scholarly journals Signorie e relazioni interstatali. Pratiche, legittimazione e contestazione del potere locale lungo la frontiera alpina dello stato di Milano (XV secolo)

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
Massimo Della Misericordia

This essay analyzes the ways in which rural lordship was legitimized, maintained and sometimes contested in the late Middle Ages. The focus is not on the local societies and the political competition within the regional state, but rather on the position of seigneurial power in the interstices of international relations. Specifically, the dynamics of the frontier allowed the lords to enforce their power, but produced situations that put their authority in risk, providing opportunities for their subjects to contrast it. Political brokerage is the key to exploring the competition and the relationship between a variety of local actors and the state authorities. The source I selected is the Carteggio sforzesco, consisting of the written correspondence between these protagonists. From this viewpoint and thanks to records rich in narrative and descriptive contents, I will try to reconstruct economic tensions, military instability, the need for diplomatic agreements and for individual protection, that define the relationship between the Duchy of Milan, Valais, Switzerland and Grisons. Finally I will go into depth in the case-study of Val Formazza, where the domination of the lords family was in decline during the 15th Century, while local protagonists of this diversified local world – highlanders of lower social conditions settled in a peripheral valley forming an ethno-cultural minority of German speakers – were capable.

Author(s):  
Christof Paulus ◽  
Albert Weber

AbstractVenice is considered the best-informed community of the late Middle Ages. The study examines the availability of information for the second half of the 15th century, particularly with regard to the key year 1462/1463, and as a case study concentrates on areas of the supposed Venetian periphery of interest, above all Hungary and the two principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The result is a thoroughly differentiated system of information acquisition, verification and control. Means of communication, as well as different areas of interest of the Serenissima, can be identified. A distinction is made between information maps and communication maps. The latter also include the distribution of news from the lagoon city exchanged with foreign envoys. During the period concerned, news was exchanged in an astonishingly liberal way, in turn integrating the Serenissima into the information networks of the other Italian states. The study thus places the „information commodity“ within the research field of late medieval gift exchange and patronage structures. In short, a thoroughly pragmatic Venetian approach to news acquisition and evaluation can be observed. Verification of the quality of the information obtained was subject not least to quantitative and ranking criteria. Ultimately, the informational power of Venice was based above all on its outstanding reputation among its contemporaries.


Author(s):  
Kristina Dietz

The article explores the political effects of popular consultations as a means of direct democracy in struggles over mining. Building on concepts from participatory and materialist democracy theory, it shows the transformative potentials of processes of direct democracy towards democratization and emancipation under, and beyond, capitalist and liberal democratic conditions. Empirically the analysis is based on a case study on the protests against the La Colosa gold mining project in Colombia. The analysis reveals that although processes of direct democracy in conflicts over mining cannot transform existing class inequalities and social power relations fundamentally, they can nevertheless alter elements thereof. These are for example the relationship between local and national governments, changes of the political agenda of mining and the opening of new spaces for political participation, where previously there were none. It is here where it’s emancipatory potential can be found.


Author(s):  
Pavlína Rychterová

This chapter examines the growing importance of the vernacular languages during the later Middle Ages in shaping the form, content, and audiences of political discourse. It presents a famously wicked king of the late Middle Ages, Wenceslas IV (1361–1419), as a case study and traces the origins of his bad reputation to a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writings. These have often been dismissed as fictions or studied solely as literature, but in fact they represent new modes of articulating good and bad kingship. The chapter shows that, in the context of an increasingly literate bourgeois culture, especially in university cities, these vernacular works transformed Latin theological approaches to monarchy, while rendering mirrors for princes and related literatures accessible to an unprecedented audience.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199423
Author(s):  
Anne M Cronin ◽  
Lee Edwards

Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Austin H. Mackesy-Buckley

<p>The main objective of the research is to better understand the concept of human scale and the role that it has to play in the design of our urban environments. The need for a clearer, less ambiguous understanding of human scale is identified as a result of its poor definition and numerous manifestations across a multitude of literature. Human scale is an important part of design that flourished particularly in the middle ages, but has largely been neglected in the industrial and technological ages. Its remergence comes with the return of consideration for the comfort of people. Yet we cannot successfully apply a concept we do not wholly understand. Human scale is therefore redefined as a collective concept that embodies the multitude of existing definitions and treats them as aspects of a larger theory. As a broader but more comprehensive definition it better facilitates the identification and exploration of relationships with what are currently treated as separate urban design objectives, such as enclosure, in an endeavour to better understand the influence of human scale. The design case study proposes a design that tests the relationship between enclosure and human scale. A large site is chosen to display how human scale operates at urban, as well as architectural and detailed levels. Through aspiring to achieve a thorough human scale design, without any exclusive emphasis on enclosure, the process and the outcome still reveal that the theoretical relationship identified in the research (that aspects of human scale foster the formation of enclosure) is unavoidable in design practice. Enclosure simply results as a consequence of thorough human scale design. The research suggests that many urban design objectives may fall under human scale's sphere of influence meaning it is not a singular concept, but an ethic of design that has many desireable consequences. While the idealistic nature of the design may be unrealistic to achieve at present, it highlights the incompatibilities with contemporary approaches and succeeds in generating discussion.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Evgueny Alexandrovich Chiglintsev ◽  
Natalya Yurievna Bikeyeva ◽  
Maxim Vadimovich Griger ◽  
Igor Vladimirovich Vostrikov ◽  
Farit Nafisovich Ahmadiev ◽  
...  

This collective article is dedicated to the images of power in the ancient and medieval societies, their forming, functions and the ways of representation. Authors found the universal components of the images of power in the different pre-industrial societies of the East and Vest, such as procedures of obtaining power, coronation and anointment, ruler&rsquo;s regalia and the forms of organizing space of power. The authors investigate the relationship between the secular and the sacred elements in the political mythology of power. This paper deals with the evolution of images of power, rituals and symbols of authority from Ancient Eastern to Medieval societies. The purpose of the article is to present the universal components of the images of power in Ancient and Medieval times. The identification of common and specific features in the representation of power and ritual practices will allow us to see the evolution of ideas about power in pre-industrial societies.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pier Francesco Cherchi ◽  
◽  
Marco Lecis ◽  
Marco Moro ◽  
◽  
...  

This paper illustrates a case study of teaching and research applied to the abandoned mining landscapes of the Sulcis area, located in the south-east side of Sardinia, one of the poorest in Europe. Although the region’s critical condition in the present, the area is nevertheless extremely rich in fascination and history. It offers unique natural landscapes, mostly pristine, a variety of archeological sites and, as mentioned, the ruins of the mining installations. All of this makes fore-seeable a concrete possibility of regeneration for the area, based on tourism, one of the island primary resources. The local institutions of Sulcis started a partnership with the University of Cagliari aiming to pursuit not just a practical and economical outcome in the immediate present, more a cultural and deeper rescue with a wider perspective. In the following pages, we present our academic activities in this mark and how we managed to guarantee fruitful superpositions of pedagogy, design, and research in our work within this kind of cooperation.Our focus is, therefore, the relationship between researching and teaching activities and the actions in support of the territory, pursued in a joint venture with the political institution. During these experiences, we defined a strategy to intercross these different layers, bringing the real and concrete dimension into our classroom, sharing our work with the students, and, at the same time, transferring the fruits of the teaching experiences to the territory. The correspondence between these two levels is not free of ambiguity and contradictions, however, we are convinced that it might show very important and fruitful outcomes.


Author(s):  
Radivoj Radic

In the Middle Ages, people had an ambivalent relationship to the beauty products: some were fully supportive of the attempts to beautify oneself, while the others, first and foremost the representatives of the church, frowned upon this notion. This feature represents a show?case of the advice and recipes for beautification from two medical collections created in the late Middle Ages. These are the Byzantine medical treatise (dating from 11th to 14th century) and the collection of Serbian medieval medicine, the so-called Hodoch Code (dating from the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century). The treatise is focusing more on the practical advice than theoretical knowledge, and its greatest part is dedicated to pharmacology. Hodoch Code (Hodoski zbornik) is in fact a therapeutic collection, and it consists of diverse medical texts. These collections contain the advice how to make one?s face white, hair black or blond, but most certainly rich in volume, as well as recipes for treating facial lines, warts, freckles, cracked lips or bad breath.


Author(s):  
Pavlo Nechytaylo ◽  
◽  
Olena Onohda ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

The paper analyses ceramics and buildings remains of the second half 13th – first half 15th centuries, coming from excavations in Kamianets-Podilskyi. It aims to introduce materials into scientific circulation, to compare the collection with synchronous objects from adjacent territories, to trace interactions in the material culture development in late medieval towns. Ceramics of the Golden Horde and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania times began to be systematically researched relatively recently in Ukraine. Thus, the materials from Kamianets-Podilskyi contribute to deepening our knowledge of less-known periods in the history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Materials analyzed were obtained during rescue archaeological research on the Polish Market square in Kamianets. These were fragmented parts of underground and aboveground building structures, as well as a collection of various household items. Building materials were mostly local clays and loam, less often wood and stone were used. A set of clay ‘roll’ blocks set in one of the pits allows us to assume similarity with the Golden Horde building technologies. Finds of coins and Crimean polychrome bowls fragments also indicate the complex emerged during the Golden Horde period. However, certain groups of pottery and coins of European minting define the complex upper date within the first half 15th century. Diverse ceramic types range from the complex is an interesting local typological phenomenon. It reflects mutual influences of the pottery traditions development both in time and space. After processing artefacts collection, the main groups of pottery were identified according to technological features. Some of them are rooted in the local ancient Rus’ traditions, others were formed under the influence of Western trends, while samples of a ‘specific’ group were common for almost the entire territory of modern Ukraine during Late Middle Ages. Pots collection was preliminary systematized up to 5 most common types selection, based on rim profiles. Many of them have a wide range of analogies, locally from Kamianets, as well as from the Western Ukraine, in Poland, Moldova and Romania. In addition to pots, the collection includes other types of kitchen and tableware, such as makitras, lids, jars and other single samples of ceramics. The typological diversity correlates with the multi-layered processes which took place in Kamianets-Podilskyi life during the Golden Horde and the Lithuanian periods. Materials from the complex, as well as other finds from synchronous objects within the city, deepen our understanding of the city’s development large-scale picture, which, however, requires further research.


Author(s):  
Dawn Langan Teele

This chapter presents a case study of women's enfranchisement in the United States. It argues that the formation of a broad coalition of women, symbolized by growing membership in a large non-partisan suffrage organization, in combination with competitive conditions in state legislatures, was crucial to securing politicians' support for women's suffrage in the states. The chapter first gives a broad overview of the phases of the US suffrage movement, arguing that the salience of political cleavages related to race, ethnicity, nativity, and class influenced the type of movement suffragists sought to build. It then describes the political geography of the Gilded Age, showing how the diversity of political competition and party organization that characterized the several regions mirrors the pattern of women's enfranchisement across the states.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document