Specialists in Magic

2020 ◽  
pp. 450-464
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Russian North ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Witchcraft Trials ◽  
Religious Courts

This chapter highlights three witchcraft trials in which the sources offer compelling evidence that the accused parties actually practiced some kind of magical work: healing and cursing; protecting crops by untying knots in grain; and identifying criminals through divination. These three instances of magical practitioners at work come from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, respectively: two are from the Ukrainian region, and one is from the Russian North. They were heard in a range of secular and religious courts and by representatives of local and central administrations. Across the three, similar issues surface. The authorities and the accused in their statements expressed concern about whether or not the practitioners accepted payment for the work and about how they learned or received their skills. In each case, there remains little question that the accused did practice some form of magic and did so with enough frequency and publicity to qualify as “professionals” (in a loose sense of the word), whether or not they identified themselves as witches. Whether they deserved the torture and harsh punishments they often received, at least into the mid-eighteenth century, is, of course, a very different kind of question.

Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Criminal Trial ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Defense Counsel ◽  
Trial Procedure ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Right

My subject is the story of the entry of lawyers into the English criminal courts and their impact on trial procedure. Until the eighteenth century lawyers played little part in the trial of felonies in England—in the trial, that is, of those accused of the most serious offenses, including murder, rape, arson, robbery, and virtually all forms of theft. Indeed, the defendants in such cases were prohibited at common law from engaging lawyers to act for them in court. In the case of less-serious crimes—misdemeanors—defendants were allowed counsel; and those accused of high treason, the most serious offense of all, were granted the right to make their defense by counsel in 1696. But not in felony. Accused felons might seek a lawyer's advice on points of law, but if they wanted to question the prosecution evidence or to put forward a defense, they had to do that on their own behalf. The victim of a felony (who most often acted as the prosecutor in a system that depended fundamentally on private prosecution) was free to hire a lawyer to manage the presentation of his or her case. But in fact few did so. The judges were generally the only participants in felony trials with professional training. They dominated the courtroom and orchestrated the brief confrontation between the victim and the accused that was at the heart of the trial.

Post-Byzantine hermeneiai zographikes in the eighteenth century and their dissemination in the Balkans during the nineteenth century

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Moutafov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters’ manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters’ manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of ‘Europeanization'.

Epic Transposed

2018 ◽  
pp. 476-492
Author(s):  
Fiona Macintosh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Spoken Drama ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The vexed problem of epic, equally detectable in the British and French theatrical traditions from the eighteenth century onwards, explains why epic had no place on the ‘tragic’ stage of the Comédie-Française during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Epic, it seems, could either be ‘low’ (so confined to the Théâtre Italien) or transported to the hyperreality of the operatic/ballet stages. This chapter examines one danced version, Gardel’s revolutionary ballet pantomime Télémaque dans l’île de Calypso (1790) in order to probe the fate of epic on the eighteenth-century stage. In the wake of the institutional divisions of the theatrical arts at the end of the seventeenth century, serious ‘spoken’ drama was restricted to a narrowly conceived ‘reality’ that precluded the ‘hyperreality’ of epic; and yet, paradoxically and chillingly, it was this ‘hyperreality’ that was increasingly providing a better reflection of the revolutionary actualities that were unfolding outside the theatre.

Silence in the Woods

Sibirica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Art Leete
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Western Siberia ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
The North ◽  
Russian North ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Colonial Encounter

This article explores the ethnographic, philosophical, and political background of the image of the northern peoples as “silent,” by analyzing the diachronic perspective descriptions of the Finno-Ugric peoples of the north who inhabit Western Siberia and the Russian North from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Early modern ethnographies treated the Siberian peoples as aggressive, although from the end of the eighteenth century this image was reassessed and a different view of the silent character of the indigenous people was introduced in scholarly literature. Silent conduct was assessed as an archaic quality of the Finno-Ugric temperament, or as the result of the colonial encounter. This manifestation of silence was the most distinctive marker of the modern transformations of power and knowledge in the arena of Siberian studies.

The Missing Rabbis of Eastern Europe

2010 ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ashkenazi Jewish ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
East European ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter examines the east European rabbinate. The rabbinate in modern eastern Europe was not significantly different from the rabbinate in other Ashkenazi Jewish communities up to the eighteenth century. In the following years, many aspects of rabbinical authority changed in almost every country of Europe. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of developments altered the conditions of rabbinic authority in eastern Europe in unique ways, and also made the selection of communal rabbis more complex than previously. Many of these changes contributed to a weakening of the power and status of the rabbinate — a power and status that were not exceptionally strong to start with. By the end of the nineteenth century, the patterns of the east European rabbinate were far from the traditional Ashkenazi model because the community, as a body that collected taxes and had internal authority, had ceased to exist.

Discursive (re)construction of “witchcraft” as a community and “witch” as an identity in the eighteenth-century Hungarian witchcraft trial records

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-234
Author(s):  
Márton Petykó
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
General Context ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Mental Constructs ◽  
Witchcraft Trials

Abstract This paper provides a qualitative historical (socio)pragmatic analysis of records of three eighteenth-century Hungarian witchcraft trials using a socio-cognitive model of discursive community and identity construction. I aim to describe how the general social and legal context of witchcraft became situated and interpreted in the actual witchcraft trial records from the delegated officials’ perspective. I argue that in the analysed records, the officials did not simply apply a codified definition of “witchcraft”, but they discursively (re)constructed “witchcraft” as a community and “witch” as the defendants’ identity. Thus, from the officials’ perspective, discursive community and identity construction established a relationship between the general context of witchcraft and the actual witchcraft trials. In order to reconstruct this process, I investigate the linguistic constructs by which the delegated officials actively created “witchcraft” and the defendants’ “witch” identity as mental constructs.

scholarly journals The Integration of Grain Markets in the Eighteenth Century: Early Rise of Globalization in the West

2012 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-707 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAFAEL DOBADO-GONZÁLEZ ◽  
ALFREDO GARCÍA-HIERNAUX ◽  
DAVID E. GUERRERO
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Commodity Markets ◽  
The West ◽  
Relative Prices ◽  
Grain Markets ◽  
Innovative Methodology ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Early Rise ◽  
Over Time

Globalization, if defined as the integration of international commodity markets, started in the eighteenth century and progressed gradually and with some setbacks into the nineteenth century, instead of suddenly appearing at some point after the 1820s. We use grain prices in Europe and the Americas to determine the extent and dynamics of market integration throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An innovative methodology, with special attention being paid to changes in residual dispersion of the univariate models of relative prices between markets, permits us to obtain a measure of market integration over time.

Mortality on Convict Voyages to Australia, 1788–1868

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-313
Author(s):  
John McDonald ◽  
Ralph Shlomowitz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
East Indies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).

Community and Discipline in Ulster Presbyterianism,c.1770–1840

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 266-277
Author(s):  
Andrew Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Geographical Concentration ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Organizational Framework ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Ulster Presbyterians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formally dealt out retribution, repentance and reconciliation through church discipline administered by Kirk sessions and presbyteries. These institutional structures had given Presbyterians an organizational framework that enhanced their geographical concentration in the north-east of Ireland. Hitherto, historians of Presbyterianism in Ireland have taken the view, often based on evidence from the period before 1740, that discipline was effective, broad in its coverage, and hard yet fair in its judgements, claims made all the more remarkable as the north-east had the highest illegitimacy rates in Ireland during the period under consideration. It has been argued that though the system largely survived the eighteenth century, it collapsed at the turn of the nineteenth because of a loss of morale among Presbyterians after the failure of the 1798 rebellion in which many thousands of them had taken part.

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