‘’s Graeflijckheyts spaer-pot met sulck ellendigh in-komen … te verrijcken’

Pro Memorie ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-265
Author(s):  
Louis Sicking ◽  
Jan de Klerk
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Law ◽  
Competing Interest

Abstract In the Middle Ages, goods washed up on the beach or fished up from the sea were an important economic asset. The customs and rules that determined the status of these goods are referred to as the ‘law of wreck’ or ‘right of wreck’. Several competing interest groups were involved: the local inhabitants as salvagers, finders or beach combers; merchants, skippers and ship-owners; landowners and the prince. Seventeenth century Dutch lawyers like Hugo Grotius and Johan van Heemskerk painted a favourable picture of the law of wreck in the Dutch Republic by pointing to the greed of the medieval counts of Holland who would only have exploited the misery of castaways. This article shows how the law of wreck developed in Holland and Zeeland in the late Middle Ages and how its rules were applied in the stewardship of North Holland between 1340 and 1400. Although the preserved accounts of the stewardship show that the count did take advantage of washed up goods, the count also had drowned people found on the beach buried and allowed merchants who could prove their goods had washed up on the Dutch beach to recover them.

Who Were the Scribes of Latin Manuscripts?

2020 ◽  
pp. 704-710
Author(s):  
Alison I. Beach
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Gender Education ◽  
The Status ◽  
Written Word

This chapter discusses scribes from antiquity and the early Christian era through the late Middle Ages: their professions, class, gender, education, religion, age, etc. The status of scribes varied dramatically from period to period, reflecting changes in literacy and respect for the written word. The author discusses monastic attitudes towards writing, the influence of different monastic orders and reform movements on ideas about scribes, and the place of scribal activity in Universities and secular bureaucracies.

Why This Time and Place?

Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Revolution

From about the late fifteenth century onwards, literature and learning acquired increased importance for the social position of noble and elite-commoner families in France. One reason is the expansion and rise to prominence of the royal office-holder milieu, which had no exact equivalent in, say, England, where the aristocracy was much smaller than the French nobility and where there was no equivalent of the French system of venality of office. In France, family literature often helped extend across the generations a relationship between two families—that of the literary producer and that of the monarch. From the late Middle Ages, the conditions for family literature were made more favourable by broad social shifts. Although this study focuses mainly on the period from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, it is likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers thrived especially up to the Revolution.

Legal Rights in Scotland

2020 ◽  
pp. 417-449
Author(s):  
Kenneth G C Reid
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Weak Form ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Property A ◽  
Dependent Children ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Face ◽  
Avoidance Measures ◽  
The Law ◽  
Scottish Government

The rules of mandatory family protection in Scotland date from the late Middle Ages and were a close copy of the rules then (but no longer) in force in England. Originally they comprised two distinct ‘legal rights’ (as they came much later to be known). In the first place, the surviving spouse had a usufruct in the immovable property of the deceased, known as ‘terce’ (for widows) and ‘courtesy’ (for widowers). Courtesy extended to the whole immovable property, terce only to one-third. In the second place, the movable property of the deceased was divided into three equal parts. The surviving spouse had a claim (the ‘relict’s right’ or jus relictae) to one part, and the surviving children to another (‘legitim’). The final one-third (‘dead’s part’) was the testator’s to dispose of in his will. Terce and courtesy were abolished, rather unthinkingly, in 1964. Today, therefore, the surviving spouse and children are protected against disinheritance only in respect of movable property – a weak form of protection made weaker still by the absence of anti-avoidance measures that would prevent testators giving property away during their lifetimes. The law is widely acknowledged to be unsatisfactory, but there is less agreement as to how it should be changed. One view is that legal rights should be extended to immovable property. Another view is that legitim should be replaced by a maintenance claim for dependent children (only). In the face of these competing views, the Scottish Government has recently decided to leave the law unchanged.

scholarly journals The Ideals of Renewal of European Spiritual Movements in the Americas

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Rios
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Indigenous Church ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

This article aims at revealing the connections between the ideals of renewal contained in the European devotions of the Late Middle Ages and those of the missionaries during the first wave of the Evangelization of Mexico. Inspired by a variety of spiritual movements aimed at building an indigenous church and centred on upholding the Law of Christ, these missionaries concur with both the reformers of the Brethren of the Common Life and Luther’s political philosophy of attaining a perfect communitas. This research focuses on demonstrating how the ideals of spiritual renewal articulated by Franciscan mystics and missionaries in the Americas embraced the same theological sources as those used by Groote, Eckhart and à Kempis in the Late Middle Ages.

Patterns of Source Survival

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
James Morton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Scholarly Book ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Book Collectors ◽  
Manuscript Collections

Chapter 3 describes how the extant Italo-Greek nomocanons survived from the medieval period to the modern day, noting two main vectors: the monastic Order of St Basil (concentrated in Sicily, Calabria, and Lucania), and the Renaissance book market in the Salento peninsula. It also considers the implications of these patterns of source survival for what kind of evidence has survived and what sort of conclusions we can draw from it. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, it explains how the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445) inspired Pope Eugenius IV to create the monastic Order of St Basil to provide an institutional structure to Byzantine-rite monasticism in southern Italy; this would play a pivotal role in supporting the remaining Italo-Greek monasteries and preserving their manuscript collections into the early modern period. The chapter then turns to the Salento peninsula, observing that families of secular Greek clergy (rather than monasteries) played the most important role in copying and preserving manuscripts in the region. During the Renaissance, the Salento became a popular region for scholarly book collectors to purchase manuscripts, bringing them to great Renaissance libraries such as the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The chapter also looks at other ways that manuscripts survived, such as through the efforts of the seventeenth-century Russian monk Arsenii Sukhanov. For the most part, manuscripts that were not stored in Basilian monasteries or purchased from the Renaissance Salento have not been preserved.

“Amphibious Power”: The Law of Wreck, Maritime Customs, and Sovereignty in Richelieu's France

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 915-944 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Trivellato
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Coastal Waters ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Law

The precise length of territorial waters, the swath of sea along the coast over which a state extended sovereign control, remained an object of debate during the seventeenth century. Some authors still adhered to the 100-mile boundary established by medieval glossators, whereas others embraced the so-called cannon-shot rule that set the limit to the reach of a shot fired from the land. But no one disputed the existence of territorial waters. Even Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), then Europe's greatest champion of the freedom of the sea, followed Roman law in conceding that a state could exert its sovereignty over littoral waters or inlets in a shoreline (diverticula maris). This rare point of agreement between theorists ofmare liberum(the free sea) and defenders ofmare clausum(the closed sea) did not eliminate all controversies concerning the governance of coastal waters. Particularly contentious were domestic and international disputes over the property rights on the cargo of sunken ships. What sources of law governed the assignment of ownership of salvaged wreckages? Who was entitled to compensation for assisting in the recovery efforts? And how did legal claims square with political maneuvering in domestic and interstate disputes over wreckages?

The Rabbi and the Mancebo: Arévalo and the Location of Affinities in the Fifteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 197-225
Author(s):  
Eleazar Gutwirth
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Elements ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Town

Abstract The background to this paper is the difference between occasionally atemporal and multinational approaches and local, historical approaches to religious ideas and encounters. The chosen example is that of two authors from one town (Arévalo) and one historical moment (fifteenth-century Castile). The article attempts firstly to identify stylistic, rhetorical, and literary elements in the historiographic traditions about the reputation of the town. Secondly it points to the changes in the status of the town in the late Middle Ages that affected Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Thirdly, after identifying certain tendencies in the writings of the two authors from the town, one Muslim (known as the Mancebo de Arévalo) and the other Jewish, Rabbi Yosef ibn Ṣaddiq de Arévalo, it searches for affinities and common elements in their attitudes.

The Still Undiscovered Origin of Portolan Charts

1983 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. C. Freiesleben
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Board Ship ◽  
Modern Form

The term ‘portolan chart’ first occurs in Italy in the thirteenth century, not long after this aid to navigation came into general use on board ship. The Italian word portolano, however, can best be translated as ‘pilot book’ or ‘sailing directions’, a different aid to navigation of which one example survives from the fourth century b.c., and pilot books are indeed still published in modern form by all seafaring nations. References by Herodotus in the History make it probable that such documents already existed in his time, and under the name of periplus they continued up to the sixth century a.d.; after which they do not appear again until the golden age of navigation in Italy and Catalonia in the late Middle Ages, apart from some much simpler early medieval types. The portolano or periplus is a description of ports, with information required by the navigator concerning anchorages, dangers threatening landfall and the winds and weather over wider areas. Commercial information was sometimes included, obviously also a matter of interest to the mariner who could read, though it may be doubted if many of them then could.Italian portolan charts exist from almost the same period as the portolani, both of them denoted by the same word compasso, but while the pilot books have their modern successors the charts were only produced up to the beginning of the seventeenth century and are not really the forerunners of the modern sea chart.

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