Changes of State

Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett

This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. It takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. The book begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simultaneously justify the freedoms of itinerant beggars and the activities of European colonists in the Indies. It goes on to examine the boundaries of the state in multiple senses, including the fundamental barrier between human beings and animals and the limits of the state in the face of the natural lives of its subjects, as well as territorial frontiers. The book reveals how early modern political space was constructed from a complex dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout, the book shows that early modern debates about political boundaries displayed unheralded creativity and virtuosity but were nevertheless vulnerable to innumerable paradoxes, contradictions, and loose ends. The book resonates with modern debates about globalization and the transformation of the nation-state.

AJS Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-250
Author(s):  
David Malkiel

Ghettoization stimulated sixteenth-century Italian Jewry to develop larger and more complex political structures, because the Jewish community now became responsible for municipal tasks. This development, however, raised theological objections in Catholic circles because Christian doctrine traditionally forbade the Jewish people dominion. It also aroused hostility among the increasingly centralized governments of early modern Europe, who viewed Jewish self-government as an infringement of the sovereignty of the state. The earliest appearance of the term “state within a state,” which has become a shorthand expression for the latter view, was recently located in Venice in 1631.


PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Greene

Among the most historically fixed of art historical and literary concepts, the Baroque arises at the intersection of early modern classicism, imperialism, and science—that is, out of the high Renaissance—to become a kind of antiprogram of resistances: to the absolutist state, the rise of empirical science, the pressures of empire, and other sixteenth-century signs of the gathering regimentation of knowledge. With a flourish of forms and a play of perspectives, the baroque embodies the recoil from such regimentation and the gathering sense that all these systems for organizing human experience fall short in the face of disorder, contingency, and death. Seen from certain vantages, the specimens of the baroque often seem complicit with the projects of absolutism, empire, and late humanism; but regarded in all their dimensions, such works are often complex reactions, critical and compromised, to those projects.


Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu

The history of eating on the street presents particular challenges as the extant material culture is especially limited. This chapter reveals the variety of food sold on the streets of early modern Rome through the study of a series of images of street sellers printed in the late sixteenth century in response to the growing ethnographic interest of travelers to the city. This chapter turns on its head what was considered a luxury in the early modern economy as these images suggest the range of foodstuffs which cannot be simply understood as daily necessities to meet the basic nutritional needs of the city’s inhabitants such as raw cooking materials or hot fast food. Instead, these images suggest that labor-saving products such as hulled rice or even products such as sweetmeats, which were normally associated with the work of the steward of an aristocratic house and the elite “dressing” of the table, were being sold on the streets. Therefore, despite the inherent ephemerality of the act of selling and eating food and the lack of surviving material culture, these images reveal the complexity of determining social distinction through food choices in early modern Rome.


2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Darlage

Studies of early modern Anabaptism have shown that many Anabaptists sought to model their communities after the examples of the New Testament and the early church before the “fall” of the church into a coercive, sword-wielding institution through the person of Constantine in the fourth centuryc.e.The Anabaptists claimed that one had to voluntarily choose to become a Christian through believer's baptism and suffer for his or her faith just as the martyrs of old had done in the face of Roman persecution. During the course of the sixteenth century, their Protestant and Roman Catholic enemies did not disappoint, as hundreds of Anabaptists were executed for their rejection of “Christendom.” To the “magisterial” Christians, Anabaptists were dangerous heretics because they denied the God-given power of spiritual and secular authorities.


2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
TERTTU NEVALAINEN

Place is an integral part of social network analysis, which reconstructs network structures and documents the network members’ linguistic practices in a community. Historical network analysis presents particular challenges in both respects. This article first discusses the kinds of data, official documents, personal letters and diaries that historians have used in reconstructing social networks and communities. These analyses could be enriched by including linguistic data and, vice versa, historical sociolinguistic findings may often be interpreted in terms of social networks.Focusing on Early Modern London, I present two case studies, the first one investigating a sixteenth-century merchant family exchange network and the second discussing the seventeenth-century naval administrator Samuel Pepys, whose role as a community broker between the City and Westminster is assessed in linguistic terms. My results show how identifying the leaders and laggers of linguistic change can add to our understanding of the varied ways in which linguistic innovations spread to and from Tudor and Stuart London both within and across social networks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (18 N.S.) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Samantha L. Smith

'Truth and the transunto' investigates the use of a hand-painted copy of the Holy Shroud which found its way to Bologna in the late sixteenth century. Used by the archbishop of Bologna, Alfonso Paleotti (1531-1610), this copy was the source of observations of the body of Christ, in the manner of an autopsy and is presented in Paleotti's book Esplicatione del Lenzuolo [...]. Early modern copies of the Holy Shroud are not however accurate copies, but present seemingly simplified replicas of the original. This article explores how such information, and indeed, level of trust, can come from these copies, which, to the modern eye, seem fallible. Previous studies have excused the strange appearance of these Shroud copies by considering them solely devotional instruments yet as the article shows, Paleotti's use of such an object shows that the copies might be better understood in the context of early modern natural historical studies and illustrations. The article draws on scholarship which discusses the emerging interest for visual evidence in early scientific practice and shows how certain types of images and image-making practices were able to evoke the idea of presence and clarify the indecipherable. Demonstrating that Paleotti's copy of the Holy Shroud was not just a religious tool, but also an epistemic image, this article shows how Paleotti's use of the term 'transunto' could be used as a valuable tool in gaining a more nuanced understanding of the concept 'copy' in Early Modern Europe.   On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585.Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.


PCD Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Wina Khairina ◽  
Christian Lund

This paper examines how a local community has tried to legalise its possession of land in the outskirts of the city of Medan, Indonesia. In the absence of accessible legal pathways and in the face of state and gang violence, the community has resorted to an imaginative mimicry of legal land access procedures. This paper argues that law-making does not exclusively originate from the state, but also from society, and as such the community has effectively created legal facts. Data were collected through interviews and long-term contact with the community.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Florin Nicolae ARDELEAN

The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in the research of territorial delimitations in late medieval and early modern Europe. A significant part of the academic debate has been focused on identifying and defining the process of transition from medieval frontiers, perceived as vague areas of contact, to modern linear borders. The aim of this article is to analyse the organization of the western confines of the Transylvanian Principality during the decades in which this state was formed, from the Ottoman conquest of Buda (1541) until the ratification of the Speyer Peace Treaty (1571). Throughout this period, the territorial delimitation of Transylvania from the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg Hungary was an ongoing process, marked by both military confrontations and diplomatic negotiations. Through a critical reassessment of the most relevant Romanian and Hungarian literature on this complex subject and the analysis of new data from official and narrative contemporary sources, I have tried to identify which were the most important political and military events that shaped the western borderlands of Transylvania. A fundamental objective of my research is to provide an accurate definition for the western region of the Transylvanian Principality, contributing thus to the general debate on the nature of frontiers/borders in sixteenth century Europe.


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