Early Modern State Research Articles

Catholics and Protestants in Graubünden: Confessional Discipline and Confessional Identities without an Early Modern State?

Catholics and Protestants in Graubünden: Confessional Discipline and Confessional Identities without an Early Modern State? Get access Randolph C. Head Randolph C. Head University of California, Riverside Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 17, Issue 3, July 1999, Pages 321–345, https://doi.org/10.1191/026635599677729971 Published: 01 July 1999

Early modern state and enterprise: shaping the dialogue between the French monarchy and paper manufacturers

Early modern state and enterprise: shaping the dialogue between the French monarchy and paper manufacturers

Catholics and Protestants in Graubünden: Confessional Discipline and Confessional Identities without an Early Modern State?

Catholics and Protestants in Graubünden: Confessional Discipline and Confessional Identities without an Early Modern State?

Monster Theory: Reading Culture (review)

130 Reviews models of power and the Early Modern state, emphasising the importance of local readings and detailed research. Ultimately, Clegg concludes, 'a history of press censorship' in the reign of Elizabeth 'is a history of critical moments in the Elizabethan state' (p. 222). Andrew McRae Department of English University of Sydney Cohen, Jeoffrey Jerome, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Minneapoli London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996; paper; pp. xiii, 315; R.R.P. US$21.95, US$54.95 (cloth). This powerful and well integrated collection comprises some fourteen ess by various contributors, together with a framing introduction by Jeffrey Cohen. As w e are told at various points (pp. xiii, 24, etc.) many of the ideas in the main text arise initially from medieval or Renaissance social situations, literatures or topoi. Furthermore, various of the contributors—Ruth Waterhouse, Michael Uebel and William Sayers—have had long and active careers as teachers of the literature of earlier periods of European culture. Several of them, like Kathleen Perry Long in her essay, 'Hermaphrodites Newly Discovered: The Cultural Monsters of Sixteenth-Century France', make the point that the present can explain the past more meaningfully. Indeed, Dr. Ruth Waterhouse goes further, as, in the words of the editor, she proceeds backwards, and so draws out one of the central concerns of the collection, antidiachronicity, . . . following the insights of the deconstructionists . . . she argues that w e can and should read backward from the present . . . A n d so Grendel is filtered through such intervening texts as Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (p. x) In short, the Beowulf essay, like a number of the others, argues powerful for the value of current cultural thought as a means of according insights into a Dark Age text. Waterhouse does, however, argue strongly for the more familiar argument and case that 'studies of Old English texts reveal as much about the period of and cultural influences on the decoder as about the AngloSaxon period itself (p.26). Here she follows Frantzen (1991), Fulm (1991), and K e m p Malone in 1970. Yet she also gives us some of the volume's clearest and most articulate comments on the Self-Other relationship, where that may be seen as the perversion of reason, and so the Other viewed as antisocial, Reviews 131 supernatural, destructive always and yet ever interacting with the society which has spawned or spurned it. In some ways these arguments are complemented by William Sayers in his essay entitled 'The Alien and the Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of the Icelanders'. This probing account of the medieval Icelandic culture of the supernatural examines the purposes to which the draugr is put in the immediate context of three principal sagas: the early chapters of Laxdoela saga; the Eurbyggja saga, with its most elaborate intertwining of the draugr and related motifs, such as supernatural animals in the general story line; and the 'person' of Glamr, in Grettis saga Asmundarson, and the consequent descent of a hero, from ascent toward strength, glory, community, and inevitable descent into powerlessness, outlawry, and solitude,... to a private life of personal memory, solitude, and fear of the dark; . . . knowledge . . . from the 'other side', of man's inevitable social, physical and spiritual decline' (p. 253) As Sayers concludes pertinently, the contemporary reader was left with the loss of the simple pagan heroic ethos, but with understanding and acceptance of 'a sadder, wiser, potentially more compassionate world under the new Christian faith' (p. 262). Thus the pagan past has been used to explain or validate the civilised(?) present, and so is an attempt at 'ethnogenesis' and the inoculation of the community—in theory at least— from past virulences by a greater conscience and its entry into a more ordered and functioning world. The above analysis of two papers is indicative of the foregrounded concerns, the detailed study of the monstrous and the Other in such contexts as: Montaigne's 'Des boyteux', III, xi; a satiric account of the court of Henri IH, written across the doubly sexed body of the hermaphrodite; or in the conjoining of giants and dwarves in Renaissance England. Yet Cohen is right to do what...

<B>Gunpowder Weaponry and the Rise of the Early Modern State</B>

<B>Gunpowder Weaponry and the Rise of the Early Modern State</B>

Gunpowder Weaponry and the Rise of the Early Modern State

S the 1988 publication of Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, the term ‘Military Revolution’ has become common parlance and accepted scholarship among military historians. Recent books and collections of articles by Brian M. Downing, Weston F. Cook Jr, David Eltis, Clifford J. Rogers, and Andrew Ayton and J.L. Price have even incorporated the term in their titles. All these works agreed that a revolution in military tactics and strategy had been effected by the innovation of gunpowder weaponry. And while it is true that the ‘Military Revolution’ thesis has had its critics, these, like Jeremy Black, John A. Lynn, Bert S. Hall and myself, have specifically targeted Parker’s ideas of technological determinism.

Does Jack Goldstone's Model of Early Modern State Crises Apply to Russia?

In 1991 Jack A. Goldstone published an important book, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, in which he boldly charted a new way to explain the basic causes of revolution throughout Eurasia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Goldstone attempts to explain the periodic waves of early modern state crises, rebellions, and civil wars in widely divergent cultures and geographic settings by developing an intriguing model of state breakdowns which he applies primarily to England, France, the Ottoman Empire, and China. Goldstone views the crises of large agrarian absolute monarchies mainly as the result of a single basic process: prolonged population growth in the context of relatively inflexible economic and social structures, eventually resulting in rapid price inflation, sudden shifts in resources, and rising social demands on a scale that most agrarian-based bureaucratic states found overwhelming. Simply put, long-term population and price in-creases have helped push rigid political, economic, and social institutions into crisis. Since the publication of Goldstone's work, there has been a positive response to it from many historians and social scientists. So far, however, no one has attempted to test Goldstone's model by applying it to a state break-down which the author did not include in his study. In my own research I have discovered that Goldstone's model may apply to Russia even though he did not focus on it. In this article I hope to demonstrate that his work helps explain Russia's Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and that the Russian test case helps validate Goldstone's model as an important contribution to comparative history.

Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555-1870

The principle cuius regio eius religio belongs to the fundamental structures of modem German history. Juridically set at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, expanded to include Calvinists and reapplied at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it governed political and religious relations in the German lands until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803. Stipulating that the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the ruled, cuius regio eius religio constituted an attempt to ameliorate the vexing problems of religious coexistence, religious pluralism, and religious conflict that the Lutheran Reformation and subsequent Protestant reform movements introduced into the fabric of German society. These problems, in turn, powerfully influenced the special trajectory of German state and nation building, ensuring that the German path, more perhaps even than those of the French or English, would be marked by problems of religious, and therefore cultural, disunity. In what follows we will consider how religious division affected state building and civil society in Germany from 1555 to 1870. While historians of early modem Germany have recently devoted a considerable amount of research to this problem, suggesting complex interactions between confessional formation and the emergence of the early modern state, historians of nineteenth-century Germany have been slower to recognize the impact of religious division on nineteenth-century German society. Moreover, neither early modern historians nor their counterparts who deal with the modern era have attempted to trace the continuities and discontinuities across what has become a strict disciplinary barrier between the two periods. In this article we will consider both periods, but we will also focus on the continuities across the barrier. Such an analysis implies two sets of questions. The first concerns the creationsometimes by suasion, sometimes by force-of confessional unity: What impact did the formation of confessional homogeneity have on state structure, on the con-

Petitions, Gravamina and the early modern state: local influence on central legislation in England and Germany (Hesse)

SUMMARY In this article Beat Kümin and Andreas Würgler make a comparative study of how the peoples in early modern England and Hesse used their acknowledged rights to present petitions and grievances to exercise a real influence on the process of legislation, and even over administration in general. They could on occasion, virtually initiate legislation from below. The article illustrates the unusually wide scope and usage of the petition in England, helped by the early recognition of the subjects' right to petition both houses of Parliament as well as the monarch. It is suggested that this could result in a broad popular participation in the work of government. But even in Hesse, where the rulers asserted their sovereign rights as sole legislators and where, from the seventeenth century, they were attempting to develop an effective bureaucratic administration to sustain their aspirations, the method of petitioning the ruler, either through the Estates, Gravamina or directly, enabled ordinary people to have a part in promoting legislation and to participate in, and even effectively restrain, the princely administration.

A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany: Family and Power in the Creation of the State

This study of the formation of the early modern state in Florence shows how local families and central rulers redefined concepts of power and domination which conditioned political evolution along social and gender lines. The Florentine state was one of the first to create new state institutions, challenge municipal powers, and develop a new centralized political system. By incorporating the families of shopkeepers, wool producers, landholders, notaries, and military officers living in the outlying town of Poppi, southwest of Florence, as integral contributors to state formation, the author provides a vivid look at the ways power and resistance operated at the everyday level of social relations, and attempts to redefine the context and the participants in state formation.

Sebastian Brant: the key to understanding Luca Penni's Justice and the seven deadly sins

This essay presents a detailed study of eight well-known School of Fontainebleau prints, Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins, etched by Leon Davent after the Franco-Italian artist Luca Penni. Some of Penni's borrowings from earlier graphic works are analyzed, in particular Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, a key source of inspiration. The prints are situated in the religious, social, and economic context of mid-sixteenth-century France, and the gender and ideological content of what may well be Penni's artistic testament is scrutinized. The series is interpreted as actively sustaining the creation of the early modern state.

Legati e governatori dello Stato Pontificio (1550-1809) ed. by Christoph Weber

696book reviews Early Modern European Legati e govematori dello Stato Pontificio (1550-1809). Edited by Christoph Weber. [PubbUcazioni degU Archivi di Stato, Sussidi 7.] (Rome: Ministero per i Beni CulturaU e AmbientaU, Ufficio Centrale per i Beni Archivistici. 1994. Pp. 989.) This volume represents a useful reference work and suggests interesting research avenues in the history of the early modern Church and of early modern Italian society. The volume consists of a chronology and prosopography of provincial and local clerical administrators Ui the Papal State from the midsixteenth century to the Napoleonic age. The work includes an introduction, lengthy descriptions of sources and bibUography, the chronology arranged by sixty cities and towns, and a prosopography including biographical and famUy information about 2,308 administrators. The famUy information adds data about another 3,420 individuals. Christoph Weber collected this information from archival series Ui the Vatican , Roman, and provincial archives, as weU as from a variety of previous compUations , the works of local erudites, printed annuaries, and genealogical coUections and treatises. WhUe the chronology is as complete as these sources permit, in the prosopographyWeber offers selections from the huge amounts of avaUable information. In particular he chose to provide limited information of better-known individuals, those for Instance who ascended to Important bishoprics or the cardinalate, to the advantage of the middle level of papal administrators ,whose careers spanned local government and the Curia offices and who represented the "backbone" (p. 31) of the Papal State. Weber also by and large excluded lay administrators from his research. This volume is, then, a useful and important reference tool for the history of the early modern Papal State. Weber also suggests, Ui his introduction and through the organization of his work, possible uses and ???efGe?^?????ß of this material. FUst, the progressive weakening of the many special administrations and arrangenrents ?Geße?? Ui various parts of ??e ß?3?e, and the waning ofnepotism by the late ße?e??ee??? century, show the ?G?eeßßeß of centraUzation and stataUzation that transformed papal administration, similarly to what happened in other early modern states. ??Ge??eG,Wèb8r's focus, in his prosopography, on the famUy context of the Uves and eßGeeGß ??e documents, points to the crucial role of the early modern bureaucracy as a link between state and society. The papal administrators came in fact often from local nobiUties and patriciates, and from a "civU" group trained in the law. The p?e??eGß of this pow8r e^e, monopolizing local administration and constituting a "bonding ground" (p. 26) for the Italian episcopate, helped the development of state power and control, but they also ensured the resistance and survival of traditional local aristocracies and eUtes into the ninetÎ8nth century. Weber's collected data,then, usefuUy add book reviews697 to debates on die bureaucratic state, on the relationship between center and periphery, and on early modern ItaUan eUtes. Tommaso Astarita Georgetown University Cajetan et Luther en 1518:Édition, traduction et commentaire des opuscules d'Augsbourg de Cajetan. Edited by Charles Morerod, O.P. 2 vols. [Cahiers Oecuméniques, 26.] (Fribourg: Éditions Universitäres. 1994. Pp. iv, 423, xvü; iv, 425-676. Fr. s. 95. paperback.) The meeting at Augsburg between Luther and Tommaso deVio has long been recognized as one of the decisive moments of Reformation history. The Dominican theologian, better known as Cajetan, was arguably the most profound Thomist ofhis generation. Luther, not yet under ecclesiastical censure,could explain and defend his theological views without the polemical rhetoric that would characterize his later work. Luther had a sufficientiy mature theological program for Cajetan later to declare that the Wittenberg Augustinian was creating an entirely new church. This is an important observation from a member of the Thomist tradition. The question of the relation of Luther to Thomistic theology was forcefully posed by Otto-Hermann Pesch Ui 1967, and recent studies have continued to explore subtleties and dtfficulties. Cajetan himself Ui the meanwhUe has been the subject of investigations by Jared Wicks and Barbara HaUensleben, among others, and as a result has acquUed a more prominent place in the canon ofcontroversial theologians. Although several dogmatic treatises have been published Ui the Leonine edition...

European Revolutions, 1492-1992. Charles Tilly , Jacques Le GoffRevolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Jack A. Goldstone

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsEuropean Revolutions, 1492-1992. Charles Tilly , Jacques Le Goff Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Jack A. Goldstone Daniel ChirotDaniel Chirot Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 67, Number 3Sep., 1995 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/245177 Views: 18Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1995 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Chester Dunning Does Jack Goldstone's Model of Early Modern State Crises Apply to Russia?, Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no.33 (Apr 2012): 572–592.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500020764

Feeding the Ottoman Troops on the Danube, 1768–1774

Provisioning of armies of 100,000 and more was one of the great challenges of all the states of Europe in the eighteenth century, forcing the coordination of production and supply of foodstuffs, and contributing to the incorporation of the military systems into the early modern state.1 Mobilisation and provisioning of the army were likewise the prime economic motivators of the Ottoman Empire, which had a long and distinguished history of the production and distribution of war supplies over vast distances, originally for the Janissary corps, and subsequently for the irregulars (levendler), the bulk of the fighting forces in the eighteenth century. Focussing on the production of biscuit, or hardtack (peksimet), for the Danubian battlefront during the 1768-74 Russo-Ottoman War, this article examines the costs and methods of financing its production, the success and failure of distribution, as well as the benefits and hazards of participation in Ottoman military fiscalism. The Ottoman government had come to rely on a provincial class of notables, consistently called ayans in the documentary evidence, for the oversight and completion of transactions driven by the exigencies of a war economy. Although the emergence of this class of officials has been corroborated by a number of studies, no one has yet considered the impact of war on these 'stewards of redistributions',2 who both profited and were coopted as the state 'reached directly into communities and households to seize the wherewithal of war'. 3 One estimate for the problems facing the armies of Europe during the later seventeenth century indicates that 60,000 soldiers and 40,000 horses required close to one million pounds of food a day.4 Costs of such demands on the society at large are extremely hard to calculate, even in western Europe, which has been far more extensively studied in this regard than the Ottoman Empire.5 One recent study of the Russian army acknowledged that the lack of data on prices combined with existing contradictory evidence makes estimating costs for the eighteenth century practically impossible.6 The Ottoman case may prove similarly intractable, but few attempts have been made even to pose the question.

Rethinking the state : Family strategies in early modern Tuscany1

Family strategies played a key role in the process of state formation in early modern Europe, yet this critical dimension of state consolidation has been largely ignored. Family and state have been treated as two separate historiographical issues. Historians of the family have analysed family patterns in relation to socio-economic and demographic trends, but have rarely related them to politics. Research on state formation has been concerned with explaining the successes and failures of central authority, the emergence of new institutions and the role of the more powerful bureaucratic provincial elites. It has thus focused on political and institutional issues and failed to analyse state-building as a socially embedded process. This article argues that families of lesser provincial elites were not only passive recipients of larger socio-economic and political circumstances, they were also active participants in the larger changes surrounding state consolidation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European rulers steadily expanded the institutions of their states and strengthened their authority over local powers. From the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, the image of the early modern state was dominated by the classic works of Jacob Burckhardt and Max Weber. Burckhardt's vision of the state as a work of art and Weber's observation on the creation of impersonal bureaucracies provided the conceptual framework to study the state and identified the state either with the policies and personalities of central rulers or with the activities of new bureaucracies. Their research thus emphasized centralization and absolutism as the main characteristics of early modern European political systems.2

The Early Modern State - J. Russell Major: From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles and Estates. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. xxii, 444. $49.95.)

The Early Modern State - J. Russell Major: From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles and Estates. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. xxii, 444. $49.95.) - Volume 57 Issue 4

Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading

If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance to that social order? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England. New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts. Sinfield is often provocative. He 'rewrites' Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.

Descriptive content analysis: the development of social discipline in the 'Reichspoliceyordnungen' of the 16th century

The program metatext1 was developed out of an application for indexing large quantities of textual data regularly over a long period of time. It turned out to be necessary to reorganize the structure of the descriptors being used at any given time. In order to improve indexing and the retrieval it was therefore decided to detach that part of the program in which the indexing takes place from the part in which the structure of the descriptors is being handled. The result of this design is a powerful tool for the collection and interpretation of historical data. The first historical sources analyzed with the help of metatext were three examples of 16th century legislation of the German Reich.2 The purpose of the thesis in progress is to analyze forms of social discipline in these sources as part of the early modern state formation. The term social discipline3, first introduced by Gerhard Oestreich, integrates Weber's theory of the development of modern society defined by reason and

The Protestant Ethic Revisited: Disciplinary Revolution and State Formation in Holland and Prussia

Current theories explain state structure and strength in terms of differences in socioeconomic and administrative development. Here, it is argued that a third factor was also critical in early modern state formation: a disciplinary revolution unleashed by ascetic Protestant movements. The essay critiques Foucalt's and Elias's theories of social disciplinization, explores the importance of disciplinary revolutions for the formation of two types of states (constitutional republics and military-bureaucratic monarchies), and seeks to identify and correct deficiencies in the neo-Marxist and institutionalist theories of the state.

Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World.Jack A. Goldstone

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsRevolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Jack A. Goldstone John MarkoffJohn Markoff Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 98, Number 4Jan., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/230096 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Chester Dunning Does Jack Goldstone's Model of Early Modern State Crises Apply to Russia?, Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no.33 (Apr 2012): 572–592.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500020764