Unstable Races?

This chapter compares some selected aspects of the life of Polish and English peasants at the turn of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. These include: social structure, legal position, size of holdings, overall economic situation, and diet. English peasants in the late Middle Ages were divided into several categories based on property right and personal freedom. The social and legal status of Polish and English peasants did not differ very much. All Polish peasants had the right to appeal to state courts and, at least theoretically, were guaranteed legal protection and the help of a solicitor. In England there was a great diversity in the size of peasant holdings. Looking at the problem of the size of holdings in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it can be seen that the number and importance of self-sufficient holdings increased at that time. Keywords: early modern period; economic situation; English peasants; legal position; Middle Ages; Polish peasants; size of holdings; social structure

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Only very recently has the parish church gained more serious interest among the public and academics in the Low Countries. Until a few years ago, historians studying religious life in the Low Countries ascribed little agency to the parish or parishioners. If the parish was studied, it was usually from an institutional or an art historical point of view. Furthermore, as this strong top-down approach has persisted in the historiography of religion throughout the 20th century, the idea of medieval decline has remained central in the study of religious change. Debates on Reformation and Counter-Reformation have also been influenced by this idea of medieval decay. International parish studies and recent studies on religious life during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period have, however, illustrated that ordinary believers and communities had an important role in shaping religion. Parish studies that use a perspective from below might just be the key to understanding how religion and religious life changed in the Low Countries during this turbulent period.

"Universities in Politics: Case Studies from the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period." History: Reviews of New Books, 1(3), p. 51

The crusading movement covers about 500 years of European history; the crusading idea affected all social groups in Europe and became an element of the knightly culture. This article highlights two main turning points in the history of the crusading movement: the Fourth Crusade and the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and the end of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291. These events lead to rethinking of the goals, objectives, and directions of the crusading movement and to expanding its geography. The crusades of the Late Middle Ages were generally more local, purposeful, pragmatic, prudent, professional, and less emotional than the campaigns of 1096–1291. The development of crusading forced the Europeans to look for explanations and justifications of their deeds. This led to the creation of the legends of their ancestors in the East. The idea of the Trojan origin of the Latins and revenge to the schismatic Greeks became important in the twelfth- and thirteenth-­century crusading literature. With the growing Turkish threat, the idea of the Frankish origin of the Turks appeared. The Trojans of Aeneas were replaced by the Trojan Turks, and in the sixteenth century by the Druze people, who were considered descendants of the first crusaders survived in the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to sixteenth century, the plans for new crusades and the legends concerning the ancestors of the crusaders were a nutritious cultural environment preserving the crusading idea. The demonstration of crusading piety and crusading zeal contributed to the achievement of the socio-­cultural and political goals of kings and knights. Through the historical memory of the ancestors of the crusaders, illusions and rhetoric about the return of the Holy Land or Constantinople, the myths and legends, the crusading idea gradually passed from real wars into a moral category and becomes a psycho-­cultural phenomenon of the political and intellectual elite of European society.

Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy is a collection of essays on the flowering of women's participation in the religious and artistic life of Italy from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It brings together scholars of religious studies, history, literature, music, fine arts, and philosophy from both Italy and the United States. Several essays document and discuss new discoveries, such as the extraordinary collection of musical compositions written by women in Bologna and Milan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the convent theater of sixteenth-century Tuscany. Other essays, in contrast, offer new interpretations of well-known figures such as Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno, or radical new assessments of the early modern debates over concepts of women's sanctity and the boundaries between holiness and heresy. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley and the contributors to this volume richly demonstrate that women in the late Middle Ages and early modern period were able to carve out creative space, most successfully in the religious sphere. They show that women did indeed speak with a creative voice in this period, and furthermore, that they were not entirely defined and limited by their marginality.

The paper, based on written sources as well as archaeological findings, points out that food preparation in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period required much more effort and skills. It also required more space and sometimes specialised rooms. The source records mention bakeries as well as cheese making and storage places, breweries and malt houses. These are usually separate buildings, functioning as back-of-house facilities. The former were located separately, most probably because of the fire hazard, and the latter perhaps because of the odours that were generated by the brewing process and the maturation or drying of the cheeses. Thus, instead of the single kitchen room that we are now accustomed to, on many farms, other rooms were used for food preparation and separate buildings that allowed for the production of the food and its preservation and safe storage. We need to take this into account when planning excavation studies of settlement assemblages dating from the time discussed here.

Book reviews in this article:Tiberius. By Robin Seager.The Lands of St. Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. By Peter Partner.Universities in Politics: Case Studies from the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Edited, with an introduction by John W. Baldwin and Richard A. Goldthwaite.Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century. By Ruth Pike.Roger of Salisbury, Viceroy of England. By Edward J. Kealey.The Loyal Consbiracy: The Lords Appellant under Richard II . By Anthony GoodmanThe Baroniul Plan of Reform, 1258‐1263. By R. F. Treharne.Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell. By G. R. Elton.The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, 1770‐1812. Volume VIII, 1911‐1912. Edited by A. Aspinall.Socialism in Britain From the Zndustrial Revolution lo llre Present Day. By Thomas L. Jarman.The Gladstones: A Family Biography, 1764‐1821. By S. G. Checkland.The 11th Hussars (Prince Albert's Own). By Richard Brett‐Smith.Napoleon. By Andre Castelot.Weimar Germany. By John R. P. McKenzie.The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals. Edited, with a preface, by Robert Boyers.The Jewish Bund in Russia From Its Origins to 1905. By Henry J. Tobias.Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist‐Founder of World Anarchism. Edited, translated, and with an introduction, by Sam Dolgoff.Witness to Revolution: Letters from Russia, 1916‐1919. By Edward T. Heald. Edited by James B. Gibney.War and Revolution: Excerpts from the Letters and Diaries of the Countess Poutiatine. Translated and edited by George Alexander Lensen.The Republic of Armenia. Volume I, The First Year, 1918‐1919. By Richard G. Hovannisian.The Cambridge History of Islam. Volume I, The Central Islamic Lands; Volume 11, The Further Islamic Lands, Zslaniic Society and Civilization. Edited by P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis.The Histoiy of West Africa. Volume I. By J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowdcr.Sir George Sansom urid japan, A Memoir. By Katherine Sansom.The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936‐1945. By John Toland.Marquette's Explorations: The Narratives Reexamined. By Raphael N. Hamilton, S. J.“Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle. By James A. Henretta.George Washington: Soldier and Man. By North Callahan.Politics Without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780‐1791. By Van Beck Hall.The Guarantee Clause of the U. S. Constitution. By William M. Wiecek.Free Negroes in the District of Columbia: 1790‐1846. By Letitia Woods Brown. With an Introduction by Richard C. Wade.The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material. By Henry Irving Tragle.Abolitionism: A New Perspective. By Gerald Sorin.Nightfall at Nauvoo. By Samuel W. Taylor.George Peabody: A Biography. By Franklin Parker.Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography. By Bruce Kuklick.Teamster Rebellion. By Farrell Dobbs.American Business & Foreign Policy, 1920‐1933. By Joan Hoff Wilson.A Secret War. Americian in China, 1944‐1945. By Oliver J. Caldwell.Cold War and Counter Revolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy. By Richard J. Walton.A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain. By Peter Gerhard.Man, State, and Society in Latin American History. Edited by Sheldon B. Liss and Peggy K. Liss.Telling Tongues: Language Policy in Mexico, Colony to Nation. By Shirley Brice Heath.Revolutionaty Struggle, 19474958. [Volume I of the Selected Works of Fidel Castro]. Edited, with an introduction, by Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés.

The livestock production and trade structures that connected the Italian peninsula and, in particular, the city of Venice with the vast Hungarian lands have been the subject of various inquiries in the secondary literature. Nevertheless, many questions remain. In this essay, I analyze the meat market in Venice (where the complex supply chain and slaughterhouse activities had considerable economic and social importance) in relation to the production and exchange structures of meat in the Hungarian lands (where the breeding of livestock and, in particular, cattle underwent considerable growth and specialization over the course of the centuries). I contend that Venice was an important end market for Hungarian beef exports. In other words, growing Venetian demand and the similarly growing Hungarian export of beef met and connected with mutual satisfaction, although not always in an entirely efficient way, giving rise to several cases of shortage and sometimes starvation and famine on the lagoon city markets. And this is a second point to investigate. If the individual and institutional Italian and Hungarian intermediaries that were interested in beef as an item of commerce can in a large part identified, many questions still surround the involvement of these economic operators in food crisis phenomena and economic practices aimed to give rise to famines in order to obtain greater profits (such as hoarding, raising prices, speculation, and export to more profitable markets). In this sense, I seek to clarify the link between the activities of operators and companies involved in the cattle trade from Hungarian territories and the famines (understood as “high price phenomena”) created in part by the lack of beef on the Venetian markets. I also examine the causes and functions of legislation and practices adopted in response to (and to prevent) starvation and/or famine and the roles of the attitudes of specific groups and economic actors involved in the meat market. Ultimately, I seek to further a more nuanced assessment of the connections between the Hungarian markets and the Italian markets between the late Middle Ages and early modern period.

Previous articleNext article FreeIn an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800Nir ShafirNir ShafirUniversity of California, San Diego Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is the story of a holy land in the Middle East—but not the one you might expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Damascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj—that is, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina—has been a well-established part of Muslim religiosity for centuries.1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the hajj's importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally undertook the journey.2 Yet the hajj's aura of timeless sanctity also hinders scholars from understanding its historicity. How did the hajj complement and compete with other forms of Muslim religiosity, such as saint worship/Sufism? Can we speak of an "Ottoman" hajj, and what significance did this pilgrimage carry for the many non-Muslim subjects of the empire? Approaching the hajj from the shrines of Damascus, no longer so holy today, rather than Mecca and Jerusalem's hallowed sites, allows us to scratch away a bit of the gilding of enduring holiness and find a history of choices and contingencies, controversies and contestations.3I argue in this article that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries an Ottoman holy land emerged that comprised the traditional sanctuaries of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, as well as the lands of greater Syria. Following the conquest of the Arab lands in the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty turned Damascus into both the center of an Ottoman imperial cult around the grave of the medieval theosophist Ibn ʿArabī and the empire's primary logistical hub for the hajj in response to the challenges of its religious and political competitors. As tens of thousands of Rūmī—that is, Turkish-speaking—pilgrims used the new infrastructure to stream into and through Damascus, the hajj also became an extended pilgrimage to visit the numerous tombs of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Non-Muslims too began to use the same infrastructure to partake in their own pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its environs, which they also referred to as the hajj. These overlapping claims to the hajj brought Rūmīs, Arabs, Christians, and others into competition and collaboration over the significance of the Ottoman holy land.As the logistical hub for the hajj, Damascus offers a view onto how religion was shaped by the forms of mobility available at the time, especially due to the development of material infrastructure. I take inspiration from recent scholarship, specifically that on the hajj, that has emphasized how new technologies of travel, such as steam and jet power, transformed Muslim religiosity by expanding its geographical horizons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 These works, with their focus on modern technologies, refrain from commenting on the premodern period, yet their insights can be applied to early modern forms of mobility. An unexpected complement to these studies is the recent book by James Grehan on everyday religion in greater Syria during the early modern period. He argues that an "agrarian religion" centered on saint worship flourished in rural parts of the Middle East among both Muslim and Christian communities. Although not explicitly framed as such, Grehan's argument is about mobility and materiality. According to Grehan, a shared religious practice of saint worship emerged from the timeless patterns of rural life and the inability of the "high" Islam of scholars and jurists to move into the countryside. Only the technological and infrastructural transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered the shocks needed to dismantle the material conditions underpinning saint worship, bring the high tradition of legalistic Islam to all areas, and make Muslim and Christian peasants realize that they belonged to distinct religious traditions.5 Grehan deserves credit for pushing scholars to pay attention to the difference between urban and rural religious life in the early modern Middle East. However, we should not assume, as Grehan does, that increased circulation inevitably homogenizes devotional practice and obliterates saint worship.6 As Nile Green has demonstrated, modern technologies like steamships and steam-powered printing presses actually fed a florescence of religious practices centered on saintly miracles.7 Moreover, I disagree with Grehan's presumption that premodern Ottoman society, even in rural areas, was static and immobile. People (and objects) traveled on camels, horses, and on foot rather than on steamships and trains, but the empire was always on the move, and these movements redefined its religious landscape. While the mode in which people traveled remained largely the same, there were particular circuits and forms of mobility unique to the Ottoman Empire; the road from Damascus was one of these.The second part of this article's argument is that the regime of circulation built on the road from Damascus gave rise to a specifically "Ottoman" lived religion in general and a shared culture of pilgrimage in particular. The hajj became a central component of the lived religion of many of the Ottoman Empire's inhabitants, Muslim and non-Muslim. Christian subjects of the empire, for example, came to refer to their pilgrimage to Jerusalem as the hajj, even integrating the honorific hajji—that is, someone who completed the hajj—into their names and titles. Asking how the hajj became "Ottoman," in turn, opens a number of related questions for the study of religion. How did the Ottoman hajj differ from earlier iterations, given that the ritual itself did not change? What is the role of the state in the creation of common religious practices? And how does the religious practice of one community—in this case, the Muslim practice of pilgrimage—come to be a shared aspect of the lived religion of a diverse and multiconfessional early modern empire?To speak of an "Ottoman" hajj also requires probing the analytical valence of the word "Ottoman." In its most restricted sense, the word applies only to the actions of the ruling dynasty, the eponymous house of Osman. In the early modern period, the word was used largely in this limited sense, both by the dynasty itself and its observers. Modern historians, however, employ a more expansive definition of "Ottoman," in which the word is a blanket term that applies to anything and everything that occurred within the empire's boundaries. Moreover, many implicitly extend this idea conceptually and assume that every subject within the empire's boundaries also possessed a shared "Ottoman" mentality or culture, which in turn drove their political and intellectual choices.8 The mechanisms for the dissemination of a common Ottoman culture or mentality are rarely articulated, however. Most often, historians point to the actions of the state as creating an Ottoman culture. For example, the sociologist Karen Barkey argues that the Ottoman state intentionally promoted a policy of religious tolerance, one that broke from earlier and supposedly narrower iterations of Islam.9 Even if we accept Barkey's assertions of a state policy of ecumenicalism, they do not necessarily help explain how cultural practices like the hajj came to be shared by all the empire's subjects at the community or individual level. Like many premodern empires, the Ottoman government did not attempt to homogenize its diverse population under a single imagined culture. While the state actively intervened in the daily religious practices of Muslims and the institutional structure of Islamic law, it never contemplated the creation of shared "Ottoman" religious practices among its subjects.10 How then did the hajj become "Ottoman"?To understand how the hajj became a practice that left its mark on nearly all Ottoman subjects, we have to rethink our understandings of empire. Historians today, especially those focusing on the Ottomans, have often understood empire to be a set of institutions that govern by replicating or projecting the rules and culture of the imperial center onto its provinces.11 In other words, empire is regarded as a synonym for the state. Other scholars highlight the inherent social diversity of empires, using empire largely as a foil to the linguistic, ethnic, or religious homogeneity of the nation-state.12 I treat empire differently in this article. I see empire as a specific assemblage or network of heterogenous human and nonhuman actors connected in myriad relationships.13 The specific elements of the network, and their arrangement, varied in time and place. Thus, the "Ottoman" hajj was different from the "Mamluk" hajj, for example, not because the ritual radically differed but because it brought together an alternate set of material and social elements: the movement of Rūmī Muslims to the Arab provinces, the kilns of Iznik and Kütahya that produced the empire's ceramics, and especially the lines of pilgrim infrastructure centered in Damascus, among others. The shared "Ottoman" culture of the hajj was not the intentional construction by the state but an unintentional by-product of the interaction of these elements, a network that could only have existed with the empire's expansion and sustained presence.14This article traces the network that brought about the creation of an Ottoman hajj and holy land. Damascus functions not as the site of a fine-grained local study but as a gateway that illuminates the various connections streaming through it. My argument brings together a constellation of actors, both human and nonhuman, that connect to form a larger picture. Moreover, since I focus on the transformation of what Nancy Ammerman has termed "lived religion," I draw the reader's attention to the creation of an Ottoman pilgrimage culture from everyday practices rather than in theological works.15 The article jumps from Egypt to Hungary and the many places in-between, but it begins with the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Damascus in 1516, which first provided the Ottoman dynasty the possibility of administering the hajj. The centrality of the hajj in Ottoman religious life was far from assured, however, in these initial years. I situate the dynasty's first operations in Damascus in a wide array of other forms of state-sponsored Muslim religiosity available to the dynasty, such as the creation of a set of imperially sponsored saintly tombs. I then turn to the Ottoman state's eventual commitment to the hajj and its massive investment in the physical and textual infrastructure of pilgrimage. The hajj became progressively important in the daily lives of Rūmī Muslims from the empire's heartland, and it even expanded to incorporate visitation to tombs and shrines. Christians too used the same infrastructure to turn their pilgrimage to Jerusalem into what they themselves referred to as the hajj. The last section examines how this network led to a shared Ottoman culture of the hajj and also to competing claims by Arabs, Rūmīs, and Christians as to who could define the Ottoman holy land.Holy Lands, Old and NewUpon his return to Damascus, fresh from the victories against the Mamluks in 1517, Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) set out immediately to thank a saint.16 The sultan seems to have attributed his victory to the omens and intercession of Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240)—an Andalusia-born Sufi theorist whom the Ottomans believed had prophesized the rise of the dynasty in a pseudepigraphic work, Al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya—and thus decided to build an imperial tomb at the site. Sultan Selim ordered that the residences, bathhouses, and an already standing mosque in the Ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood be bought from their owners and quickly demolished. Within three months, a congregational mosque had been erected around the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī.Even today, Ibn ʿArabī is a notorious figure. Thanks to his pantheistic theories of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd), he is regarded as either the greatest Sufi master or the master of the infidels.17 The residents of Damascus, however, knew little of Ibn ʿArabī before the Ottomans' entry. Despite the fact that it had been well known that he had died in the city, travelers who sought out his grave state that it was being used as a rubbish dump in the fourteenth century. In 1499, one apparently had to scale the wall of a bathhouse in order to access the neglected graveyard housing Ibn ʿArabī's unvisited tomb.18 Other observers, such as Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546), the future imam of the mosque built at Ibn ʿArabī's tomb, tell us that the site was already the tomb of a certain Ibn al-Zakī.19While they knew little of Ibn ʿArabī, the residents were at the center of their own holy land, populated by the graves of local saints and holy men, many of them being ṣaḥāba, the companions of the Prophet. This Syrian holy land had been built up over centuries; the oldest surviving collection of the faḍā'il (virtues) of the area comes from the mid-eleventh century and reflects the traditions and stories that had been collected up to that moment about Syria's sacrality.20 The arrival of the Crusaders—who built at least four hundred chapels and churches in the Levant over the course of their two-hundred-year presence—prompted the resacralization of greater Syria.21 As the Ayyubids (under Salāh al-Dīn, r. 1174–93) and the Mamluks (under Baybars, r. 1260–77) reclaimed this land, they quickly began a campaign of creating a new Muslim holy land in southern Syria. Rulers, military men, and common townsfolk took part in rediscovering, often in an inspired dream, the locations of the tombs of early Islamic figures and heroes from the wars against the Crusaders and then contributing to their construction and upkeep. Older, smaller pilgrimage sites, such as the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, were greatly expanded, and non-Muslims were banned from entering them. Churches and monasteries were converted into Sufi lodges; revenues from villages that previously supported monasteries and churches were seized and reendowed to support the new shrines.22 Whereas earlier holy sites had predominantly stressed biblical events and urban locales, this new wave of shrine building saw the establishment of the graves of a wide variety of early Islamic figures, learned scholars, and military heroes throughout both the urban and rural landscape. Geographies and pilgrimage guides (pilgrimage to shrines, that is) of the period, like those of al-Idrīsī (d. 1165) and al-Harawī (d. 1215), included these shrines and sites. While the Crusader incursion might have spurred the renewed sacralization of the lands of Syria, the spread and establishment of shrines by themselves was part of the growing shift in the middle to late medieval period toward an Islam centered on saints and holy men—that is, Sufism.23The Ottoman government's warmhearted embrace of Ibn ʿArabī and its intervention in the sacred landscape of Damascus were not acts intended for the locals but rather for its competitors in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Iran. In the post-Mongol Turco-Iranian world, especially on the frontiers of Anatolia and the Balkans, there was a constant potential for holy men and saints' descendants to raise the flag of rebellion in their fortress-like lodges and become contenders for political power.24 Only a few years before his conquest of the Mamluk lands, Sultan Selim had quelled a serious rebellion in central and eastern Anatolia by the Kızılbaş followers of the Safavid Shah Ismail, a man who had used his holy ancestry to found a state in the late fifteenth century. Even cities like Cairo were not exempt from this particularly Turco-Iranian idiom of political sainthood. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ottoman conquest, a new holy man from Anatolia, Ibrāhīm al-Gulshanī (d. 1534), started gathering a following and consolidating power in Cairo.25 In these uncertain times, the Ottoman government took a distrustful stance against many Sufi orders and instead decided to turn Ibn ʿArabī into a "nondenominational grand master of spirituality from whose esoterism all Sufi orders could get inspired, and ideologized, in defense of the Sunni faith and its political patrons."26This type of experimentation was found in other early modern Islamicate empires throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) developed a sort of Sufi order in which he was the holy shaykh and his courtiers and subjects were disciples.27 Later, when the Mughals conquered the Deccan, they the shrines of the Muslim The built massive tomb in around their in creating a cult of the around the other Sufi The Ottomans too with this throughout the sixteenth century, for example, a tomb shrine for Sultan on the Arab observers, however, saw the Ottoman government's of Ibn ʿArabī's tomb as an attempt by Muslims from the to and even the hajj and the holy sanctuaries of Mecca and The residents of Damascus referred to the many Ottoman as In its most sense, Rūmī a and someone who and came from the lands of the central lands of the Ottoman between the in the and the in the have of the medieval from however, is actually a of his or from the lands of This early modern at with its in both the medieval and modern In the medieval period, the both the and in the and fourteenth centuries, it began to refer to Muslims in the This and was by the development of Ottoman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into an and of competing with a that the Rūmī from that of the more or In the nineteenth century, however, the it applied to subjects of the empire, which is its In local Arab residents of Damascus saw the as with only a of Islam and its to build a tomb over the grave of Ibn ʿArabī being the of their of the of the events by the Ibn a number of omens for the future of Ibn ʿArabī's new the the bought the and to the general and that the had The as they the a and the the the man who the sultan to build the mosque and tomb in the first Only a had also were at the foot of Ibn ʿArabī's grave as the their to it into a holy site. they erected a a traditional of over the tomb and more but only under the of being of what the people might and that no one find out about While the sultan to the and a for a Ibn ʿArabī, the people of Damascus of high due to the and the of in their an of the Safavid one when an of the and the was into the by his to its As the shrine they from a building that a had that these had been from the tomb of saint the of the an to the of Ibn Selim and the Rūmī the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī on the of The of is the central of the hajj, when the stream onto the of and for the this a hajj Ibn Ṭūlūn that the Ottomans were to the hajj with pilgrimage to the new tomb of Ibn ʿArabī, as they had the pilgrimage to the and to against the significance or the might have with their of was however, because the of the Rūmīs, was so that he could not the and the of even with a In other words, he the a were to the and were throughout the sites of the the of the and were given out in the by the As he the it for a moment that he had built the shrine of a of holy on the eastern of the it was an it was at the employ of the of it spread among the the and the men of state. it was that it was the of one of the bathhouses, which became with and when the they believed it to be holy only did the to the locals but also few of the and of the to the were that as residents decided to because of the high brought on by the Ottoman Ṭūlūn a the when he was the and of the mosque at Ibn ʿArabī's While he with the that what is for few of his came to visit in his new The of the land to visit the tomb when he came to the more traditional tombs at the He was left with the Rūmīs, who had it their to visit the tomb during their and like a certain who came with his to the tomb to to be by one should us that it was not a that the Ottoman government both and into the hajj and the the Islamic world, there were a wide variety of that and saintly power, and the same the construction of Ibn ʿArabī's a cult centered on Ibn ʿArabī was not so Ibn take on Ibn ʿArabī's tomb the that the religious of the Ottomans immediately following the Other Arab scholars of the period a of the religious and the cult of Ibn the tomb and the cult among Rūmī scholars in as Rūmī scholars a of Ibn ʿArabī, for the saint needed to be among all the scholars in the imperial Although the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained a for Rūmī Damascus and the Arab lands become the center of a different holy Ottoman Ottoman government for a different of a state that did not on the creation of imperially tombs of holy men and The tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained but the dynasty instead to become a of and a of Islam centered on following Islamic the course of the sixteenth century, it and in congregational in every and and that Muslims them as it to a particular of religiosity on practices such as and the The dynasty undertook these actions to itself from its imperial competitors like the and as had their own of shrines and but also with an toward the it had at greatest in a Sunni for the empire in its of the the of Mecca and that it had from the Even with these sites at their Ottoman in the hajj were a of for of the sixteenth For example, only toward the of the sixteenth century did the dynasty support for the tomb of Sultan in Hungary and order its shaykh to move to Mecca and focus his and on the grave of the to the the of Arab the government's shift toward the hajj was a In of over a hundred years the conquest of the Arab lands, the (d. a book in of The of the of the Ottomans were to other dynasty, or to set a number of and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known by their of of the or the of the house of The had their of Rūmī which them the site of an about the of imperial and in the Arab the Ottoman dynasty as a of both religious and a view to the the Ottoman and a century Whereas they had been as they were of especially to their massive investment in the religious sites of the hajj and the people who lived how they of thousands of on the of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Hebron, so so that they were never This was in to the on the military to the of the from The was by no an the from the seventeenth century that the and became and These imperial were by from the of the the which lands, and from both Muslims around the empire and of the dynasty The government also the around and Jerusalem, renewed of the area around the built and and all the in and hajj was a every which if not of thousands of through and massive infrastructure needed to be developed to bring to Mecca and Moreover, the pilgrimage had to be so that at the time in Mecca to the of the the left Damascus or there was not a to traveled on or horses, and a few were in However, the which included the many and that came traveled by The most was the between Damascus and Medina, the pilgrim were to the Syrian had been used during the Mamluk period, it no or infrastructure to to other than the few Thus, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty began a of in the Syrian hajj The first was a

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an acute religious crisis occurred in England due to the troublesome specter of heresies proliferating at the time. During the 1520s and 1530s, Thomas More, Lord Chancellor, played a major role in the escalating polemical warfare against Lutheran and evangelical heresy. And in the 1640s and 1650s, the fragmentation of Protestantism provoked powerful new fears of unbridled heresies and the rise of anti-heretical writings. This article examines the cultural fears sparked by the hysterical religious imagination and how they generated enormous anxieties, savagery, and bitter religious contention and polarization. It also looks at the anti-heresy literature of the English Civil War and Interregnum in the context of new legislation enacted by Parliament to control the proliferation of religious error. In addition, it considers the remarkable continuities between the late Middle Ages and early modern period with regard to heresy, treason, fears, and the feverish religious imagination, along with what was distinctive about the imaginings of heretics and heresies during those unstable decades.

How were women perceived and treated in Alpine communities in the late Middle Ages? This study explores this question by using sources ranging from the fourteenth up to the sixteenth century and from Valais to Tyrol to investigate practices of gender-based inclusion and exclusion in three interconnected areas: language, communal work projects, and legal proceedings. As the findings presented in this article show, Alpine communities depended heavily on the labour and knowledge of women. This dependence led to a pragmatic acknowledgement of the contribution of female labour and knowledge. In some cases, this even led to their inclusion in civic duties and rights which were (nominally) reserved for men. Nominally because, as this analysis also shows, the language in sources from the rural Alpine area can be heavily distorted by the widespread use of generic masculine terms, which conceal the presence of women in the past.

The Concept of "Early Modern" Mitchell Greenberg (bio) The editors of this journal have posed a series of questions the answers to which would hopefully offer a more comprehensive understanding of what we mean by that catch-all concept, the "early modern." Given the very fact that the questions asked are so varied both temporally and conceptually, hopefully I will be forgiven for couching my own thinking in terms that are both general and personal. Although it would be intellectually more satisfying to be able to pin down so broad a concept as the "early modern," I am afraid that my own inability to do so cogently is directly tied to what I perceive to be the defining mark of the concept, its inherent ambiguity. To my mind, the concept of the "early modern" is elusive in a temporal sense (where do we situate it historically—beginning in the sixteenth century and extending up to the French Revolution of 1789, or is it more limited in time, say from the mid-sixteenth to the late-seventeenth centuries?) And is it not a concept whose temporal limits can shift depending on its geo-political location? (Elizabethan England, Neo-Classical, i.e., mid-seventeenth century, France, or "baroque" Rome, Madrid [Mexico City!], or Vienna?) Are the different socio-cultural productions across Europe part of the same phenomenon? What of the differences in religious expression and persecutions, scientific discoveries, extra-European exploration, exploitation, and colonization? It would appear at first hand that any over-riding conceptual framework is intellectually risky especially when we are faced with the often contradictory academic disagreements between historians, literary scholars, philosophers, sociologists, theologians, anthropologists, and many others whose differences about any single definition of the concept are varied and heated. Unable to find any one definition that would embrace so large a socio-cultural phenomenon, I rely on what appears to me to be a common thread [End Page 75] among all these varied phenomena and that thread is double. Although almost any historical period may be described as inherently traumatic, I find that the period between 1550 and 1700 is marked by both a generalized European fear that chaos is about to descend upon the world and a desire for some force, some leader who would be able to waylay that chaos, establish order and put things that seem askew, aright. We hear echoes of this fear resounding across the European continent from England to Poland, from Paris to Naples in what historians have called the "crisis of the Seventeenth Century" (Trevor-Roper). So, for starters I would start by circumscribing the concept of the "early modern" as a generalized crisis of European civilization and the various responses, political, social, and aesthetic that arose in a limited historical period (1550 to 1700) as an attempt to deal with this crisis, and in so doing ushered in new ways of configuring the place of the human subject in a radically changing symbolic system—a system that eventuates in reformulating those parameters of subjectivity that we now define as our own. It would appear that when we talk about the "early modern" for however extended or narrow our definition of it may be, it is the seventeenth century that figures as the pivotal, transitional moment where those systems of representation that had dominated, that had coalesced into a "master narrative" that had defined the period from the late Middle Ages up to and through the Renaissance, were gradually being transformed into what was to emerge in the eighteenth century as a new configuration of subjectivity that would be the mark of the "modern." In his seminal early study Les Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucault argued for seeing the seventeenth century as a liminal period separating and joining one representation of the configurations of human subjectivity—the analogical—that, he claims, was the principal episteme up to and through the Renaissance, to the "transparency of Classical representation," which established its firm hold on the West in the eighteenth century. The seventeenth century would figure the moment of passage between these two epistemes, participating in both, seeing (but not, of course, in any clearly articulable fashion) the gradual, inexorable disappearance...

Reviewed by: Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany Michelle Smith Spinks, Jennifer, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World, 5), London, Pickering and Chatto, 2009; hardback; pp. 224; 66 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. $US99.00, £60.00; ISBN 9781851966301. Tales of monstrous births were well known across Europe in the late medieval and early modern period. They were used symbolically by authors in a variety of media to 'represent and debate issues of morality, religion and politics' (p. 3). Curiously, there were more printed references in Germany than anywhere else, which suggests something other than a passing interest. Jennifer Spinks examines a number of illustrated printed publications, such as broadsheets, pamphlets and books, which appeared in sixteenth-century Germany. Beginning with instances of monstrous births in the late fifteenth century, she maps the development of such material across the Reformation, finally ending her discussion in the late sixteenth century. Central to her argument are the religious conflicts of the Reformation and early Counter-Reformation, and the role the resultant polemical propaganda played in promoting a visual culture grounded in natural and unnatural occurrences. In a world shaken to the core by religious disorder, monstrous births and other such phenomena were used didactically and apocalyptically: they were understood as messages from a God who was unhappy with the moral state of that world. Spinks begins by briefly outlining classical and early Christian ideas of monstrous births, before leading the reader to the sixteenth century where there is a 'rich array of visual and textual materials for understanding natural wonders and prodigies … [and which are] best encountered through illustrated print catalogues' (p. 8). This cultural history is laid out chronologically within a structure that analyses specific types of printed material – from crude woodcuts to sophisticated texts – together. The central focus is the positive and negative meanings which sixteenth-century people gave to monstrous births and how we, as modern historians, can access those meanings through a close analysis of this printed material. Spinks argues that her discussion 'places considerably more weight than any previous study on the positive interpretations given to monstrous births in the period immediately preceding the Reformation' (p. 10). Furthermore, she claims the evidence points to a marked increase in negative and apocalyptic interpretations which peaked mid-century. Different meanings were now being attached to monstrous [End Page 255] births in order to interpret emerging topics of concern. Travel narratives brought tales of monstrous races home to local audiences prior to the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 briefly discusses such travel literature, the visual effect it had on audiences, and the mentalities that developed with regard to those living on the outer edges of the world. Medieval imagery saw the idea of monstrous races and monstrous births as one body, as exemplified in John Mandeville's Travels. However, by the sixteenth century, monstrous births came to be seen as unique and unrelated to those marginalized races. Spinks analyses what she calls the 'culture of prodigies' (p. 23) that emerged during the reign of Maximilian I, and how the emperor used wondrous signs and monstrous births for political ends. The remainder of the chapter examines Sebastian Brant's broadsheets that brought the representation of monstrous births to a wider audience through an appealing combination of words and images, and paved the way for the outpouring of works seen during the sixteenth century. Chapter 2 places images of monstrous births firmly within the expanding visual culture of the early sixteenth century. Using the work of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Spinks outlines the varying methods and approaches used to construct images of monstrous births that resulted in more naturalistic dimensions to artists' illustrations. Chapter 3 examines the images of the Monk Calf and the Papal Ass in the polemic pamphlets of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon where they used the images as allegories of the Catholic Church. As Spinks argues, monstrous bodies 'became texts to be read and argumentatively decoded using highly visual language' (p. 11). Chapter 4 demonstrates that, by mid-century, there was an increase in the number of books that focused on...

Although many historians have extensively discussed the agricultural history of Europe between the late Middle Ages and the modern era, this period of crucial changes has received less attention from archaeologists. In this paper, zooarchaeological evidence from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period is studied to investigate evidence for improvements in animal husbandry during the ‘long’ sixteenth century. The size and shape of the principal domestic animals (cattle, sheep, pig, and chicken) are explored through biometrical data and integrated with evidence of taxonomic frequencies, age-at-death, and sex ratios. Evidence from twelve English sites and nine Basque sites is compared. The results show that in England a remarkable size increase of animals occurred throughout the post-medieval period, with much of this improvement occurring in the sixteenth century. In the Basque Country, a slight improvement is attested only during the ‘long’ sixteenth century, while in the following centuries the size of the animals decreased, perhaps in relation to the economic crisis that affected the Iberian Peninsula for much of the seventeenth century. The nature and causes of these changes and the different scenarios characterizing the two countries are discussed with the aim of understanding the development of early modern farming and the foundations of the so-called Agricultural Revolution.