The Promise and Peril of Credit

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Trivellato
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
Financial Innovations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Credit Contracts

This book takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West's centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. This book recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. It locates the legend's earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, the book describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.

The Japanese Village in the Seventeenth Century

1952 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Vital Function ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Barriers ◽  
The Middle Ages

As in the Middle Ages in the West, so in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) men were fond of explaining the hierarchical society in which they lived by comparing it to an organism. Social classes, Confucian scholars said, were like parts of the body: each had a vital function to perform, but their functions were essentially different and unequal in value. In this scheme the peasants were second in importance only to the ruling military class. Just as the samurai officials were the brains that guided other organs, so the peasants were the feet that held the social body erect. They were the “basis of the country,” the valued producers whose labor sustained all else. But, as a class, they tended innately to backsliding and extravagance. Left alone they would consume more than their share of the social income, ape the manners and tastes of their betters, and even encroach upon the functions of other classes to the perilous neglect of their own. Only the lash of necessity and the sharp eye of the official could hold them to their disagreeable role. They had to be bound to the land; social distinctions had to be thrown up around them like so many physical barriers; and, to remove all temptation to indolence and luxury, they had to be left only enough of what they produced to let them continue producing.

Why This Time and Place?

Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Revolution

From about the late fifteenth century onwards, literature and learning acquired increased importance for the social position of noble and elite-commoner families in France. One reason is the expansion and rise to prominence of the royal office-holder milieu, which had no exact equivalent in, say, England, where the aristocracy was much smaller than the French nobility and where there was no equivalent of the French system of venality of office. In France, family literature often helped extend across the generations a relationship between two families—that of the literary producer and that of the monarch. From the late Middle Ages, the conditions for family literature were made more favourable by broad social shifts. Although this study focuses mainly on the period from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, it is likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers thrived especially up to the Revolution.

Reconfiguration

2020 ◽  
pp. 379-405
Author(s):  
Howard Hotson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
Or Education ◽  
Alphabetical Order ◽  
Collective Effort ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
European Intellectual History ◽  
Successive Generations

Alsted and Bisterfeld, Hartlib and Comenius, Welsch and Leibniz all proposed to emend the Encyclopaedia of 1630, and all failed. Contemplating the failure of these attempts opens up the broadest vista attained by this study. The idea of an ‘enkyklios paideia’, a cycle or circle of instruction or education, is an ancient one which gradually took literary shape during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Three successive generations of reform—led by Agricola, Ramus, and Keckermann—and a fourth generation of collective effort by a whole community generated the most perfect literary manifestation of this idea in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia (section 11.i). For at least two generations after its appearance in 1630, scholars across Europe acknowledged the Encyclopaedia as the leading work of its kind and sought to revise or replace it. During this lengthy period, the connotations of the term ‘encyclopaedia’ shifted from designating a ‘cycle of studies’ to a genre of books which sought to summarize the circle of learning in print (section 11.ii). But with the failure to replace Alsted’s work, the systematically organized, pedagogically orientated, Latin encyclopaedias worthy of the name exploded into innumerable discrete topics which were reorganized in alphabetical order in the various European vernaculars to create a new genre of academic reference works inappropriately labelled ‘(en)cyclopaedias’ first by Chambers in 1728 and then by D’Alembert and Diderot in 1751. The implications of this transformation for the shape of European knowledge were profound. The demise of the age-old tradition culminating in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia can therefore be regarded as a major watershed in European intellectual history created by the simultaneous political, military, confessional, and intellectual crises of the mid-seventeenth century (section 11.iii).

Small-town conflict in the later Middle Ages: events at Shipston-on-Stour

Urban History ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dyer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Small Town ◽  
The Social ◽  
Urban Conflict ◽  
The Middle Ages

The seventeenth-century Worcestershire antiquarian Thomas Habington knew of great agitations around 1400 at Shipston-on-Stour, a manor of Worcester Cathedral Priory. He reported that after an arbitration of 1405–6 ‘the discontented tenants not satisfied broke out against their lord again, but all these being long since buried, shall not be revived by my pen, which shall never prejudice or blot any with infamy’. This article will rescue the rebels from the oblivion to which Habington sought to condemn them. This is not just to correct his bias (as a recusant he sympathized with Benedictine monks; as a member of the gentry he disliked disturbance of the social order), but more to use the Shipston story to investigate general problems of urban conflict in the Middle Ages.

Divine Illumination, Mechanical Calculators, and the Roots of Modern Reason

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Dear
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Inferential Reasoning ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mechanical Reasoning ◽  
Divine Illumination ◽  
Natural Philosophers

ArgumentTalk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.

Introduction: The Ottoman Empire and its Frontiers

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. S. PEACOCK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

Stretching across Europe, Asia and Africa for half a millennium bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the major forces that forged the modern world. The chapters in this book focus on four key themes: frontier fortifications, the administration of the frontier, frontier society and relations between rulers and ruled, and the economy of the frontier. Through snapshots of aspects of Ottoman frontier policies in such diverse times and places as fifteenth-century Anatolia, seventeenth-century Hungary, nineteenth-century Iraq or twentieth-century Jordan, the book provides a richer picture than hitherto available of how this complex empire coped with the challenge of administering and defending disparate territories in an age of comparatively primitive communications. By way of introduction, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of these four themes in the history of Ottoman frontiers.

Some Comments on Later Casuistry and ‘Jesuitical’ Equivocation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Corran
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Limiting Factor ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter discusses early modern controversies about equivocation and mental reservation in the light of medieval intellectual history. Sixteenth-century polemics on equivocation are best explained in terms of the social and intellectual developments of that period, rather than anything inherent to the medieval discussion. The Reformation, the wars of religion in the sixteenth century, the persecution of religious minorities created an urgent new need for casuistry among Catholics who found themselves endangered. In addition the Second Scholasticism sought to make pastoral teaching relevant to political leaders of their period. Nevertheless, the combination of a stable framework of casuistical questions and changing content of moral theology that emerged in the later Middle Ages is crucial for understanding its subsequent history. The framework of ideas that were established during the medieval period was a crucial limiting factor to the later quarrels about justified equivocation.

Mamlūk Poetry, Ottoman Readers, and an Enlightenment Collector

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 272-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
James White
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

AbstractOne kind of reader’s note that has received minimal attention in scholarship to date is the poem. This article suggests that the verses added by readers to manuscripts can reveal information concerning the social and intellectual history of reading communities, the history of collecting, and the reception of literary works. I examine an appendix of unattributed poems that were added by a group of readers to a holograph copy of Ibn Sūdūn al-Bashbughāwī’s (d. 868/1464) Nuzha (Bodleian Library MS. Sale 13), most probably in northern Syria in the seventeenth century. I identify the poems and their authors, study their manipulation in the Sale manuscript, and offer some initial conclusions as to what they can tell us about the social and intellectual contexts in which MS. Sale 13 was stored before it came to England.

scholarly journals The Global World in the Pre-Modern Era: Lessons from the Past for Our Future With a Focus on the Early Modern Novel Fortunatus (1509)

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
Global World ◽  
Modern Era

There are many efforts underway today to investigate the true extent to which the notion of globalism already applied to the pre-modern world. This study reviews some of the major scholarly contributions, examines major historical, social, and literary developments and phenomena in the Middle Ages that lend themselves well to support the argument that early forms of globalism certainly existed, and illustrates this specifically through a close reading of the anonymous German novel Fortunatus, first printed in Augsburg in 1509. The conclusions that can be drawn from this highly popular work, republished and translated many times far into the late seventeenth century, find significant confirmation in even much earlier texts and historical networks. Hence, carefully modified and adapted, the concept of globalism finds confirmation already in the pre-modern world.

scholarly journals Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Environmental Protection in the Financial Decisions of Individual Consumers

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (7) ◽  
pp. 1934
Author(s):  
Damian Walczak ◽  
Leszek Dziawgo ◽  
Danuta Dziawgo ◽  
Michał Buszko ◽  
Jarosław Pawłowski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Survey Study ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Environment Protection ◽  
Socially Responsible ◽  
Responsible Investment ◽  
Financial Decisions ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
The Social

Insufficient environment protection may have serious ecological consequences, resulting in a number of problems in the modern world, many of which are a direct result of human behavior. Therefore, one needs to limit negative ecological effects by consciously shaping environment-related behaviors. The present paper analyzes the declared attitudes of individuals when it comes to taking into consideration pro-environmental factors, including energy, consumption, and waste. We have also studied the social awareness of the socially responsible investment idea, as well as pro-ecological individual behaviors related to private finance. Our survey study, conducted on a representative sample of 1030 Polish respondents, shows that participants’ individual features have little impact on pro-ecological decisions, and that declared pro-ecological attitudes are not reflected in actual behaviors. Polish consumers are still not active enough in making decisions concerning pro-ecological actions, first of all, in terms of energy and waste. As a result of the conducted research, we suggest increasing all activities in the field of environmental policy that could increase the participation of society in facilitating sustainable development.

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