scholarly journals Ideologies of Diplomacy

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-492
Author(s):  
Jane Yeang Chui Wong

The publication in 2008 of John Watkins’s special issue for the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” opened up the formal aspects of the ambassador’s office and official channels of diplomatic negotiation to a complex sociocultural landscape underlying the processes of diplomacy-in-the-making. The field of New Diplomatic History has since burgeoned. This current special issue hews closely to the cross-disciplinary nature of newer diplomatic history, and it responds to critical challenges that have recently emerged in scholarship, particularly the need to balance both breadth and depth of historical and cultural analysis. This volume considers how English institutional and sociocultural networks informed diplomatic practice in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and how diplomatic thought, representation, and the forging of international relations were interpreted within various English communities. The collection takes special interest in how “ideologies of diplomacy” were formed, negotiated, and articulated within and beyond formal diplomatic spheres. Drawing on various elements of international relations theory, the essays address the ambiguous and contradictory elements of diplomatic reciprocity, explicating the tensions between diplomatic ambition and local governance.

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu

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.


2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurits Ebben ◽  
Louis Sicking

Abstract New Diplomatic History in the Premodern Age. An IntroductionThe study of medieval and early modern diplomacy has long been considered one of the most conservative subdisciplines in the field of history. During the last three decades, however, diplomatic history has undergone profound changes. This introductory article shows how these changes were triggered by developments in other disciplines and happened under the influence of the cultural turn. Until recently most general histories of diplomacy were based on the conceptions of Donald Queller and, more particularly, of Garrett Mattingly. Scholars working on medieval and early modern history have applied new international relations theories and moved away from analyses that were strictly oriented towards diplomatic relations between sovereign territorial states. The cultural turn gave rise to a range of innovations in diplomatic history, leading historians to focus on the diplomatic process and its cultural dimensions rather than on the results of diplomatic activity. The special issue for which this article serves as an introduction shows that historians working in the Netherlands have also been influenced by these developments.


Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102452942098782
Author(s):  
Michael Murphy

The quantum moment in International Relations theory challenges the taken for granted Newtonian assumptions of conventional theories, while offering a novel physical imaginary grounded in quantum mechanics. As part of the special issue on reconceptualizing markets, this article questions if prior efforts to conceptualize ‘the market’ have been unsuccessful at capturing the paradoxical microfoundational/macrostructural because of the Newtonian worldview within which much social science operates. By developing a new, quantum perspective on the market, taking the physical paradigm of the wavefunction, I seek to explore the connections between entanglement, nonlocality, interference and invisible social structures. To demonstrate the applicability of quantum thinking, I explore how global value chains and open economy politics might be ‘quantized’, through the mobilization of core concepts of quantum social theory, within the broad framework of the market as a quantum social wavefunction.


2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER BURKE

Attempting to combine cultural history with translation studies, this article examines translation between languages as a special case of a more general phenomenon, translation between cultures. It surveys printed translations made in Europe between 1500 and 1700, discussing which kinds of people translated which kinds of book from and into which languages. Particular attention is given to the reconstruction of the early modern ‘regime’ of translation, in other words the manner (free or literal, domesticating or ‘foreignizing’) in which translations were made.


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