scholarly journals Literary Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, 1555-1720

These essays discuss approaches to early modern literature in central Europe, focusing on four pivotal areas: connections between humanism and the new scientific thought the relationship of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature to ancient and Renaissance European traditions the social and political context of early modern writing and the poets' self-consciousness about their work. As a whole, the volume argues that early modern writing in central Europe should not be viewed solely as literature but as the textual product of specific social, political, educational, religious, and economic circumstances. The contributors are Judith P. Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Thomas W. Best, Dieter Breuer, Barton W. Browning, Gerald Gillespie, Anthony Grafton, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Uwe-K. Ketelsen, Joseph Leighton, Ulrich Maché, Michael M. Metzger, James A. Parente, Jr., Richard Erich Schade, George C. Schoolfield, Peter Skrine, and Ferdinand van Ingen.

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Stefan Hanß

AbstractThis article presents new evidence on the authorship and readership of the earliest printed Ottoman language materials that details the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire actively engaged in learning Ottoman. Such findings open up a new field of inquiry evaluating the Ottoman impact on the German-speaking lands reaching beyond the so-called “Turkish menace.” Presenting the variety of Ottoman language students, teachers, and materials in central Europe, as well as their connections with the oral world(s) of linguistic fieldwork in the Habsburg-Ottoman contact zone, this article argues that Ottoman language learning is an important but thus far neglected element in understanding the cultural and intellectual landscape of early modern central Europe. What may appear to be experiments with linguistic riddles on first glimpse was in fact grounded in deep enthusiasm and fascination for Ottoman language learning shared among a community of Protestant semi-scholarly aficionados.


Author(s):  
Bernd Mertens

Abstract The succession legislation of the Holy Roman Empire - On the understanding of the sources of law in early modern times. Though the succession legislation of the Holy Roman Empire 1498−1529 affected only a small part of private law, it is excellently suited to examine the understanding of the sources of law in early modern times, the interaction between the imperial and territorial legislators, imperial and territorial courts as well as the relationship of imperial law and common law to particular law and customary law. A closer look is also given to the context of this succession legislation, the institutions involved and the final consequences.


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.


2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EDWARDS

The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.


Author(s):  
Matthew C. Augustine

The argument of this book follows two main themes: the first has to do with periodicity; the second with politics, especially as a framework within which to view seventeenth-century literature. This chapter maps the disciplinary paradigms which have long produced a view of the seventeenth century saturated by high-definition contrasts: between the earlier and later Stuart periods, but also between factions and ideologies. It then asks what it would look like to write the history of seventeenth-century literature anew, to tell a story about imaginative and polemical writing in this age that remained open to accident and unevenness, to contradiction and uncertainty. Giving illustrative consideration to John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, the chapter begins to suggest some new ways of conceiving how these writers might relate to one other and to the politics and aesthetics of a long seventeenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Hellerstedt

This article explores the problem of innate, natural talent vs acquired skill, knowledge, and virtue in dissertations from Uppsala University around 1680. These texts have never before been studied. It discusses questions such as: how did Swedish academics of the period conceive the relationship between ingenium (innate potential) and (acquired) virtue or knowledge? Which teaching methods did they advocate? How do the texts relate to developments in seventeenth century society? The study uses a combination of contextual analysis and a ‘history of concepts’ approach to answer these questions. The analysis reveals that the Swedish dissertations respond to contemporary debates (involving well-known authorities such as Vives, Huarte, Erasmus, and Comenius) and that they were affected by the immediate context: the growth of the early modern state and the social mobility which accompanied that growth. Education is described in Renaissance humanist terms, with a clear affinity to moral philosophical concepts such as virtue and habituation. The learning process described is analogous to the acquisition of moral virtue and education itself is to a large extent legitimated with reference to moral socialization. The educational ideas put forward balance discipline and playfulness, and represent a relatively democratic view of the distribution of human capabilities, showing a great trust in the potential of education. However, there is also a distinct stress on medical explanations of differences in individual talent.


Author(s):  
David Sorkin

This chapter details how the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire constituted the central European region of emancipation. Some historians would contend that the Holy Roman Empire's “archaic, traditionalist constitution created a society that tolerated religious and ethnic differences to a far greater degree than the more centralized states of Western Europe”; in other words, “early modern central Europe was a pluralistic, complex society more tolerant of differences than England, France or Spain.” Whether this observation is accurate or not, it concerns toleration, not parity. Jews in the Holy Roman Empire fell behind Jews to the east and west in their political status. They gained neither collective corporate privileges nor the civic rights of emerging civil societies. To be sure, their juridical equality in the courts of the Holy Roman Empire marked a significant elevation in status. The Court Jews' extensive individual privileges were also an elevation in status, yet only for a miniscule elite. In sum, Jews in the Holy Roman Empire did not keep pace with their brethren east and west, thus making the transition to emancipation, when it came, a painful rupture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tayra M. C. Lanuza-Navarro

Astrology, its legitimacy, and the limits of its acceptable practice were debated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Many of the related arguments were mediated by the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the responses to it. Acknowledging the complexities of the relationship between astrological ideas and Christian teachings, this paper focuses on the Catholic debates by specifically considering the decisions about astrology taken by the Spanish Inquisition. The trials of astrologers are examined with the aim of understanding the role of experts in astrology in early modern Spain. This study brings into view the specific nature of the debate on astrology in Spain, the consequences of the actions of the Inquisition and the social control it exerted. The historical events discussed comprise a particular case and also mirror the general debates about astrology taking place in early modern Europe. The experts’ opinions expressed in trials and in reports about the discipline received by the Inquisition reveal two key traits of the debate: the dispute about who had the authority to decide on the legitimacy of astrology and the disagreement about what constituted natural and judicial astrological practices. These led to different opinions about what was to be done with each defendant and about what content in their books ought to be forbidden.


1992 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 135-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Luft

This Essay Attempts to contribute to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of Central Europe by making explicit a variety of themes that haunt discourse about Austrian culture and by making some suggestions about periodizing the relationship between Austria and German culture. I originally developed these thoughts on Austria as a region of German culture for a conference in 1983 at the Center for Austrian Studies on regions and regionalism in Austria. Although the political institutions of Central Europe have undergone a revolution since then, the question of Austria's relationship to German culture still holds its importance for the historian-and for contemporary Austrians as well. The German culture I have in mind here is not thekleindeutschnational culture of Bismarck's Reich, but rather the realm that was once constituted by the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. This geographical space in Central Europe suggests a more ideal realm of the spirit, for which language is our best point of reference and which corresponds to no merely temporal state.


1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Retha M. Warnicke

The elaborate pageantry and festivities of grand public processions have proven to be of great interest to historians writing on late medieval and early modern Europe. The more limited ceremonies and protocol at court have attracted somewhat less attention, although on occasion they have been adopted as evidence of a monarch's personal feelings about his attendants and family members. A study of royal protocol and the social and political framework in which rulers fulfilled their roles as sovereigns is timely, for it will surely lead to a new and fuller understanding of how monarchs's public roles, such as those of the Tudors, related to their private motivations.Greeting ceremonies, which were one aspect of the “law of hospitality,” require special attention, because they offer insights into the interactions of people of varying status who were of fundamental importance to the hierarchical communities of Europe. As Esther Goody points out, “Greeting becomes a mode of entering upon or manipulating a relationship in order to achieve a specific result.” How monarchs privately greeted their brides, the topic of this essay, not only offers insights into the complexity of the relationship of individuals who were wed by proxy before they had become acquainted, but also offers evidence of how the greeting ritual performed by monarchs differed from that enacted by their royal and noble relatives.


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