‘Is it not strange that he is thus bewitch’d?’

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Sexual Attraction ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Cultural Anxiety ◽  
Over Time

This chapter addresses the representation of Edward II’s agency and culpability in his sexual and political relationships with his favourites. I situate depictions of Edward’s favourites as irresistibly attractive in the context of wider early modern cultural anxiety concerning transgressive sexual attraction; and consider medieval and early modern writers’ changing negotiations of the question of Edward’s culpability for the disastrous political events of his reign compared to that of his favourites’ ‘evil counsel’. Although willingness to attach some blame to Edward himself increases over time – reflecting the increasing temporal remoteness of his reign – chroniclers consistently retained a level of strategic polyvocality, demonstrating their need to negotiate the engaging political pertinence of their subject matter with its risky, seditious potential.

Doubtful Readers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin A. McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Aemilia Lanyer ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Early Modern Poetry ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Over Time

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

Bad Customs, Civic Ordinances, and “Customary Time” in Medieval and Early Modern English Urban Law

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Esther Liberman Cuenca
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Legal Force

This article examines 45 preambles in collections of urban customary law (called custumals) from 32 premodern towns in England between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Urban custom was the local law of English towns, and constituted traditions and privileges that gained legal force over time. How lawmakers conceived of “bad” custom—that is, the desuetude or corruption of custom—was crucial to the intellectual framework of urban law. Evidence from preambles shows that lawmakers rooted the legitimacy of their laws in “customary time,” which was the period from the supposed origins of their customs to their formalization in text. Lawmakers’ efforts to reinforce, ratify, and revise urban customs by making new custumals and passing ordinances were attempts to broaden their autonomy and respond to the possibility of “bad” custom.

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.

scholarly journals Making things new: Invention privileges and the configuration of priority

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Marius Buning
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Modern System ◽  
Web Of Knowledge ◽  
The Law

It was because of the early modern system of invention privileges that questions concerning inventorship became a recurrent subject matter of legal dispute. This essay focuses mainly on the details of one such dispute, namely the 1597 case litigated in the Dutch Republic between Jacob Floris van Langren (ca. 1525–1610) and Jodocus Hondius Sr. (1563–1612). The essay assesses how the law shaped, challenged, and constrained claims to innovation, pushing the argument that it was because of the privilege system that the borders between imitation and novelty became ever more clearly defined. The case study thus illustrates how the law functioned as a technology ordering a complex web of knowledge and status claims.

‘In Corona Populi’

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-67
Author(s):  
K.J. Kesselring
Keyword(s):  
Sudden Death ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Active Intervention ◽  
Lay Participation ◽  
Financial Interests ◽  
Star Chamber ◽  
Over Time

Chapter 2 examines the coroner’s inquest, asking how homicides become known and categorized, and how this changed over the period. Coroners held an office that dated from the late twelfth century, but one freshly charged from around 1487, when statutes sought to press the coroners to action through fees and fines. The coroners’ determinations of the nature of a sudden death, in early years, focused on the financial incidents owed to the king. Over time, financial interests in a killing became more diffuse and the king’s interests became more expansively understood. The active intervention of the Privy Council and the Court of Star Chamber helped police the efforts of inquests. The mix of lay participation and central oversight gave the early modern inquest a special flavour. Coroners’ inquests came to be seen as serving not just the king’s interest and the king’s peace, but something conceived as public justice.

The Accidents of the Soul

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-82
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medical Diagnostics ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Diagnostic Medicine ◽  
Over Time

“The Accidents of the Soul” asks which disciplines were seen to provide a knowledge of the passions in the early modern period, and how that map of the disciplines changed over time. It opens by noting the relatively minor position the passions held in a received philosophical “science of the soul,” itself divided between physics and metaphysics. As “accidents of the soul”—that is, contingent qualitative alterations in the soul—the passions lay at the margins of philosophical knowledge: they were seen as subject to too much particularity and contingency to belong to what one author called “certaine science.” They belonged instead to the “low” sciences, the practical sciences, fields that study human actions and that therefore were seen to produce a merely probable knowledge of particulars: fields like rhetoric, politics, poetics, ethics. The passions also belonged to medicine insofar as diagnostic medicine was understood as an art: in medicine, “accidents” are symptoms and the phrase “accidents of the soul” belongs to medical discourse insofar as it takes account of the particularities of the passions as part of a regimen of health. The chapter situates the seventeenth-century treatises on the passions in relation to various kinds of discourse on the passions all seen as promoting forms of probable knowledge on the model of medical diagnostics: physiology and “characterology,” most notably. It ends with a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello as a text that probes the limits—and the dangers—of this probable knowledge of the passions.

Prices in Toledo (Spain): Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 269-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
David González Agudo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Price Index ◽  
Great Increase ◽  
Precious Metals ◽  
Food Prices ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Demographic Growth ◽  
Over Time

Differences in material conditions are a determinant that explains the little divergence between northwestern and southern Europe. This article approaches the evolution of prices in early modern Toledo (Spain). The price index includes new items such as housing and employs different baskets over time, reflecting changes in consumption patterns. During the city’s golden age, prices grew faster than in London, Paris, or Amsterdam. Wine, urban rent, and food prices experienced a great increase, coinciding with demographic growth and the arrival of the American precious metals. Prices slowed in the first half of the seventeenth century, throughout Castile’s demographic and economic decay.

Solidarity and European Union Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Grimmel
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Central Value ◽  
Charter Of Fundamental Rights ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Eu

Solidarity is one of most contentious and contested concepts in European Union (EU) politics. At the same time, it was, and remains, a central value of European integration that has been more and more institutionalized over time. The numerous codifications in the EU treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights, along with the increasingly frequent references to the value in political declarations and decisions, prove the value’s growing significance. Yet, there also exists a fundamental divide between rhetorical commitments to solidarity and the practice of the EU and its member states. The most recent crises of the EU have shown the instrumentality and strategic use of the concept in order to promote particular political positions rather than work toward a more common understanding of European solidarity. This makes the application of solidarity in the EU a question not just of arriving at definitional clarity, but also of developing practices that reflect solidarity in concrete cases. Such practices are inextricably linked with three grounds for action: voluntariness, selflessness, and identification. Despite, or precisely because of, these difficulties in defining, concertizing, and implementing solidarity as a European value, there is a rising interest in solidarity in various fields of studies, such as political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and history, making it an interdisciplinary and multidimensional subject matter.

Challenges to Traditional International Relations Theory Posed by Environmental Change

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Dyer
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Practical Challenge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Over Time

Changes in the environment can impact international relations theory, despite enjoying only a limited amount of attention from scholars of the discipline. The sorts of influence that may be identified include ontology, epistemology, concepts, and methods, all of these being related to varying perspectives on international relations. It is likely that the most profound implications arise at the ontological level, since this establishes assumptions about, for example, whether the world we wish to understand is both political and ecological. However, more recently the recognition of the practical challenge presented by the environment has become widespread, though it has not yet translated into a significant impact on the discipline of international relations, even when theoretical implications are noted. It is now almost obligatory to include the environment in any list of modern international relations concerns, as over time it has become necessary to include peace, underdevelopment, gender, or race, as they quite rightly became recognized as significant aspects of the field. Moreover, the environment, as a relatively novel subject matter, has naturally brought some critique and innovation to the field. However, studies of the environment are also subject to such descriptors as “mainstream” and “radical” in debates about how best to tackle the subject. As is often the case, the debates are sharpest among those with the greatest interest in the subject.

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