Download or read book Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire written by Duncan Hardy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 a diverse array of regional actors played an autonomous role in political life. The Empire's obvious differences compared with more centralized European kingdoms have stimulated negative historical judgements and fraught debates, which have found expression in recent decades in the concepts of fractured 'territorial states' and a disjointed 'imperial constitution'. Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire challenges these interpretations through a wide-ranging case study of Upper Germany — the southern regions of modern-day Germany plus Alsace, Switzerland, and western Austria — between 1346 and 1521. By examining the interactions of princes, prelates, nobles, and towns comparatively, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire demonstrates that a range of actors and authorities shared the same toolkit of technologies, rituals, judicial systems, and concepts 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. On the basis of this evidence, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire offers a new and more coherent depiction of the Holy Roman Empire as a sprawling community of interdependent elites who interacted within the framework of a shared political culture.

Download or read book Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean written by Taco Terpstra and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How ancient Mediterranean trade thrived through state institutions From around 700 BCE until the first centuries CE, the Mediterranean enjoyed steady economic growth through trade, reaching a level not to be regained until the early modern era. This process of growth coincided with a process of state formation, culminating in the largest state the ancient Mediterranean would ever know, the Roman Empire. Subsequent economic decline coincided with state disintegration. How are the two processes related? In Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, Taco Terpstra investigates how the organizational structure of trade benefited from state institutions. Although enforcement typically depended on private actors, traders could utilize a public infrastructure, which included not only courts and legal frameworks but also socially cohesive ideologies. Terpstra details how business practices emerged that were based on private order, yet took advantage of public institutions. Focusing on the activity of both private and public economic actors—from Greek city councilors and Ptolemaic officials to long-distance traders and Roman magistrates and financiers—Terpstra illuminates the complex relationship between economic development and state structures in the ancient Mediterranean.

Download or read book The Devil s Art written by Jason P. Coy and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern Germany, soothsayers known as wise women and men roamed the countryside. Fixtures of village life, they identified thieves and witches, read palms, and cast horoscopes. German villagers regularly consulted these fortune-tellers and practiced divination in their everyday lives. Jason Phillip Coy brings their enchanted world to life by examining theological discourse alongside archival records of prosecution for popular divination in Thuringia, a diverse region in central Germany divided into a patchwork of princely territories, imperial cities, small towns, and rural villages. Popular divination faced centuries of elite condemnation, as the Lutheran clergy attempted to suppress these practices in the wake of the Reformation and learned elites sought to eradicate them during the Enlightenment. As Coy finds, both of these reform efforts failed, and divination remained a prominent feature of rural life in Thuringia until well into the nineteenth century. The century after 1550 saw intense confessional conflict accompanied by widespread censure and disciplinary measures, with prominent Lutheran theologians and demonologists preaching that divination was a demonic threat to the Christian community and that soothsayers deserved the death penalty. Rulers, however, refused to treat divination as a capital crime, and the populace continued to embrace it alongside official Christianity in troubled times. The Devil’s Art highlights the limits of Reformation-era disciplinary efforts and demonstrates the extent to which reformers’ efforts to inculcate new cultural norms relied upon the support of secular authorities and the acquiescence of parishioners. Negotiation, accommodation, and local resistance blunted official reform efforts and ensured that occult activities persisted and even flourished in Germany into the modern era, surviving Reformation-era preaching and Enlightenment-era ridicule alike. Studies in Early Modern German History

Download or read book Caricature and French Political Culture 1830 1848 written by David S. Kerr and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2000-09-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Philipon (1800-1862) was the founder of the satirical illustrated press in France. With the newspapers he owned and directed, La Caricature and Le Charivari, he led an unprecedentedly coherent and vitriolic campaign of disrespect against King Louis-Philippe and his regime. Using a group of young caricaturists (the most talented of whom were Daumier, Grandville, and Travies) and the collaboration of a gifted team of writers (including Balzac) he crafted a new language of opposition. This book is the first full scholarly study of the structure of the illustrated press in the 1830s, its contribution to political debate in France, the dissemination of caricature and its potential as political propaganda, and the links between caricature and other forms of political-cultural discourse under the July Monarchy.

Download or read book Land and Lordship written by Otto Brunner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Otto Brunner contends that prevailing notions of medieval social and constitutional history had been shaped by the nineteenth-century nation state and its "liberal" order. Whereas a sharp distinction between the public and the private might be appropriate to descriptions of contemporary society, such a dichotomy could not be projected back onto the Middle Ages. Focusing particularly on forms of lordship in late medieval Austria, Brunner found neither a "state" in the modern sense nor any distinction between the public and private spheres. Behind the apparent disorder of late medieval political life, however, Brunner discovered a coherent legal and constitutional order rooted in the the rights and obligations of noble lordship. In carefully reconstructing this order, Brunner's study weaves together social, legal, constitutional, and intellectual history.

Download or read book King and Emperor written by Janet L. Nelson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles I, often known as Charlemagne, is one of the most extraordinary figures ever to rule an empire. Driven by unremitting physical energy and intellectual curiosity, he was a man of many parts, a warlord and conqueror, a judge who promised 'for each their law and justice', a defender of the Latin Church, a man of flesh-and-blood. In the twelve centuries since his death, warfare, accident, vermin, and the elements have destroyed much of the writing on his rule, but a remarkable amount has survived. Janet Nelson's wonderful new book brings together everything we know about Charles, sifting through the available evidence, literary and material, to paint a vivid portrait of the man and his motives. Charles's legacy lies in his deeds and their continuing resonance, as he shaped counties, countries, and continents, founded and rebuilt towns and monasteries, and consciously set himself up not just as King of the Franks, but as the head of the renewed Roman Empire. His successors--in some ways even up to the present day--have struggled to interpret, misinterpret, copy, or subvert his legacy.

Download or read book Heart of Europe written by Peter H. Wilson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Economist and Sunday Times Best Book of the Year “Deserves to be hailed as a magnum opus.” —Tom Holland, The Telegraph “Ambitious...seeks to rehabilitate the Holy Roman Empire’s reputation by re-examining its place within the larger sweep of European history...Succeeds splendidly in rescuing the empire from its critics.” —Wall Street Journal Massive, ancient, and powerful, the Holy Roman Empire formed the heart of Europe from its founding by Charlemagne to its destruction by Napoleon a millennium later. An engine for inventions and ideas, with no fixed capital and no common language or culture, it derived its legitimacy from the ideal of a unified Christian civilization—though this did not prevent emperors from clashing with the pope for supremacy. In this strikingly ambitious book, Peter H. Wilson explains how the Holy Roman Empire worked, why it was so important, and how it changed over the course of its existence. The result is a tour de force that raises countless questions about the nature of political and military power and the legacy of its offspring, from Nazi Germany to the European Union. “Engrossing...Wilson is to be congratulated on writing the only English-language work that deals with the empire from start to finish...A book that is relevant to our own times.” —Brendan Simms, The Times “The culmination of a lifetime of research and thought...an astonishing scholarly achievement.” —The Spectator “Remarkable...Wilson has set himself a staggering task, but it is one at which he succeeds heroically.” —Times Literary Supplement

Download or read book Political Culture in the Latin West Byzantium and the Islamic World c 700 c 1500 written by Catherine Holmes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic – roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.

Download or read book The Holy Roman Empire written by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire that reveals why it was not a failed state as many historians believe The Holy Roman Empire emerged in the Middle Ages as a loosely integrated union of German states and city-states under the supreme rule of an emperor. Around 1500, it took on a more formal structure with the establishment of powerful institutions--such as the Reichstag and Imperial Chamber Court--that would endure more or less intact until the empire's dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides a concise history of the Holy Roman Empire, presenting an entirely new interpretation of the empire's political culture and remarkably durable institutions. Rather than comparing the empire to modern states or associations like the European Union, Stollberg-Rilinger shows how it was a political body unlike any other--it had no standing army, no clear boundaries, no general taxation or bureaucracy. She describes a heterogeneous association based on tradition and shared purpose, bound together by personal loyalty and reciprocity, and constantly reenacted by solemn rituals. In a narrative spanning three turbulent centuries, she takes readers from the reform era at the dawn of the sixteenth century to the crisis of the Reformation, from the consolidation of the Peace of Augsburg to the destructive fury of the Thirty Years' War, from the conflict between Austria and Prussia to the empire's downfall in the age of the French Revolution. Authoritative and accessible, The Holy Roman Empire is an incomparable introduction to this momentous period in the history of Europe.

Download or read book The Medieval Empire in Central Europe written by Herbert Schutz and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a concise yet detailed political history of medieval Central Europe as it traces the history of the Medieval Empire from its inception as a kingdom during the early 10th century, to its formation as Roman Empire, its support of the papacy, its struggle with the papacy for supremacy, the shift of its centre of gravity to Italy and its demise into particularist parts by the middle of the 13th century. It surveys the three dynasties which ruled the Post-Carolingian Empire and follows the political emergence of a disjointed region through its crystallization into an independent kingdom to become by the year 1000 the strongest military and political power in Europe, ultimately called upon to stabilize the political unrest in Italy. As Roman emperors the kings ordered the affairs of the city of Rome and bolstered the spiritual and political position of the popes until several competent popes turned the papal dependency into its primacy and enforced the subordination of the secular authorities. The Crusades helped to play great military and political power into papal hands, so that the secular authority declined, as the monarchy lost interest in Germany and became focused on Italy and especially on Sicily.

Download or read book Rethinking Colonialism written by Craig N. Cipolla and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical archaeology studies once relied upon a binary view of colonialism: colonizers and colonized, the colonial period and the postcolonial period. The contributors to this volume scrutinize imperialism and expansionism through an alternative lens that rejects simple dualities and explores the variously gendered, racialized, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Colonialism is not a phase in the chronology of a people but a continuous phenomenon that spans the Old and New Worlds. Most important, the contributors argue that its impacts—and, in some instances, even the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus—are ongoing. Inciting a critical examination of the lasting consequences of ancient and modern colonialism on descendant communities, this wide-ranging volume includes essays on Roman Britain, slavery in Brazil, and contemporary Native Americans. In its efforts to define the scope of colonialism and the comparability of its features, this collection challenges the field to go beyond familiar geographical and historical boundaries and draws attention to unfolding colonial futures.

Download or read book Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c 1410 1800 written by Tracey A. Sowerby and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World offers a new contribution to the ongoing reassessment of early modern international relations and diplomatic history. Divided into three parts, it provides an examination of diplomatic culture from the Renaissance into the eighteenth century and presents the development of diplomatic practices as more complex, multifarious and globally interconnected than the traditional state-focussed, national paradigm allows. The volume addresses three central and intertwined themes within early modern diplomacy: who and what could claim diplomatic agency and in what circumstances; the social and cultural contexts in which diplomacy was practised; and the role of material culture in diplomatic exchange. Together the chapters provide a broad geographical and chronological presentation of the development of diplomatic practices and, through a strong focus on the processes and significance of cultural exchanges between polities, demonstrate how it was possible for diplomats to negotiate the cultural codes of the courts to which they were sent. This exciting collection brings together new and established scholars of diplomacy from different academic traditions. It will be essential reading for all students of diplomatic history.

Download or read book Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire written by Luca Scholz and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borders and Mobility 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 study 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. Luca Scholz unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers' right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire's political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but 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 and the early nineteenth centuries, Borders and Mobility in the Holy Roman Empire offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

Download or read book Empire of Magic written by Geraldine Heng and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the twelfth century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts--in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, Heng shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible--usable--for the future. Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance--historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others--to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.

Download or read book Strange Brethren written by Maximilian Miguel Scholz and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sixteenth century, German cities and territories welcomed thousands of refugees fleeing the religious persecution sparked by the Reformation. As Strange Brethren reveals, these Reformation refugees had a profound impact on the societies they entered. Exploring one major destination for refugees—the city of Frankfurt am Main—Maximilian Miguel Scholz finds that these forced migrants inspired new religious bonds, new religious animosities, and new religious institutions, playing a critical role in the course of the Reformation in Frankfurt and beyond. Strange Brethren traces the first half century of refugee life in Frankfurt, beginning in 1554 when the city granted twenty-four families of foreign Protestants housing, workspace, and their own church. Soon thousands more refugees arrived. While the city’s ruling oligarchs were happy to support these foreigners, the city’s clergy resented and feared the refugees. A religious fissure emerged, and Frankfurt’s Protestants divided into two competing camps—Lutheran natives and Reformed (Calvinist) foreigners. Both groups began to rethink and reinforce their religious institutions. The religious and civic impact was substantial and enduring. As Strange Brethren shows, many of the hallmarks of modern Protestantism—its confessional divides and its disciplinary structures—resulted from the encounter between refugees and their hosts. Studies in Early Modern German History

Download or read book Heresy and Citizenship written by Eugene Smelyansky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heresy and Citizenship examines the anti-heretical campaigns in late-medieval Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Strasbourg, and other cities. By focusing on the unprecedented period of persecution between 1390 and 1404, this study demonstrates how heretical presence in cities was exploited in ecclesiastical, political, and social conflicts between the cities and their external rivals, and between urban elites. These anti-heretical campaigns targeted Waldensians who believed in lay preaching and simplified forms of Christian worship. Groups of individuals identified as Waldensians underwent public penance, execution, or expulsion. In each case, the course and outcome of inquisitions reveal tensions between institutions within each city, most often between city councils and local bishops or archbishops. In such cases, competing sides used the persecution of heresy to assert their authority over others. As a result, persecution of urban Waldensians acquired meaning beyond mere correction of religious error. By placing the anti-heretical campaigns of this period in their socio-political and religious context, Heresy and Citizenship also engages with studies of social and political conflict in late medieval towns. It examines the role the exclusion of religiously and socially deviant groups played in the development of urban governments, and the rise of ideologies of good citizenship and the common good. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in medieval urban and religious history, and the history of heresy and its persecution.

Download or read book Incendiary Art written by Kevin Salatino and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1998-01-15 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Festivities such as those exalting the court of Louis XIV, the celebration of James II's London coronation, and the commemoration of the peace celebrations of 1749 at The Hague culminated in dazzling pyrotechnical displays. These were in turn reproduced as prints, paintings, and narrative descriptions. This unique book examines the propagandistic and rhetorical functions these printed records came to serve as vehicles of aesthetic, cultural, and emotional significance.