Women’s Religious Actions in the German Sectors of the Early Modern World

Daphnis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 603-619
Author(s):  
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Global Connections

Germans were active in constructing transcultural experiences on a global scale – for better or worse – from Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map on. Most of those who have been studied were men, but women traveled and migrated as well, and they supported those who did financially, institutionally, and emotionally. Their movements and actions have left fewer and more shadowy records than those of men, but a more gender-balanced account of global connections in the early modern period is emerging. This essay examines three ways in which German women’s actions shaped the early modern world in the realm of religion: women’s establishment of religious communities, women’s patronage of overseas missions, and women’s proselytizing, particularly that undertaken by Moravians. All of these built on networks and traditions established in Europe, but ones that already reached across political boundaries in the splintered world of the Holy Roman Empire, or beyond it to co-religionists in Prague, Paris, or Copenhagen.

scholarly journals Introduction

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-13
Author(s):  
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
North American ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
European History ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Central European ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Works Of Art

This issue of Central European History may at first seem some-what unexpected. All the following papers pertain to the early modern period. All of them moreover originated in connection with an exhibition of works of art, “Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680. A Selection from North American Collections,” its published catalogue, and a symposium, “The Culture of the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680,” held on the occasion of the exhibition's opening. The papers published in this issue are accordingly essays in art, literary, intellectual, and, more generally, cultural history; some words may be needed to explain how they come to appear here now.

Catholic refuge and the printing press: Catholic exiles from England, France and the Low Countries in the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 532-561
Author(s):  
Alexander Soetaert
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
French Speaking

The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai may sound unfamiliar to modern readers. The bishopric of Cambrai dates to the sixth century but only became an archdiocese and, consequently, the centre of a church province in the sixteenth century. The elevation of the see resulted from the heavily contested reorganization of the diocesan map of the Low Countries by King Philip II in 1559. The new province included the medieval sees of Arras, Cambrai and Tournai, as well as the newly created bishoprics of Saint-Omer and Namur. Its borders were established to encompass the French-speaking Walloon provinces in the south of the Low Countries, territories that are now divided between France and Belgium.1 In the early modern period, this area was already a border and transit zone between France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles. The province’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was deeply marked by recurrent and devastating warfare between the kings of Spain and France, eventually resulting in the transfer of significant territory to France.2 However, the Province of Cambrai was also the scene of frequent cross-border mobility, and a safe haven for Catholic exiles originating from the British Isles, France and other parts of the Low Countries.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Constitutional System ◽  
Territorial States

Interpretations of the Holy Roman Empire have always been fraught and contested, particularly regarding the late medieval and early modern period. German historians have offered two main interpretations of the Empire in recent decades. The first sees it as a patchwork of territorial states, and the second as a Reichsverfassung: a constitutional system characterized by disjunctive or oppositional forces. This Introduction sets out how this book will re-conceptualize the Empire as a more coherent political entity, using Upper Germany as a wide-ranging case study. Viewed comparatively, the evidence from the period between 1346 and 1521 suggests that all kinds of political actors shared in the same structures, dynamics, and assumptions—the same ‘political culture’. In particular, elites constantly interacted within the framework of associations such as alliances and leagues, which are the main focus of this book, and force us to view the Empire as a more interconnected political landscape.

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.

scholarly journals ‘A Place full of Trade’: Placing an Early Modern Chinese Town in Global Cultural History

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Anne Gerritsen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Town

This article focuses on the history of Wuchengzhen 吳 城 鎮, a small town in the inland province of Jiangxi. It explores the history of the town between 1500 and 1850 in terms of both its local significance as an entrepot for trade in grain and tea and its global connections to early modern Europe, by way of the trade in porcelain. The question this paper explores concerns the juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the idea gained from global historians, that during the early modern period, globally traded commodities like tea and porcelain situate a small town like this in a globalized, perhaps even unified or homogenous, world, and on the other hand, the insight gained from cultural historians, that no two people would ever see, or assign meaning to, this small town in the same way. Drawing on this insight, the history of Wuchengzhen is explored on the basis of different textual (administrative records, local gazetteers, merchant manuals) and visual sources (maps and visual depictions of the town), exploring the ways in which the different meanings of the town are constructed in each. The combination of global and cultural history places Wuchengzhen on our map of the early modern world.

Managing legal pluralism: the negotiations on the re-acquisition of crown land in the Livonian Diet (1681) as a matter of securitisation and imperial integration

2021 ◽  
Vol 9s4 ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Doroth�e Goetze
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Eastern Border ◽  
Normative Foundations ◽  
Crown Lands

The emergence of empires during the early modern period led to a shift of territorial borders and social as well as economic and political boundaries. This is also true for early modern Sweden and especially for Livonia, being one of the eastern border provinces of the Swedish empire. The plans for withdrawing alienated possessions of the Swedish Crown there, i.e. a reduktion, make this particularly clear. This article examines the discussion of the year 1681 between the Swedish Crown and the Livonian knighthood and nobility in the Livonian Diet on the retake of crown lands as an example of how early modern empires dealt with legal pluralism. Combining the concepts of securitisation and integration will show that these deliberations should be understood less as a struggle for or against re-acquisitions of crown lands than as negotiations about Swedish rule in Livonia, and its normative foundations and functions, and thus about the Swedish empire.

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