Browse

This book offers a re-evaluation of the last year of the Fronde—the political upheaval between 1648 and 1652—in the making of seventeenth-century France. In late December 1651 cardinal Mazarin defied the order for his perpetual banishment, and re-entered France at the head of an army. The political and military crisis that followed convulsed the nation, and revived the ebbing fortunes of a revolt led by the cousin of the young Louis XIV, the prince de Condé. The book follows in detail the unfolding political and military events of this year, showing how military success and failure swung between the two sides through the campaign, driving both cardinal and prince into a progressive intensification of the conflict, while simultaneously fuelling a quest for compromise and settlement which nonetheless eluded all the negotiators’ efforts. The consequences were devastating for France, as civil war smashed into a fragile ecosystem that was already reeling under the impact of the global cooling of the ‘Little Ice Age’. 1652 raises questions about established interpretations of French state-building, the rule of cardinal Mazarin and his predecessor, Richelieu, and their contribution to creating the ‘absolutism’ of Louis XIV.

This volume charts the rise and decline of absolutism in Milan from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. The study shows how authority above the law, once the preserve of pope and emperor, was claimed by the ruling Milanese dynasties, the Visconti and the Sforza, and why this privilege was finally abandoned by Francesco II Sforza (d. 1535), the last duke. As new rulers, the Visconti and the Sforza had had to impose their regime by rewarding supporters at the expense of opponents. That process required absolute power (also known as plenitude of power), meaning the capacity to laws and the rights of subjects, including titles to property. The basis for such power reflected the changing status of Milanese rulers, first as signori and then as dukes. Contemporary lawyers were at first prepared to overturn established doctrines in support of the free use of absolute power: even Baldo degli Ubaldi accepted the latest teaching. But eventually lawyers regretted the new approach, reasserting the traditional principle that laws could not be set aside without compelling justification. The Visconti and the Sforza also saw the dangers of absolute power: as legitimate princes they were meant to champion law and justice, not condone arbitrary acts that disregarded basic rights. Black traces the application of plenitude of power in day‐to‐day government, and demonstrates how the rulers of Milan kept pace with the initial acceptance and subsequent rejection by lawyers of the concept of absolute power.

This book offers the first systematic analysis of the cultural and religious appropriation of Andalusian architecture by Spanish historians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Spain was left with a significant Islamic heritage: Córdoba Mosque had been turned into a cathedral, in Seville the Aljama Mosque’s minaret was transformed into a Christian bell tower, and Granada Alhambra had become a Renaissance palace. To date this process of Christian appropriation has frequently been discussed as a phenomenon of hybridisation. However, during that period the construction of a Spanish national identity became a key focus of historical discourse. The aforementioned cultural hybridity encountered partial opposition from those seeking to establish cultural and religious homogeneity. The Iberian Peninsula’s Islamic past became a major concern and historical writing served as the site for a complex negotiation of identity. Historians and antiquarians used a range of strategies to re-appropriate the meaning of medieval Islamic heritage as befitted the new identity of Spain as a Catholic monarchy and empire. On one hand, the monuments’ Islamic origin was subjected to historical revisions and re-identified as Roman or Phoenician. On the other hand, religious forgeries were invented that staked claims for buildings and cities having been founded by Christians prior to the arrival of the Muslims in Spain. Islamic stones were used as core evidence in debates shaping the early development of archaeology, and they also became the centre of a historical controversy about the origin of Spain as a nation and its ecclesiastical history.

What was the Holy Roman Empire in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries? At the turning point between the medieval and early modern periods, this vast central European polity was the continent’s most politically fragmented. The imperial monarchs were often weak and distant, while an array of regional actors played autonomous political roles. The Empire’s obvious differences from more centralized European kingdoms have stimulated negative judgements and fraught debates, expressed in the historiographical concepts of fractured ‘territorial states’ and a disjointed ‘imperial constitution’. This book challenges these interpretations through a wide-ranging case study of Upper Germany between 1346 and 1521. By examining the interactions of princes, prelates, nobles, and towns comparatively, it demonstrates that a range of actors and authorities shared the same toolkit of rituals, judicial systems, and configurations of government. Crucially, Upper German elites all participated in leagues, alliances, and other treaty-based associations. As frameworks for collective activity, associations were a vital means of enabling and regulating warfare, justice and arbitration, and even lordship and administration. The prevalence of associations encouraged a mentality of ‘horizontal’ membership of political communities, so that even the Empire itself came to be understood and articulated as an extensive and multi-layered association. On the basis of this evidence, the book offers a new and more coherent vision of the Holy Roman Empire as a sprawling community of interdependent elites who interacted within the framework of a shared ‘associative political culture’, which constituted an alternative structure and pathway of political development in pre-modern Europe.

This book contains a collection of essays addressing a number of wide-ranging, interrelated themes spanning over 200 years of the Habsburg Empire. The book is a political, religious, cultural and social history of a broad but often neglected swathe of the European continent. It seeks — against the grain of conventional presentations — to apprehend the era from the late-seventeenth to late-nineteenth century as a whole. Casting light on key aspects of the evolution towards modern statehood in Central Europe, it also dwells on the crises of ancien-regime structures there, in the face of new challenges both at home and abroad. Much attention is devoted to the Austrian or Habsburg lands, especially the interplay of the main territories which comprised them. A further central issue analysed is the evolution of the kingdom of Hungary, from its full acquisition by the Habsburgs at the beginning of the period to the emergence of the dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end. More than this though, the book examines the individual character of the essay as a genre.

When Martin Luther mounted his challenge to the Catholic Church, reform stimulated a range of responses, including radical solutions such as those proposed by theologians of the Anabaptist movement. But how did ordinary Anabaptists, men and women, grapple with the theological and emotional challenges of the Lutheran Reformation? Anabaptism developed along unique lines in the Lutheran heartlands in central Germany. Here, the movement was made up of scattered groups and did not centre on charismatic leaders as it did elsewhere; ideas were spread more often by word of mouth than by print; and many Anabaptists had uneven attachment to the movement, recanting and then relapsing. Historiography has neglected Anabaptism in this area, since it had no famous leaders and does not seem to have been numerically strong. Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief challenges these assumptions, revealing how Anabaptism’s development in central Germany was fundamentally influenced by its interaction with Lutheran theology. By doing so, it sets a new agenda for understandings of Anabaptism in central Germany, as ordinary individuals created new forms of piety which mingled with ideas about brotherhood, baptism, the Eucharist, and gender and sex. Anabaptism in this region was not an isolated sect but an important part of the confessional landscape of the Saxon lands, and continued to shape Lutheran pastoral affairs long after scholarship assumed it had declined. The choices these Anabaptist men and women made sat on a spectrum of solutions to religious concerns raised by the Reformation. Understanding their decisions, therefore, provides new insights into how religious identities were formed in the Reformation era.

Commonly stigmatized as “bastards” in early modern France, children born out of wedlock were said to have neither kin nor kind, neither family nor nation. In practice, however, many natural parents voluntarily recognized their extramarital offspring and raised them within their households. Because early modern France lacked a uniform code of civil law, the rights and legal disabilities of these children were matters of perennial litigation and debate. The stigmatization of extramarital offspring intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the sovereign courts curbed the rights that such children had traditionally enjoyed. This bolstered the collective power of the elite lineages at the expense of individual passions. These families were the primary architects and beneficiaries of the development of absolute monarchy in France. However, in the eighteenth century, the growing problem of child abandonment prompted many jurists to reconsider whether the stigmatization of extramarital offspring was truly in the interest of the public and the state. At the same time, natural parents continued to exploit persistent variations in French law to provide favors and advantages to their extramarital offspring. Even as French legal culture increasingly shifted from an adjudicatory toward a more legislative model amid the deepening crisis of the Bourbon monarchy, children born out of wedlock were increasingly destigmatized as “natural children.”

This book presents a new study of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1696), with special reference to Bayle’s polemical engagement with the theologian Pierre Jurieu. While recent years have seen a surge of interest in Bayle, there is as yet no consensus on how to interpret Bayle’s ambiguous stance on reason and religion, and how to make sense of the Dictionnaire. This book aims to establish a new method for reading the Dictionnaire under a dual premise: first, that the work can only be rightly understood when placed within the immediate context of its production in the 1690s; second, that it is only through an appreciation of the mechanics of the work as a whole, and of the role played by its structural and stylistic particularities, that we can attain an appropriate interpretation of its parts. Special attention is paid to the heated theological–political conflict between Bayle and Jurieu in the 1690s, which had a profound influence on the project of the dictionary and on several of its major themes, such as the tensions in the relationship between the intellectual sphere of the Republic of Letters and the political state, but also the danger of religious fanaticism spurring intolerance and war. The final chapters demonstrate that Bayle’s clash with Jurieu was also one of the driving forces behind Bayle’s reflection on the problem of evil; they expose the fundamentally problematic nature of both Bayle’s theological association with Jurieu, and his self-defence in the second edition of the Dictionnaire.

Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

What role did women play in the pre-industrial European economy? This book tackles this question using a body of new evidence. By examining women's activities in a particular pre-industrial economy — the early modern German territory of Württemberg — it questions mono-causal explanations that ascribe women's economic position to reproductive biology, technology, or cultural beliefs. Instead, it shows that social institutions play the key role. Markets expanded in Europe between 1600 and 1800, creating economic opportunities for both women and men, but they were circumscribed by strong ‘social networks’ — local communities, craft guilds, merchant guilds, and church courts — supported by the growing early modern state. These corporative bodies generated a ‘social capital’ of shared norms and collective sanctions that benefitted insiders but harmed outsiders. This book illuminates the ‘dark side’ of social capital by showing how collective norms can stifle innovation and growth by perpetuating the privileges of powerful interest groups and by preventing weaker economic agents — such as women, migrants, and minorities — from participating fully in the economy. It offers comparisons between women's position in different developing economies, historical and modern. Finally, it proposes a new methodology for combining qualitative and quantitative evidence to cast light on ‘invisible’ economic agents such as women and the poor who are often pushed into the black market informal sector by formal sector institutions.

The African presence in imperial Spain, of between 10-15 per cent of the population, was due to the institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade that brought between seven- to eight hundred thousand Africans as slaves to Spain and Portugal. If we add those slaves born in these European territories and the three to four hundred thousand Moor, Berber and Turk slaves, there were approximately two million slaves living in the Iberian Peninsula during this period. The Afro-Hispanic proverb ‘Black but Human’ that provides part of the book’s title, serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which certain visual representations of slavery both embody and reproduce hegemonic visions of subaltern groups, and at the same time provide material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves themselves. It thus allows us to generate critical insights into the articulations of slave subjectivity by exploring the links between visual regimes and the early modern Spanish and New World discourses on slavery and human diversity. My book provides a complex new reading of neglected moments of artistic production in Hapsburg Spain establishing their importance as relays of power and resistance. We could claim that the ‘Black but Human’ topos encodes the multilayered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance, and the ways in which these moments are articulated visually by a range of artists. Thus, this proverb is the main thread of the six chapters of this book.

The rise of civilised conduct and behaviour has long been considered as one of the major factors in the transformation from medieval to modern society. Thinkers and historians alike argue that violence progressively declined as men learned to control their emotions. The feud is a phenomenon associated with backward societies, and in the West duelling codified behaviour and channelled aggression into ritualised combats that satisfied honour without the shedding of blood. French manners and codes of civility laid the foundations of civilised Western values. But as this original work of archival research shows, we continue to romanticise violence in the era of the swashbuckling swordsman. In France, thousands of men died in duels in which the rules of the game were regularly flouted. Many duels were in fact mini-battles and must be seen not as a replacement of the blood feud, but as a continuation of vengeance in a much bloodier form. This book outlines the nature of feuding in France and its intensification in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, civil war, and dynastic weakness, and considers the solutions proposed by thinkers from Michel de Montaigne to Thomas Hobbes. The creation of the largest standing army in Europe since the Romans was one such solution, but the militarisation of society, a model adopted throughout Europe, reveals the darker side of the civilising process.

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

This is the first book to examine one of Europe's largest Protestant communities in Hungary and Transylvania. It highlights the place of the Hungarian Reformed church in the international Calvinist world, and reveals the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society. Calvinism attracted strong support in Hungary and Transylvania, where one of the largest Reformed churches was established by the early seventeenth century. Understanding of the Hungarian Reformed church remains the most significant missing element in the analysis of European Calvinism. The Hungarian Reformed church survived on narrow ground between the Habsburgs and Turks, thanks to support from Transylvanian princes and local nobles. They worked with Reformed clergy to maintain contact with western co-religionists, to combat confessional rivals, to improve standards of education and to impose moral discipline. However, there were also tensions within the church over further reforms of public worship and church government, and over the impact of puritanism. This book examines the development of the Hungarian church within the international Calvinist community, and the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society.

This book examines processes of Catholic renewal from a unique perspective. Rather than concentrating on the much studied heartlands of Catholic Europe, it focuses primarily on a series of societies on the European periphery and examines how Catholicism adapted to very different conditions in areas such as Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, East-Central Europe, and the Balkans. In certain of these societies, such as Austria and Bohemia, the Catholic Reformation advanced in tandem with very rigorous processes of state coercion. In other Habsburg territories, most notably Royal Hungary, and in Poland, Catholic monarchs were forced to deploy less confrontational methods, which nevertheless enjoyed significant measures of success. On the Western fringe of the continent, Catholic renewal recorded its greatest advances in Ireland but even in the Netherlands it maintained a significant body of adherents, despite considerable state hostility. In the Balkans, the book examines the manner in which the papacy invested substantially more resources and diplomatic efforts in pursuing military strategies against the Ottoman empire than in supporting missionary and educational activity. The chronological focus of the book is also unusual because on the peripheries of Europe the timing of Catholic reform occurred differently. The book begins with the pontificate of Clement VIII and, rather than treating religious renewal in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as essentially a continuation of established patterns of reform, it argues for the need to understand the contingency of this process and its constant adaptation to contemporary events and preoccupations.

Mining the diaries, memoirs and poems written by Catholics in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, this book explores how Catholics experienced religious and political change in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. The general aim of the book is to demonstrate that by problematizing the relationship between clerics and laypeople, we can gain a better insight in the changing fortunes of the Catholic Church. The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands came at the expense of a civil war, that eventually became a war of religion. This book revolves around two questions. The first concerns the passive way in which Catholics responded to Calvinist aggression in the early decades of the conflict; the second aim is to account for the very active support that laypeople in the Southern Netherlands, after 1585, began to show for a Catholic revival. The book argues that both phenomena can be explained by way in which the clergy interacted with the laity. Initially, clerics tried to contain the Reformation by presenting it as an internal problem, in which lay people should not become involved. This attitude changed around 1580. Traditional Christians began to radicalise and identify themselves as Catholics, while in Catholic exile centres, new relationships were forged between laypeople and clerics, who at last acknowledged the need to involve the laity. After 1585, priests and politicians in the Habsburg Netherlands devised a religious way for believers to ‘do their bit’ to end the war. In the process, this sealed the division of the Netherlands.

This book aims to make an innovative contribution to the history of the state-building process in late medieval Lombardy (thirteenth–fifteenth centuries), by illuminating the myriad conflicts attending the legitimacy of power and authority at different levels of society. Through the analysis of the rhetorical forms and linguistic repertoires deployed by the many protagonists (not just the prince, but also cities, communities, peasants, and factions) to express their own ideals of shared political life, the work proposes to reveal the depth of the conflicts in which opposing political actors were not only inspired by competing material interests—as in the traditional interpretation to be found in previous historiography—but were often also guided by differing concepts of authority. From this comes a largely new image of the late medieval–early Renaissance state, one without a monopoly of force—as has been shown in many studies since the 1970s—and one that did not even have the monopoly of legitimacy. The limitations of attempts by governors to present the political principles that inspired their acts as shared and universally recognized are revealed by a historical analysis firmly intent on investigating the existence, in particular territorial or social ambits, of other political cultures which based obedience to authority on different, and frequently original, ideals.

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.

A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760 tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Aleppo, Syria, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book reconstructs the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, and brings to light the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge draws attention to connections between the seemingly aloof world of the early modern university and spheres of commercial and diplomatic life, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs whom they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, the book shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. It then argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.