Early Modern Society Research Articles

Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies and Cultures. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra (New York, Routledge, 2019) 274 pp. $155.00 cloth $42.95 paper Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2020) 334 pp. $49.95

Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies and Cultures. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra (New York, Routledge, 2019) 274 pp. $155.00 cloth $42.95 paper Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2020) 334 pp. $49.95

Illegitimate parenthood in early modern Europe

ABSTRACT This special section presents new research on the ways in which unmarried parents – particularly women – negotiated illegitimacy, how they interacted with urban institutions, and what legal resources they had. Throughout the early modern period, extramarital pregnancies were an important issue of concern to urban authorities and city dwellers. In line with recent historiographic strands, the two articles in this section approach the topic of unwed motherhood from below. The articles pay particular attention to the interactions between institutions and unwed mothers, the diversity of identities of unmarried parenthood, and the agency of unwed mothers in early modern Europe. Geographically, the contributions cover evidence from cities in Italy, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. In this introduction, we contextualize the most important issues addressed in the contributions. We explain why early modern societies regarded unwed motherhood as such a serious problem and expound the concept of ‘agency’ in relation to illegitimacy. We then elaborate on the institutions that dealt with unmarried parenthood in early modern Europe and their possible effect on the agency of unmarried mothers. This includes the impact of changes on the treatment of illegitimacy by institutions, and the North-South divide with regard to attitudes towards unwed parenthood.

The Power of Religious Societies in Shaping Early Modern Society and Identities. By Rose-Marie Peake. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 245 pp. €99.00 cloth.

The Power of Religious Societies in Shaping Early Modern Society and Identities. By Rose-Marie Peake. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 245 pp. €99.00 cloth.

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.

Fashion or Function? The Use of Silver in Seventeenth-Century Irish Society

What was more important to consumers in seventeenth-century Ireland: the fashion or the function of their silver? This article disentangles the multiple and complex motivations informing the robust acquisition and consumption by individuals and institutions of a wide-ranging assortment of silverwares. Using the body of extant plate and a large array of documentary sources, this article poses and addresses several questions that have hitherto received little or no attention in the literature: How was silver used in seventeenth-century Ireland? Can we dismiss or prioritise the use value of items ostensibly acquired for symbolic, ceremonial or commemorative purposes? Did design and decoration matter? And, if so, how did this impact on value and utility? By answering these questions, this article evaluates plate as a material simultaneously facilitating functional purposes and expressing taste. This article uses these conclusions to generate a greater understanding of early modern Irish consumer society and the role of silver within this society.

Muck, Mummies and Medicine: Disgust in Early Modern Science

Abstract This essay shows that early modern practices that used human bodily matter cannot be – as hitherto – explained by the absence of the emotion of disgust nor as being conducted in spite of disgust. Instead, it proposes to read those practices’ changing history as part of the history of the ‘paradox of disgust’. Four case studies (on anatomy, excrement, mummies and skulls) demonstrate that disgust was highly productive: it attracted fascination, allowed physicians to fashion themselves, and was even believed capable of healing. Over time and for complex reasons, however, the productive side of disgust declined. Combining current approaches in the history of emotions and material culture studies, this essay sets out not only to propose a new narrative for the changing role of disgust in early modern science and societies, but also to explore how variations in settings and human intervention changed the way emotions were used and perceived.

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.

The Saint as Medicator: Medicine and the Miraculous in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy.

SummaryThis article discusses the interlinkage of medicine and the miraculous in the healing actions of living saints, based on the canonisation dossiers of St Francesca Romana (1440–53) and St Francesco di Paola (1512–17). These documents include a large number of miracles performed by saints during their lifetime, and in a large proportion of these cases, the holy person administered some kind of medical substance to an infirm devotee before or while performing the miracle. While the commissioners of canonisation inquests had to determine that the cure was of a miraculous origin, it appears that for the devotees the medical and miraculous acts were an inseparable part of the same continuum. Occasional conflicts arose with medical professionals, but the living saints also collaborated with them. The connection of a medicating saint and a miracle-performing saint is thus an essential aspect of the medical pluralism of late medieval and early modern societies.

Introduction: War and Emotion in Early Modern Europe

Since the 1980s, the history of emotions has developed rapidly. Some even speak of a real emotional turn. However, military history and the history of emotions still intersect little in early modern history studies. Since Antiquity, the emotions of soldiers have certainly been regarded as an objective parameter of war, and the role of emotions in the war context seems obvious. However the military history of modern Europe is still not very open to the concepts and methods of the history of emotions which, quite often, does not study war. Yet the history of emotions suggests fruitful avenues for renewing military history, and the study of war, omnipresent between the 16th and 18th centuries, is crucial to understand early modern societies.

Legal Vocabulary of Arabic-Speaking ‘adat Monuments in 14th-20th Century Dagestan (Some Results of the Study of Islamic Discourses)

The article is an attempt at a concise historical-legal dictionary of legal custom or ‘adat practiced by Muslim highlanders in the North-East Caucasus in the 14th-20th centuries. It contains 107 dictionary and phraseology units gathered in documents, normative and narrative sources including inscriptions. They share characteristic inaccuracies in Arabic morphology and peculiar semantics. The author argues that it was the result of cultural translation of historical realities of non-Arab society. Its legal vocabulary was created by relatively competent Shari‘a judges, teachers and students of madrasahs for members of their own rural communities and confederacies. The translation into Arabic aimed at legitimizing agreements concluded at meetings of the confederations. The glossary should help readers of local Arabic-speaking sources from the North-East Caucasus. At the same time, it elucidates controversies of Islamic discourse based on the Dagestani ‘adat that was a changing legal custom in the framework of first Islamic and then Russian imperial and early Soviet law. Historians know better the discourse of Muhammad of Kututl, Dawud of Usisha, Murtada-‘Ali of Urada who took part in the 17th-19th centuries Shari‘ah movement against non-Islamic local customs. In judicial practice, however, these scholars had to refer to different ‘adat norms and procedures reflecting the early modern society they lived in. At the same time, they Islamized legal custom gradually as we can see from changing meanings of the terms presented in the paper.

“Republican” Mutinies in the Spanish Navy: Resonances of an Era of Rebellion and the Erosion of an Empire

AbstractAt the end of the eighteenth century, the large-scale warfare that confronted the major European powers exceeded their financial capabilities. This, in turn, affected the operational effectiveness of their military machinery and disturbed its disciplinary order. Consequently, by the 1790s, French, British, and Dutch naval crews resorted to mutiny on an enormous scale. They were driven by fatigue, harsh conditions of service, and disagreements with higher command. Decades later, the Real Armada witnessed a series of riots, resembling those of its rival powers but linked to the struggles for independence in the Hispanic-American colonies. Nearly all historians have overlooked the Spanish case, but the motives and direct consequences of the Spanish mutinies are worthy of explanation as part of global processes driven by the Age of Revolutions. Moreover, they offer an opportunity to improve the knowledge of early modern Spanish naval society.

Review: Global Reformations. Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, edited by Nicholas Terpstra

Review: Global Reformations. Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, edited by Nicholas Terpstra

Pratiques de l’écrit, pratiques de la carte : Rendre justice aux cartes médiévales et modernes (note critique)

Pratiques de l’écrit, pratiques de la carte: Rendre justice aux cartes médiévales et modernes (note critique)La sortie du catalogue de l’exposition qui a eu lieu en 2019 aux Archives nationales, Quand les artistes dessinaient les cartes. Vues et figures de l’espace français, Moyen Âge et Renaissance, sous la direction de Juliette Dumasy-Rabineau, Nadine Gastaldi et Camille Serchuk, est l’occasion de revenir sur une production cartographique importante à partir de la fin du Moyen Âge, celle des cartes à grande échelle, envisagées ici pour l’espace français. Si le catalogue met l’accent sur la dimension artistique de ces cartes, le corpus choisi permet surtout de montrer que celles-ci s’inscrivaient dans des contextes documentaires plus vastes. L’ouvrage rend également compte de la diversité de leurs usages et de leur rôle récurrent dans le cadre du règlement de conflits devant la justice. Il donne un certain nombre d’éclairages, qui mériteraient d’être approfondis, concernant les commanditaires de ce type de cartes et invite, pour finir, à réfléchir sur quelques idées reçues quant aux représentations cartographiques de l’espace dans les sociétés médiévales et modernes, mais aussi dans les sociétés occidentales contemporaines.

Unwed mothers, urban institutions and female agency in early modern Dutch, German and Italian towns

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has exposed the complexity of the position of unwed mothers in early modern society. The traditional focus on their social marginalization is complemented by a growing awareness and scrutiny of their agency in navigating the various social, cultural, economic and political constraints. The various formal and informal institutions that were available to them played significant roles in shaping the extent to which these women were able to exercise control and make meaningful decisions. The aim of this contribution is to assess how different institutional arrangements affected women’s options in navigating unwed motherhood across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cities in Holland, Germany and Italy. Based on an overview of existing literature, we compare the experiences of unwed mothers by focusing on their scope of action before criminal courts, in litigation for marriage or financial compensation, and in abandonment practices. Differences cannot be characterized solely by contrasting Catholic and Protestant regions, nor can a North-South divide capture all variations we found. Rather, we argue, the contours of urban unwed mothers’ agency were shaped by a combination of women’s socio-economic status, the problematization of illegitimacy in societies, the availability of institutional arrangements relating to criminal prosecution, civil litigation, and welfare provisions, and the particular entanglements of these institutions in a given society.

“Melodious Madrigals”: A Study of Animal Musicians in Early Modern England

In early modern England, people believed in the music of the spheres, the notion that the foundations of cosmic order were a result of musical principles. The importance of music in early modern English society encouraged Renaissance thinkers to hear music in a variety of places, even within the noises of animals. I argue that numerous early modern literary texts, including works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton, indicate that animals are capable of hearing celestial music and that they are imitating the heavenly music through their own musical performance. Animals' imitation of celestial music raises the following questions: Could animal-created music be a kind of divine language? Do animals' natural musical capabilities indicate that they are more connected to the divine than human beings are? Such questions matter because animals were seen as expendable in early modern England and, therefore, this view of animals as possibly closer to the divine than human beings problematizes the widely held early modern belief that men are superior to beasts. This article contributes to the rapidly growing field of early modern animal studies by creating a connection between Renaissance views of animals and the conceptual basis for environmental stewardship in our own time.

Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89. Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xi+269.

<i>Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89</i>. Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xi+269.

Epilogue 1: Early Modern Ottomans

Epilogue 1: Early Modern Ottomans Joanna Innes (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Ottoman Empire, Periodization The phrase “early modern” caught on among Anglophone historians of Britain and Europe in the 1970s. It resolved a tension between two accounts of when the modern era began: in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation and the “rise of capitalism,” or, as it was then becoming increasingly common to argue, with the industrial revolution—the latter account all too easily entailing the relegation of all that came before to the realm of the “pre-industrial” or (still worse) the “traditional.” The French had already developed a way of making the distinction: the first watershed marked the birth of “histoire moderne”; whereas the Revolution inaugurated “histoire contemporaine.” Anglo-phones by this means acquired a similar tool. The phrase allowed the sixteenth century and after to be “modern,” but a different kind of modern. Though a vision of modernity (with detachable components) remained implicit, by and large the effect was to free the “early modern” period to be modern in its own way. The phrase was attractive to non-Marxists, because it offered an alternative to “feudalism to capitalism” schemas: it opened the way to a characterization of the economic structures and practices of the era in fresh terms. The period thus demarcated was understood to have been characterized by change and crisis—the much debated “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” This in turn was commonly argued to have been at least in part a political crisis, associated with the rise of new kinds of state keen to develop new forms of relationship with society, and also with struggles for pre-eminence between these states—not least those that were developing world-traversing “seaborne empires.” In some tension with these emphases, interest in structural-function-alist anthropology encouraged constructions of “early modern society” as a broadly static system, a meaning-drenched hierarchy, which could be thrown into disorder but tended to reassemble itself back into something like its equilibrium state. In parallel, Malthusian demography encouraged the modelling [End Page 74] of population and the environment as a homeostatic system: crisis-prone but constantly reverting to equilibrium. It is clear from the think-pieces assembled here that, by the time Ottoman-ists embraced the “early modern” in the 1990s and still more during the early twenty-first century, the phrase had acquired somewhat different baggage for Europeanists, and therefore offered different opportunities, and posed different problems. This was partly because of broader changes in historiographical fashion, and partly because understandings of the period were inflected by increasingly upbeat, future-oriented accounts of the eighteenth century, in which interest boomed around this time. As historians responded to sloganizing about “globalization” with their own accounts of and approaches to the “global,” more attention was directed to the many more and less benign forms of European outreach and contact, and to Europeans’ importation and consumption of new exotic commodities, also, to new forms of learning and the impact of “print culture,” and to changing forms of sociability. Analysis of the logic of social roles gave way to stories about “self-fashioning.” While developments in the forms of states were still imagined as having created tensions with subject populations, these were subsumed into a longer narrative about the rise of powerful “fiscal-military” states, which succeeded only inasmuch as they forged effective relationships with their societies. Ottomanists wondering how far to try to locate themselves within this narrative have approached that question with needs and hopes that also distinguish them from the first generation of Europeanist adopters. Contributors to the current discussion repeatedly identify two main drivers: the desire to escape from a narrative of Ottoman history which posits “decline” from the battle of Lepanto onwards, and the desire to enter into more equal comparative or transnational conversations with Europeanists—which have become more possible as Europeanists for their part have become keener to stage such conversations. This contrast (no doubt over-schematized) between two episodes of adoption reminds us that the meaning of phrases such as “early modern” is always changeable and context-dependent. By my reckoning, a small majority of contributors to this discussion see merit in using...

Early Modernity: An Idea in Need of Greater Depth

Early Modernity: An Idea in Need of Greater Depth James Grehan (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Ottoman Empire, Social History, Urbanization One common complaint leveled against the term “early modernity” is that it carries too much baggage. Historians who try to apply it to Ottoman history, or any other part of the “non-Western” world, will immediately have to fend off the accusation that they are, unwittingly or not, smuggling a “Eurocentric” framework into places where it does not belong. If we are to use this term outside European history, then, the fundamental task will be to fashion a definition which is suitable for the entire globe. Yet sensitivity to Eurocentrism, fueled by debates about orientalism, will not be enough for the job. A more insidious problem within conventional narratives about early modernity is a preoccupation with social elites. Receiving nearly exclusive stress are trends at the “top” of society, e.g., the diffusion of firearms, the subsequent creation of “gunpowder empires,” the growth of long-distance trade, the huge expansion in the worldwide stock of bullion, the resulting impulse towards commercialization, etc. All these observations are undoubtedly part of the story, but leave out far too much. It is a way of writing history which returns, again and again (like much of Ottoman historiography itself), to the state, its army and bureaucracy, and well-to-do merchants. The rest of society appears as idle bystanders, at best marginal to the discussion and distant from the real motors of historical change. The path to a more suitable definition therefore lies squarely (though not exclusively, of course) within social history. In no other way can we bring the question of “early modernity” down to street level. Indeed, if we cannot find signs of it here, then it will always seem like a cheap knock-off from European historiography, and worse still, have almost nothing to say about the experiences of the vast majority of Ottoman subjects (and people elsewhere). Thus, social history will supply the sternest test for any “early modern” periodization. [End Page 34] It will commit us to a search for “deep structures.” Without this requisite social depth, any notion of “early modernity” will forever totter over narrow and shaky foundations. How should such a social history proceed? One theme which ought to be at the forefront is urbanization. Nearly everywhere from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, towns grew larger and more numerous. This shift towards a relatively more urban population has to be one of the decisive boundaries between the early modern and medieval eras. If we look at the Ottoman experience, we immediately find intriguing parallels. Most dramatic, especially during the sixteenth century, was the sprouting of new towns and the revival of old ones across Anatolia and the Balkans. In the Arab provinces, too, the urban population grew substantially (in the range of sixty to eighty percent for the biggest Arab towns between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries). The conversion of villagers into townspeople and the creation of self-consciously urban social zones have to rank as achievements of the first order. We have hardly come to grips with all this far-reaching upheaval, which was hardly unique to the Ottoman Empire. Early modern societies throughout Eurasia were nurseries for towns and fostered the dim beginnings of what would later, under more favorable circumstances, mature into modern bourgeois culture. A more urban population necessarily generates greater social dynamism. By their nature, towns accelerate social mobility and innovation. One result of Ottoman urbanization was the formation of a more articulated social hierarchy whose various ranks, manners, and status symbols have yet to be analyzed in detail. A more obvious departure from medieval times was the rise of a more sophisticated material culture. Most famous are the early modern recreational drugs, coffee and tobacco (joined by tea, chocolate, and sugar in other parts of the world). We might imagine that these commodities conquered new markets by virtue of their chemical charms alone. Their diffusion, though, is inconceivable without the growth of towns, which accounted for the greatest “market share” and were most active in fostering a new leisure culture—most notably in the invention of the coffeehouse...

Many languages — one town: royal free towns of Upper Hungary

Early modern Hungarian society was characterised by the presence of multiple different languages. This was especially true for the kingdom’s urban communities where speakers of various tongues encountered each other in relatively small physical spaces. In this paper, the case of the Upper Hungarian royal free towns is discussed. As a result of the towns’ origins and late medieval development, the communities of burghers, and especially local elites, tended to cultivate their German cultural and linguistic identities. Moreover, in their political imagination, an especially important role was played by the ideals of communal harmony and unity. However, each of the towns was opened to the immigration of new inhabitants, who in many cases were people of non-German origin, and who thus presented potential sources of disharmony. Various measures were therefore developed to address the situation, ranging from the gradual integration of newcomers into the cultural fabric of every community to punitive measures aimed at excluding those ignorant of a specific language from positions of economic or political influence. An important phenomenon occurred with the Reformation with its stress on more prominent use of vernacular language in worship. The mainly indirect impact of larger political developments on the local sociolinguistic situation is also mentioned.

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.