The Emotional Economy of Early Modern Pilgrimage Shrines: The Case of Mariazell

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Charles Zika

This article aligns with recent attempts to challenge the notion that pilgrimage shrines were unified centres of sacred power. It aims to demonstrate that pilgrimages offered varied and changing benefits through their various cultic objects, and that these benefits were transformed as meanings attributed to objects changed over time in response to changing historical pressures and needs. It explores the different emotional benefits cultic objects generated – whether consolation, gratitude, joy, fidelity, self-abasement or resilience – within a broader economy of emotional exchange, promotion and control. The history of three significant objects in the Mariazell basilica – the Statue of Mercy, the Marian Column and the Treasury Image – demonstrates how physical and cultural framing, associated religious rituals, and broader political patronage and association, promoted different emotional responses around these objects. Under pressure of the Hapsburgs’ close association with the shrine from the seventeenth century, changes in the promotion of objects like the Marian Column and the Treasury Image, as well as more structured and choreographed pilgrimage practices, reflected the transformation of Mariazell into a site for the expression of collective and proto-national emotions, in addition to the individual emotional benefits that continued to be critical for the shrine’s ongoing popularity and survival.

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter G. Platt

This essay begins by providing some early modern definitions, as well as a brief history, of paradox in the Renaissance. But paradox could be more than a rhetorical figure. Thus, the paper turns to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century descriptions of Venice in English and explores how a geographical site could do the work of the verbal paradox. The essay then reads Othello's complicated epistemological, ontological, and sexual issues through Venice's symbolic geography. Finally, it will suggest briefly that the stage — and particularly the interaction between audience and play — is also a site of paradox, a place where spectators, dazzled and destabilized by unresolved and unresolvable problems, are forced to reevaluate their cognitive and cultural worlds.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 570
Author(s):  
James W. Watts

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern institutions resembled the biblical model. It then exposes widespread knowledge of Leviticus 25 in early modern political and economic debates. Demonstrating this awareness shows with high probability that colonial cultures presupposed the two-tier model of slavery in Leviticus 25:39–46 to naturalize and justify their different treatment of White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135918352110288
Author(s):  
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

This article is about an everyday paper object: an envelope. However, as opposed to most other flat paper containers, the enveloppe Soleau can only be bought from L’Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of €15 you get a perforated, double-compartment envelope allowing you to constitute proof of creation and assign a precise date to your idea or project. But the enveloppe Soleau is something much more than just a simple and cheap way by which you can prove priority in any creative domain. It is a material footprint anchored to centuries of practices associated with disclosure and secrecy, a gateway into the infrastructure of the intellectual property system and its complicated relationship to the forms of knowledge it purports to hold. The purpose of this article is to consider the making of the enveloppe Soleau as a bureaucratic document, a material device performing a particular kind of legal paperwork. In four different vignettes, the article tracks the material becoming of the enveloppe Soleau as an evidentiary receptacle, beginning by going back to early modern practices of secrecy and priority, continuing with its consolidation in two patents (from 1910 and 1911) to the inventor Eugène Soleau (1852–1929), and ending up, in 2016, dematerialized in the e-Soleau. As a bureaucratic document, the enveloppe Soleau shows just how much work a mundane paper object can perform, navigating a particular materiality (a patented double envelope); formalized processes of proof (where perforations have legal significance); the practices of double archiving (in an institution and with the individual) and strict temporal limitations (a decade). Ultimately, the enveloppe Soleau travels between the material and immaterial, between private and public, between secrecy and disclosure, but also between what we perceive of as the outside and inside of the intellectual property system.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.


1925 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 79-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asta Moller

The history of coal-mining in the seventeenth century covers what may be termed the first chapter in the great story of English coal. In less than a century a seemingly insignificant and experimental industry developed into one of considerable importance. Coal had been used locally before this period; but an industry, as such, did not arise till a decline in the country's supply of wood stimulated new activities. It is possible that the introduction of coal might have been indefinitely postponed, had not years of ruthless felling of timber and neglect of forest lands, coincident with an increasing demand for wood for other than domestic purposes, caused a shortage of fuel. To the Elizabethan the decay of woods had an even wider significance. The demands of the Navy, the extension of the Empire and the discovery of new countries all laid a claim on timber. Its preservation became a matter of national concern. That the individual consumer should have possessed this degree of circumspection, and acted accordingly, was hardly to be expected; but the national needs were brought home to him through an increase in the price of wood. The use of coal became a matter of necessity rather than of choice.


Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Javier Ruano García

The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent scarcity of sources which supply trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical scene of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might help us contribute to complete the sketchy map of lexical provincialisms at the time.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton

This introductory chapter provides a background of how mass immunization programs made vaccination a cornerstone of Chinese public health and China a site of consummate biopower, or power over life. Over the twentieth century, through processes of increasing force, vaccines became medical technologies of governance that bound together the individual and the collective, authorities and citizens, and experts and the uneducated. These programs did not just transform public health in China—they helped shape the history of global health. The material and administrative systems of mass immunization on which these health campaigns relied had a longer history than the People's Republic of China itself. The Chinese Communist Party championed as its own invention and dramatically expanded immunization systems that largely predated 1949 and had originated with public health programs developed in southwestern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. The nationwide implementation of these systems in the 1950s relied on transformations in research, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and concepts of disease that had begun in the first decades of the twentieth century. These processes spanned multiple regime changes, decades of war, and diverse forms of foreign intervention. Most important, they brought with them new ideas about what it meant to be a citizen of China.


The Perraults ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch

The introduction sets the story of the Perraults against the backdrop of early modern France. It covers the transformation of French culture in the seventeenth century (in its different dimenstion: geographical, social, and institutional, including the rise of academies and salons, the court at Versailles), the history of intellectual families, notions of family strategy, and the use of networks in historical analysis. It also includes an outline of the chapters.


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