Inheritance and Emotions: Performing the Patriarch in an Aristocratic Stepfamily in Seventeenth-Century Habsburg Hungary

2020 ◽  
pp. 036319902094810
Author(s):  
Gabriella Erdélyi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Concern

The case study investigates how the responsibilities of an early modern “anxious patriarch” modified in a stepfamily context. It focuses on the central concern of aristocratic patriarchs to secure the continuity of the lineage and transmit properties and governance by positioning a heir. By reading the testaments, correspondence and the exceptional series of instructions to his eldest son, the study depicts the strategies, which the aristocrat Miklós Esterházy adopted, and argues that these strategies served to solicit the compliance of and solidarity among kin, half-kin, and step-kin as well as his own image as a good father.

Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/1595)

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 272-291
Author(s):  
Christopher Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Popular Ballads

Abstract This article examines one of the Bodleian Library’s copies of Robert Persons’ Elizabethan succession tract A Conference about the Next Succession that a 1650s reader has heavily annotated and used to compile a miscellany of poems and extracts from religious, political and historical works. The annotations and miscellany are concerned primarily with recent religious and political history. The reader compiles copies of popular ballads and poems, quotations from religious polemic by Catholic authors and a set of calculations of the dates of recent events in English Catholic history. This marked book serves as a case study through which to explore historical consciousness and the production of particularly Catholic forms of history and memory in the early modern period. This article seeks to query critical narratives concerning apparently combative seventeenth-century political reading practice by extending the remit of the ‘political’ to encompass different generic forms and approaches. It argues that by combining chronological and analogical perspectives this reader constructs a distinctively recusant history. An appendix identifies all of the works used by the annotator and all of the known editions or manuscripts they may have used.

Morisco Prophecies at the French Court (1602-1607)

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-123
Author(s):  
Mayte Green-Mercado
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Court

Abstract This article presents a case study of a rebellion conspiracy organized by a group of Moriscos—Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism—in the early seventeenth century. In order to carry out their plans, these Moriscos sought assistance from the French king Henry iv (r. 1589-1610). Analyzing a Morisco letter remitted to Henry iv and multiple archival sources, this article argues that prophecy served as a diplomatic language through which Moriscos communicated with the most powerful Mediterranean rulers of their time. A ‘connected histories’ approach to the study of Morisco political activity underscores the ubiquity of prophecies and apocalyptic expectations in the social life and political culture of the early modern Mediterranean. As a language of diplomacy, apocalyptic discourse allowed for minor actors such as the Moriscos to engage in politics in a language that was deemed mutually intelligible, and thus capable of transcending confessional boundaries.

Edward II as Political Exemplum

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Spectrum Analysis ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Political Spectrum

This chapter discusses the continuing political relevance of Edward II’s narrative during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in England and France. As the first English King to have been deposed, and a paradigmatic example of the dangers of overmighty favourites, Edward was a compelling precedent for writers across the political spectrum. Analysis of the ways in which writers deployed his example provides a valuable case study for investigating how historical examples functioned in early modern political discourse, and reveals the hermeneutic agency of political writers in the process of ‘using’ history, when examples such as Edward’s deposition could be interpreted as supporting either side of a political debate.

Introduction to the Mirror

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Susan Mokhberi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Global History ◽  
Modern Period

During the seventeenth century, French missionaries, travelers, diplomats, and writers raised comparisons between France and Persia that established Persia as a suitable mirror for France. The two countries were connected through diplomatic contacts, images, material objects, and texts, which together laid the basis for an imagined relationship. Frenchmen created an image of Persia that matched their own tastes and political circumstances and evolved over the course of the century. Inspired by new trajectories in global history, the case study of France and Persia challenges traditional ideas of Orientalism by uncovering the variety of European responses to Asia in the early modern period.

The Governance of Early Modern Trade: The Case of Hans Thijs, 1556–1611

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 606-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Gelderblom
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Business Organization ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
Enforcement Costs

In this article the organization of early modern trade is analyzed through a case study of the business of Hans Thijs, an Antwerp merchant who worked in Danzig and Amsterdam in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. His career demonstrates how early modern merchants combined markets, personal relations, and firms to govern their transactions. The complementary relationships among these institutions helped to minimize information and enforcement costs. A comparison of Hans Thijs' business organization in Danzig (1585–1595) and in Amsterdam (1595–1611) shows that trade was governed more efficiently in markets of greater scale and scope.

The Malleable Early Modern Reader

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-203
Author(s):  
Kimberley Skelton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Reading Room ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
Modern Reader

Across early seventeenth-century Europe, the physical boundaries that had structured reading practices in institutional libraries from monasteries to universities suddenly dissolved. Where readers had previously encountered shelving units that projected out perpendicular from the wall to create secluded study spaces, they now found open rooms outlined by shelving along the perimeter walls. Readers thus seemed to have been given a new freedom to pursue idiosyncratic activities; yet the open reading room coincided with sharpened anxiety about the hazards of undisciplined reading. In The Malleable Early Modern Reader: Display and Discipline in the Open Reading Room, a case study of Oxford’s Bodleian Library together with contemporaneous notions of human perception, Kimberley Skelton argues that, paradoxically, the open reading room was an effective response to seventeenth-century concerns about reading because it molded the reader into the ideally studious scholar.

Hybridizing Scholastic Psychology with Chinese Medicine: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Catholic's Conceptions of Xin (Mind and Heart)

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Theoretical Position ◽  
East West

AbstractThis paper explores the dynamics of cultural interactions between early modern China and Europe initiated by the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries through a case study of Wang Honghan, a seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic who systematically sought to integrate European learning introduced by the missionaries with pre-modern Chinese medicine. Focusing on the ways in which Wang combined his Western and Chinese sources to develop and articulate his views on xin (mind and heart), this paper argues that Wang arrived at a peculiar hybrid between scholastic psychology and Chinese medicine, not so much through a course of haphazard misunderstanding as through his conscious and patterned use and abuse of his Western sources, which was motivated most possibly by a wish to define a theoretical position that most suited his social roles as a Catholic convert and a Chinese medical doctor. Thus, rather than seeing Wang as an epitome of "transmission failure," this paper offers it as a showcase for the tremendous dynamism and creativity occurring at this East-West "contact zone" as representatives of both cultures sought to appropriate and transform the symbolic and textual resources of the other side.

Public Appearance and Criminal Judicial Practices in Early Modern Germany

1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria R. Boes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Frankfurt Am Main ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Dna Sampling ◽  
Police Forces

One of the most fascinating aspects of criminal adjudication is the method of identifying the criminal. Who committed the crime? While crime-detecting agents of the twentieth century use an array of sophisticated methods, such as fingerprinting, psychology, and, most recently, DNA sampling, no such methods were available to their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts. In fact, during the early modern period there were hardly any police forces to speak of. How, then, did contemporaries detect and report their culprits? Here I address these intriguing questions using an urban case study of Frankfurt am Main from 1562 to 1696.

scholarly journals Between Sin and Salvation: The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artisan Pieter Plockhoy and His Ethics of Work

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (S19) ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Henk Looijesteijn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Stepping Stones ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Comprehensive Study

SummaryThere have been few attempts systematically to study the ethics of work in the early modern age on the basis of contemporary sources. Such a study should start with case studies of individual thinkers, as stepping stones to a more comprehensive study of the ethics of work. This article provides such a case study, of the seventeenth-century Dutch artisan Pieter Plockhoy (c.1620–1664). As will be shown, work was a central component of Plockhoy's philosophy of true, practical Christianity, and on the basis of his tracts a more or less coherent ethics of work can be reconstructed. Although this article concentrates on Plockhoy's philosophy of labour, his thought fits into a broader context of related contemporary thinkers, many of whom shared his concerns. Thus the article shows that for scholars wishing to study the ethics of work there is still a whole field which, though yielding a potentially rich harvest, lies fallow.

Men of prowess and women of piety: A case study of Aceh Dar al-Salam in the seventeenth century

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sher Banu A.L. Khan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Female Leadership ◽  
Successful Leadership ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Studies on leadership in Southeast Asia's early modern era have tended to centre necessarily on men, and in particular, on O.W. Wolters' concept of ‘men of prowess’. The concept of female leadership is still little researched. This case study of Sultanah Safiatuddin Syah of Aceh (1641–75) provides some insights into female leadership in the Malay-Muslim island world of Southeast Asia. Contrary to the received view that successful leadership tended to be male (men of prowess), this article demonstrates that female leadership and the justification for the position of the ruler relied less on notions of sacral and charismatic power based on male prowess, but instead shifted to Muslim notions of piety and the just ruler.

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