scholarly journals Shira Brisman. Review of "Animating Empire: Automata, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World" by Jessica Keating.

CAA Reviews ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Brisman
Daphnis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 603-619
Author(s):  
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Germans were active in constructing transcultural experiences on a global scale – for better or worse – from Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map on. Most of those who have been studied were men, but women traveled and migrated as well, and they supported those who did financially, institutionally, and emotionally. Their movements and actions have left fewer and more shadowy records than those of men, but a more gender-balanced account of global connections in the early modern period is emerging. This essay examines three ways in which German women’s actions shaped the early modern world in the realm of religion: women’s establishment of religious communities, women’s patronage of overseas missions, and women’s proselytizing, particularly that undertaken by Moravians. All of these built on networks and traditions established in Europe, but ones that already reached across political boundaries in the splintered world of the Holy Roman Empire, or beyond it to co-religionists in Prague, Paris, or Copenhagen.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
David Do Paço

This article analyses how food, recipes, and techniques and manners introduced as foreign were integrated in eighteenth-century German cookbooks. Doing so it intends to transfer a methodology recently developed in social history to history of food in order to get a better understanding of how eighteenth-century European societies defined foreignness. It claims that cookbooks should be considered as topographies of the table and presents the Holy Roman Empire as a particularly rich field of study for history of circulation in the early modern world. 


Author(s):  
Luca Scholz

The enclosure of movement in the Holy Roman Empire, studied here through the lens of safe conduct, engendered a highly contingent interplay of obstructive and accelerating factors that affected the geography and temporality of different forms of movement in different ways. Spatially, these efforts were not concentrated at territorial borders but at settlements, toll stations, and other choke points, indicating that late modern border talk is unsuitable for understanding the ordering of movement before the mid-eighteenth century. The fact that early modern freedoms of movement, however poorly enforced, did not exist by default but by deliberate design challenges the image of the early modern ‘state’ as a preventer of mobility. This conclusion places the book’s findings in a broader perspective and argues that the history of the Holy Roman Empire offers an alternative framework not just for understanding other parts of the early modern world but also for appreciating ambiguities inherent in the late modern border regime.


Author(s):  
Luca Scholz

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.


Nordlit ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias E. Hämmerle

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards

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.


PONTES ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 213-227
Author(s):  
Végh Ferenc

The estates of the Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom, as it is well known, took an active role in the struggles of the Thirty years’ War (1618‒1648) on the Habsburg dynasty’s side. At the request of the monarch, many aristocrats and wealthy noblemen, who had been trained in the so-called small wars (German Kleinkriege) practised along the Ottoman border, raised especially light cavalry units and conducted them to the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Nicholas VII. Zrínyi/Zrinski (1620‒1664) the Croatian-Slavonian ban-to-be (1647–1664) himself recruited cavalry companies in three successive years (1642–1644), at the head of which he fought in Bohemia and Moravia against the Swedes as well as in upper Hungary against the troops of George I. Rákóczi, the Prince of Transylvania (1630–1648). Moreover, he was appointed as the supreme commander of the Croatian-type cavalry two times. The present gap-fi lling paper primarily aims to clear the chronology of Zrínyi’s field operations in these years. It also reveals his probable motives, the characteristics of the negotiations with the imperial high command as well as the gathering of the troops. The case study will enable us to draw conclusions about the military entrepreneurship of this kind, giving an impetus to the research of this neglected field of early modern military history.


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