Juridical Equality

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Central European ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Central European Region ◽  
East And West

This chapter details how the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire constituted the central European region of emancipation. Some historians would contend that the Holy Roman Empire's “archaic, traditionalist constitution created a society that tolerated religious and ethnic differences to a far greater degree than the more centralized states of Western Europe”; in other words, “early modern central Europe was a pluralistic, complex society more tolerant of differences than England, France or Spain.” Whether this observation is accurate or not, it concerns toleration, not parity. Jews in the Holy Roman Empire fell behind Jews to the east and west in their political status. They gained neither collective corporate privileges nor the civic rights of emerging civil societies. To be sure, their juridical equality in the courts of the Holy Roman Empire marked a significant elevation in status. The Court Jews' extensive individual privileges were also an elevation in status, yet only for a miniscule elite. In sum, Jews in the Holy Roman Empire did not keep pace with their brethren east and west, thus making the transition to emancipation, when it came, a painful rupture.

Translating Sorrow

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Central European ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Italian Music

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.

scholarly journals Ottoman Language Learning in Early Modern Germany

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Stefan Hanß
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

AbstractThis article presents new evidence on the authorship and readership of the earliest printed Ottoman language materials that details the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire actively engaged in learning Ottoman. Such findings open up a new field of inquiry evaluating the Ottoman impact on the German-speaking lands reaching beyond the so-called “Turkish menace.” Presenting the variety of Ottoman language students, teachers, and materials in central Europe, as well as their connections with the oral world(s) of linguistic fieldwork in the Habsburg-Ottoman contact zone, this article argues that Ottoman language learning is an important but thus far neglected element in understanding the cultural and intellectual landscape of early modern central Europe. What may appear to be experiments with linguistic riddles on first glimpse was in fact grounded in deep enthusiasm and fascination for Ottoman language learning shared among a community of Protestant semi-scholarly aficionados.

scholarly journals Literary Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, 1555-1720

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature

These essays discuss approaches to early modern literature in central Europe, focusing on four pivotal areas: connections between humanism and the new scientific thought the relationship of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature to ancient and Renaissance European traditions the social and political context of early modern writing and the poets' self-consciousness about their work. As a whole, the volume argues that early modern writing in central Europe should not be viewed solely as literature but as the textual product of specific social, political, educational, religious, and economic circumstances. The contributors are Judith P. Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Thomas W. Best, Dieter Breuer, Barton W. Browning, Gerald Gillespie, Anthony Grafton, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Uwe-K. Ketelsen, Joseph Leighton, Ulrich Maché, Michael M. Metzger, James A. Parente, Jr., Richard Erich Schade, George C. Schoolfield, Peter Skrine, and Ferdinand van Ingen.

scholarly journals Introduction

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-13
Author(s):  
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
North American ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
European History ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Central European ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Works Of Art

This issue of Central European History may at first seem some-what unexpected. All the following papers pertain to the early modern period. All of them moreover originated in connection with an exhibition of works of art, “Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680. A Selection from North American Collections,” its published catalogue, and a symposium, “The Culture of the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680,” held on the occasion of the exhibition's opening. The papers published in this issue are accordingly essays in art, literary, intellectual, and, more generally, cultural history; some words may be needed to explain how they come to appear here now.

scholarly journals Central Europe in the Sixteenth Century: A Musical Melting Pot

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 97-102
Author(s):  
Lilian P. Pruett
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Southeastern Part ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Central European ◽  
Musical Practices

After briefly reviewing the problems arising from attempts to dentify precise geographical outlines of Central Europe in the course of time, the author opts to use the limitations existing in the sixteenth century, the time frame of the presentation. This means, essentially, the borders of the Habsburg homelands, i.e., the southeastern part of the Holy Roman Empire. The paper argues that the roots of Central European musical practices were established through the foundation of regulated institutional entities such as the imperial chapels of Maximilian I (1496) and other rulers (Albrecht V of Bavaria, 1550), their successors and imitators, as well as the transalpine Renaissance church centers. As these institutions were staffed by musicians coming from virtually every corner of Europe – each practitioner bringing his own territorial contribution with him – the emerging musical consciousness of the Central European region had as cosmopolitan a foundation as that of Europe at large. Still, the proximity of the Central European art music scene to the variety of local ethnic traditions may be interpreted as lending a flavor to the musical expression of the area, endowing it with a character of its own. While in its beginnings the recipient of many influences from multinational contributors, in a later, equally cosmopolitan period (the Classicism of the eighteenth century), Central Europe reciprocates in equal measure, its contributions exerting impact upon European music in general.

scholarly journals Der nordische Fremde: Historische Untersuchung des medialen Schwedenbildes im Heiligen Römischen Reich (1500–1721)

Nordlit ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias E. Hämmerle
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Northern Regions ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Great Northern War

Until to the beginning of the 17th century the North was rather an unknown and abstract space for the average German-speaking recipient of early modern mass media (for example illustrated broadsheets, newspapers, pamphlets). In the course of the 17th century due to Denmark’s and Sweden’s participation in the Thirty Years War, the northern regions became a central topic in the early modern mass media and therefore forced the recipient to be more aware of it. In the course of the second half of the 17th century the northern kingdoms became less important for the publicists in the Holy Roman Empire and instead they laid their focus on the politics of French and the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the image of the northerners and their stereotypes, which had been introduced to the German speaking readers in the course of the Thirty Years War, lived on until the beginning of the 18th century. Nevertheless, the Great Northern War (1700–1721) brought the people from the northern regions back to the media landscape of the Holy Roman Empire and about the same time the illustrated broadsheet – an almost antiquated genre of mass media that had struggled with the upcoming of the new modern genre ‘newspaper’ – experienced a kind of a renaissance. The aim of this article is to describe how the northern region, with a focus on Sweden, was depicted in early modern mass media between the 15th and the 18th centuries. I will show continuities and changes of the visual and textual representation of ‘northerners’ and ‘Sweden’ in early modern mass media, which were published in the Holy Roman Empire between around 1500 until the end of the Great Northern War in 1721.

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