Early Modern European Society Research Articles

Swedish income inequality in 1613

AbstractIn this paper we present the first estimate of the full income distribution in pre‐industrial Sweden (including present‐day Finland). We draw on the schedule and the individual assessments devised by the authorities to distribute the 1613 Älvsborg ransom taxation to estimate income inequality, as well as the income shares of the top quantiles and of various social groups. We find that Sweden was relatively equal compared with other early modern European societies, for two main reasons: first, because the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and other middle‐rank social groups all held relatively small shares of the total income, and second, because the landless groups were less numerous in Sweden than in other societies. This resulted in a large share of the total income going to the relatively homogeneous group of landed peasants, who made up the majority of the population. Our study thus speaks to the political historiography of early modern Sweden, within which negotiation and collaboration between the landed peasantry and the state has been seen as pivotal to the state formation process.

Paul M. Dover. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

In this outstanding and deftly written synthesis, The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Paul Dover places paper at the heart of “the information revolution in early modern Europe.” An earlier generation of scholarship, chiefly inspired by groundbreaking works by Lucian Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (L’Apparition du livre, 1958) and Elizabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1980), located in the rise of print and the material object of the book the signal transformations that defined the media landscape of early modern Europe. Dover builds upon more recent research on topics such as archival practices, state formation, and political economy to emphasize instead the importance of paper as a substrate of communicative and preservative practice across early modern European societies. Paper’s importance as a medium, the author argues, was the underlying development that enabled information—its creation, circulation, and preservation both in print and non-print forms—to become a fundamental facet of life in early modern Europe. Drawing on scholarship in five languages, Dover brilliantly brings together a variety of adjacent historiographies on the structural transformations of the early modern period—the expansion of commerce, the origins of the fiscal-military state, and the rise of print itself—and demonstrates how paper’s expansive availability in Europe from the end of the medieval period provided the underlying condition for these developments.

House-Destruction as a Ritual of Punishment in Early Modern Europe

The public execution of criminals was a familiar ritual of early modern European society. This article, however, examines the less frequent practice of ordering that a criminal’s house be ritually demolished following the execution. In many cases, the destroyed house was then replaced by a monument which was intended to simultaneously obliterate and perpetuate the criminal’s memory. Rare as it was, ritual house-destruction was a surprisingly widespread practice, undertaken at various times between 1520 and 1760 in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands. Though punitive house-destructions had been undertaken in medieval Europe, the practice acquired new overtones in the early modern era. This article examines how and when this striking form of punishment was applied in early modern Europe and considers why authorities would order the destruction of property in order to enshrine the memory of particularly serious crimes.

Life in a Time of Pestilence: The Great Castilian Plague of 1596–1601. By Ruth MacKay (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 288 pp. $39.99

How did an early modern European society respond to the challenge posed by plague? In her eloquent and deeply researched study of the plague that ravaged Castile for five years at the end of the sixteenth century, which may have killed half a million people, MacKay provides a fine-grained detailed depiction of how Castile’s inhabitants responded to the plague through a close reading and analysis of dozens of archival collections and the rich contextual knowledge that she has acquired through her previous work on early modern Spain. The book’s central argument, carefully and convincingly presented throughout, is that as horrific as the plague was and as much as it may have driven individuals to despair, Castilian society as a whole displayed a remarkable amount of resilience, drawing on past practices and memories in its response to the challenges posed by epidemic disease (2–3).MacKay has structured the book in chapters that are defined thematically around sites—Palace, Road, Wall, Market, Street, Town Hall, and Sickbed. This structure facilitates her approach of foregrounding the voices of Castilians themselves, while allowing her historiographical and methodological asides. The book, however, is not especially interdisciplinary. MacKay is aware of what might be called the recent “genetic turn” in plague studies—largely driven by the genetic and archaeological work that discovered Yersinia Pestis as the pathogen behind medieval and early modern plague outbreaks in Europe—suggesting that the last decade of this research warrants revisiting previous narratives of disease transmission (5–6, 112). But such is not the focus of her valuable work, which offers a deep understanding of the nature of state and society in early modern Castile.The challenge posed by the arrival of the plague in 1596 at the end of Philip II’s reign fell principally on the court of Philip III, who became king in 1598, ruling over a state that was decentralized, both administratively and financially. The corregidores, one of the most common groups that MacKay follows through the archives, were hired by municipalities as intermediaries between towns/cities and the Cortes, which collected the taxes for the Crown (38–39, 173). The municipalities taxed themselves in order to buy food and clothing for the poor (126, 160). They also decided how and against whom to enforce quarantines (57), which buildings to requisition to create hospitals for the contagious sick (233), how to raise new taxes to support these hospitals (184), and when to raise taxes to hire physicians (215).Castile had been suffering, even before the arrival of the plague, from famine and harsh winters. MacKay clearly depicts local and royal officials carefully balancing the imperatives of commerce—the need of farmers, peasants, and especially friars for access into and out of cities to make a living—with the public-health concerns around disease transmission (106, 117). In addition, tension between gathering information about the spread of the disease and controlling its spread was rife (72); quarantine enforcement was never better than partial (115). As for the mechanism of the disease’s transmission, nothwithstanding the raging contemporary debate and confusion about the nature of contagion (111, 226), the consensus that the culprit was cloth led to the burning of both clothes and linens, a policy that disproportionately affected the poor (109, 160).This rigorous, lucid, and occasionally beautiful book will benefit any student of early modern Europe or of the history of health and disease. It merits a wide readership even though it does not address a number of comparative questions that are worthy of consideration, including how this plague affected other parts of the Iberian peninsula and how precisely the Castilian experience of the plague changed between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

On the Forms and Content of Moral Instruction in School Books and Children’s Reading Books of the 16th to the Early 19th Centuries. Part I

School institutions of various levels were one of the important agents of the moral reform movement characterizing early modern European society. Schools instilled certain moral values and models of decent behavior also through elementary textbooks and children’s reading books. Despite significant conservatism of this book production, its analysis for a long period of time allows to notice several changes: in the method of reasoning about the virtuous and vicious; argumentation in favor of certain patterns of behavior; the emergence of new thematic blocks that verifies the influence of philosophical thought of that era on educational literature. The first part of the study analyzes the main forms of instructive material in school books and children’s reading books. Collections of Biblical excepts, religious-moralistic proverbs and maxims (Spruchbücher), catalogues of obligations (in form of the so-called “house-tables” (Haustafel) and threefold duties in relation to God, himself, and the neighbor), rules of decorum, instructive stories, virtuous examples, instructive visual images and collections of allegorical pictures-emblems – all these forms go back to various book genres, could coexist in the same textbook or compete with each other.

Introduction: The cultural and material worlds of mining in early modern Europe

AbstractThis special issue is dedicated to the cultural values and impacts of the early modern mining industry and some of the enterprises and practices that surrounded them. The contributions enquire into how mining and metallurgy became a key sector in early modern European society, not only in terms of economic prosperity with its utilitarian connotations, but as a sociocultural phenomenon, whose materials and products affected, or even enabled, many areas of life and rulership. The authors' contributions focus on places, materials, and processes, and assess how historical actors engaged with metallic materials, both under and above the ground. They analyse human engagement with mined materials not simply from an economic perspective, but also as an administrative and legal praxis, a technological challenge, an environmental problem, a spiritual engagement, and an affective experience. This approach affords a broader perspective which expands the history of mining beyond the narrow sense of a history of material extraction, one that crosses the borders of the European mining regions and takes activities in urban hubs and on the sea into consideration as well.

Between Apprenticeship and Skill: Acquiring Knowledge outside the Academy in Early Modern England

ArgumentApprenticeship was probably the largest mode of organized learning in early modern European societies, and artisan practitioners commonly began as apprentices. Yet little is known about how youths actually gained skills. I develop a model of vocational pedagogy that accounts for the characteristics of apprenticeship and use a range of legal and autobiographical sources to examine the contribution of different forms of training in England. Apprenticeship emerges as a relatively narrow channel, in which the master’s contribution to training was weakly defined and executed conservatively. The creation of complementary channels of formal instruction was constrained by cost and coordination problems. When we consider a range of British youths who obtained advanced skills as artisan practitioners (and engaged in invention or pursued natural philosophical interests), we see the importance of individual agency over institutional structures. For these youths, training could involve rejecting apprenticeship, engaging in periods of advanced study, including time in multiple workshops after the end of apprenticeship, and parallel campaigns to access scarce books and communities of scholarship.

Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society. Maria Ågren, ed.

<i>Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society</i>. Maria Ågren, ed.

Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society ed. by Maria Ågren

Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society ed. by Maria Ågren

Maria Ågren, editor. Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society.

Maria Ågren, editor. Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society.

THE POPULARITY OF ANCIENT HISTORIANS, 1450–1600

AbstractThe histories of ancient Greece and Rome are part of a shared European heritage, and a foundation for many modern Western social and cultural traditions. Their printing and circulation during the Renaissance helped to shape the identities of individual nations, and create different reading publics. Yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the forms in which works of Greek and Roman history were published in the first centuries of the handpress age, the relationship between the ideas contained within these texts and the books as material objects, and thus the precise nature of the changes they effected in early modern European culture and society. This article provides the groundwork for a reassessment of the place of ancient history in the early modern world. Using new, digital resources to reappraise existing scholarship, it offers a fresh evaluation of the publication of the ancient historians from the inception of print to 1600, revealing important differences that alter our understanding of particular authors, texts, and trends, and suggesting directions for further research. It also models the research possibilities of large-scale digital catalogues and databases, and highlights the possibilities (and pitfalls) of these resources.

Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society. Edited by Maria Ågren. Oxford University Press. 2017. xi + 258pp. £22.99.

Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society. Edited by Maria Ågren. Oxford University Press. 2017. xi + 258pp. £22.99.

«This memorandum is one of the best documents we have». The use of archives and documents by Swiss merchants in France (17th-18th centuries)

Ligitation was very common phenomenon in early modern European society, because of the legal pluralism and the intense mobility of people. Conflicts frequently involved foreigners and in that sense the long-lasting presence of Swiss merchants in France offers an interesting case study. Despite the alliance treaties between the Swiss Confederacy and France giving the Swiss important privileges, their rights were often theatened by local officials. Being involved in such litigation meant fulfilling the demands of differents institutions to provide proof for any rights claims. In this framework a significant number of documents were produced, collected and archived. the essay argues that these documental practices favoured a textual and collective memory among, Swiss migrants, creating abroad a sort of proto-national selfconsciousness, before it appeared within the Old Swiss Confederacy itself

From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain by Cristian Berco

Reviewed by: From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain by Cristian Berco Jon Arrizabalaga Cristian Berco. From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. xvi + 264 pp. $65.00 (978-1-4426-4962-0). During the past few decades historical studies of disease have gone through a substantial renewal, with attention to old and new questions from a plurality of historiographic and theoretical approaches, such as those related to social history, social constructivism, new cultural history, “disease in action,” and the linguistic and emotional “turns.” Sexually transmitted disease is one of the areas where this renewal has become most apparent, not least because their peculiar clinical features (sexual contagion, painfulness, chronicity, disability, and intercurrence of asymptomatic periods) and sociocultural connotations (disgustingness to sight and smell, stigma linked to physical and moral corruption) make them a privileged site for historical and anthropological research. From Body to Community remarkably deals with the meaning of venereal disease from the perspective of its sufferers in seventeenth-century Spain, where the great pox or French disease was then also known as the bubas. Yet, Cristian Berco’s study not only deals with the poxed patients’ suffering during hospitalization, but also tracks their everyday life before and after, in relation to their familial, communal, and institutional anchors. Berco’s research focuses on the mid-seventeenth-century patients of the Hospital de Santiago at Toledo, the formerly imperial city that since the late sixteenth century had been gradually declining in favor of Madrid—the new capital of the Spanish monarchy—in terms both economic and demographic (from 70,000 to 15,000 inhabitants in the mid-seventeenth century). Despite these circumstances, its size, history, heritage, and archival records have made the city of Toledo in early modern times instrumental as a splendid micromodel for historical research, as shown by a great deal of works by scholars like F. Javier Aranda Pérez, Jean-Pierre Dedieu, Linda Martz, Julián Montemayor, Jesús Perezagua Delgado, Hilario Rodríguez de Gracia, Juan Sánchez Sánchez, and Ángel Santos Vaquero.1 [End Page 806] Having originally belonged to the military Order of Santiago, the Hospital de Santiago was turned into a pox hospital in 1500, eventually becoming one of the largest health care institutions “specializing” in the pox in the early modern Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, according to the main source for Berco’s study—the hospital’s magnificent admissions book between 1654 and 1665—of the more than four thousand patients taken in during that twelve-year period, 58.0 percent came from Toledo city and its hinterlands, 37.6 percent from the rest of Spain, 2.4 percent from abroad, and 2.0 unknown. From these records Berco has built a database that includes patients’ names, birthplaces, residences, parents, and marital status with partners’ identities, as well as a detailed account (fabric, color, and condition) of the garments worn when they were admitted into the Hospital de Santiago. These details show a wide occupational variety of male and female poxed patients taken in (priests, artisans, farmers, unskilled and skilled laborers, retailers, administration employees, nobles) who had to endure the rigors of their illness’s inpatient treatment including both physical and spiritual care. Moreover, Berco’s combined use of these and other hospital sources (letters, contracts, inspections by authorities, regulations) with a variety of other primary sources—archival (notarial, inquisitorial, and others) as well as medical and literary (manuscript and printed)—has allowed him to track patients’ physical and social lives beyond the hospital’s walls so that he has skillfully reconstructed the histories of people living with the burden of a chronic, painful, and stigmatizing disease in an early modern European society and analyzed their familial interactions, civic identities, careers, and relationships with different kinds of networks. Apart from its introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into eight chapters, all of them introduced by patients’ stories allusive to each chapter’s main issue, through which Berco has masterfully examined (1) the pox signs in their physical and social meaning; (2) the meaning of medical concepts and assumptions for the patients and their experiences with...

Konkurrenz um Vermögen im südlichen Tirol des 16. Jahrhunderts

Summary This contribution assumes that in early modern European societies a large part of wealth was transferred through inheritance and marriage. Therefore it is necessary to analyse law and practice of inheritance systems and marital property regimes in view of their entanglement. Access, disposition and rights of use concerning real estate, money and moveable wealth resulted mostly from gender-specific logics. The situation of widows and their provision differed clearly depending on legal contexts. The initial hypothesis is that this situation was especially fragile if sons were the preferred principal heirs and separation of property prevailed – as was the case in the analysed areas of southern Tirol. Particularly prominent were the competing claims of the widowon the one hand and of the children and the husband’s relations on the other. It is the aim of this paper to shed light on the impact of different axes of competition based on a broadly conceived concept of wealth.

La construcción de una institución comercial: el consulado de las naciones flamenca y alemana en la Sevilla moderna

Este trabajo intenta estudiar la historia del consulado de las naciones flamenca y alemana en la Sevilla moderna, especialmente su proceso de construcción. Este objetivo es posible gracias al uso de diversas fuentes documentales, sobre los protocolos notariales del Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla. Así, podemos ver cómo nació a comienzos del siglo XVII, creció durante el reinado de Felipe IV y alcanzó su momento álgido en tiempos de Carlos II; siempre luchando por los privilegios sociales y económicos que eran tan apreciados en la sociedad europea de la Edad Moderna.

Super-Vision: Weather Watching and Table Reading in the Early Modern Royal Society and Académie Royale des Sciences

The use of astronomical and mathematical tables dates back to antiquity, and contributors to the annals of early modern European scientific societies such as the Royal Society of London and the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences extended them to meteorological observations submitted by a network of correspondents in Europe and beyond. Tables could be read in the usual fashion by finding the intersection of rows and columns. But they could also be scanned like an image, in the hopes of discovering subtle correlations between factors that seemed to presage changes in the weather. This practice of “seeing everything at a glance” in tables of weather observations echoes other early modern attempts to create synthetic images from heaps of data.

Super-Vision

The use of astronomical and mathematical tables dates back to antiquity, and contributors to the annals of early modern European scientific societies such as the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academie Royale des Sciences extended them to meteorological observations submitted by a network of correspondents in Europe and beyond. Tables could be read in the usual fashion by finding the intersection of rows and columns. But they could also be scanned like an image, in the hopes of discovering subtle correlations between factors that seemed to presage changes in the weather. This practice of “seeing everything at a glance” in tables of weather observations echoes other early modern attempts to create synthetic images from heaps of data.

Guilt and the origins of modern law

Tracing the history of legal concepts from the decline of European feudalism to the Reformation, this paper examines ways in which the concept of guilt shaped the first evolution of modern law, and it claims that the early revolutionary junctures in the construction of the law were centred around specific and distinctive conceptions of guilt. It argues that, through the history of medieval and early-modern European society, the law learned positively to abstract and account for itself through internally formative exchanges over the subject of guilt, and changes in law's observation of guilt reflected a growing refinement in law's societal sensibility, in its inclusivity, in its patterns of imputation and in its positive powers of self-legitimation. Guilt formed the term around which the law enacted the necessary stages of its social adaptation and produced constructs to underwrite the requirement for general, abstracted and positively inclusive law that constitutes modern society. The ultimate result of guilt's evolution as a legal figure became visible in the fact that the law progressively intensified its positivity and inclusivity, and it amplified the legal and normative resources that it permitted modern societies to store, utilize and reproduce.

Decorating the Divas of Renaissance Society

Decorating the Divas of Renaissance Society Carole Collier Frick (bio) Bella Mirabella's Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Beginning with a clever play on Said's Orientalism as her title, editor Bella Mirabella's Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories obliquely manages to consider the construction of the Other in this interdisciplinary anthology focused on cultural practices in dress as part of the material culture of early modern European society. Sporting over sixty color illustrations attractively placed in a central choir that show accessory pieces ranging from ambergris-centered pomander beads to an ivory dildo with a butterfly bag at the other, this beautifully executed book intrigues. In the elegantly written initial chapter, Mirabella introduces this collection of studies on accessories such as pearls and jewelry, starched linen ruffs, codpieces, platform shoes, and veils, with the intent of bringing the topic of the accessories worn by men and women in Renaissance Italy and England "to the center of a discussion about material culture and social practice." Mirabella also questions the limits of any definition of what an accessory is by arguing that they are "multivalent objects, with multiple uses and meanings mediated by practice and context" (1). Thus perfume, scissors, dildos, personal wax seals, and even boys become "accessories," expanding our usual notion of the term in interesting and often intellectually challenging ways. Mirabella elides the word accessory with access, noting how these objects allowed wearers access to desired situations (like making a fortuitous marriage) not normally available to them, if they were accessorized impressively. She also points out that some accessories held their value and therefore became strategic investments for the future. Moreover, they created beauty, which is one reason why there are records of human beings [End Page 315] accessorizing as early as forty-five thousand years ago. Excessive decoration, however, could lead to accusations of deception, distortion, and even sinfulness, and therefore a proper balance was crucial to successful ornamentation. Beginning with an essay by Evelyn Welch on "stink"—scent and perfumed objects such as beads, buttons, and gloves—this text is coherently organized into five parts, the first of which is titled "Dressing Up," and also contains a piece on veils by Eugenia Paulicelli and a consideration of handkerchiefs by editor Mirabella. Each of these three chapters takes up the contradictory possibilities of its particular object of discussion. As a case in point, Paulicelli associates veils with both the Madonna and prostitutes, handkerchiefs with both flirtation and bodily fluids. The slippage between the sublime and disgusting is ingenious. Part 2 then investigates "erotic attachments"; in this section three lively studies engage the titillating trilogy of busks, codpieces, and dildos. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass explore the meaning of the busk, an intimate object of ivory, wood, metal, or whalebone that was worn inside the central seam of a woman's corset to flatten her stomach while pushing up her breasts. Next, Will Fisher looks at how the male accessory of the codpiece helped to materialize "competing ideologies of masculinity" by taking on two distinct forms that favored different parts of the male genitalia (102). Liza Blake rounds out this section with an examination of the use of early modern dildos as fashionable accessories, making a distinction between the dildo as the "sign" of a penis and as a "thing" in its own right, while arguing for its "thingness." The accompanying illustrations showing the actual objects as well as representations of them (including a 1795 frontispiece showing group sex from de Sade's La philosophie dans la boudoir) make for truly enlightening reading. Opening part 3 entitled "Taking Accessories Seriously," is Karen Raber's thought-provoking study of the many layers of meaning in Elizabeth I's conspicuous display of herself in "a bushel of pearls" (159). This is followed by Catherine Richardson's examination of the significance of the movement of jewelry in early modern society and personal relationships. Finally, Joseph Loewenstein' considers the complex meanings of the wax seal (as imprinted by a signet ring or seal matrix) in the material culture of early modern England and as demonstrated in the work of Shakespeare. Here, each...