scholarly journals Introduction: The Material Worlds of Food in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract All of the articles in this special issue show the necessity of having to combine different kinds of sources—texts with images, images with objects, and objects with absences—to build an integrated history of the material worlds of food in the early modern period. They also reflect newer approaches to materiality which are sensitive to the relationship between matter and the senses and consider the haptic, visual, olfactory, and even aural aspects of cooking and eating alongside taste. In turn, the tastes of collectors and the fragility and absence of source material also need to be taken into consideration in order to write a meaningful cultural and social history of food. Despite the ephemeral nature of eating and cooking, this special issue shows that the sources studied by historians of material culture of the early modern period are remarkably rich, and their analysis fruitful.

scholarly journals Privacy and Social Spaces

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Natália Da Silva Perez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Examination

In this introductory text to the special issue Regulating Access: Privacy and the Private in Early Modern Dutch Contexts, Natália da Silva Perez argues that privacy can be a productive analytical lens to examine the social history of the Dutch Republic. She starts by providing an overview of theoretical definitions of privacy and of the ‘private versus public’ dichotomy, highlighting their implications for the study of society. Next, she discusses the modern view of privacy as a legally protected right, explaining that we must adjust expectations when applying the concept to historical examination: in the early modern period, privacy was not yet fully incorporated within a legal framework, and yet, it was a widespread need across different echelons of society. She provides a historical overview of this widespread need for privacy through instances where people attempted to regulate access to their material and immaterial resources. Finally, she describes how the four articles in this special issue contribute to our understanding of the role of privacy in early modern Dutch life.

Coda: Repositioning Early Modern Prague on the Global Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The City

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

scholarly journals Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Eli Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Last Ice Age ◽  
The City

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over thelongue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Katharina Grasskamp
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Maritime Networks ◽  
History Of

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells’ shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.

Impotence and the Natural Explanation of Bewitchment: Wolfgang Reichart’s Medical Case Report on the Loss of “potentia coeundi”

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-295
Author(s):  
Giovanni Rubeis ◽  
Frank Ursin ◽  
Florian Steger
Keyword(s):  
Case Report ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural Explanation ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Medical Case Report ◽  
Natural Means

Abstract Wolfgang Reichart (1486-c. 1547) was a humanist and a town physician of Ulm. His work consists of a largely unpublished collection of nearly 600 texts. So far, it has been claimed that this compilation only consists of letters and poems. However, we have found a medical treatise, wherein Reichart discusses a case of impotence, its pathophysiology and therapy. One of the crucial aspects in this text is the relationship it describes between witchcraft and medicine. The patient claims that his condition is the result of bewitchment. Reichart accepts witchcraft as a possible aetiological explanation, but claims that since the processes triggered by witchcraft are still natural, the patient can be cured by natural means. Thus, Reichart’s approach is an important contribution to the history of medicine and to the history of science of the early modern period. We provide the first edition, translation, and commentary of the text.

Wearing Linens

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-142
Author(s):  
Susan North
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Invisible

Chapter 5 begins the exploration of the material culture of clean bodies and clothes in early modern England. What were the ‘linens’ that doctors and moralists insisted must be clean? Linen clothing comprised two main groups: the visible and the invisible. The latter were linen undergarments—shirts, shifts, stockings, and drawers—requiring regular changing but remaining unseen when a person was fully dressed. Accessories worn on the head, around the neck, and at the wrists were the visible linens. Part of fashionable dress in a variety of forms, they were the outward sign that propriety was being observed and maintained. The relationship of visible and invisible linens to prevailing styles of dress is examined and how they changed according to fashion during the early modern period.

Mapping the early modern city

Urban History ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Hills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This paper analyses in their political context the festival decorations created by Paolo Amato, architect to the Senate of Palermo, in 1686 for the festival of the patron saint of that city. One of these decorations, that of the main altar in the cathedral, is of particular interest in that it represents a map of the city itself. An analysis of this map in relation to other seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps of Palermo reveals its political and social aim and biases, but also shows that it was unusually up to date and accurate as a representation of the city at that date. Such a representation not only marks a striking cul-de-sac in the history of the development of cartography, but sheds light on the relationship between forging politically acceptable identities for a city and their representation in the early modern period. The map in particular, but all the decorations, or apparati, in general are interpreted in the context of the weakened Spanish empire (to which Sicily belonged) and of the internal politics of the island and of Palermo.

scholarly journals Recycling in early modern science

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON WERRETT
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices.

Ehestand und Ehesachen

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Rational Model ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

Until the early modern period, marriage is the only institution in Europe which allows for the deciphering of nothing less than the divine organization of human coexistence. But ever since Luther's vernacular treatise “Von Ehesachen” (“On Marriage”), marriage has been regarded as a "public estate" of matrimonial matters and, to that extent, as a micro-logical testimonial of a macro-rational model of order whose influence on the history of literature is still not fully developed. This volume offers comparative and neo-philological perspectives on both canonical and long-neglected texts supplementing research discussions established in medieval studies as well as in studies in cultural and social history. The historical and systematic scope of the case studies collected here is intended to give an impression of the complex interlocking the institute of marriage generates between literature, theology, and legal doctrine, and the dynamics that have developed in European cultures from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries.

Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Grasskamp
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Maritime Networks ◽  
History Of

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells' shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document