scholarly journals Liminal urbanity: Wars, connections and material culture in early modern Helsingborg

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Sumner
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Context Analysis ◽  
Small Market ◽  
Market Town ◽  
Town Centre ◽  
The Status ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Urban Consumption

In the 1600s, Helsingborg was a small market town with great importance as a transport and trade connection between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. Caught in the middle between two empires, Denmark and Sweden, the lives of Helsingborg residents were affected by wars, plagues and political disturbances. This thesis investigates the status of Helsingborg as a contested periphery town in relation to Helsingör on the other side of Öresund and in a wider southern Scandinavian context. Analysis of archaeological finds from six post-medieval sites in town centre, with primary focus on ceramics, examines how the material culture reflects urban consumption patterns, global trade connections and political changes. The results of the study demonstrate that Helsingborg in the 1600s was closely connected by trade and personal relationships to Helsingör.

The Sempster's Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607)*

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1084-1118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juana Green
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women's Relationships ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Anxieties

This essay demonstrates how handkerchiefs in The Fair Maid map out the cultural anxieties about courtship and marriage practices that were mobilized by women's participation in early modern England's expanding market economy. It locates handkerchiefs within the material culture of the period, examining the status of handkerchiefs as commodities as well as women's relationships to these commodities, and it considers how handkerchiefs are transformed into love tokens when women personalize them with embroidery. Contextualizing the play's use of handkerchiefs with historical evidence from matrimonial cases, the essay shows how handkerchiefs embody the social contradictions embedded within early modern marriage practices.

scholarly journals Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory, and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 566-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Walsham
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Confessional Identity

AbstractThis article explores domestic artifacts that testify to the afterlife of the European Reformation in the British Isles. Focusing especially on decorated and commemorative delftware, it investigates how the memory of the Protestant past was appropriated and altered in the English context and how it infiltrated the household in the guise of consumer goods in which taste, piety, politics, and private sentiment were intertwined. It analyzes their changing meanings as they moved in space and time, examines their role in cementing and complicating senses of confessional identity, and probes the process of selective remembering and forgetting by which the Reformation acquired the status of a momentous event.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

Early Modern English Borders: Homogeneity and Heterogeneity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Boyi Chen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Building ◽  
Channel Islands ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Status ◽  
British Case

This article discusses the process of English border-formation in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and around the Channel Islands, including efforts of the English government in border formation, and the local identities of borderlands. I evaluate political considerations, as well as examining social and cultural resonances to show that the English historical border was formed as part of the consolidation of state and nation in terms of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Channel Islands. I argue that border ‘building’ was not always smooth, or to be taken for granted in terms of state-building. The borderlands of the English state have manifested both a homogeneity and heterogeneity in the four regions, each with four particular forms or tendencies in their deep structures: homogeneity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from heterogeneity to homogeneity, and heterogeneity. In the article, I use homogeneity to refer to the status of the acculturational tendency, while using heterogeneity to refer to a deviation of the interaction between the English state and other states or nations. This article touches upon a topic not restricted to the British case, but relevant worldwide: the construction of borders in the context of the fundamental conflict between a ‘nation’, which is to say a culturally and often linguistically distinctive entity, and a ‘state’.

Coda: Repositioning Early Modern Prague on the Global Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The City

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

scholarly journals England and the Catholic Reformation: The Peripheries Strike Back

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-285
Author(s):  
James E. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Position Paper ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Early Modern English

AbstractAlthough the Protestant Reformation has traditionally been the focus of research on early modern England, the last two decades have witnessed a rapid increase in scholarship on the experience of the country’s Catholics. Questions surrounding the implementation of the Catholic Reformation in England have been central since the topic’s inception as a subject of academic interest, and the field has more recently captured the attention of, amongst others, literary scholars, musicologists and those working on visual and material culture. This article is a position paper that argues early modern English Catholicism, though not doing away with all continuities from before the country’s definitive break with Rome, was fully engaged with the global Catholic Reformation, both being influenced by it, but also impacting its progression. Whether through reading and writing, or more physical expressions of mission and reform, English Catholicism was a vital part of the wider Catholic Reformation.

Philosophers and Physicians on the Scientific Validity of Latin Physiognomy, 1200-1500

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ziegler
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Scientific Validity ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Rational Explanation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Jean Buridan ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Sound Theoretical Basis

AbstractThe article surveys and contextualizes the main arguments among philosophers and academic physicians surrounding the status of physiognomy as a valid science from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. It suggests that despite constant doubts, learned Latin physiognomy in the later Middle Ages was recognized by natural philosophers (William of Spain, Jean Buridan, William of Mirica) and academic physicians (Rolandus Scriptor, Michele Savonarola, Bartolomeo della Rocca [Cocles]) as a body of knowledge rooted in a sound theoretical basis. Physiognomy was characterized by stability and certainty. As a demonstrative science it was expected to provide rational explanation for every bodily sign. In this respect, learned physiognomy in the Middle Ages was dramatically different from its classical sources, from Islamic and possibly from early-modern physiognomy as well.

Open Houses from Etic to Emic Perspectives: Casa Aperta in Early-Modern and Nineteenth-Century Italy

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Raffaella Sarti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local People ◽  
Geographical Differences ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
The Status ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

What did early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians mean when they used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta, literally to keep open house and to have an open house? In this article I will try to answer this question, which is far less trivial than one might imagine. Before tackling the topic, a premise is necessary. In some previous works, I used an etic category of ‘open houses’, i.e. a category I elaborated to interpret the implications of the presence, in many households, of domestic staff from different classes, places, races than their masters/employers. Such a presence made those houses open. The border between different peoples and cultures was inside the houses themselves that were places of exchanges, confrontations and clashes. In this article, I will develop a different approach: I will map the emic uses of the ‘open-house’ category, i.e. I will analyse how early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta. While some uses had to do with hospitality and sociability, others had legal meanings, referring to citizenship rights and privileges, the status of aristocrats, the differences between foreigners and local people and taxpaying. I will pay particular attention to the latter, also suggesting possible geographical differences and changes over time. This will present an opportunity to delve into the cultural and legal world of early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians, and to unveil the importance of houses for one's status.

Self and Body

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Sassatelli
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Specific Configuration ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Late Modern

This article investigates the historical formation and specific configuration of a threefold relation crucial to contemporary society, that between the body, the self, and material culture, which, in contemporary, late modern (or post-industrial) societies, has become largely defined through consumer culture. Drawing on historiography, sociology, and anthropology, it explores how, from the early modern period, the consolidation of new consumption patterns and values has given way to particular visions of the human being as a consumer, and how, in turn, the consumer has become a cultural battlefield for the management of body and self. The article also discusses tastes, habitus, and individualization.

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