Early Modern Europe Research Articles

Effects of weather and climate on fluctuations of grain prices in southwestern Bohemia, 1725–1824 CE

Abstract. Grain prices in early modern Europe reflected the effects of weather and climate on crop yields and a complex array of societal and socio-economic factors. This study presents a newly developed series of grain prices for Sušice (southwestern Bohemia, Czech Republic) for the period 1725–1824 CE, based on various archival sources. It aims to analyse their relationships with weather and climate, represented by temperature, precipitation, and drought (self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index, scPDSI) reconstructions, as well as particular weather extremes and anomalies reported in documentary evidence. Wheat, rye, barley, and oats series in Sušice showed high mutual correlations. The mean highest prices during the year typically occurred from May to July before the harvest, while prices usually declined afterwards. Wheat, rye, and barley prices were significantly negatively correlated with spring temperatures and positively correlated with scPDSI from winter to summer. This indicates that wetter winters, cooler and wetter springs, and wetter summers contributed to higher prices. The extremely high grain prices in the years 1746, 1771–1772, 1802–1806, and 1816–1817 were separately analysed with respect to weather and climate patterns and other socio-economic and political factors. The results obtained were discussed in relation to data uncertainty, factors influencing grain prices, and the broader European context.

Marginal and Obsolete? Rural Hospitals in Early Modern Europe: A Case Study of Catalonia

Summary Small local hospitals have been neglected by historians, and frequently assumed to have been marginal to their communities and largely obsolete by the eighteenth century. This paper questions such assumptions via a case study of Catalonia. It provides the first comprehensive estimates for the number of hospitals over the course of the eighteenth century, and then examines a sample of surviving accounts and other documentation to analyse the extent and nature of care provided. While the quality of care varied and most hospitals were restricted by their income, particularly against a background of war and rising prices, many nevertheless provided considerable care both to transient populations of foundlings and migrants and to their local communities. The paper calls for a re-evaluation of these forms of care in line with the re-evaluation of women’s caring work.

Reforming Church History. The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern European Historiography, edited by Gehrt D., Matthias M, and Salatowsky S2023

Reforming Church History. The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern European Historiography, edited by Gehrt D., Matthias M, and Salatowsky S2023

Why Westphalia Still Matters: Territorial Rights under Empire

Abstract Territory is a distinctive feature of modern international politics, but there is little consensus over what about it is distinctively modern. Recent scholarship in historical international relations (IR) takes modern territoriality to be defined by the practice of creating and enforcing borders. Scholarship therefore dismisses the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, once thought to be the origin of the sovereign territorial state, because it did not change border practices. However, this approach ignores legal history. I argue that territory is a legal concept, and a history of modern territoriality must explain under what conditions rulers expressed their authority as territorial in nature. This article explains why the legal evolution of territorial rights (landeshoheit, iure territorii) in early modern Europe was distinctive of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). While national monarchies asserted their “sovereignty” as non-territorial in order to capture overseas empires, the HRE developed a legal doctrine of territorially circumscribed jurisdiction within the imperial hierarchy. The Peace of Westphalia was a culminating event in which diverse privileges were recast as a single territorial right. Territorial autonomy was not only consistent with the hierarchy of the HRE but was fundamental to preserving it. This article has two contributions. First, it adds to recent scholarship on modern territoriality by explaining how legal history furnished the preconditions for ruling territory. Second, it places Westphalia and the empire’s legal history within the recent turn toward empire in historical IR. An important source for the development of international law was the internal constitution of the HRE. This prompts us to reconsider the notion that international law assumes a world of sovereign territorial states. On the contrary, early international law concerned territorial states nested within imperial hierarchy, not the anarchy of sovereignty.

Reading the rebus: the reception of seventeenth-century German rebus broadsheets

Rebuses—visual riddles that replace words or syllables by images—were highly popular in early modern Europe. Many broadsheets containing rebus poems were printed in France and Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although multiple theories on the intended audience and use of these rebuses have been formulated by historians, very little is known about their actual reception, since the extant broadsheets rarely contain any traces of their use by contemporary owners. However, several German rebus riddles have recently come to light that do contain evidence of how they were read and interpreted in early modern times. The broadsheets in question are political in nature: they pertain to the Thirty Years’ War, ridiculing the opponent by means of visual satire. The solutions to these rebus puzzles have been added in early modern hands. These rare traces of the contemporary reception of rebus broadsheets make it possible to follow the thought process of their readers step by step, demonstrating how they tackled the visual riddles and which type of image was most difficult to decipher. In one case, multiple individuals even worked on the solution at different stages, showing how these visual games could be played over and over again. These sources give us a unique insight into early modern visual literacy at work.

Book Review: Music and religious education in early modern Europe by Hyun-Ah Kim

Book Review: <i>Music and religious education in early modern Europe</i> by Hyun-Ah Kim

Veronica O’Mara / Patricia Stoop (Eds.), Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Catholic Preaching and Preachers Across Manuscript and Print (C. 1450 to C. 1550). (SERMO. Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching, Vol. 17.) Turnhout, Brepols 2023

Veronica O’Mara / Patricia Stoop (Eds.), Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Catholic Preaching and Preachers Across Manuscript and Print (C. 1450 to C. 1550). (SERMO. Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching, Vol. 17.) Turnhout, Brepols 2023

Veronica O'Mara, and Patricia Stoop, eds. Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Catholic Preaching and Preachers across Manuscript and Print (c. 1450 to c. 1550) Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Pp. 516.

Veronica O'Mara, and Patricia Stoop, eds. Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Catholic Preaching and Preachers across Manuscript and Print (c. 1450 to c. 1550) Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Pp. 516.

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science VERITRACE will enhance our understanding of the role of ancient wisdom writings in the development of early modern natural philosophy by employing state-of-the-art digital techniques on a large corpus of early modern texts. The project charts the spread of this discourse from Renaissance Italy to early modern Europe and identifies watershed moments in the reception of these ancient wisdom writings.

Our ancestors: the Cimbri, Goths and Sarmatians. Three ethnogenetic legends in early modern Europe

ABSTRACT The study presented here is an attempt at a comparative analysis of three early modern phenomena in the history of ideas and culture: three ethnogenetic theories about the origins of the Swedish (Gothic) and Polish (Sarmatian) nations and states, as well as that of the Danes, originating from the ancient Cimbri. First, they will be compared as historiographic concepts characteristic of early modern knowledge. The next part of the paper concerns modifications to these theories made in national historiographies and the broader visions of the history of the respective countries based on them. The last part of the study presents how these ideas function at the political level, both in relation to broader visions of political reality and political practice. The analysis suggests that while in the case of the 16th-century historical concepts of origo gentis, there are more similarities than differences, the subsequent stages of development show increasing differentiation: the ideas of Sarmatian ethnogenesis underwent greater changes than others. However, there are similarities in the way Gothic and Sarmatian ideas functioned in political life and politics during that period in Sweden and Poland, respectively. The weakest point is the influence of Cimbrian ethnogenesis on the politics of Denmark at that time.

Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period. By Ivana Čapeta Rakić and Giuseppe Capriotti. Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World, vol. 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. 309 pp. $125 cloth. Open-access e-book: https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MEMEW-EB.5.123930

Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period. By Ivana Čapeta Rakić and Giuseppe Capriotti. Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World, vol. 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. 309 pp. $125 cloth. Open-access e-book: https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MEMEW-EB.5.123930

:Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe

:<i>Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe</i>

‘These arts I used with thee’

Abstract This article delves into the collaborative dynamics of early modern literary production, emphasising the need for a comprehensive view of collaboration beyond joint authorship as the role of translators is still often overlooked, maintaining their perceived secondary status even after the translational turn. Using Petrarch's I Triumphi, first printed in 1470, and arguably one of the most decisive vernacular works in early modern Europe, as a case study, the article showcases the pivotal contribution of translators to a text's international prominence, challenging established gender norms in Petrarchism. The article highlights the role of the female translators as collaborators and proposes a nuanced understanding of gender, social class and religious factors in shaping translation practices, enriching our comprehension of early modern literary dynamics.

Underground Mathematics. Craft Culture and Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe, by Thomas Morel

Underground Mathematics. Craft Culture and Knowledge Production in Early Modern Europe, by Thomas Morel

Reforming Church History. The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern European Historiography ed. by Daniel Gehrt, Markus Matthias, and Sascha Salatowsky (review)

Reforming Church History. The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern European Historiography ed. by Daniel Gehrt, Markus Matthias, and Sascha Salatowsky (review)

Imaging Authority, Authorship and Mortality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Imaging Authority, Authorship and Mortality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Averting Miscarriage in Early Modern Europe

Averting Miscarriage in Early Modern Europe

Of Coffee Cups and Beer Glasses: Material Drinking Culture and Colonial Beverages in Rural Northwest Germany, 1600–1800

abstract: This article explores the spread of material drinking culture of colonial and domestic beverages in rural regions in early modern northwest Germany. The rapid diffusion of colonial beverages in early modern Europe is well established in literature on consumption and material culture. But historians have yet to adequately answer questions concerning the way these beverages influenced material culture in intermediate regions, which were neither centers of (global) trade networks nor at their periphery. This article argues that while rural, intermediate areas lagged behind the development of centers, they also produced new forms of material drinking culture distinct from cities.

Redefining the treponemal history through pre-Columbian genomes from Brazil

The origins of treponemal diseases have long remained unknown, especially considering the sudden onset of the first syphilis epidemic in the late 15th century in Europe and its hypothesized arrival from the Americas with Columbus’ expeditions1,2. Recently, ancient DNA evidence has revealed various treponemal infections circulating in early modern Europe and colonial-era Mexico3–6. However, there has been to our knowledge no genomic evidence of treponematosis recovered from either the Americas or the Old World that can be reliably dated to the time before the first trans-Atlantic contacts. Here, we present treponemal genomes from nearly 2,000-year-old human remains from Brazil. We reconstruct four ancient genomes of a prehistoric treponemal pathogen, most closely related to the bejel-causing agent Treponema pallidum endemicum. Contradicting the modern day geographical niche of bejel in the arid regions of the world, the results call into question the previous palaeopathological characterization of treponeme subspecies and showcase their adaptive potential. A high-coverage genome is used to improve molecular clock date estimations, placing the divergence of modern T. pallidum subspecies firmly in pre-Columbian times. Overall, our study demonstrates the opportunities within archaeogenetics to uncover key events in pathogen evolution and emergence, paving the way to new hypotheses on the origin and spread of treponematoses.

The Maker of Pedigrees: Jakob Wilhelm Imhoff and the Meanings of Genealogy in Early Modern Europe. Markus Friedrich

The Maker of Pedigrees: Jakob Wilhelm Imhoff and the Meanings of Genealogy in Early Modern Europe. Markus Friedrich