Performing Conversion

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
Selection Of

This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theatre that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of other kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.

Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 235-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garthine Walker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Professional Competence ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Personal Conflict ◽  
Social Code ◽  
Active Individual ◽  
Selection Of

Within the historiography of gender and reputation in early modern Europe, female and male honour are usually presented as being incommensurable; yet they are constantly compared. Female honour has been discussed primarily in the context of sexual reputation. Male honour is commonly imagined as ‘more complex’, involving matters of deference, physical prowess, economic and professional competence and die avoidance of public ridicule. Thus the predominant model of gendered honour has been oppositional—female to male, private to public, passive to active, individual to collective and, by extension, chastity to deeds. Such a model, however, is misconceived. Just as the honour of men could be bound up with sexuality and the body, so these constituted merely one—albeit powerful—concomitant of feminine honour. Sexual probity was indeed central to the dominant discourse of early modern gender ideology, and historians have quite properly noted the significance of a social code of female honour ‘which was overwhelmingly seen in sexual terms’. But the potency of this discourse has itself frequently led to the selection of sources in which sexual conduct and reputation are central issues, and in which sexual constructions of female dishonour are immediately visible Because women's honour has effectively been imagined in terms of dishonour, constructions of shame—especially those associated with sexuality and sexual behaviour—have been privileged over, or compounded with, those of affront. Even when it has been noted that sexual insult could be a mundane response ‘in every sort of local and personal conflict’, conceptualisations of women's honour have been defined overwhelmingly by the nature of such responses rather than the conflicts themselves.

Princes’ Justifications of War in Early Modern Europe: The Constitution of an International Community by Communication

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Anuschka Tischer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Europe

Anuschka Tischer starts out with the historical analyses of the book by elaborating the dialectic of war discourses and international order in early modernity: according to Tischer, nearly every prince in early modern Europe came up with a ‘just reason’ when going to war. Whereas the theory of international law represented academic opinions, the political justifications offered the official view which fed into the public discourse. By referring to a general international law in their war declarations (and counter-declarations), the belligerent parties shaped the pattern of today’s modern international law. However, the early modern justifications represented the political and social values of pre-revolutionary Europe. While international law was regarded as universal, the European Christian powers distinguished between wars in and outside of Europe. The chapter reveals the contradictions inherent in this distinction by analysing how princes in early modern Europe justified their wars, which norms and orders were accepted, and how far international law was the result of elaborate discussions and power politics. Tischer’s findings are picked up by Hendrik Simon in his contribution on the nineteenth-century discourse of war and international order.

scholarly journals From Impropriety to Betrayal: Policing Non-Marital Sex in the Early Modern Dutch Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Rose ◽  
Elisabeth Heijmans
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Men ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Transgressive Behavior ◽  
Marital Sex ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Dutch Empire

Abstract The policing of illicit sex formed a key mode of social control in early modern Europe, where reproduction in legally sanctioned marriage was the primary means through which property and status was passed. When Europeans formed overseas colonial settlements sustained by slave labor and populated by people of a broad variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, this concern with sexually transgressive behavior took on new dimensions. This article takes the case of Dutch trade-company-led colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to examine how colonial visions of social order in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean shaped authorities’ responses to different types of non-marital sex. To facilitate comparison, these acts are read through narratives of criminalization, comprised of both conceptualizations of crime and prosecution practices. Through an analysis of legislation issued across the Dutch empire, most notably bylaws, combined with a selection of case studies from the juridical practice, we show that a concern with keeping different ethnic, religious, and status groups separate and maintaining European dominance shaped the policing of sexuality in such a way that the distinction between relatively benign sexual “improprieties” and a more serious criminal narrative of sexual “betrayal” was re-arranged along gendered and racialized lines. Conceptualizations and prosecutions alike show a considerably more stringent treatment of sex between non-Christian or non-white men and women of European status than between European men and enslaved or free local women, even when the latter scenario was coercive or violent.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Symbolic Economy ◽  
The Gift

This chapter examines the centrality of gift giving to the developing commercial cultures of early modern Europe and the rise to prominence of works of art, especially paintings, in circuits of gift exchange. Contrary to common assumption, gift giving in the early modern period acquired renewed importance as a mode of negotiating professional, social, and personal ties in a rapidly changing, increasingly commercialized environment. Art also emerged as an essential gift currency for negotiating relationships of patronage and clientage, and highly selfconscious artists increasingly turned to the gift’s symbolic economy to negotiate with patrons and set their transactions apart from ordinary forms of exchange. I probe the interconnections between gifts and art in various overlapping contexts of early modernity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document