Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
State Building ◽  
Court System ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church ◽  
Written Sources

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. Like their European neighbors, Russia and the Ukrainian lands recorded incidents of witchcraft and sorcery from the times of the earliest written sources, and along with other Christian cultures, they formally condemned the practice of magic outside of the Church. In synch with their European contemporaries, they saw spikes in formal legal prosecution during the early modern period. In the case of Russia, this was a time of ambitious state building and expansion of the tsarist court system. Formal trials of witches there began as a minute trickle in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when they were already well underway or even inching toward an end in parts of Western Europe. Peaking in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, Russian and Ukrainian trials abated only during the 1770s but did not cease altogether until the mid-nineteenth century. Witchcraft was energetically prosecuted in Russia and Ukraine after the entire notion of magic had fallen into disrepute (or even become laughable) among most members of the educated classes in Western areas.

scholarly journals Arheološki nalazi dekorativno-funkcionalnih elemenata obuće iz kasnoga srednjeg vijeka u Kaštelima

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonči Burić
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Church

Late medieval graves in the Kaštela region have been found to contain, in addition to jewelry, decorative-functional elements of clothing and footwear, termed Gothic according to the stylistic period then in fashion. These are finds from graves that were then on the territory of the commune districts of Split and Trogir. Finds are taken into consideration here that belong to remains of footwear, which so far in Croatia have not even been recognized as such, and which can be stratigraphically and typologically placed in the late Middle Ages (14th-15th cent.). These are objects of a utilitarian character that at the same time have clear stylistic traits, and they have been discovered in the past two decades during systematic excavation of medieval cemeteries in Kaštela. These are large parish cemeteries that grew up around early medieval churches; the cemetery around the church of St. George of Putalj and the cemetery around the church of St. George of Radun. The Putalj cemetery was the graveyard for the inhabitants of medieval Sućurac for more than four centuries (12th-16th cent.), and the Radun cemetery belonged to part of the village of Radun and had an even longer continuity of burial (11th-16th cent.). The first examples were found at these sites, some of them in situ, which enabled a more precise functional determination of them through stylistic-typological parallels and also among dislocated finds in graves with multiple burials, as well as parallels at cemeteries in neighboring regions in central Dalmatia. Finds to the present of shoe buckles can be classified to two typological variants (Pl. I:1-3), one of them called the Radun type according to the eponymous site (Pl. I:1, 3). They are all chronologically coherent and belong to those strata of the cemeteries that are dated according to determined parameters (stratigraphy, typology of the finds) to the 14th and beginning of the 15th centuries, when the Gothic style in art was already completely developed. They can thus be attributed as artistic craft products of the artisan workshops in Split and Trogir at that time, which were distributed throughout the area of the urban districts of those communes. Finds of functionally identical objects have been recorded on the territory of Roman Salona and its broader vicinity, but in the period of late antiquity, while in the early modern period (16th-18th cent.) finds of iron hobnails for shoes or boots have been registered at a large number of sites in the hinterland of central Dalmatia. In addition to the rare and generalized tiny depictions of shoe buckles in the artistic sources of the Gothic and Renaissance (paintings, frescoes, sculptures) in Western Europe, references to them can also be found in written sources. One notarial document from the 16th century in Zadar mentions shoe buckles under the term fiube da scarpe. The investigation of this segment of material culture is just beginning, and new data can be expected to be discovered in documents and works of art, and above all in new archaeological finds of buckles for footwear, which will considerably improve our knowledge of this interesting attire detail from the Gothic and Renaissance periods.

Pietists and Kibbitzers

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-134
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Hasidei Ashkenaz

This chapter offers a reply to the criticism on the essay presented in the previous chapter. It focuses on Edward Fram's article, 'German Pietism and Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Polish Rabbinic Culture'. Fram's article shows that German Pietism as a radical religious and social movement was no more influential in Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it had been in medieval western Europe. In retrospect, it appears that it could hardly have been otherwise. The standard Sefer Ḥasidim, first published, as noted by Fram, in Bologna (1538) and quickly republished in Basel (1580) and Kraków (1581), is a compound work, opening with the conventional pietism of the first 152 sections and continuing with the radical one of the German Pietists. For every passage of radical pietism there is a counter-passage of the conventional sort, the result being that no one could infer from the work any coherent religious position. And, as Fram points out, Polish ethicists and thinkers were singularly uninclined to the distinctive doctrines of German Pietism and never reproduced those passages that expressed the idiosyncratic agenda of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. His conclusions simply extend those of the author about the Middle Ages to eastern Europe in the early modern period.

The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.

Introduction

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marenbon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Philosophy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Middle Ages

This introductory chapter explains how medieval philosophy has hardly made an appearance before in this series of philosophy lectures, and why the author decided on a theme that brings together thinkers from the Middle Ages and the early modern period. It then briefly summarizes the arguments of the three main chapters and of the responses to them.

The Long Seventeenth Century in Latin America

Itinerario ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Antonio Annino
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
Linear Time ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Times ◽  
Conceptual Revolution ◽  
Fernand Braudel

During the last thirty years, the nature of historical chronology has changed drastically. Fernand Braudel was among the first to show that historical time is neither uniform nor linear, but rather multiple, irregular and socially determined. However, Braudel and his followers have merely carried to an extreme a conceptual revolution already initiated by Marc Bloch in the 1920s. In his studies on the Middle Ages, Bloch identified several time scales: the linear time of Christian history, the circular time of nature and liturgy, the times of the peasant, the townsman and the merchant, and so on. In short, historical time has been transformed in such a way as to prompt a new search for direction and order in historical studies. The new concept of different and irregular time scales forces us to continually redefine the duration of certain phenomena in order to understand them. Chronologies no longer have the same enduring character that provides a definite and reassuring order for the past, as positivism and historicism had claimed to do. In order to be useful at all, chronologies have to be diverse and indicate dates demarcating durations, if only because it is now a generally accepted fact that the time scales of collective mentalities are not the same as those of the economy, politics, or demography.

The Reformation and Early Modern Periods

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-34
Author(s):  
Katrina Jennie-Lou Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Christmas Trees ◽  
Radical Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Catholic Churches

From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, Christians in Western Europe and North America celebrated Christmas in a variety of ways. Some of the practices or elements of celebration are familiar as they are still a part of many Christmas celebrations today, such as gift-giving, hospitality, feasting, singing, and decorating with greenery and Christmas trees. Other aspects of Christmas revelry were reduced during this period, as reformers in both the Protestant and Catholic Churches worked to rid the holiday of some of its excessive forms of festivity, such as misrule, social inversion, or superstitious practices. While in some areas, namely Scotland, England, and New England, radical reformers, including the Puritans, did away with Christmas festivities in the late-sixteenth and early- to mid-seventeenth centuries, these legal strictures were difficult to enforce and were not long-lasting. Instead, in both Protestant and Catholic countries, Christmas celebrations continued, though they often changed from what they had been in the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century, traditions such as Christmas carols, Christmas trees, Nativity scenes, and Saint Nicholas iconography had been established that were taken up and popularized on a wider scale, but claims that those traditions were not invented until the nineteenth century are often rather overstated. Instead, many of these traditions grew and blossomed throughout the early modern period, sometimes despite radical Reformation attempts to get rid of Christmas, sometimes because of reforms in its celebration.

The Importance of Theology for Church and Society

1973 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-270
Author(s):  
Jan Milič Lochman
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Positive Answer ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church

The times seem to have passed when one could give without JL hesitation a positive answer to the question concerning the meaning of theology for church and society. The traditionally privileged status of theology in European culture had become problematical. In Eastern Europe this has occurred in a direct and frontal ideologically intensified way. However, in Western Europe it has been rather indirect and concealed, but of perhaps even greater consequence in light of the discrepancy between the still existing privileges of ecclesiastical institutions and the in reality largely secularised cultural climate. For many contemporaries theology has become a curious, if not dubious, matter. One is somewhat justified in speaking of the ‘end ofthe protected season for theologians’.But is this ‘end of the protected season’ simply to be identified with the ‘end of theology’? Some tend to this conclusion—even among theologians. I would reject this conclusion, however, and not as the result of a dogmatic prejudice, but out of the personally felt and ecumenically reflected experience of an Eastern European theologian. The hour when the church and its theology lost some of their privileges has proved in no way to be the end, but rather the beginning of a new, certainly narrow, but more credible path, which in the long run might be perhaps even more efficient in view of our role in church and society. We should not overlook this experience—it is valid, mutatis mutandis, also for other situations. The end of the ‘protected season’ need not be only troublesome, but can at the same time be an opportunity: an opportunity for a new credibility.

scholarly journals Christian Mangup: The Modern Source Base and the Main Stages of Its History

2021 ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
Valery E. Naumenko ◽  
Aleksandr G. Gertsen ◽  
Darya V. Iozhitsa
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Entire Period ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Church Building ◽  
History Of ◽  
Available Information ◽  
The Church

Throughout the entire period of the Middle Ages, the settlement of Mangup was one of the most important ideological centres for the spread of Christianity in the south-western Crimea. From the creation of the independent Gothic bishopric on, it housed the residence and the cathedral church of the hierarchs of Crimean Gothia. This is evidenced by numerous churches and monasteries discovered by many-year-long excavations of the site (27 in total). This paper is the first in the scholarship attempt of systematization of all available information from the sources related to the Christian history of the castle of Mangup, written, epigraphic, archaeological, and so on. Particular attention has been paid to the results of modern excavations of the church archaeology monuments at the settlement in question, carried out systematically in 2012–2021. They formed the basis for the reconstruction of the main stages of church building and the most important periods in the history of the local Christian community. Generally, it covers a wide period from the mid-sixth century, when a big basilica featuring the nave and two aisles, the future cathedral of the Gothic bishopric (metropolia), was built at Mangup along with the large Byzantine castle, and finished in the early seventeenth century. The construction and functioning of most part of known churches and monasteries of the castle of Mangup dates to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when this site finally developed into a large mediaeval city, the capital of the principality of Theodoro in the south-western Crimea.

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.

The Crisis of Episcopal Authority During the Reign of Elizabeth I

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger B. Manning
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Spiritual Leadership ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
The Church ◽  
And Training ◽  
Episcopal Authority

The theory behind the Henrician religious settlement was that certain papal and episcopal powers of jurisdiction were vested in the Crown by parliamentary enactments because the Pope and the English bishops had failed to reform abuses in the Church. In the absence of an alternative administrative system, the bishops continued to govern the Church as agents of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy. Although some episcopal powers of jurisdiction were returned to the Elizabethan bishops, the actual authority allowed them did not suffice to effect a reformation or to enforce conformity to the established church. In order to resolve this crisis of episcopal authority the seventeenth-century prelates and divines elaborated theories of divine-right episcopacy, but the Elizabethan bishops found it more expedient to fall back upon extraordinary grants of royal authority contained in ecclesiastical commissions.IThe Henrician and Edwardian alienations of episcopal jurisdiction are spectacular and dramatic, yet the erosion of episcopal authority began long before the Henrician Reformation. For over two centuries English bishops had been primarily royal servants. They were, by temperament and training canonists and diplomats rather than pastors; like the Renaissance popes they had grown accustomed to compromise rather than providing spiritual leadership. Not only in England, but throughout Western Europe, bishops rarely sat as judges in their own courts. Much of their authority had been permanently delegated to commissaries, who tended to become independent agents. They were, moreover, hard put to resist encroachments upon their ordinary authority by archdeacons and cathedral chapters, while ecclesiastical corporations devoted considerable effort to securing exemption from episcopal visitations.

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