scholarly journals Fra eneveldets scene mot representative forsamlinger: visitasen som offentlig arena i Norge, ca. 1750–1850

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 183-211
Author(s):  
Trond Bjerkås

From the Stage of State Power to Representative Assembly?: The Visitation as a Public Arena, 1750–1850In the eighteenth century, the bishops’ visitations to dioceses constituted an important part of the control apparatus of the Church and the absolutist state. The article examines visitations in Norway in terms of public arenas, where the common people interacted with Church officials. During the period 1750 to 1850, the visitations were gradually transformed from arenas in which the state manifested its power towards a largely undifferentiated populace, to meeting places that resembled representative assemblies with both clerical and common lay members. Thus, it adapted to new forms of public participation established by the reforms of national and local government in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the process amounted to an elitization, because a few representatives replaced of the congregation as a whole. It is also argued that parish churches in the eighteenth century functioned as general public forums with a number of other functions in addition to worship, such as being places of trade and festivities. This seems to change in the nineteenth century, when churches became more exclusively religious arenas. The transition can be seen in the context of new forms of participation in Church matters. Many clerics wanted greater participation by sections of the commoners, in order to strengthen control in moral and religious matters.

Antiquity ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 4 (15) ◽  
pp. 347-351
Author(s):  
Edward A. Martin

A Great antiquity has been claimed for dew-ponds, or rather for those ponds which have passed as such. They are found on the higher parts of the chalk downs of Southern England, and sometimes indeed on their very summits. They first came to be noticed by reason of the fact that in dry weather, when by all reasoning from their exposed position they ought quickly to dry up, they are the very ponds that still carry water, whereas other ponds on the lands below, which are fed by runnels and other drainage, are the earliest to suffer from drought. This is a very real distinction, for the old dewponds, to call them by their better-known name, have no drainage beyond the collecting area of their own banks. That observant student of natural history, Gilbert White, was almost the earliest writer to call attention (in the middle of the eighteenth century) to the ponds on the common above Selborne, which, although used for the watering of innumerable cattle and sheep, had never been known in his time to fail. His attempted explanation need not trouble us here, but it is noteworthy that he did not call them by the name of dew-ponds, and this name did not appear until well on into the nineteenth century. Pseudoscientific people gave this name to something which they could not explain and so the mysterious dew-pond was christened. They still give it the same name, although those living in their immediate neighbourhood still know them as mist-ponds or fog-ponds. The worst of it is that the mystery of the dew-ponds is constantly cropping up in print, and it really seems as if the general public does not want to know the truth of the matter. Mystery always appeals to them and I fear that editors do not always desire to deprive their readers of its fascination.


1996 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 283-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Wykes

The Glorious Revolution encouraged Presbyterians to hope for comprehension within the Church of England. The failure of those hopes led them to co-operate more closely with their Congregational brethren. In London the earliest practical outcome of this increased co-operation was the Common Fund, which held its first meeting in June 1690. Controlled by managers drawn from both denominations, the Fund was established to offer financial help to poor ministers, congregations, and students who lived in the provinces. A scheme for uniting the two ministries, the Happy Union, set out in the ‘Heads of Agreement’, was adopted a year later on 6 April 1691, but within months this union had dissolved amidst bitter dissension. In less than four years all the schemes for co-operation between Presbyterians and Congregationals had collapsed in London. Nevertheless, co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents, and even the ideals of the Happy Union, continued in the provinces long after the failure in London. In part this was because the desire for a union between the two denominations was widely held throughout the country; indeed the earliest agreement was made by an Assembly of West Country ministers at Bristol in June 1690, nearly a year before the ‘Heads of Agreement’ were adopted in London. Moreover, in many localities following toleration, Presbyterians and Independents still came together in one meeting as a result of the earlier persecution and because of their loyalty to a particular minister. Where dissent was strong, such as in London and the major towns, separate congregations for Presbyterians and Congregational were likely; but where dissent was weaker, particularly in the countryside, congregations included members from both denominations. In these circumstances, members had to accept a minister who did not necessarily share their own denominational preferences. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century the majority of these joint congregations were to divide, as (in most cases) the smaller body of Congregational supporters withdrew to establish their own meetings. There had, however, been more than twenty years of co-operation in many areas in the period following the collapse of the Happy Union in London, and in a few cases such arrangements even continued until the early nineteenth century. There is evidence from at least two congregations, at Leicester and Chesterfield, of a formal agreement to settle the differences between the two denominations. The Happy Union and its failure in London has been the subject of a number of studies, but by contrast the continuing co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents in the provinces has received little detailed attention.


Author(s):  
Brian Porter

This chapter argues that as recently as the 1880s, Catholicism, as it existed in Poland at the time, was still somewhat resistant to expressions of antisemitism. Catholicism, in other words, was configured in such a way in the late nineteenth century as to make it hard for antisemites to express their views without moving to the very edges of the Catholic framework. Catholicism and antisemitism did overlap at the time, but the common ground was much more confined than it would later become. If one moves forward fifty years, to the 1930s, one sees a different picture: the discursive boundaries of Catholicism in Poland had shifted to such a degree that antisemitism became not only possible, but also difficult to avoid. The upshot of this argument is that Catholicism in Poland is not antisemitic in any sort of essential way, and that religion did not directly generate the forms of hatred that would become so deadly and virulent in the early twentieth century. None the less, Catholicism did become amenable to antisemitism in Poland, so much so that the Church in Poland between the wars was one of the country's leading sources of prejudice and animosity.


Author(s):  
Janet McLean

The authority claims of the administration have undergone radical change with consequences for the shape and content of administrative law. In the seventeenth century, authority was claimed in office, as a means to limit the imposition of the King’s will and to secure the independence of officials, especially the judges. In the eighteenth century, virtue, property, and independence became the basis for office, and the common law sought to enhance such authority through notions of public trust. After the nineteenth-century transition to more centralised and bureaucratic hierarchy, democracy became the new source of authority for the administration, reinforced by the ultra vires doctrine. In each era, the authority claims of the administration have been reflected in the frameworks for judicial supervision. In this way the common law has simultaneously constituted and controlled authority. In the present day we are in the process of rethinking whence administrators derive their legitimate authority and the theoretical foundations of judicial review. Beginning with the authority claims of the administration and framing a juridical response which reflects and tests such claims would be a good place to start.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry

In the sixteenth century, Spaniards forcibly resettled Andeans into planned towns called reducciones. Andeans adapted the political and religious institutions of the new towns, the cabildo (town council) and the cofradías (confraternities), and made them their own, organizing them by the Andean social form, the ayllu. Over time, political legitimacy and authority within towns was transferred from traditional native hereditary lords, the caciques, to the common people of the town, who called themselves the común. Although a Spanish word, común took on Andean meaning as it was the word used to translate terms for collective land and the collective people of a town. It became a recognized shorthand for a political philosophy empowering common people. In the late eighteenth-century era of Atlantic Revolutions, the común rose up against its caciques, in an Enlightenment-from-below moment of popular sovereignty.


1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-236
Author(s):  
Peter B. Nockles

‘It is an old theory of ours, that there are very few of the positions assumed by the antagonists of the Catholic church, which may not be turned against each other, with far more effect than they carry against the common adversary whom they all seek to assail. A skilful use of the weapons employed against each other by various sects of Protestantism, in their internecine warfare, would supply one of the most curious, and we will venture to say, one of the most solid and convincing arguments of the truth of the Catholic religion to be found in the whole range of polemical literature’.(Dublin Review, 1855).Anti-Catholicism, represented in the era of the eve of Emancipation by a rich genre of polemical literature focusing on the supposed ‘difficulties of Romanism’, has been the subject of much recent study; notably for the eighteenth century by Colin Haydon, and for the nineteenth, by Walter Amstein, Edward Norman, D. G. Paz, Walter Ralls, F. M. Wallis and John Wolffe. In contrast, English Catholic controversial writing against the Church of England, focusing on what one Catholic writer (in a conscious reversal of the stock Anglican polemical title) called the ‘difficulties of Protestantism’, with notable exceptions such as Sheridan Gilley, Leo Gooch and Brian Carter, 5 has been comparatively neglected for the half century prior to the dawn of the Oxford Movement in 1833.


Slavic Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander M. Martin

It was long accepted throughout the European world that a father's authority over his children should be unchallengeable and that the authority of monarchs and noble lords was absolute because they, too, were “fathers” to their subjects. A profound shift in this thinking occurred during the eighteenth century, however, as increasingly critical attitudes toward paternal authoritarianism subverted the patriarchal ideology that undergirded the old regime. Recent scholarship has even linked the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions to these changing beliefs about the nature of the family. These ideas had a powerful impact among Russia's westernized upper class and drove conservatives to search for a less harshly authoritarian justification for the old regime. Much soul-searching went into their attempt to reconcile autocracy and serfdom with the respect for human dignity and the delicate moral sensibilité that were increasingly expected of any cultivated European. Slavophilism, which glorified the common people and emphasized the duties of monarch and nobility, represented one outcome of this quest. The anguished process by which proto-Slavophile beliefs evolved out of the noble culture of the Catherinian age is strikingly apparent in the turbulent biography of the poet, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka.


1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl H. E. Zangerl

“The revolution is made,” the Duke of Wellington declared in 1833, “that is to say power is transferred from one class in society, the gentlemen of England professing the faith of the Church of England, to another class of society, the shopkeepers being dissenters from the Church, many of them being Socinians, others atheists.” Wellington's political postmortem was, to say the least, premature. The gentlemen of England and Wales continued to prosper, especially in the counties. In fact, most local government historians have argued that the landed classes virtually monopolized the administration of county affairs before 1888 when county government was institutionally restructured by the County Councils Act. The instrument of their control was the county magistracy acting in Quarter and Petty Sessions. K. B. Smellie, expressing a widely-held viewpoint, describes the county magistracy in the nineteenth century as the “rear guard of an agrarian oligarchy,” the “most aristocratic feature of English government.” Yet no one has furnished statistical evidence for this contention on a countrywide basis or for an extended time span. Is the notion of an aristocratic stranglehold over the counties really more impressionistic than substantive? By examining the “Returns of Justices of the Peace” between 1831 and 1887 in the British Parliamentary Papers, a nearly untapped statistical storehouse, it is possible to determine the degree of continuity in the social composition of the county magistracy.Before doing so, it might be helpful to sketch the changing character of the Quarter Sessions.


Rural History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
AUDREY ECCLES

Abstract:Madness has been a social problem from time immemorial. Wealthy lunatics were made royal wards so that their estates would be looked after, and the common law very early admitted madness and idiocy as conditions justifying the exemption of the sufferer from punishments for crime. But the vast majority of lunatics have never been either criminal or wealthy, and many wandered about begging, unwelcome in any settled community. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the law made some attempt to determine a course of action which would protect the public and theoretically also the lunatic. This legislation and its application in practice to protect the public, contain the lunatic, and deal with the nuisance caused by those ‘disordered in their senses’, form the subject of this article. Much has been written about the development of psychiatry, mainly from contemporary medical texts, and about the treatment of lunatics in institutions, chiefly from nineteenth-century sources, but much remains to be discovered from archival sources about the practicalities of dealing with lunatics at parish level, particularly how they were defined as lunatics, who made such decisions, and how they were treated in homes and workhouses.


1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Meng

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous social, political, and economic fermentation. Much of our contemporary civilization was shaped by the forces released during those five decades. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans of great ability and deserved renown had written and were writing of the rights of man and of the citizen. More than ever before in the history of the modern world thought was being given to the lot of the common people. In America, and later in France, Thomas Paine epitomized this liberal intellectual trend in words that have been adopted as classic expressions of the inherent value of the human personality.Unfortunately, the phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism during he nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused the new bourgeois ruling classes to lose sight of the basic human values stressed so emphatically by the eighteenth-century intellectuals.


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