scholarly journals Mobility and Urban Space in Early Modern Europe: An Introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Luca Zenobi
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Multisensory Experience

Abstract Early modernists have explored a range of mobile practices taking place in cities: from religious and civic rituals to the multisensory experience of traversing streets and squares. Research has also shown the pivotal role played by cities as hubs where people came and went, ideas circulated, and goods passed through. Yet mobility did not just “take place” in cities. In presenting a new collection of articles on the subject, this paper suggests that urban spaces were more than just a stage for the streams of trade and migration. Rather, mobility had a transformative effect on cities: it assigned new meaning to urban locations, altered the ways in which space was ordered, and often refashioned the built environment itself. In addition, the paper argues that the relationship between movement and urban spaces was reciprocal: by channelling the flow of people through spaces of control and reception, cities shaped mobility as much as mobility shaped cities.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Europe

There were few subjects that animated people in early modern Europe more than lying. The subject is endlessly represented and discussed in literature; treatises on rhetoric and courtiership; theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence; travel writing; pamphlets and news books; science and empirical observation; popular culture, especially books about strange, unexplained phenomena; and, of course, legal discourse. For many, lying could be controlled and limited even if not eradicated; for others, lying was a necessary element of a casuistical tradition, liars balancing complicated issues and short-term pragmatic considerations in the expectation of solving more problems than they caused through their deceit....

scholarly journals Tails of Cross-Channel Comets: From Acclaim to Obscurity

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Patricia Demers
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Gift Books ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Printed Text ◽  
Modern Europe

This article explores the diverse materialities of texts created by three female luminaries that expand our understanding of translation and transformation in early modern Europe. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon’s translation of Bishop Jewel’s Apologia was praised as the official text of the Elizabethan Settlement and printed without change for the edification of both English readers and Continental sceptics. Yet despite its centrality in the vitriolic controversy between Jewel and Louvain Romanist Thomas Harding, within a generation Bacon’s name disappeared. Bilingual calligrapher and miniaturist Esther Inglis prepared and presented stunning manuscript gift books, often including self-portraits, to patrons on both sides of the Channel. Her artisanal expertise emulated and often outdid the typographic variety of the printed text. Scholarly and lionized participant in the Neo-Latin Republic of Letters, Anna Maria van Schurman, whose landmark Dissertatio was translated as The Learned Maid, scandalized her conservative Calvinist supporters by embracing Labadism and praising its simple ways in her autobiography Eukleria. These three early modern women, distinct in temperament, time, and social status, are the subject of this exploration, which seeks to understand the dynamics and fluctuations of cross-Channel transmission and the role played by the Channel divide or bridge in creating a brief notoriety soon to be followed by obscurity.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Colin Burrow
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Learning Practices ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Rhetorical Structures ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction sets out the argument of the book. It suggests that the imitation of authors (imitatio) is not primarily a matter of verbal appropriation but of learning practices from earlier texts. That process is intrinsically hard to describe, and as a result discussions of the topic in the rhetorical tradition relied on a rich store of metaphors. These were themselves to become part of the practice of imitation. The introduction describes the various kinds of imitatio which developed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries: ‘adaptive’ imitation, in which an earlier text is made ‘apt’ to new times, and ‘formal imitation’, in which an author imitates not the exact words, but the favoured rhetorical structures of an earlier writer. It explains how the word ‘model’ came to be used of an imitated text, and explores the relationship between imitation, plagiarism, and ideas about intellectual property. It explains how regarding an ‘author’ as a potentially open-ended series of texts distinguished by their style and form connects early modern theories of imitation with contemporary interests in artificial intelligence. It briefly suggests some implications of the subject for writing outside Europe, and explains how this book departs from earlier studies of the topic in its scope and argument.

Song, Confession, and Criminality: Trial Records as Sources for Popular Musical Culture in Early Modern Europe

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 616-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
City Government ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the city government of Augsburg, Germany, struggled to maintain religious peace as the confessional boundaries between its Catholic and Protestant communities hardened. As tensions gradually rose, city officials feared and scrutinized the disruptive potential of the psalms and chorales sung by Augsburg's Protestant majority. Those suspected of owning, singing, or distributing inflammatory songs were subject to imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and exile. When an Imperial decree established a fully Catholic city government in March 1629, the authorities tightened this scrutiny, banning Protestant singing entirely in public and private and using a network of informants to catch violators. A remarkably well-preserved collection of criminal interrogation records in Augsburg dramatizes city officials' concern about religious song and their attempts to restrict its cultivation through coercive measures. These records, which preserve the testimony of suspects and witnesses as well as original evidence (such as manuscript or printed songs), show the ways in which local authorities tried to control singing that they felt threatened the public peace. At the same time, these sources give us unparalleled insight into the production, performance, and circulation of religious songs. Although the interrogations reveal much about how and where songs——often contrafacta of well-known psalms or chorales——were written and performed, the authorities were especially intent on finding out how they originated, who bought, sold, and sang them, and why. These exchanges between interrogators and suspects provide a starting point for an analysis of the relationship between singing, religion, and criminality in an early modern urban environment.

‘Everyone Should Be Like the People’: Elite and Popular Religion and the Counter Reformation

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the GermanVolkskundetradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

scholarly journals KØBENHAVN

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunvor Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Queer Space ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Queer Spaces ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Home Territory

In this article I present findings of a phenomenological study of the relationship between urban space, sexuality and gender. I have investigated conditions of urban spaces in which social gatherings established among equal and perceptived adults expressing their sexual lusts and pleasures are allowed and encouraged. I have characterised these urban spaces as queer spaces. In the first part, I present circumstances that have imperative significance to the existence of queer spaces, and I argue that queer spaces exist in the metropolis and because of the metropolis. Hereafter, I expound the yearnings that are related to queer spaces and point out that for some individuals queer space equals an emancipated and at the same time an oppositional space to other urban spaces. For other individuals queer space is taken as a parallel space to other urban spaces. These different connotations to queer spaces are related to a dichotomy of either keeping a queer sexuality a secret or being open about it. Finally, I suggest that queer space serves as home territory recognised by being something in between the wide, open urban space, and the intimate, private space, and this unique trait of queer space contributes to a redefinition of the positions of men and women in their sexual performances in public.  

scholarly journals Du retrait à la reconquête : pratiquer la ville après un épisode psychotique

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Zoé Codeluppi
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Recovery Period ◽  
Recovery Process ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Large Array ◽  
Public Places ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Abstract. The article aims to provide a better understanding of the urban practices of young people living with a diagnosis of psychosis while recovering. I show the way practices are adjusted according to the temporal dynamics of psychosis. I argue that the continuous variability of symptoms over the recovery period implies alternately practices of withdrawal and reconquest of the urban space. I first outline participants' reconquest of urban spaces, which starts in well-known places and then extends to less familiar ones. In doing so, I point out the diversity of urban spaces inhabited by participants during the recovery process which includes institutional, private, as well as public places. I then outline the various material, relational and sensory resources available in these spaces. I show how participants use them according to the temporal dynamics. I finally highlight the way participants are gradually getting involved in the relationship with a large array of resources as the intensity of symptoms is reducing. My analysis is based on a three months ethnography in a therapeutic institution in Lausanne.

scholarly journals To Sing Upon the Book: Oral and Written Counterpoint in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-105
Author(s):  
Ronald Broude
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Music Printing ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Textual Form ◽  
The Relationship

During the fifteenth century, many musici thought of counterpoint as an improvisational practice in which certain procedures were employed to produce a musical texture in which interest lay in the interplay of two or more melodic lines. The improvisational practice was called singing upon the book (cantare super librum): it required one singer to realize a pre-existing melody (called a cantus firmus) inscribed in a text while one or more other singers (called concentors), reading from that same text, devised, ex tempore, a countermelody or melodies that obeyed the rules of counterpoint with respect to the cantus firmus. Similar procedures, applied in writing, produced res facta, contrapuntal texture in textual form. Counterpoint and res facta were alternative means of providing music for occasions both sacred and secular. During the sixteenth century, several factors combined to alter the relationship between improvised and written counterpoint, and by the end of the century the importance of the former was greatly diminished. The growth of music printing provided an abundance of music for a growing community of amateurs who could read music but were not interested singing upon the book. The composers responsible for this new music embraced emerging ideas that stressed the advantages of written music, which enjoyed permanence that improvised counterpoint lacked, which was usually more observant of the rules than improvised counterpoint could be, and which enhanced the reputations of the composers who created it. As a result of these developments, emphasis shifted from improvised to written counterpoint, from the procedures that produced a contrapuntal texture to the texture itself, and singing upon the book came to be seen by many not as an end in itself but as a way to sharpen composers’ skills. Marginalized by print, improvised counterpoint survived in a much reduced community, largely in Catholic France and Iberia, and eventually, for want of a musical community large enough to sustain it, ceased to be a living musical tradition.

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