Download or read book A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany written by H. C. Erik Midelfort and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magisterial work explores how Renaissance Germans understood and experienced madness. It focuses on the insanity of the world in general but also on specific disorders; examines the thinking on madness of theologians, jurists, and physicians; and analyzes the vernacular ideas that propelled sufferers to seek help in pilgrimage or newly founded hospitals for the helplessly disordered. In the process, the author uses the history of madness as a lens to illuminate the history of the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the history of poverty and social welfare, and the history of princely courts, state building, and the civilizing process. Rather than try to fit historical experience into modern psychiatric categories, this book reconstructs the images and metaphors through which Renaissance Germans themselves understood and experienced mental illness and deviance, ranging from such bizarre conditions as St. Vituss dance and demonic possession to such medical crises as melancholy and mania. By examining the records of shrines and hospitals, where the mad went for relief, we hear the voices of the mad themselves. For many religious Germans, sin was a form of madness and the sinful world was thoroughly insane. This book compares the thought of Martin Luther and the medical-religious reformer Paracelsus, who both believed that madness was a basic category of human experience. For them and others, the sixteenth century was an age of increasing demonic presence; the demon-possessed seemed to be everywhere. For Renaissance physicians, however, the problem was finding the correct ancient Greek concepts to describe mental illness. In medical terms, the late sixteenth century was the age of melancholy. For jurists, the customary insanity defense did not clarify whether melancholy persons were responsible for their actions, and they frequently solicited the advice of physicians. Sixteenth-century Germany was also an age of folly, with fools filling a major role in German art and literature and present at every prince and princelings court. The author analyzes what Renaissance Germans meant by folly and examines the lives and social contexts of several court fools.
Download or read book The Preservation of Jewish Religious Books in Sixteenth Century Germany Johannes Reuchlin s Augenspiegel written by Daniel O'Callaghan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-11-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first complete and thoroughly commented English translation of Johannes Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel (1511). The translation sheds light on the author’s motive in appealing to the authorities for the preservation of Jewish books at a stage of great cultural change in Early Modern Europe. It also addresses the question of how the church and state dealt intellectually with Judaism at a time when it was considered a threat to the existence of Christianity. The translation of one of the most politically controversial sixteenth century pamphlets provides a view of the treatment of a minority’s culture with perhaps lessons for today’s world.
Download or read book Communal Reformation written by Peter Blickle and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1992 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communal Reformation is the most original and provocative book to appear in its field in the past quarter-century. It met with an enthusiastic response, particularly in England and the United States, when first published in Germany in 1985 and is now available in translation. Peter Blickle's groundbreaking study, which is intended for scholars and students interested in the history of pre-modern Europe, the development of Germany, the history of Christianity, and historical sociology, reconstructs the connection between the crisis of rural society at the end of the Middle Ages, the great Peasants' War of 1525, and the reformation as a social movement. Blickle focuses on southern Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern eras (roughly 1400 to 1600), though his work has important implications for the social and religious history of Europe as a whole.
Download or read book Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth Century Germany written by Jennifer Spinks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an exmination of printed representations of monstrous births in German-speaking Europe from the end of the fifteenth century and through the sixteenth century, beginning with a seminal series of broadsheets from the late 1490s by humanist Sebastian Brant, and including prints by Albrecht Durer and Hans Burgkmair.
Download or read book The Reformation in the Cities written by Steven E. Ozment and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1975-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A bold synthesis of intellectual and social history which explains the appeal of Protestantism to the German and Swiss cities, the media of its communication, and the means of its establishment."--Religious Studies Review "This book is a stimulating addition to the recent work in urban history, and it offers a new and thought-provoking perspective on the teachings and appeal of early Protestantism."--History "Ozment very masterfully combines the history of ideas and social history in a work of exacting scholarship and persuasive argumentation. It will no doubt become a seminal work in its field."--The Annals "This fine study is a pleasure to read, shows an excellent understanding of the late medieval scene, and presents convincing evidence that magistrates and city council leaders were not the 'motors of reform' in the cities of Germany and Switzerland.... There is nothing in print in English that is comparable."--Choice "A work of unusual interest and value. . . . Essential reading for all students of the Reformation."--New Review of Books and Religion
Download or read book Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany written by Joy Wiltenburg and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.
Download or read book The Book Triumphant written by Malcolm Walsby and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection presents new research on the development of printing and bookselling throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, addressing themes such as the Reformation, the transmission of texts and the production and sale of printed books.
Download or read book The Burgermeister s Daughter written by Steven Ozment and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1997-02-27 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era when women were supposed to be disciplined and obedient, Anna proved to be neither. Defying 16th-century social mores, she was the frequent subject of gossip because of her immodest dress and flirtatious behavior. When her wealthy father discovered that she was having secret, simultaneous affairs with a young nobleman and a cavalryman, he turned her out of the house in rage, but when she sued him for financial support, he had her captured, returned home and chained to a table as punishment. Anna eventually escaped and continued her suit against her father, her siblings and her home town in a bitter legal battle that was to last 30 years and end only upon her death. Drawn from her surviving love letters and court records, The Burgermeister's Daughter is a fascinating examination of the politics of sexuality, gender and family in the 16th century, and a powerful testament to the courage and tenacity of a woman who defied the inequalities of this distant age.
Download or read book Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany written by David M. Luebke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of “conversion.” One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change— conversion—had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies.
Download or read book Church Mother written by Katharina Schütz Zell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imbued with character and independence, strength and articulateness, humor and conviction, abundant biblical knowledge and intense compassion, Katharina Schütz Zell (1498–1562) was an outspoken religious reformer in sixteenth-century Germany who campaigned for the right of clergy to marry and the responsibility of lay people—women as well as men—to proclaim the Gospel. As one of the first and most daring models of the pastor’s wife in the Protestant Reformation, Schütz Zell demonstrated that she could be an equal partner in marriage; she was for many years a respected, if unofficial, mother of the established church of Strasbourg in an age when ecclesiastical leadership was dominated by men. Though a commoner, Schütz Zell participated actively in public life and wrote prolifically, including letters of consolation, devotional writings, biblical meditations, catechetical instructions, a sermon, and lengthy polemical exchanges with male theologians. The complete translations of her extant publications, except for her longest, are collected here in Church Mother, offering modern readers a rare opportunity to understand the important work of women in the formation of the early Protestant church.
Download or read book German Histories in the Age of Reformations 1400 1650 written by Thomas A. Brady and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-13 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the connections between the political reform of the Holy Roman Empire and the German lands around 1500 and the sixteenth-century religious reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. It argues that the character of the political changes (dispersed sovereignty, local autonomy) prevented both a general reformation of the Church before 1520 and a national reformation thereafter. The resulting settlement maintained the public peace through politically structured religious communities (confessions), thereby avoiding further religious strife and fixing the confessions into the Empire's constitution. The Germans' emergence into the modern era as a people having two national religions was the reformation's principal legacy to modern Germany.
Download or read book Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe written by Merry E. Wiesner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major new textbook, designed for students in all disciplines seeking an introduction to the very latest research on all aspects of women's lives in Europe from 1500 to 1750, and on the development of the notions of masculinity and femininity. The coverage is geographically broad, ranging from Spain to Scandinavia, and from Russia to Ireland, and the topics investigated include the female life-cycle, literacy, women's economic role, sexuality, artistic creations, female piety - and witchcraft - and the relationship between gender and power. To aid students each chapter contains extensive notes on further reading (but few footnotes), and the approach throughout is designed to render the subject in as accessible and stimulating manner as possible. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe is suitable for usage on numerous courses in women's history, early modern European history, and comparative history.
Download or read book Jews Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth Century Germany written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together important research on the reception and representation of Jews and Judaism in late medieval German thought, the works of major Reformation-era theologians, scholars, and movements, and in popular literature and the visual arts. It also explores social, intellectual, and cultural developments within Judaism and Jewish responses to the Reformation in sixteenth-century Germany.
Download or read book The First Book of Fashion written by Ulinka Rublack and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.
Download or read book The Return of Hans Staden written by Eve M. Duffy and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-04 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans Staden’s sixteenth-century account of shipwreck and captivity by the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil was an early modern bestseller. This retelling of the German sailor’s eyewitness account known as the True History shows both why it was so popular at the time and why it remains an important tool for understanding the opening of the Atlantic world. Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf carefully reconstruct Staden’s life as a German soldier, his two expeditions to the Americas, and his subsequent shipwreck, captivity, brush with cannibalism, escape, and return. The authors explore how these events and experiences were recreated in the text and images of the True History. Focusing on Staden’s multiple roles as a go-between, Duffy and Metcalf address many of the issues that emerge when cultures come into contact and conflict. An artful and accessible interpretation, The Return of Hans Staden takes a text best known for its sensational tale of cannibalism and shows how it can be reinterpreted as a window into the precariousness of lives on both sides of early modern encounters, when such issues as truth and lying, violence, religious belief, and cultural difference were key to the formation of the Atlantic world.
Download or read book Medieval Family Roles written by Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This colelction of twelve original essays by European and American scholars, offers some of the latest research in three broad areas of medieval history: marriage, children, and family ties.
Download or read book The Sword of Judith written by Kevin R. Brine and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book of Judith tells the story of a fictitious Jewish woman beheading the general of the most powerful imaginable army to free her people. The parabolic story was set as an example of how God will help the righteous. Judith's heroic action not only became a validating charter myth of Judaism itself but has also been appropriated by many Christian and secular groupings, and has been an inspiration for numerous literary texts and works of art. It continues to exercise its power over artists, authors and academics and is becoming a major field of research in its own right. The Sword of Judith is the first multidisciplinary collection of essays to discuss representations of Judith throughout the centuries. It transforms our understanding across a wide range of disciplines. The collection includes new archival source studies, the translation of unpublished manuscripts, the translation of texts unavailable in English, and Judith images and music.
