was shaped through complex social dynamics in which the middling sort and petty gentry fulfilled a crucial role. Through this process, popular beliefs percolated into judicial proceedings. Members of influential provincial families were the social agents who reconstructed old supernatural methods of proof into innovative rational experiments, often replicating public displays of proof that helped bolster the criminal charges and provided a competing arena of evidence. The article claims that the judges' cooperation with these “experiments” might have been an endeavor by the official legal system to circumvent the threat posed by a popular grassroots alternative to the exclusive jurisdiction of the court system.

Tracing the Movement of Knowledge across Vast Distances and Long Temporal Spans

Transfers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Pamela H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Research Group ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
Beliefs And Values ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Trade And Exchange

A research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on “Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World” held a series of workshops (2014–2015) on the movement of knowledge (materials, techniques, objects) across Eurasia, resulting in an edited volume. Participants articulated a framework of “entangled itineraries,” “material complexes,” and “nodes of convergence” by which historians might follow routes of knowledge-making extending over very long distances and/or great spans of time. The key concepts are (1) “material complex” denoting the constellation of substances, practices, techniques, beliefs, and values that accrete as knowledge around materials; (2) the “relational field,” the social, intellectual, economic, emotional domain formed by a “node of convergence”—often a hub of trade and exchange—within which a material complex crystalizes; and (3) “itineraries,” or the routes taken by materials through which they stabilize and/ or transform.

scholarly journals The Paradigm of Unity in the Science and Culture

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-72
Author(s):  
Stanislaw Grochmal
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Methodological Basis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Science And Culture

Abstract The paradigm of unity is a response to the contemporary needs of society; it shows a new way of looking at social and cultural processes, in positive and creative aspects, giving the hope to solve many problems of the modern world. It constitutes a methodological basis for building both the theoretical models and application schemas, also reveals the directions of the empirical research (Biela, 1996). The paper presents the importance of the paradigm of unity for science and modern culture, particularly in relation to the social sciences, its characteristics and applications in several disciplines, as well as a chance to emerge from the current crisis of civilization based on this paradigm.

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