German Lands Research Articles

Drinking and Public Space in Early Modern German Lands

This paper explores the relationship between drinking and public space in early modern Bavaria (Germany) and Bern (Swiss Confederation). Contemporaries drank alcohol mainly on sociable occasions and in public houses. Due both to mounting demand (greater spatial mobility) and to supply (potentially high income for publicans), the number of establishments increased between 1500 and 1800. Most emerged near markets and thoroughfares. Closer analysis reveals the spatial ambiguity of early modern inns, taverns and alehouses. While obliged to grant access to the “public,” they were simultaneously “private” households of their keepers. Furthermore, individual rooms were not invariably marked as “public” or “private” but were opened or closed depending on specific occasions. As social sites, public houses became contested spaces, reflecting the conflicting interests of authorities, patrons and publicans. The provision of victuals, sociability and public services helped to stabilize communities, while alcohol-related violence and unrest could challenge the existing order.

Sounding the Frauenseele : Gender, Modernism, and Intertextuality in Alban Berg's "Uber die Grenzen," op. 4, no. 3

When scholars describe societal and intellectual trends in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that affected musical modernism, they often include technological innovation, urbanization, and positivism, among other important factors.1 Frequently omitted from musicians' experience of modernity, however, is the changing situation of women, an omission that can obscure the important aspect of gender discourse from our understanding of modern music.2 In fact, shifts in the circumstances and societal perception of women arguably stand as one of the most significant changes of the modern era. A vociferous intellectual and literary debate had raged from the late nineteenth century onward over the idea of woman—issues ranging from her role in society to her effect on masculine identity and from the negative power of her "metaphysical essence" to her embodiment of Nature.3 In Germanic lands this [End Page 51] discourse came to be known as the Frauenfrage, or "woman question," and in various artistic and musical works the character and nature of woman was a deep-seated, if not explicit, concern.4 How can one argue that gender discourse affected the changing musical aesthetic? Certainly, the characterization or description of woman in a song or opera offers symbolic material for analysis. But what can we say about how an ideological discourse inflects a musical sound and its expression? Alban Berg, through the record of his reading in his books and journals, offers an exceptional insight into one modernist composer's perception and negotiation of the discourse on woman. With a study of Berg's reading of the Frauenfrage I specifically discuss the intertextual impact of its ideology on the musical style of the third song of op. 4, "Über die Grenzen" (Beyond the Boundaries). The idea of intertextuality in music, or the interaction between language, music, and other expressive and symbolic forms, can illuminate complex strands of ideological production in a musical design. Intertextuality goes beyond questions of musical text painting, or the totality of a piece's narrative, and instead situates the local expression of musical gesture in response to the intellectual discursive environment that helped foster its inception, highlighting the interaction between rhythm, pitch, texture, and timbre. Why do particular sounds arise to fulfill the creative impulse of the composer? To study the possible impact of the Frauenfrage on this process, I look into Berg's discursive imagination. Berg's confidence in his knowledge about woman is apparent in a letter he wrote to his American friend Frida Semler in July 1907 when he was twenty-two years old.5 In it he discusses his knowledge and expertise in judging a woman's character, and he assures her that despite his age he had already developed a discerning knowledge of the "soul of woman" (Frauenseele). Previous to the passage quoted here, Berg expressed his excitement about a play Semler had recently written and her other college experiences. [Your personality] is far beyond the best of your female compatriots—and—I can calmly say—stands above the most noble (an expression from Altenberg) of your fellow women!! This looks like only idle flattery: but it is not. It is but a matter of experience. I imagine, and I know I am not wrong, that I know human nature in general, and the soul of woman in particular. This knowledge I have learned less from letters than from personal experience and perspective; and I can say, despite my youth with regard to these things that in these matters I have never been mistaken—on the contrary, I have always gotten it right. [Die Sie weit über die besten Ihrer Landsmanninnen—und—ich kann ja ruhig sagen—über die edelsten (das ist so ein Ausdruck von Altenberg) Ihrer Geschlechtsgenossinnen stellt!! Das schaut nun aus als...

Early Modern

HistoryVolume 90, Issue 297 p. 125-146 Early Modern First published: 27 January 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2005.00326.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Books reviewed: Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe. James van Horn Melton (ed.), Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment: Constructing Publics in Early Modern German Lands. Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Thomas F. Mayer (ed.), The Correspondence of Reginald Pole 1. A Calendar, 1518–1546: Beginnings to Legate of Viterbo. Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in England. Narasingha P. Sil, Tudor Placemen and Statesmen: Select Case Histories. Jennifer Loach. Edited and with an introduction by George Bernard and Penry Williams, Edward VI. Andrei Pavlov and Maureen Perrie, Ivan the Terrible. Monique Weis, Les Pays-Bas Espagnols et les États du Saint Empire 1559–1579: Priorités et enjeux de la diplomatie en temps de troubles. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Pamela Sharpe, Population and Society in a East Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton 1540–1840. J. Chynoweth, N. Orme and A. Walsham (eds), The Survey of Cornwall by Richard Carew. Mark Stoyle, Circled with Stone: Exeter's City Walls 1485–1660. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. S. Mutchow Towers, Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England. Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England. Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match. Robert Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors. Brennan C. Pursell, The Winter King: Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years’ War. John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire 1650–1831. Orcutt Frost, Bering: The Russian Discovery of America. Janis Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution. M. John Cardwell, Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years’ War. Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. James Kelly, Sir Edward Newenham MP, 1734–1814: Defender of the Protestant Constitution. Volume90, Issue297January 2005Pages 125-146 RelatedInformation

Psychological Models of Masculinity in Döhlin, Musil, and Jahnn: Männliches, Allzumännliches by Roger Kingerlee (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 257 from some considerable tightening up: too much space is devoted to announcements of what is to follow, and too many unproductive detours into what little secondary literature there is on Hermann distract from the central findings of the study. In short: if the dissertation had been turned into a book (and a much shorter one at that), its impact on future debates could have been increased considerably. But even as it is, Godela Weiss-Sussex's study succeeds in re-evaluating Hermann as an author at the height of the literary fashions and the socio-cultural debates of his time: the time, that is, when Berlin was transformed into the firstreal metropolis in the German lands. National University of Ireland, Maynooth Florian Krobb Psychological Models of Masculinity in Doblin, Musil, andjahnn: Mdnnliches, Allzumdnnliches . By Roger Kingerlee. (Studies in German Language and Litera? ture, 27) Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Mellen. 2001. xviii + 391 pp. ?79.95. ISBN 0-7734-7493-5 (hbk). This book aims to do more than extend the application of gender critique to some classic modernist texts. Kingerlee adopts a critical stance towards the perspectives on male sexuality established by Klaus Theweleit in Mannerphantasien (Frankfurt a.M.: Roter Stern, 1977), Andrew Webber in Sexuality and the Sense of Self in Musil and Trakl (London: MHRA, 1990), and Maria Tatar in Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), and provides readings of Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Jahnn's Perrudja which bring out the senses in which these texts themselves present a critique of aggressive or 'heroic' masculinity. That critique, he rightly observes, owes much to the analytical discussion of human personality prompted since the 1880s by the writings of Nietzsche, Ernst Mach, Freud, Jung,and a number of other psychological theorists. It is a consistent strength of Kingerlee's textual analysis that he is able to relate specific motifs and specific perspectives on gender reliably to theoretical assumptions which were current when the literary works in question were being written, including works on Taoism which strongly influenced thinking about the complementarity of male and female principles. At a distance of time, the stereotypical character of these assumptions is readily apparent. Freud, for all the liberating potential of his notion of polymorphous sex? uality, clove to normative conceptions of active masculinity and passive femininity; Adler preserved this assumption within his analysis of dominant and submissive per? sonality types; Jung provided the similarly dichotomous model of the unconscious anima/animus; and even the pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who did much to expose untenable assumptions about gender identity in the 1920s, retains an inherited conception of 'effeminacy'. Such stereotypes are understandably echoed by the literary authors under discussion here: the habitual attitudes of Doblin's protagon? ist Biberkopf towards women and the realm of nature (with which 'the feminine' is also stereotypically associated) are brutally domineering, Musil is candid about the predatory aspect of his protagonist's sexuality, and the conventional understanding of effeminacy is a frequent reference point forJahnn's discussion of personality traits. But each narrative explores the formation and development of an individual in ways which assist a subtle appreciation of the tensions and cross-currents within sexual identity. Jahnn, a bisexual, provides a particularly revealing account of a male per? sonality which is irreconcilable with the heroic preconceptions of the period around the First World War, and Kingerlee is surely rightto emphasize?against the views of earlier critics?what the failure of Perrudja's personal relationships shows us about the complex impulses at work in his psyche. 258 Reviews The specific senses in which the imagery and organization of these literary texts challenge and interact with the conventional thinking of their time could have been pursued further.In places Kingerlee appears to rest content with linking the narrative content to the thinking of Jung or Adler in particular. But by examining these three texts alongside each other, he provides an illuminating study of the contribution that literary writing was making in the 1920s to the revision of gender assumptions. The book would have benefited from closer editorial attention to detail in some...

La Musique au temps des Encyclopédistes by Claude Dauphin (review)

MLR, 99.1, 2004 195 origin by participating willingly in colonial ventures (which included collusion in the slave trade). Overall, the Protestant refugee experience, completed in the course of the nineteenth century, constitutes mutatis mutandis an important model fordiaspora studies and offersone measure of what happens over time to a displaced community which, interestingly,frequently compared itselfas a result of its own biblical culture to the dispersal of the Jewish people. Studies of other diasporas have much to learn from mechanisms of assimilation, issues of identity,relations with indigenous inhabitants, and eventual dissolution and disappearance of communities. The policies adopted towards French Protestant refugees by host communities merit equally close study. Protestants in German lands were offered commercial and administrative privileges, helping too in the repopulation of Lithuania. At the same time, explanations for the decline of Huguenot communities must be placed in other contexts, since, as these books demonstrate, they could not escape wider historical developments, such as the Enlightenment, the more general decline of religious fervour in significant parts of continental Europe and among men. New Protestant arrivals in Germany did not lead to the refilling of the churches, with the result that members of communities looked firstto social rather than religious cohesion. These two books therefore open up a number of interesting new horizons in our consideration of the Protestant diaspora. Despite their wealth of detail and breadth of reference, it is therefore unfortunate that, except in one or two cases, a sense of strong theoretical definition is lacking in the distinctions that need to be drawn between the terms 'Refuge' and 'Diaspora', some contributors using the latter term to referto the wider dispersal of Protestants in the New World. It would also be important to establish the evolution of the terms 'immigre', 'emigre', and a fortiori'refugie'. It is clear, however, that Huguenot studies now look very different,and these two books do a wider service in reminding us of that. University of Manchester Henry Phillips La Musique au temps des Encyclopedistes. By Claude Dauphin. Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d'etude du xvme siecle. 2001. 148 pp.; 4 b&w ills. ?30. ISBN 2-84559-010-5. Though it is not explicit in the title,this book roughly covers the period 1750 to 1772: 1750 marks the publication ofthe prospectus forthe Encyclopedie, 1772 its completion. On p. 8 Claude Dauphin further notes that the dates 1750 and 1770 correspond to the death of Bach and the birth of Beethoven respectively, between which two musical 'revolutions' took place: classicism and romanticism, not to mention Sturm und Drang. Positing an implicit link between the development of theory in France and musical style elsewhere in Europe, one could expect a book whose outlook would be cosmopolitan. In reality the focus of this work is very largely French, and while a welcome attempt is made at opening the field of enquiry (so that a brief skim through the index will throw up the names Bach, Beethoven, Bemetzrieder, Burney, Calzabigi, Corelli, etc), the six brief chapters of which this book is composed cover familiar ground, particularly since the 'temoin principal de cette periode cruciale' (p. 9) is taken?albeit in my view correctly?to be Rousseau. Furthermore, despite the presence of the Encyclopedists in the work's title, the most serious discussion of the Encyclopedie itself is delayed until Chapter 6, with the result that the study suffers markedly from a lack of clarity and direction throughout, and an uneven treatment of material. Hence Dauphin will give over three pages to a discussion of Paul Claudel, as an example of the destiny of musical drama after Rousseau's criticism, but only one page to the linguistic substratum of this criticism itself. 196 Reviews Towards the end of Chapter 1 Dauphin is at pains to point out that the variety and pluridisciplinarity of the object of study justifies some liberties with chronology, where musical works are concerned, but the works chosen sometimes fitawkwardly with the theoretical works in question. More serious is the anachronistic use of musi? cal and rhetorical terms, and particularly a seeming conflation of dessein with unite de melodie (p. 27). Chapter 2, which considers the place of music in the...

Breaking Barriers and Building Boundaries: Christian-Jewish Relations in the Writings of Leo Baeck

By the year 1900, many Jews regarded themselves as an integral part of the cultural, economic and political1ife of Germany, even if the non-Jewish population may not have seen them in the same way. In view of the subsequent fate of German Jewry, there is much to suggest that the Jewish perception was wishful thinking rather than an accurate measure of reality. But we can understand how the Jews reasoned: they had lived in Germany even before the country became Christian; some may have settled there in Roman times. By the early Middle Ages, Jews had become well established in the German lands. The impact of the French Revolution and the subsequent unification of Germany had offered them new opportunities for integration. One of the early exponents of modem Judaism, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), was even recognized as a German philosopher of note. Other Jews had come to play important roles in the life of Germany. A growing number genuinely believed that they had good reason to feel at home in the country in which their families had lived for so many centuries.

Posters, Pamphlets and Prints: The Ways and Means of Disseminating Dissident Opinions on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt

A flood of posters, pamphlets and satirical prints accompanied the politico-religious disturbances of 1566. Largely as a result more titles came off the presses in the Low Countries then than at almost any time in the period 1541–1600. Whereas Protestant pamphlets and satirical prints had circulated in huge numbers in the German lands ever since the start of the Reformation, the Habsburg government in the Low Countries had been fairly successful in suppressing a dissident religious press. That began to change in the 1550's and in particular in the early 1560's. Hitherto historians of the book have been chiefly concerned with the production of substantial works; here the economics of printing pamphlets and prints, and the dissemination of such ephemera are the focus of attention.

Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, Volume Two: Hoch- und Spatmittelalter (review)

This is the first volume to appear in a planned six-part series on the history of religion in the German lands from antiquity through the modern era. Its declared goal is to examine the totality of religious behavior and experience during the high and later Middle Ages from a phenomenological and interdisciplinary perspective. The author, Peter Dinzelbacher, has consciously written neither a history of theological ideas nor a church history. Rather, by drawing on a wide range of sources including both Latin and vernacular verse and texts, painting, sculpture, and inquisition and visitation records, Dinzelbacher examines how religion affected daily life and attitudes. His presentation of hundreds of examples of (predominantly) late medieval religious life in Germany rests on two fundamental assumptions. First, "holiness" is not understood as the equivalent of moral sanctity, but rather as the numinous presence of unseen powers which could be associated with persons, places, rites, and objects. Second, late medieval religious life was characterized by a conflict between institutional religion (religion préscrite) on the one hand and the people's lived religious experience (religion vécue) on the other. Both assumptions lead to a problematic understanding of medieval religion, as I will argue below.

The German Lands and Eastern Europe. Essays on the History of Their Social, Cultural, and Political Relations

Notes on the Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction R.Bartlett and K.Sch nw er The German Settlement in Central and Eastern Europe During the High Middle Ages M.Rady Cives Patriae : 'German' Burghers in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth K.Friedrich German Specialists in Petrine Russia: Architects, Painters and Thespians L.Hughes State-Sponsored Immigration Into Eastern Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries R.Bartlett and B.Mitchell Herder's Conception of Nationhood and its Influence in Eastern Europe H.B. Nisbet Westjuden : Germany and German Jews Through East European Eyes J.D.Klier 'Dearest Nicki...': Monarchical Relations Between Prussia, the German Empire and Russia During the Nineteenth Century J.Paulmann The Germans and Czech Statehood in the Twentieth Century H.Lemgerg Invited but Unwanted? Migrants from the East in Germany, 1890-1990 K.Sch nw er Soldiers and War Criminals: the Ongoing Debate about the Wehrmacht in the Second World War T.J.Schulte From Ethnic Cleansing to Ethnic Resurgence: the German Minority in Poland, 1945-95 K.Sword One Thousand Years of Polish-German Camaraderie N.Davies Index

Abraham David. To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in 16th- Century Eretz-Israel. Translated by Dena Ordan. Judaic Studies Series. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999. xiii, 360 pp.; Abraham David. In Zion and Jerusalem: The Itinerary of Rabbi Moses Basola (1521–1523). Jerusalem: C. G. Foundation Jerusalem Project Publications, 1999. 148 pp. (English), 48 pp. (Hebrew).

The intensification of Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel in the wake of expulsions and messianic stirrings brought together outstanding figures whose individual and collective achievements left an enduring imprint on Jewish life. The renaissance in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, particularly in Safed, produced one of the most remarkable and creative moments in Jewish intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Refugees from Spain and Portugal, as well as from Italian and German lands, wended their exile-weary way to the Holy Land. Fueled by a new, more favorable Ottoman administration and unprecedented economic opportunities, the conditions were set for the renewal of Jewish cultural life. Abraham David's book To Come to the Land is not primarily about the processes of immigration to the land, although a brief chapter is devoted to that subject at the beginning. It focusses on specific aspects of Jewish life in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, primarily in Jerusalem and Safed.

Francis the Musician and the Mission of the Joculatores Domini in the Medieval German Lands

Jordan had good reason to marvel. Since he and his fellow missionaries had arrived in 1221, the Franciscans had established a large network of convents that extended to every region of the German lands. Scholars and preachers in his order had propagated the values of Franciscan piety among the burghers, monks, and secular clergy of this vast territory. Many of Jordan's brethren had become advisers to the nobility; others had enhanced the influence of the order through their activities as priests and prelates. Moreover, they had transmitted their spirituality to the people of the German lands through music, as Francis himself had ordained.

Lutherans in Russia since 1990

Origins Lutherans formed the most important Protestant group in the Russian Empire. As early as the mid-sixteenth century Tsar Ivan IV, 'the Terrible', called numerous weapon smiths, fortification designers, officers, artists and architects to Moscow from German lands, settling them in the 'German suburb' (Nemetskaya sloboda). With the tsar's permission the first Lutheran church in Russia was established in Moscow in 1576.' Baltic territories with a compact Lutheran population (Latvians, Estonians and Germans) fell to the Russian Empire with the annexation of the former lands of the German Teutonic Order of Knights: Estland and Livland in 171011721, Courland in 1796. Germans reached Central Russia (the lower Volga and Saratov region 1763-69: 23,000) and later Ukraine (the Black Sea region 1804-56: 54,000; Volhynia from 1863: 150,000) and the Caucasus (1814-17). Some three quarters of these immigrants were Lutherans. In the Russian Empire (excluding Poland and Finland) Lutherans numbered 3.3 million before the First World War: 1.1 million Latvians, 1.1 million Germans, 1 million Estonians, 140,000 Finns and several thousand Swedes. The Baltic Germans in Estland, Livland and Courland had built up a well-function­ ing church organisation that integrated the Estonian and Latvian peasant popUlation. In 1802 the German university in Dorpat/Tartu was established with a Lutheran theological faculty that became famous throughout Europe. In contrast to the Baltic Lutherans, the German colonists in Russia did not succeed in building up a church administration, and so in 1832 an imperial decree established the 'Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia' (Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Russland) to oversee all Protestants in the country (including the few members of the Reformed faith). The church leadership, the 'General Consistory' (General-Consistorium), was of course located in St Petersburg. This Lutheran Church, whose official language was German, represented a state church with inferior legal rights to those of the Russian Orthodox Church; its spiritual and secular leaders and the heads of the church administration were appointed by the emperor personally and paid by the state treasury.2 Lutheran ministers, like Orthodox priests, were quasi-state officials who had to maintain state registers (births, marriages, deaths). The church's official language, as well as that of the university in Dorpat, was German. Germans always constituted the majority of the church leadership and of the clergy; Estonians and Latvians entered the pastorate in larger numbers only after 1850. 3

Seize the Book, Jail the Author: Johann Lorenz Schmidt and Censorship in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Under the patronage of two south German nobles, Johann Lorenz Schmidt published an annotated translation of the Bible's opening books in 1735. Known as the Wertheim Bible, Schmidt's translation drew national attention for its intellectual and religious innovations. In the face of a wave of condemnations, supporters withdrew into silence, leaving Schmidt almost alone to defend his work and call for conditions of open debate. Saxony and Prussia issued book bans, followed by the German emperor's council and a host of other central European powers, and Schmidt was incarcerated. With the aid of loyal friends, he fled to Hamburg, where he spent most of his remaining years in relative obscurity, all the while continuing his campaign to bring free thinking to the German lands. Drawing on extensive manuscript and printed collections, Spalding offers the first comprehensive treatment of how Schmidt, a lowly private tutor, challenged one of the most elaborate censorship systems ever devised.

Uneasy bedfellows: science and politics in the refutation of Koch's bacterial theory of cholera.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.4 (2000) 671-707 [Access article in PDF] Uneasy Bedfellows: Science and Politics in the Refutation of Koch's Bacterial Theory of Cholera Mariko Ogawa [Figures] Introduction Six large cholera epidemics were said to have occurred in Europe between 1830 and the First World War. A great deal of research has been published on the first four, especially the first, and on associated efforts to improve water and sewage systems during this time. 1 Important investigations of the last two epidemics have been published by Richard Evans and Frank Snowden: Evans mainly discusses the cholera epidemic in [End Page 671] Hamburg in the 1890s, and Snowden, the cholera epidemic in Naples occurring around 1910, although both works also cover epidemics in the 1880s, particularly in southern France and Italy. 2 However, a fifth cholera epidemic of the 1880s, first confined to Egypt but then spreading to Italy, southern France, and Spain, has attracted little in-depth scholarly attention, apart from the works of William Coleman, Norman Howard-Jones, and Anne Hardy. 3 It seems as if the years 1883-84 in particular are an air pocket in the research, although some authors--for example, David Arnold, Mark Harrison, Sheldon Watts, and Jeremy D. Isaacs--give us excellent descriptions of the related issue of sanitation in British India during the second half of the nineteenth century. 4 Yet understanding this epidemic, and particularly the British response at the time, is especially important for three reasons. First, a major difference between conditions at the time of the earlier epidemics and in the 1880s is the presence of the Suez Canal. The cholera in Egypt in 1883 was the first outbreak to occur after the completion of the canal, and the cause of that epidemic was alleged by some of the European powers to be English ships coming into the Mediterranean Sea from India via the canal. Second, while during the four earlier epidemics the residents of Britain, France, and the German lands had all suffered cholera themselves, at the time of the epidemic in Egypt these three powers were still free of cholera and could afford to dispatch research commissions to [End Page 672] study the disease. In this time of imperialism, it is important from the viewpoint of the development of international sanitation that the three big powers almost simultaneously sent teams of investigators to Egypt, each of which was laboring under different national expectations. Third, from the viewpoint of bacteriology, cholera in 1883-84 is interesting because these were critical years for the identification of the cholera germ. At this time the German microbiologist Robert Koch was still in the process of formulating his famous postulates for determining a germ source for a disease--and in fact, these met with theoretical difficulty specifically in relation to the cholera germ. Peter Baldwin has published an illuminating overview of the ways in which European nations reacted to the ever-present threat of epidemic contagion during 1830-1930. 5 As for the British reaction to the fifth cholera epidemic in particular, Coleman refers to Koch's commissions to Egypt and India in 1883-84, and he observes that the British were doing very little in response to the new epidemic. 6 However, there is evidence that the British were in fact making an effort to deal with the problem; for example, William Guyer Hunter was dispatched to study the cholera in Egypt and his final report was published in the British Command Papers in 1883. 7 A paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science in February 1886, entitled "The Official Refutation of Dr. Robert Koch's Theory of Cholera and Commas" (which does not seem to have been mentioned elsewhere in the literature), gives an enlightening view of the British response by bringing the relationship between bacteriology and the social, economic, and political situation of the time into sharp focus. 8 A close examination of "The Official Refutation" and related documents, therefore, contributes to previous research on the interaction...

A Jewish Response

Bret Stephenson and Susan Power Bratton’s discussion is a fascinating study of Luther’s anti-Jewish views. While it is widely recognized that Luther condemned the Jews and sought to expel them from German lands, little has been written about the ecotheological implications of his attitudes. Stephenson and Bratton’s exploration of the theological model adopted by Luther adds an important dimension to the discussion of Luther’s critique of the Jewish people.

The German Lands and Eastern Europe: Essays on the History of their Social, Cultural and Political Relations

The German Lands and Eastern Europe: Essays on the History of their Social, Cultural and Political Relations

The European family: an historico-anthropological essay

Series Editors Preface. Preface. 1. The Beginnings. 2. The Heritage of Greece and Rome. 3. The Coming of Christianity. 4. The German Lands. 5. The European Patterns and Medieval Regimes. 6. Women, Children and Fathers in the Reformation and Counter--Reformation. 7. Dowry and the Rights of Women. 8. The Differences. 9. Proto and Full Industrialization. 10. Modernization and the Family: The Theories. 11. The Contemporary Family in Practice. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Selected Reading. Index.

Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Ninteenth-Century Prague (review)

Reviewed by: Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague John M. Efron Sylvie-Anne Goldberg. Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague. Translated by Carol Cosman. Originally published as Les deux rives du Jabbok: La maladie et la mort dans le judaïsme ashkénaze: Prague XVIe–XIXe siècle, 1989. Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society, no. 9. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. xviii + 303 pp. Ill. $45.00; £37.50. This is an ambitious book: Sylvie-Anne Goldberg sets out to treat the attitudes to illness and death among Central European Jews, from the early modern to the modern period. Informed by the Annales school in general and by Philippe Ariès’s work on death in particular, her approach is to apply their historiographic methods to the Jewish past in order to illuminate what is a severely underresearched area. In the process of reconstructing Jewish mentalities, she sheds light on the most intimate of life’s moments for Jews—analyzing what attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerning illness and death they shared with their Christian neighbors, and what set them apart. Goldberg ably demonstrates that the Jews’ customs concerning illness and death were in many ways remarkably similar to those of their neighbors. For example, Latin was used for Jewish funerary inscriptions until the ninth century, after which time they were written in Hebrew; Goldberg attributes this to the flourishing of Ashkenazic communities in Germany and France, the intellectual prestige and authority they came to enjoy, and the subsequent development of new, sacred conceptions of the relation of these new communities to the dead. Most strikingly, she has found no indications of the existence of a specifically Jewish cemetery before the eleventh century, and she hypothesizes that until this time, “Jews were buried . . . in funerary spaces shared by others and doubtless without the benefit of headstones” (p. 25). After about 1000 c.e. this situation changed. She suggests that the emergence of the Jewish cemetery was due to the spread of Christianity among Europeans, whose increasing sacralization of burial places—illustrated by the transference of the cemetery from outside the town to the interior of the church—forced Jews to make provision for their own funerary space. No longer could burial grounds be shared places of rest for Christians and Jews. Elsewhere, Goldberg indicates those times and places where specific historical moments gave rise to particular Jewish customs. For example, the Crusades and the mass slaughter they brought in their wake for the Jews of the Rhineland saw [End Page 705] the appearance of memorial books, the kaddish (prayer for the dead), and the annual lighting of memorial candles for the dead—all of which remain essential to the funerary practices of Jews to this very day. In other spheres, Jewish practices are reminiscent of those among Christians, even though the origins of the two may be distinct. For example, similar to the notion of Christian mercy as expressed by Catholic brotherhoods, the Jewish obligation to visit the sick (bikkur holim) was based on a notion of “disinterested kindness” (hesed shel emet)—but rather than a mere imitation of Christian practice, Goldberg says that among Jews the visitations were inspired by the advent of Lurianic Kabbalah in the sixteenth century. In particular, Jewish burial societies first emerged in Italy (though Christian guilds in German lands had them as well), in areas populated by Iberian Jewish exiles. Kabbalah, with its themes of resurrection, atonement, and the individual life of the soul, inspired a “virtual explosion of books on death rituals” between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 86). One of these was the book by Aaron Berachia of Modena called Crossing the Jabbok (1626)—an allusion to the purifying river of fire that, kabbalists said, the soul passes over after death in order to reach the realm of eternal life. It is Goldberg’s claim that death and suffering define community. Thus the centerpiece of her study is the hevra kaddisha of Prague, or its burial society, established in 1564, which became the prototype for all...

Dürer and His Culture (review)

Reviews 221 Carole M . Cusack School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney Eichberger, Dagmar and Charles Zika, ed., Durer and His Culture, Cambridge/Cambridge University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xiv, 255; 77 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$99.95. In 1840, Christian Daniel Rauch's over life-size bronze statue of Alb Durer was unveiled in the centre of the Milk Market in Nuremberg. This square, renamed the Albrecht-Durer-Platz, provided a civic locus for honouring the town's most renowned son. J . L. Deifel's engraving of thismonument (Fig. 9.2) shows the artist as a timeless icon towering above the admiring crowd of burghers. The statue's temporary base was inscribed with the prayer: Father Diner, give us thy blessing, that like thee w e m a y truly cherish German art; be our guiding star until the grave, (p. 184) Rauch's statue is emblematic of the history of posthumous portrayals of Durer: he is larger than life, an embodiment of Nuremberg's past greatness and Germany's artistic patrimony, and a cultural hero claimed by different audiences as their o w n ever since his death in 1528. ^ Durer as both artist and mythic figure poses serious methodological challenges to modern scholars. At a symposium held in Melbourne in 1994 in conjunction with the major exhibition Albrecht Durer in the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, a group of noted specialist from several disciplines (art history, history, literature, and religion) focused on different aspects of Durer's cultural context as a way of broadening the dialogue about his art. Editors Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika state that 'the theoretical notion underlying this collection is the view that contemporary cultural practices and discourses, rather than Durer's evolutionary development as an artist, offer the key to 222 Reviews the understanding of much of Diirer's artistic work' (p. 1). H o w can modern scholars better locate Durer within his diverse and often conflicting cultural environment? While not all of the essays wholly succeed, especially those that dance around rather than engage the art, this compendium is marvellously thought provoking and highly recommended to anyone interested in Early Modern Germany. Eichberger's 'Naturalia and Artefacta' raises the intriguing thesis that Diirer's remarkable nature drawings, which range from beetles to complex landscapes, might have been stimulated by the discovery of the N e w World and by the n e w practice of collecting natural objects. While contact with the Americas and other newly explored lands certainly interested Durer and clearly affected Europeans' traditional sense of the limits of nature and geography, the direct influence upon his art is questionable. His personal curiosity about nature was fully manifested in his art from the early 1490s while the new or revised world view would take a few decades to impact on his culture. Chronological problems are again raised by her efforts to explain Diirer's fascination with the external appearance of things as part of the broader and later development of Wunderkammers with their categorisation of objects into naturalia (raw materials), exotica, and artefacta (objects crafted from these materials). Larry Silver's 'Germanic Patriotism in the Age of Durer' offers a stimulating consideration of Germania. A s contemporary humanists selectively mined Tacitus and other ancient authors, they sought to recover a German past that might help them define their present German identity. Heinrich Bebel wrote 'We are an autochthonous people, born from the soil of the land on which w e n o w make our home' (p. 39). Conrad Celtes and others championed their historical link with their physical place. History, geography, and a healthy dose of myth coincide in their nationalistic rhetoric. As Silver has shown elsewhere, their attitudes about landscape greatly influenced Albrecht Altdorfer, among others. Making the case for Diirer is more difficult. Silver suggests that Diirer's Landscape with Cannon etching (1518) is a statement about the imperial army's defence of the German lands in the face of the mounting Turkish threat. W i m Hiisken proposes that contemporary humanistic literature on deceit aids our understanding of the so-called Michelfeldt Tapestry, Reviews 223 an allegorical woodcut...

Useful To Have, But Difficult To Govern. Inns and Taverns in Early Modern Bern and Vaud

AbstractThis essay examines the significance of inns and taverns in the early modern period. Drawing above all on a series of registers from the French and German lands of the Swiss Republic of Bern, the discussion is presented in two parts. A first section investigates structural aspects such as ownership, clientele, and the remarkably multifunctional character of these establishments. The second part illustrates the continuing growth in provision during the Ancien Régime and the limited impact of government regulation. It is argued that inns and taverns became the most prominent social centres in early modern local communities and that popular demand for their services prevailed over sustained campaigns to restrict numbers and discipline patrons.