Modern Europe Research Articles

Dissident Blood: Neo-Santeria in Barcelona and the Refusal of Sacrifices

This article explores the emergence and development of Neo-santeria in Barcelona, a contemporary trend of Afro-Cuban religious practices characterized by the rejection of animal sacrifice, a central ritual in traditional Santeria. The study identifies and analyzes four key arguments employed by Neo-santeros to legitimize this rejection within the secular and modern European context: the scientistic, de-traditionalist, individualistic, and ecologist arguments. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, the article demonstrates how Neo-santeros navigate the tension between distancing themselves from certain traditional spiritual roots—particularly the practice of animal sacrifice—and the intertwining with European and contemporary cultural logics, particularly those related to secularism. The article situates Neo-santeria within the broader landscape of European holistic spiritualities, highlighting its strategic positioning as a religion that aligns with and challenges secularist expectations in modern Europe. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how Afro-Cuban religions, particularly Neo-Santería, can be defined by the ongoing creativity of their practitioners. This distinctive feature not only defines the fluid nature of these traditions but also contributes to the diversification and increased complexity of the spiritual landscape in European contexts, where Afro-Cuban practices are being intertwined in local cultural and religious frameworks.

A Challenge to Local Primitivism in Eastern European Cultures: the African ‘Exotic Heritage’ in Modern Art

Summary This article deals with the ‘primitivist’ sources of European modern art, with a focus on Eastern European artists, including some who later developed their careers in the West. These artists are regarded as atypical but relevant cases of modernist legacies, yet their contribution is less studied because of their non-Western European backgrounds. Their early artistic careers were influenced by the local folk and naïve style and motifs of their rural homelands, but they later transmuted their ‘primitivist style’, adopting the fashionable exotic, mostly African, motifs of the Western modernist schools when they moved to the West (typically, France), connected themselves with the modernist movement and received recognition. Unlike the perspective usually adopted by art criticism, this article suggests a heritage studies approach: it firstly conceptualises and considers how one type of heritage primitivism is subsumed to another in this complex artistic formation, and then problematises this dissonant legacy of their work. It is argued that in the field of cultural heritage debate, we need to extend the concept of dissonant heritage to discuss the dual concept of local/exotic heritage, while critically reassessing the uses of primitivism in its authenticist vs. assimilationist ideological intentions.

Social terminology in “Traité de la Noblesse” by Gilles-André La Roque de La Lontière (1678)

The “Traité de la noblesse” by Gilles-André de La Rocque de La Lontière is an example of the treatises on nobility that were prevalent in early modern Europe. The author, a renowned French genealogist, heraldist, and royal historiographer, presented his work as a comprehensive summary and conclusion on the issues surrounding nobility in French society. Although Larocque’s voluminous treatise has been referenced by researchers of the French nobility, it has not been the subject of in-depth investigation by Russian historians. This paper aims to address this gap in the historical literature by analysing the major problems outlined in the treatise and the social terminology used by Larocque as a reflection of the process of defining the boundaries of the noble estate in early modern France. The close subject and epistemic connection between the nobiliary discourse and the French erudite intellectual current is demonstrated. The process of closure of the nobility that took place at that time required the delineation of the boundary between the nobility and the roturiers. In this regard, the internal structure of the French nobility was of little interest to La Rocque, who focused on clarifying its lower border. He provides a detailed account of the terms used to define the borderline between the lower levels of nobility. Larocque addresses the controversial question of the dignity of the old and new nobility, concluding that they are equivalent.

“Social” terminology in sir John Skene’s lexicography “De verborum significatione”

The process of specification of the social and, in particular, the process of demarcation between the social and the legal spheres in Early Modern European intellectual discourse exhibited both general regularities and elements contingent on the regional specificity of intellectual traditions and institutional practices. In the article, the author examines the Scottish version of this process, with the lexicography of the Scottish civil lawyer Sir John Skene (1549–1617) “De Verborum Significatione” serving as a case in point. The analysis of the social concepts included in the lexicography demonstrates that the heterogeneity of the genesis of strata and groups within the Scottish nobility, as observed by contemporaries, precluded the establishment of a hierarchy of noble titles and dignities within the Scottish kingdom. Consequently, reflection on the nobility as a social phenomenon was also prevented. Conversely, the ascendancy of civil law, with its rigorously delineated subject matter and enduring lexical apparatus, fostered the elaboration of the legal domain. However, this process also impeded the differentiation between the legal and the social. The author demonstrates that numerous concepts that would subsequently be imbued with particular social connotations within the Scottish intellectual tradition during the seventeenth century were nevertheless still regarded as an intrinsic component of the legal framework within the community of the kingdom. When referenced in the Scottish laws and parliamentary acts examined by Skene, these concepts were closely associated with legal privileges, judicial procedure, or the distinctive characteristics of property relations.

The Localization of Global Music and the Diverse Practices of Modern European Music Festivals

This paper examines the phenomenon of cross-cultural music fusion in modern European music festivals, analyzing the innovation and development of global music within the context of localization. With the advancement of globalization, European music festivals have emerged as vital platforms for musical exchange among diverse cultures. The study demonstrates that global music manifests new forms of expression and creative techniques through its interaction with local traditions. Through case studies of WOMEX and the Salzburg Festival, this paper reveals how global musical elements are localized in terms of language, instrumentation, melodies, rhythms, and performance styles. In this process, musicians enhance the diversity and innovation of music while preserving the essence of their cultural heritage. Additionally, the study highlights the tension between global music and local culture, emphasizing the importance of balancing cultural respect with innovation. Ultimately, this paper offers new insights and directions for future research in cross-cultural music studies, advocating for a deeper exploration of global music's performance across different regions and its implications for cultural identity.

Versammeln, besprechen, beschließen

Different forms of diets, councils and assemblies shaped the political landscape of late medieval and early modern Europe, and especially the Holy Roman Empire. Princes and clerics, the representatives of towns and of monasteries came together in various constellations to discuss problems, adopt decisions and perform rituals. It has been repeatedly suggested that it might be fruitful to compare these different forms of assemblies. The actual attempts to do so, however, often remain unsatisfactory even to their own authors. What is still required is a systematic comparison in the hope of creating a typology of assemblies. At a summer school held in Lübeck in 2019, some initial ideas were put forward on how to undertake such an staggering endeavor. A catalogue of criteria for comparing different forms of assemblies would need to include how often they were convened, who their participants were (both by number and status), what issues were discussed (their content and intended scope), what procedures were obtained for discussion and decision-making, how they interrelated with other types of assemblies, what the aim of the meeting was and how it was attained. These criteria can also help one to grasp how one type of assembly changed over time. An initial comparison led to the conclusion that the different forms of meetings may have assembled a different set of participants and discussed different issues, yet they employed strikingly similar procedures and underwent a similar process of institutionalization.

Gendered Touch. Women, Men, and Knowledge-making in Early Modern Europe, edited by Francesca Antonelli, Antonella Romano, and Paolo Savoia

Gendered Touch. Women, Men, and Knowledge-making in Early Modern Europe, edited by Francesca Antonelli, Antonella Romano, and Paolo Savoia

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

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

Confessional Cross-Pollination: Basel Humanists as Suppliers of Lutheran and Catholic Exempla

Basel humanists shaped religious discourse beyond the Reformed sphere through their collections of exempla, short narratives designed to illustrate a moral or doctrinal message. Because scholars of early modern exempla typically focus on either Lutheran or Catholic exempla collections, the role of Reformed compilers as mediators between confessions has been obscured. This article uses methods from the field of digital humanities and corpus linguistics to examine the lasting influence of Theodor Zwinger (1533–1588), Conrad Lycosthenes (1518–1561), and Johannes Herold (1514–1567) on Lutheran and Catholic exempla collections in a newly quantitative way. Using the concordance software AntConc, this study identifies numerous citations that demonstrate that Zwinger and Lycosthenes facilitated confessional cross-pollination of exemplary narratives from the mid-sixteenth through the early eighteenth century. Although citations of Zwinger, Lycosthenes, and Herold are more frequent in Lutheran exempla collections, the existence of several Catholic editions of Zwinger’s Theatrum vitae humanae indicates that Catholic readers also valued Zwinger’s work. This examination showcases the vital role of Swiss humanists in cross-confessional networks of information exchange and religious discourse in early modern Europe.

‘Martenaut Waves’ in the Music of the French Avant-Garde Cinematographer of the First Half of the 20th Century (on the example of the creativity of A. Honegger)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the figurative, semantic and symbolic specificity of the interpretation of the timbre of "Martenaut waves" in the music of the French avant-garde cinematography of the first half of the 20th century, including in the work of A. Honegger. Research methodology. Cultural-historical, interdisciplinary historical-cultural, as well as analytical-musicological methods were essential for this work. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it introduces for the first time into the circulation of art historians the materials related to the film music of A. Honegger and its timbral specificity, marked by an appeal to the semantic and expressive features of the "Martenaut waves". Conclusions. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as a result of rapid scientific and technical progress, cinematography came to the forefront of world art. The unity of cinematography as a synthetic art and music is strengthened by the emergence of sound cinema in 1926-1927, in which music is recorded on the same film as the image. The use of electric musical instruments, including "Martenaut waves", becomes organic in this process. Thanks to their unusual timbre, they acquired the meaningful status of the embodiment of "the materialisation of the intangible." The world of hallucinations and dreams, mystical spiritual revelations and unusual natural phenomena – such was the range of images that were conveyed with the help of this instrument in French film music of the 1930s and 1940s. A. Honegger worked most fruitfully in this field during the mentioned period, whose creative output includes more than forty soundtracks, including those using "Martenaut waves". One of the first films in which the expressive timbre of this instrument is used was the science fiction film "The End of the World" (1931) directed by A. Gans, as well as the animated film "Idea" (1934) directed by B. Bartosh and artist F. Mazerel. In the musical accompaniment of these films, the timbre of the "Martenaut waves" occupies almost the most important place, revealing the connection of the instrument with the sphere of the Sacred and the Cosmic and the spiritual and stylistic searches of European modern culture.

The Tratado de las campañas of Martin García Cerezeda: military life writing and self-advancement in the memoirs of a sixteenth-century Spanish veteran

ABSTRACT The memoirs of the Spanish arquebusier Martin García Cerezeda, who served in the Spanish army during the Italian Wars (1494–1559), were employed several times in studies on early modern military and intellectual history and the experience of soldiering and warfare. Using Cerezeda’s Tratado de las campañas as an exhaustive narrative full of instructive and significant information is indeed understandacle, but very little was written on Cerezeda’s potential motivation to write his recollections of his long and arduous military service in the larger context of the writing of autobiographies and memoirs, whether military or otherwise, in early modern Europe. While returning to the original manuscript in the library of the Escorial produced more questions than answers on Cerezeda and his work, this paper nevertheless demonstrates that the veteran Cerezeda was carefully and meticulously attempting to present himself as worthy of the patronship or assistance of the ascending noble and soldier Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, 3rd Duke of Sessa (d.1578), the grandson of the famous Gran Capitán. By placing himself in several key events, alongside several central figures of his time, and especially the Emperor Charles V, and presenting himself as a zealous and principled Christian soldier, Cerezeda was attempting to press the specific buttons that could more easily caught the eye of a sixteenth century Spanish nobleman who was steeped in a mixed cultural environment of humanistic stylistic preferences and a traditional chivalric ethos.

ANDREU, Xavier y BOLUFER, Mónica (eds.), European Modernity and the Passionate South. Gender and Nation in Spain and Italy in the Long Nineteenth Century, Brill, Leiden, 2023, 271 pp.

ANDREU, Xavier y BOLUFER, Mónica (eds.), European Modernity and the Passionate South. Gender and Nation in Spain and Italy in the Long Nineteenth Century, Brill, Leiden, 2023, 271 pp.

European Modernity and the Passionate South: gender and nation in Spain and Italy in the long nineteenth century

European Modernity and the Passionate South: gender and nation in Spain and Italy in the long nineteenth century

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

Book Review: <i>The Maker of Pedigrees: Jakob Wilhelm Imhoff and the Meanings of Modern Genealogy in Early Modern Europe</i> by Markus Friedrich

Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel

Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel. This paper evaluates the capacity of the contemporary Northern Irish novel to act as an agent of transmission for a ‘post-Troubles’ readership, one distanced by a generation from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that symbolised the partial end of sectarian violence. The critic Liam Harte suggests that “no part of modern Europe (if not the world) has greater claim than Northern Ireland to the mantle of most-narrativized region”, but the transmissive function of fictional works in this context remain under-critiqued. Here, I assess the aspirations of novelistic narrative to cater for what Premesh Lalu has described, in the context of post-apartheid South African art forms, as ‘psychic repair’ (Undoing Apartheid, 2023). The essay engages the 2018 novel Milkman, by Northern Irish author Anna Burns, to ask how fictional narrative transmits the detail of the past across a generation first, in parallel to other literary and artistic genres, and second, in relation to an expanding archive of ongoing legal tribunals and government incentives directed towards the production of an ‘official history’ for Northern Ireland. Through attention to the self-conscious foregrounding of forensic reading practice by Burns and fellow writers, I show the necessary place of fictional recovery in the field of political and cultural memory. Keywords: Troubles, Northern Irish fiction, transmission, memory, generation

Revisiting Douai Ms 785: Musical Cultures of Exiled English Convents through the Lens of a Miscellany

Abstract Scholarship on early modern English Catholic music after the reformations tends to focus on the activities of male musicians and male institutions. Despite increased study of English convent culture by scholars of religious, social, and literary history, there remains little specialist examination of music at post-Reformation English convents in exile, and their role in wider musical networks in early modern Europe is markedly under-acknowledged. This article aims to highlight how complex miscellanies with links to English monastic institutions in exile can offer insight into the convents’ otherwise elusive musical world. Using a hitherto unanalysed miscellany – Douai Ms 785 – this article will show how codicological study of manuscripts, combined with study of concordances and unica, can illuminate the role of English convents in early modern musical networks. In doing so, it will demonstrate the need to understand miscellanies like Douai Ms 785 as witness to interacting, overlapping musical and religious ecosystems in early modern Europe.

Comments on Suraj Yengde’s lecture

Emerging out of religious conflict in early modern Europe, the terms race and caste as we understand them today went on to define hierarchical relations in different parts of the globe. Yet, they have never completely parted ways and Suraj Yengde’s essay explores these hidden connections in the use that American sociologists made of both categories. They generally did so by setting one term against the other in the attempt to account for racial discrimination in the United States. Race and caste were mediated by class in these debates, a category seen as being more modern and progressive than either of them. The comments that follow argue that caste and race are not simply the precursors of class and continue to interact with each other without the latter’s mediation. Anti-race and anti-caste politics are also more connected to religious forms of universality.

Digital sovereignty: conceptual challenges and constitutional implications

This article examines how national states and integrative unions such as the European Union employ the concept of digital sovereignty in their policy discourse. It begins with the premise that contemporary digital policy of these entities is intricately linked to the idea of digital sovereignty. The study analyzes the factors that have led national states and the European Union to enter a new phase of modern constitutionalism - digital constitutionalism. Modern European constitutionalism has accumulated experience in various social spheres, as evidenced by developments such as economic constitutionalism. In the digital era, it raises and attempts to answer questions about how digital constitutionalism can overcome the limitations of traditional constitutional thinking, particularly its focus on state-legal and political phenomena. The article explores the extent to which the generalization of purely state constitutional principles can advance in the digital age. The paper emphasizes that digital constitutionalism is a convenient concept for explaining the phenomenon of constitutional resistance to challenges created by digital technologies. It notes that existing foreign, and especially Ukrainian, legal scholarship has not yet formed a clear and unified vision of this concept. This article provides a literature review on digital constitutionalism and offers an analysis of the theoretical frameworks surrounding the concept. It posits that digital constitutionalism is an ideology that adapts the values of modern constitutionalism to the demands of the digital age. Currently, digital constitutionalism does not provide normative answers to the challenges of digital technologies, but rather presents a set of principles and values that inform and guide them. The article argues that Internet governance is evolving towards fragmentation, polarization, and hybridization, which contribute to the development of an architecture of freedom and power in the digital environment. The study aims to identify constitutionally significant threats associated with digitalization and allows for the development of constitutional counterstrategies.

Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617–1680) Member Publication Patterns in the VD17

This paper presents the first results of a larger project that draws on large-scale data analysis to investigate the publication patterns and networks of the 890 members of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617–1680), or Fruitbearing Society, the first and largest cultural society in early modern Central Europe. First, we elucidate the major steps, including data wrangling, evaluation, clean-up, and algorithmic enrichment, necessary to transform the already high-quality VD17 bibliographic database into research data. Then, we relate the first results of our investigation of the publication patterns of Society members over time. This analysis brings more nuance to the existing narrative of a society that shifted from focusing on the literary and linguistic aspects of its agenda in the first period (1617–1650) to a more courtly one in the later periods (1651–1662/67) of its existence

Response to: Reflections on 'Have we lost sleep?'

I would like to thank Professor Ekirch for his reflections on 'Have we lost sleep?', which contain several points that I have already responded to within the paper following his peer review of my original submission to Medical History in 2023 (Professor Ekirch having voluntarily identified himself as a reviewer in a normally double-blind process). I acknowledge that the focus of my paper was on Ekirch's original work from 2001; if I did not engage as he would have wished with his subsequent publications, this was simply because I do not perceive the same substantial developments in his thinking and research on the subject that he does. Indeed, the present critique by Ekirch amounts essentially to more of the same: a long list of references and quotes but little detailed discussion of any individual source. As my paper demonstrates, seemingly unambiguous evidence from a brief quotation can become less clear-cut when placed in context. I am sorry if I deploy the word 'might' more than Ekirch would like. This reflects, I hope, a healthy degree of uncertainty and intellectual humility in my approach to the complex issue of pre-industrial sleep. To extend Ekirch's metaphor, if the jigsaw puzzle that both he and I are trying to assemble can take the form of a cat or a dog, it is possible that its true form is neither animal. The extent to which people woke in the night in pre-industrial Europe, the duration of such awakening, and the predominant cultural attitude towards this-concern, acceptance, or indifference-are topics about which it would seem wise to avoid sweeping statements and generalisations, given the relatively long period covered and the social, cultural, and individual diversity that must be taken into consideration. I can only repeat that I think amassing more brief references, and selectively citing relatively small physiological studies and anthropological evidence from global settings, is unlikely to provide much clarity, let alone definitive answers. I welcome Professor Ekirch's contribution to this discussion as an indication that the question of segmented sleep in early modern Europe is by no means settled but is a matter of ongoing debate.