scholarly journals Ruling Climate: the Theory and Practice of Environmental Governmentality, 1500-1800

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-137
Author(s):  
John Emrys Morgan ◽  
John Emrys Morgan

This one-day conference brought together scholars from across Europe and North America to discuss the relationship between governments and the environment in the early modern period. Papers discussed competing conceptions of environmental and climatic models and their use as instruments of control to justify a variety of social and economic interventions. With early career, established and leading scholars discussing environmental governmentality in global contexts, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the breadth of research at ‘Ruling Climate’ was testament to the vitality of the environmental humanities, and its current status as a leading movement in contemporary historical research.

Author(s):  
Heather L. Ferguson

This chapter draws on Katip Çelebi's Düstūrü’l-‘amel li ıṣlāhı ’l-ḥalel, or the Guiding Principles for the Rectification of Defects, to outline how attention to genre, to the relationship between conceptual models and administrative practice, to the role of sultanic authority as an anchor for imperial order, and to the significance of comparative historical analysis offers an alternative approach to Ottoman state-making in the early modern period. It further suggests that the “middle years” of the state might best be understood as a tension between principles of universal rule and the practices designed to entice and co-opt regional elites into a coherent sociopolitical order.


Author(s):  
Laura Marcus

The years of childhood have become increasingly central to autobiographical writing. Historians have linked this development to the new ideas about life-stages that emerged in the early modern period. Philippe Ariès (1914–84) made a key contribution in 1960 with a book on the child and family life in the ancien régime, known in English as Centuries of Childhood. ‘Family histories and the autobiography of childhood’ considers how genealogy (the tracing of family history) and the shaping of family relations by cultural and social forces have been central concerns for many modern autobiographers. It also looks closely at the relationship between child and parent and at the impact of mixed cultures.


Itinerario ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

Historians have traditionally paid relatively little attention to the French migrations to America. Although in the early modern period France was a demographic giant, had a deep – yet not enough recognized – maritime tradition, had many colonies in the Americas from the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence to the Amazon, and suffered from a tumultuous political history comparatively few of its people migrated to British North America and the United States. France has therefore and to some extent understandably enjoyed minimal visibility in the American ethnic landscape. There is, however, a long tradition of French migrations to America, beginning with the Huguenots at the end of the seventeenth century. At times these influxes were important in terms of number and influence, indeed in 1690 and in 1790 French was spoken in the streets of Charleston and of Philadelphia.


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Lynneth J. Miller

Using writings from observers of the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague, this article explores the various understandings of dancing mania, disease, and divine judgment applied to the dancing plague's interpretation and treatment. It argues that the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague reflects new currents of thought, but remains closely linked to medieval philosophies; it was an event trapped between medieval and modern ideologies and treated according to two very different systems of belief. Understanding the ways in which observers comprehended the dancing plague provides insight into the ways in which, during the early modern period, new perceptions of the relationship between humanity and the divine developed and older conceptions of the body and disease began to change, while at the same time, ideologies surrounding dance and its relationship to sinful behavior remained consistent.


2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Olds

Recent scholarship has shown that, even at the heart of the Catholic world, defining holiness in the Counter-Reformation was remarkably difficult, in spite of ongoing Roman reforms meant to centralize and standardize the authentication of saints and relics. If the standards for evaluating sanctity were complex and contested in Rome, they were even less clear to regional actors, such as the Bishop of Jaén, who supervised the discovery of relics in Arjona, a southern Spanish town, beginning in 1628. The new relics presented the bishop, Cardinal Baltasar de Moscoso y Sandoval, with knotty historical, theological, and procedural dilemmas. As such, the Arjona case offers a particularly vivid example of the ambiguities that continued to complicate the assessment of holiness in the early modern period. As the Bishop of Jaén found, the authentication of relics came to involve deeper questions about the nature of theological and historical truth that were unresolved in Counter-Reformation theory and practice.


Author(s):  
Jaime Goodrich

Over the course of the early modern period, political and religious upheavals in England led to the formation of many different expatriate communities on the Continent and in North America. As Catholics, Protestants, Nonconformists, and Royalists lived in exile, they established three major sorts of communities: lay congregations; educational institutions; and monastic houses. Examining texts produced by and for representative examples of each group (the Marian congregation at Geneva, the English colleges at Rheims and Rome, and the Third Order Franciscan convent in Brussels), this chapter offers case studies of the way that exiled communities adapted certain forms of writing in order to develop and express a collective religious identity. In doing so, members of these groups negotiated their relationships with one another, the English nation, and the broader Continental religious community.


2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-Part2) ◽  
pp. 1531-1560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Forman

This article traces the connections between the circulation of commodities and counterfeit coins in The Roaring Girl. Contextualizing the play's representation of counterfeits within a discussion of the relationship between real and counterfeit money in the early modern period, I argue that the play registers and addresses economic pressures, in part through its commentary on, and revision of, the conventions of stage comedy. In particular, the play offers enhanced forms of realism and the fiction of the “individual” in the title character, Moll, to compensate for the absence of legible material guarantees for value, legitimacy, or status. I conclude with a reading of the play's representation of masterless persons as the necessary shadow side of the plethora of opportunities seemingly offered by the market.


2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. D. CLARK

ABSTRACTThis historiographical review offers a critical reconsideration of a central component of modernization theory: the model of secularization devised within the sociology of religion, and especially the version sustained by sociologists in the UK. It compares that model with the results of historical research in a range of themes and periods, and suggests that those results are now often radically inconsistent with this sociological orthodoxy. It concludes that an older historical scenario which located in the early modern period the beginnings of a ‘process’ of secularization that achieved its natural completion in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries is finally untenable, and it proposes a broader, more historical conception of ‘religion’ able to accommodate both persistent religiosity and undoubted changes in religious behaviour.


2021 ◽  

The responsibility to protect and intervention possessed a central political importance in the early modern period. This volume asks whether there was also a duty to intervene alongside the right to do so. This draws attention to the relationship between the responsibility to protect, security and reputation, which is the focus of the contributions the book contains. Chronologically, they range from the 15th to the 18th centuries and discuss monarchical duties to protect, alliance commitments, confessional legitimation and motives, as well as those based on patronage, contractual relationships and electoral processes. One of the book’s important findings is a deeper understanding of reputation, which is comprehensively examined here as a political guiding factor with reference to changing understandings of security for the first time.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 480-503
Author(s):  
Amanda Flather

This paper explores the neglected topic of the organization and use of household space for work (paid and unpaid) during the early modern period. It engages critically with the concept of ‘the open house’ in relation to recent arguments about processes of spatial and social closure of houses and households in the early modern period associated with the development of a capitalist socio-economic system. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, autobiographies, inventories and court records the analysis considers how work was organized in the domestic context and how experience varied according to gender, age, status and location as well as time of day, week or year. The paper argues that a perceived dichotomy between an open house and a closed home secluded from the social and business world of community and commerce is inadequate in the consideration of space and attitudes in this period. Individuals in larger houses could control access to certain spaces at specific times and work could be concentrated in certain rooms. But in practice in most households the complicated demands of the household economy required openness to outsiders that rendered the boundaries of houses more permeable and potentially more unstable than they are today. The analysis considers the case of England and compares rural and urban homes in a particular regional context, but it opens up several ways for historians to think about the relationship between work and home in other European regions.


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