scholarly journals Blood, Land and Power: The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Perez-Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Land Management ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Status Rivalry ◽  
Shed Light

The analysis of land management, lineage and family through the case study of early modern Spanish nobility from sixteenth to early nineteenth century is a major issue in recent historiography. It aims to shed light on how upper social classes arranged strategies to maintain their political and economic status. Rivalry and disputes between old factions and families were attached to the control and exercise of power. Blood, land management and honour were the main elements in these disputes. Honour, service to the Crown, participation in the conquest and ‘pure’ blood (Catholic affiliation) were the main features of Spanish nobility. This book analyses the origins of the entailed-estate (mayorazgo) from medieval times to early modern period, as the main element that enables us to understand the socio-economic behaviour of these families over generations. This longue durée chronology within the Braudelian methodology of the research aims to show how strategies and family networks changed over time, demonstrating a micro-history study of daily life.

scholarly journals Adjectival Agreement in Middle and Early Modern Welsh Native and Translated Prose

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Marieke Meelen ◽  
Silva Nurmio
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
And Function

This paper investigates adjectival agreement in a group of Middle Welsh native prose texts and a sample of translations from around the end of the Middle Welsh period and the beginning of the Early Modern period. It presents a new methodology, employing tagged historical corpora allowing for consistent linguistic comparison. The adjectival agreement case study tests a hypothesis regarding position and function of adjectives in Middle Welsh, as well as specific semantic groups of adjectives, such as colours or related modifiers. The systematic analysis using an annotated corpus reveals that there are interesting differences between native and translated texts, as well as between individual texts. However, zooming in on our adjectival agreement case study, we conclude that these differences do not correspond to many of our hypotheses or assumptions about how certain texts group together. In particular, no clear split into native and translated texts emerged between the texts in our corpus. This paper thus shows interesting results for both (historical) linguists, especially those working on agreement, and scholars of medieval Celtic philology and translation texts.

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.

scholarly journals Plague, Practice, and Prescriptive Text

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 152-178
Author(s):  
Moshe Dovid Chechik ◽  
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Accepted Practice ◽  
At Home

Abstract This article studies the fate of a contradiction between practice and prescriptive text in 16th-century Ashkenaz. The practice was fleeing a plagued city, which contradicted a Talmudic passage requiring self-isolation at home when plague strikes. The emergence of this contradiction as a halakhic problem and its various forms of resolution are analyzed as a case study for the development of halakhic literature in early modern Ashkenaz. The Talmudic text was not considered a challenge to the accepted practice prior to the early modern period. The conflict between practice and Talmud gradually emerged as a halakhic problem in 15th-century rabbinic sources. These sources mixed legal and non-legal material, leaving the status of this contradiction ambiguous. The 16th century saw a variety of solutions to the problem in different halakhic writings, each with their own dynamics, type of authority, possibilities, and limitations. This variety reflects the crystallization of separate genres of halakhic literature.

Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chomel (1671–1740): A Case Study in Problems Relating to the Social Status of Scientists in the Early Modern Period

1986 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-322
Author(s):  
David Sturdy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practice Of Science

Consider this statement: the practice of science influences and is influenced by the civilization within which it occurs. Or again: scientists do not pursue their activities in a political or social void; like other people, they aspire to make their way in the world by responding to the values and social mechanisms of their day. Set in such simple terms, each statement probably would receive the assent of most scholars interested in the history of science. But there is need for debate on the nature and extent of the interaction between scientific activity and the civilization which incorporates it, as there is on the relations of scientists to the society within which they live. This essay seeks to make a contribution mainly to the second of these topics by taking a French scientist and academician of the eighteenth century and studying him and his family in the light of certain questions. At the end there will be a discussion relating those questions or themes to the wider debate. There is an associated purpose to the exercise: to present an account of the social origins and formation of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chomel (botanist, physician and member of the Academic des Sciences) which will augment our knowledge of this particular savant.

Personalschriften als biographische Quelle. Ein Projekt zum personalen Gelegenheitsschrifttum in den Beständen der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha

Daphnis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466
Author(s):  
Stefan Anders
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Research Library ◽  
Joint Project ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People

This paper presents a joint project of the Institute for Early Modern Cultural History and the Research Library in Gotha, which is digitizing and making accessible about 8000 printed documents from the 16th to the 18th century. These documents were created on the occasion of such personal events as birth, marriage or death. During this process, numerous names of the people mentioned in these occasional documents are being identified and consolidated in a consistent format. The short biographies generated contain essential personal data, originating mostly from these documents but supplemented by information taken from reference books and other biographical resources. The huge potential of these occasional documents for the biographical reconstruction of persons of the early modern period is then demonstrated by a case study, which demonstrates the reliability of the collected data.

Material Mediators: Johan Maurits, Textiles, and the Art of Diplomatic Exchange

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
World Markets ◽  
East And West ◽  
Johan Maurits ◽  
Dutch Brazil

Although textiles were key facilitators in global diplomacy in the early modern period, there has been little scholarly consideration of the dynamic role they played in shaping diplomatic relationships during a time when textiles of all types from both east and west were circulating actively as wholesale commodities across world markets. This case study addresses this lacuna by examining the role that textiles, including linens, silks, and tapestries, played in mediating the inter- and intra-cultural diplomatic negotiations of Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen (1604-1679), the governor-general of Dutch Brazil from 1637 to 1644. As I argue, the production and dissemination of objects such as linens and especially the Old Indies tapestry series, based on designs made under Johan Maurits’s patronage, demonstrate how textiles, in their many forms and formats, were uniquely suited to negotiate the dynamic shifts that characterized cross-cultural diplomacy in the early modern period.

scholarly journals A Community of Councillors: Tudor Government and Prosopography

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connor Huddlestone
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Executive Board ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Collective Biography ◽  
Patterns Of Interaction

The Tudor privy council was the executive board of the English state and its members the leading political players of the era. Historians of Tudor politics have traditionally focused on kings and great men. When they deal with the privy council, they treat councillors in isolation, only exploring their links with others during moments of political strife. The result is a historiography dominated by faction and division. A prosopographical approach – a form of collective biography that helps identify the shared elements in a group’s experiences, and foregrounds the relations between its members - allows us to look at this group of men as a group, and in so doing to see them differently. Their many shared experiences - a childhood spent together at the same grammar school, a tour of Europe’s universities as young adults, joint military service, marriage into the same family, or time spent together hunting, hawking, and feasting - makes it much harder to divide councillors into neat opposing camps. More broadly, this paper uses the case-study of Tudor privy councillors to illustrate how tools taken from the Digital Humanities can enhance and expand the prosopographical approach: in particular modern relational database software moves us beyond simply identifying common themes in the lives of the members of this group, and allows us to explore patterns of interaction between them. Such an approach, moreover, has the potential to enhance our understanding of many other groups of the early modern period. ​

Portraying Friendship by the Book

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-199
Author(s):  
Richard Hughes Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract This article responds to the philosopher Alexander Nehamas’ argument that “no gesture, look, or bodily disposition, no attitude, feeling, or emotion, no action and no situation is associated with friendship firmly enough to make its representation a matter for the eye.” The article proposes a “humanist exception” to Nehamas’ general rule. Building on Lorna Hutson’s argument that humanism “textualized” friendship, I contend that in the early modern period scholars and artists associated with humanism were engaged in the development of a set of recognizable signs of friendship connected to the distinctive humanist culture of the book and associated activities of reading, writing, and circulating texts. The article offers a case study of Quentin Metsys’ diptych of Erasmus and Pieter Gillis (1517) and then applies the lessons gleaned from that work to a picture that Nehamas cites as evidence of his claim, Jacopo Pontormo’s Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s “On Friendship” (ca. 1522). Both pictures, I contend, not only depict friendship but also promote humanist ideals of friendship to the viewer.

Catholicism, Kinship and the Public Memory of Sir Thomas More

2002 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 476-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL QUESTIER
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
Group A ◽  
Lord Chancellor

Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post-Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism's political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document