Download or read book Holland Under Habsburg Rule 1506 1566 written by James D. Tracy and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under what conditions were limited forms of self-government possible in medieval and early modern Europe? While many historians have sought an answer by investigating the development of parliamentary institutions in emerging national monarchies and the wider autonomy enjoyed by various city-states within their own borders, James D. Tracy concentrates instead on a relatively neglected phenomenon at an intermediate level of political organization—the self-governing province. Focusing on the province of Holland during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II (1506–1566), Tracy argues convincingly that Holland effectively underwent an apprenticeship in self-government. The seven provinces of the Dutch Republic—among which Holland was the richest and most populous—were the first in history to govern themselves by a consensus among their towns and nobles. The foundations for this internal cohesion were put in place long before the Dutch Revolt; first by medieval provincial dynasties, then by the dukes of Burgundy, and finally by the House of Habsburg. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Holland was urbanized to a surprising degree, with over forty percent of its population residing in some thirty small and mid-sized towns. Forced by external threats to rise above their economic rivalries, the towns joined together through the forum of the provincial parliament, or States of Holland, which came to assume a primary role in the management of public finances. While noting that the growing autonomy of Holland did not make the Dutch Revolt inevitable, Tracy points out that the revolt could hardly have succeeded without provinces that already had a tradition of managing their own affairs. In the broader context of European political institutions, the circumstances that permitted the provincial states to assume many of the functions of government illustrate not only the capacity for self-government but also the formation of genuine body politics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Download or read book Rereading Huizinga written by Peter Arnade and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume is a reappraisal of the legacy and historiographical impact of Johan Huizinga's 1919 masterwork for the centenary of its publication in the field of medieval history, art history, and cultural studies.

Download or read book Reading Huizinga written by Willem Otterspeer and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary: This study by the renowned Dutch scholar Willem Otterspeer shows the same hallmark passion with which Huizinga immersed himself in history. For Huizinga, philology was the mother of all interpretative endeavour, the master skill from which all branches of humanities originate and to which they all ultimately return. Reading and writing were both part of a collective ritual that channeled human passion into beautiful forms, while passion, and how to master it, remained the fundamental fact of human life. Throughout this analysis of Huizinga's oeuvre, Otterspeer remains faithful to his main philosophical tenets, in which contrast and harmony, memory and desire, are the warp and weft of his work. And again, this is precisely what Otterspeer does. Reading and writing, passion and detachment, method and mysticism are here combined in a way that would have delighted Huizinga himself. This book is the English translation of the original Dutch edition: 'Orde en trouw' (2006).

Download or read book Enchanted Europe written by Euan Cameron and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the dawn of history people have used charms and spells to try to control their environment, and forms of divination to try to foresee the otherwise unpredictable chances of life. Many of these techniques were called 'superstitious' by educated elites. For centuries religious believers used 'superstition' as a term of abuse to denounce another religion that they thought inferior, or to criticize their fellow-believers for practising their faith 'wrongly'. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, scholars argued over what 'superstition' was, how to identify it, and how to persuade people to avoid it. Learned believers in demons and witchcraft, in their treatises and sermons, tried to make 'rational' sense of popular superstitions by blaming them on the deceptive tricks of seductive demons. Every major movement in Christian thought, from rival schools of medieval theology through to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, added new twists to the debates over superstition. Protestants saw Catholics as superstitious, and vice versa. Enlightened philosophers mocked traditional cults as superstitions. Eventually, the learned lost their worry about popular belief, and turned instead to chronicling and preserving 'superstitious' customs as folklore and ethnic heritage. Enchanted Europe is the first comprehensive, integrated account of western Europe's long, complex dialogue with its own folklore and popular beliefs. Drawing on many little-known and rarely used texts, Euan Cameron constructs a compelling narrative of the rise, diversification, and decline of popular 'superstition' in the European mind.

Download or read book Cities of Ladies written by Walter Simons and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers. In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.

Download or read book Court and civic society in the Burgundian Low Countries c 1420 1530 written by Andrew Brown and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the spectacles and ceremonies of society in the Low Countries. It is the first ever attempt to unite and translate some of the key texts which informed Johan Huizinga's famous study of the Burgundian court in The Waning of the Middle Ages, a work which has never gone out of print.

Download or read book The Shock of Medievalism written by Kathleen Biddick and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An attempt to disrupt, critique and question the practices and assumptions of medieval studies in light of recent theoretical debates in postmodern, queer, feminist, and post-colonial theory.

Download or read book The Fullness of Time written by Matthew S. Champion and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the fifteenth century, the Low Countries transformed Europe's economic, political and cultural life. Innovative and influential cultural practices emerged across the region in flourishing courts, towns, religious houses, guilds and confraternities. Whether in visual culture, music, devotional practice, or communal rituals, the thriving cultures of the Low Countries wrestled with time, both through explicit measurement and reflection, and in the rhythms of social and religious life. This book offers a deeper understanding of how time was structured and experienced by different constituencies through a series of detailed readings of diverse cultural objects and practices, ranging from woodcuts and painted altarpieces, to early print books, and to the use of polyphony in the liturgy. Individual chapters are devoted to life in the university towns of Louvain and Ghent, the liturgical rituals at Cambrai Cathedral, and the rich pageantry that marked the courts of Philip the Good and the new Burgundian rulers. What emerges is a complex temporal landscape in which devotional and secular practices and experiences merged into a new "fullness of time."

Download or read book Inventing the Middle Ages written by Norman Cantor and published by Lutterworth Press. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Ages, in our cultural imagination, are besieged with ideas of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights, lords and ladies. In his era-defining work, Inventing the Middle Ages, Norman Cantor shows that these presuppositions are in fact constructs of the twentieth century. Through close study of the lives and works of twenty of the twentieth century's most prominent medievalists, Cantor examines how the genesis of this fantasy arose in the scholars' spiritual and emotional outlooks, which influenced their portrayals of the Middle Ages. In the course of this vigorous scrutiny of their scholarship, he navigates the strong personalities and creative minds involved with deft skill. Written with both students and the general public in mind, Inventing the Middle Ages provided an alternative framework for the teaching of the humanities. Revealing the interconnection between medieval civilisation, the culture of the twentieth century and our own assumptions, Cantor provides a unique standpoint both forwards and backwards. As lively and engaging today as when it was first published in 1991, his analysis offers readers the core essentials of the subject in an entertaining and humorous fashion.

Download or read book The Medieval World written by Peter Linehan and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking collection brings the Middle Ages to life and conveys the distinctiveness of this diverse, constantly changing period. Thirty-eight scholars bring together one medieval world from many disparate worlds, from Connacht to Constantinople and from Tynemouth to Timbuktu. This extraordinary set of reconstructions presents the reader with a vivid re-drawing of the medieval past, offering fresh appraisals of the evidence and modern historical writing. Chapters are thematically linked in four sections: identities beliefs, social values and symbolic order power and power-structures elites, organizations and groups. Packed full of original scholarship, The Medieval World is essential reading for anyone studying medieval history.

Download or read book Medieval Bruges written by Andrew Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruges was undoubtedly one of the most important cities in medieval Europe. Bringing together specialists from both archaeology and history, this 'total' history presents an integrated view of the city's history from its very beginnings, tracing its astonishing expansion through to its subsequent decline in the sixteenth century. The authors' analysis of its commercial growth, industrial production, socio-political changes, and cultural creativity is grounded in an understanding of the city's structure, its landscape and its built environment. More than just a biography of a city, this book places Bruges within a wider network of urban and rural development and its history in a comparative framework, thereby offering new insights into the nature of a metropolis.

Download or read book The Annales School written by André Burguière and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Annales school emerged in the late 1920s around the history journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale. This book examines the origins and evolution of a group which still widely influences the study and teaching of history.

Download or read book A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages written by Richard G. Newhauser and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the senses is indispensable for comprehending the Middle Ages because both a theoretical and a practical involvement with the senses played a central role in the development of ideology and cultural practice in this period. For the long medieval millennium, the senses were not limited to the five we think of: speech, for example, was categorized among the senses of the mouth. And sight and hearing were not always the dominant senses: for the medical profession, taste was more decisive. Nor were the senses only passive receptors: they were understood to play an active role in the process of perception and were also a vital element in the formation of each individual's moral identity. From the development of specifically urban or commercial sensations to the sensory regimes of holiness, from the senses as indicators of social status revealed in food to the Scholastic analysis of perception, this volume demonstrates the importance of sensory experience and its manifold interpretations in the Middle Ages. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

Download or read book A Usable Past written by William J. Bouwsma and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-06-27 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays assembled here represent forty years of reflection about the European cultural past by an eminent historian. The volume concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation, while providing a lens through which to view problems of perennial interest. A Usable Past is a book of unusual scope, touching on such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture, the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization, and the teaching of history. The essays in A Usable Past are unified by a set of common concerns. William Bouwsma has always resisted the pretensions to science that have shaped much recent historical scholarship and made the work of historians increasingly specialized and inaccessible to lay readers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that since history is a kind of public utility, historical research should contribute to the self-understanding of society.

Download or read book Realms of Ritual written by Peter Arnade and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While earlier historians have seen the elaborate public rituals of the Burgundian dukes as stagnant forms held over from the chivalric world of the High Middle Ages, Peter Arnade argues that they were a vital theater of power through which the ducal court and the urban centers constantly renegotiated their relationship. This book is the first to apply the combined insights of social, political, and cultural history to an important but little-explored area of medieval and early modern Europe, the Burgundian Netherlands. Realms of Ritual traces the role of ritual in encounters between the dukes of Burgundy (later the Habsburg princes) and the townspeople of Ghent, the most important city in the county of Flanders. Arnade analyzes city-state ceremonies through which Ghent's aldermen, patricians, guildsmen, and the city's military and drama confraternities confronted local power and the growth of the Burgundian state. In the first serious reappraisal of Johan Huizinga's classic work The Waning of the Middle Ages, Arnade confirms Huizinga's vision of a Low Country society rich in public symbols, yet reveals the city-state conflict within which such ritual thrived. He offers a dramatically new perspective on the Northern Renaissance, as well as a historical/anthropological model for the study of urban-state relations.

Download or read book Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges c 1300 1520 written by Andrew Brown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-10 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public religious practice lay at the heart of civic society in late medieval Europe. In this illuminating study, Andrew Brown draws on the rich and previously little-researched archives of Bruges, one of medieval Europe's wealthiest and most important towns, to explore the role of religion and ceremony in urban society. The author situates the religious practices of citizens - their investment in the liturgy, commemorative services, guilds and charity - within the contexts of Bruges' highly diversified society and of the changes and crises the town experienced. Focusing on the religious processions and festivities sponsored by the municipal government, the author challenges much current thinking on, for example, the nature of 'civic religion'. Re-evaluating the ceremonial links between Bruges and its rulers, he questions whether rulers could dominate the urban landscape by religious or ceremonial means, and offers new insight into the interplay between ritual and power of relevance throughout medieval Europe.

Download or read book Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages written by Barbara H. Rosenwein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions.