Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Accounting, and the Genesis of the State Archive in Early Modern France

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Soll
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Financial Management ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Modern France ◽  
State Archives ◽  
Essential Contribution ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Double Entry ◽  
Modern Era

This study shows how, between 1661 and 1683, the culture of double-entry, mercantile accounting was central to Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s massive project of royal archive building in ancient régime France. Scholars have tended to see state archives as the products of learned and legal culture. The case of Colbert demonstrates that mercantile culture and commerce also made an essential contribution to archival development in the early modern period, as well as laying the foundation for state sponsored learning, science, industry, art, building, and administration. It illustrates how economic interest and financial management drove archive formation and organisation in the early modern era, correcting the dominant emphasis on techniques derived from scholarship.

scholarly journals A Fantastic Frenzy of Consumption in Early Modern France

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Llewellyn
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Contemporary Western Society

The enthusiastic (even excessive) consumerism of contemporary western society has its roots, according to some, in the expansion of the consumption of goods in Renaissance Europe. Early modern men and women were ardent, even “passionate” consumers. Such self-indulgence was regarded as decadent and socially perilous; religious and other moral authorities of the era sought to eradicate or at least control these sins of excess. My study examines criticism of “crimes of consumption” in both serious and satirical French literature of the early modern era, including such pamphlets as Frenaizie fantastique Françoise Sur la Nouvelle Mode des Nouveaux Courtisans bottez de ce temps and Pasquil de la Cour pour apprendre à discourir et s’habiller à la mode. Scrutiny of these texts suggest that women’s “crimes of consumption” tended to reveal who they “really were”—bad women, sinful women, dangerous women who led men into sin. Men’s crimes of passionate consumption sometimes also revealed their sinful selves—some were seen as gluttons, for example. But men’s consumption was also, at times, condemned as an attempt to appear to be what they were not; their display of acquired objects revealed an effort to claim membership in a social class to which they did not belong. Le consumérisme enthousiaste (et même démesuré) de la société occidentale contemporaine a ses racines, d’après certains, dans l’expansion de la consommation de biens en Europe pendant la Renaissance. Dès les débuts de la modernité, hommes et femmes furent des consommateurs ardents, voire « passionnés ». S’adonner au plaisir d’acquérir était sévèrement condamné par les théologiens et les moralistes. Cet article examine la critique de ces passions excessives dans la littérature morale et satirique de l’époque, incluant les pamphlets tels que Frenaizie fantastique Françoise Sur la Nouvelle Mode des Nouveaux Courtisans bottez de ce temps et Pasquil de la Cour pour apprendre à discourir et s’habiller à la mode. Une analyse approfondie de ces textes montre combien la question du gender influe sur l’interprétation de ces passions : la femme coupable de tels excès y est vue mauvaise, pécheresse, dangereuse pour l’homme ; l’homme, quant à lui, est condamné pour dissimuler et vouloir paraître autre que ce qu’il est, entendre d’une autre classe que celle à laquelle il appartient.

scholarly journals Early Modern Midwives: Carving a Path in the Male-Dominated Field of Medicine

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 9-28
Author(s):  
Rachel Bedic
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medical Field ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

The field of Medicine in the early Modern period was primarily male-dominated. Women in the Early Modern era were faced with numerous challenges when pursuing a career in the medical field, due to not only their gender, but also the limitations they faced when obtaining formalized medical training. Due to their natural knowledge, women in the Early Modern period were able to thrive in the medical field as midwives despite having their authority constantly undermined by male authorities such as the Church and male physicians. Although female midwives lacked the formal education their male contemporaries received, their informal natural knowledge of the female body helped them thrive in a male-dominated field of medicine.GRADE RECEIVED: 85%PROFESSOR: Dr. Rose

scholarly journals THE VISION OF THE CHILDHOOD IN THE CODES OF THE URBAN LAW IN THE RZECZPOSPOLITA IN XVI - EARLY XVII CENTURY

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Tetiana Hoshko
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Middle Ages

As the people of the Middle Ages thought in symbolic categories, this symbolism was imposed on the notion of human life. In Europe, it had a distinct Christian colouration and was associated with the symbolism of numbers. This was reflected as well in the idea of the stages of human life, the number of which ranged from three to seven. Childhood, which was the first in this scheme, lasted from birth to adolescence, that is until reaching puberty. For the medieval people who thought concretely, just tangible things were important. It is not surprising, therefore, that the notion of attaining adulthood was not so much based on the formal number of years as on the real external physiological features. However, over time, such a ‘visual’ determination of the age of the personrecedes into the background.Childhood has been linked to a guardianship that has received much attention in the city law codes of the early modern period. Anyone who could not manage their lives and property could count on it.In the Middle Ages, childhood had no place, and until the 12th century, children were hardly depicted. The appearance of the post-mortem images of children in the 16th century was evidence of a change in the emotional attitude to them. This change was reflected in the city law codes of the late 16th century. They protected the right of a child to life and property, even of the unborn or born but not survived child. The born and baptized child was already a complete person with soul and likeness of God.The German town law protected children from too severe punishment, first of all from execution. It was believed that before reaching a certain age the children were unconscious creatures, so they could not deliberately commit crimes. And punishment to death was unacceptable for unconscious wrongdoing. The city law codes in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 16th and early 17th centuries reflected the evolution of ideas about childhood from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era. Although they refer to the legal norms of previous epochs, they contain many provisions which appeared under the influence of Humanism and the Reformation. As a result of deeper Christianization of morality at the turn of the Middle Ages and modern era, a new attitude to childhood appears, as to a special and important stage in human life. Therefore, as of the 16th century, there were special articles about children in legal codes. The city law begins to protect the interests of children by considering various aspects, in particular, the rights of the unborn but conceived child, of the children of ‘righteous bed’, orphans, etc., the children’s property interests, their lives and future.

Présence d’esprit in Action in Seventeenth-Century France

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-190
Author(s):  
Emma Gilby
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Changing Attitudes

This chapter contributes to the story of how and where criticism functions in early modern France by analysing descriptions of présence d’esprit or ‘presence of mind’, which emerge in the mid-1650s as a way of signalling quick thinking. Présence d’esprit is clearly associated with the salons, where it is required for participation in literary and linguistic games, and emerges simultaneously at a crucial juncture in Blaise Pascal’s Lettres provinciales (1656–7), where it is used to shine a satirical light on the casuistry of the Jesuits. In both contexts, the attribution of présence d’esprit can be both negatively and positively accented. It crystallizes anxiety about the privileging of spontaneity and instinct over careful curation and the work of scholarship. These ambivalent views, mirroring changing attitudes to ‘la critique’, also demonstrate the complex interweave of poetics, rhetoric, and theology in the early modern period, and the places they share.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-166
Author(s):  
John-Mark Philo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

The conclusion draws together the main themes and concerns of the book: namely how the translation and application of Livy in Tudor England was intricately connected to the most pressing political and cultural concerns of the day. So too it reflects on Livy’s impact on the vernacular literatures of the period, including William Painter’s novellas and Shakespeare’s poetry and prose. It also underlines the fact that, rather than a diminishing interest in Livy, the seventeenth century saw the historian at the heart of the constitutional debates underpinning the English Civil War. The translation of Livy in the early-modern period, as the conclusion underlines, functioned not only as a reflection of the political concerns of the moment, but also as an active attempt to reshape, refashion, and urge forward those concerns. Though Livy’s part in the Classical Reception of the early-modern era is sometimes underplayed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Livy’s contribution to the culture and politics of sixteenth-, and indeed seventeenth-, century England.

Miscellaneous Order

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus Vine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Textual Form ◽  
Archival Practices ◽  
Modern Era

This book examines one of the most pervasive, but also perplexing, textual phenomena of the early modern world: the manuscript miscellany. Faced with serial problems of definition, categorization, and (often conflicting) terminology, modern scholars have tended to dismiss the miscellany as disorganized and chaotic. Miscellaneous Order radically challenges that view by uncovering the various forms of organization and order previously hidden in early modern manuscript books. Drawing on original literary and historical research, and examining both the materiality of early modern manuscripts and their contents, this book sheds new light on the transcriptive and archival practices of early modern Britain, as well as on the broader intellectual context of manuscript culture and its scholarly afterlives. Based on extensive archival research, and interdisciplinary in both subject and matter, it focuses on the myriad kinds of miscellaneous manuscript compiled and produced in the early modern era. Showing that the miscellany was essential to the organization of knowledge across a range of genres and disciplines, from poetry to science, and from recipe books to accounts, Miscellaneous Order proposes a new model for understanding the proliferation of manuscript material in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By restoring attention to ‘miscellaneous order’ in this way, it shows that we have fundamentally misunderstood how many early modern men and women read, wrote, and thought. Rather than a textual form characterized by an absence of order, the miscellany, it argues, operated as an epistemically and aesthetically productive system throughout the early modern period.

The Heavens Inscribed: the instrumental poetry of the Virgin in early modern France

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL WINTROUB
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Specialized Knowledge ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Modern France ◽  
The Status ◽  
Practical Mathematics

AbstractThe expert in the early modern period was frequently looked upon with suspicion. Though expertise was associated with specialized knowledge and skill, it was also associated with cunning, deception and social climbing. Indeed, such knowledge threatened well-defined and time-honoured social and disciplinary boundaries. This was certainly the case with practical mathematics, which was considered by many to be an inferior grade of knowledge, especially when compared with natural philosophy and theology. This spawned numerous attempts to elevate the status of practical mathematics and to lend legitimacy to its practitioners. This article focuses on one such attempt, that of an early sixteenth-century French cosmographer–explorer–poet named Pierre Crignon. Crignon participated in voyages of exploration and was renowned as a cosmographer and navigator, but his contemporaries perhaps best knew him as a poet. The paper examines how Crignon attempted to bring together and legitimate the disparate forms of his expertise as a navigator, cosmographer, humanist poet and theologian through the multivalent medium of his poetry, and in particular through a poem comparing the Virgin Mary to the astrolabe.

El discurso anti-islámico castellano: de disputa teológica a cimiento del proyecto universalista carolino (1460–1530)

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-424
Author(s):  
Constanza Cavallero
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
European History ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Christian Discourse

Abstract From a comparative perspective, I will study two anti-Islamic Castilian writings produced during the period of the transition between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era: Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei (1460) and Gonzalo de Arredondo’s Castillo inexpugnable defensorio de la fe (1528). This study compares the terms in which each of these works addresses (a) the confrontation with Islam, (b) dissensions within Christianity, and (c) the king’s role in the midst of those conflicts. The contrastive approach to these analogous works, which were written almost seven decades apart, will allow an analysis of two different articulations of anti-Saracen Christian discourse in Spain, both before and after some key milestones in European history. These different perceptions of Islam had an impact on the conception of Christianity and Europe itself at the very beginning of the early modern period.

scholarly journals Reindeer Pastoralism

2021 ◽  
pp. 157-194
Author(s):  
Jesper Larsson ◽  
Eva-Lotta Päiviö Sjaunja
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Property ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Common Pool Resources ◽  
Reindeer Husbandry ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Grazing Lands ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Property Regime

AbstractThe chapter focuses on intensive reindeer husbandry or reindeer pastoralism, which was a tenure system that emerged in the early modern period. Reindeer pastoralism and grazing are deeply interconnected and we therefore illuminate the ecological settings for reindeer grazing. A large part of the debate about governing common-pool resources has dealt with pastoralists and their grazing lands. Important features of reindeer pastoralism are described, including a discussion about how the number of tame reindeer developed in early modern era. The chapter ends with a portrayal of and a discussion about individual households’ rights to use certain areas for grazing, chiefly based on descriptions of contemporary court rulings from the local court in Jokkmokk. We show how a common-property regime evolved.

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