Download or read book Images of the Medieval Peasant written by Paul H. Freedman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval clergy, aristocracy, and commercial classes tended to regard peasants as objects of contempt and derision. In religious writings, satires, sermons, chronicles, and artistic representations peasants often appeared as dirty, foolish, dishonest, even as subhuman or bestial. Their lowliness was commonly regarded as a natural corollary of the drudgery of their agricultural toil. Yet, at the same time, the peasantry was not viewed as “other” in the manner of other condemned groups, such as Jews, lepers, Muslims, or the imagined “monstrous races” of the East. Several crucial characteristics of the peasantry rendered it less clearly alien from the elite perspective: peasants were not a minority, their work in the fields nourished all other social orders, and, most important, they were Christians. In other respects, peasants could be regarded as meritorious by virtue of their simple life, productive work, and unjust suffering at the hands of their exploitive social superiors. Their unrewarded sacrifice and piety were also sometimes thought to place them closest to God and more likely to win salvation. This book examines these conflicting images of peasants from the post-Carolingian period to the German Peasants’ War. It relates the representation of peasants to debates about how society should be organized (specifically, to how human equality at Creation led to subordination), how slavery and serfdom could be assailed or defended, and how peasants themselves structured and justified their demands. Though it was argued that peasants were legitimately subjugated by reason of nature or some primordial curse (such as that of Noah against his son Ham), there was also considerable unease about how the exploitation of those who were not completely alien—who were, after all, Christians—could be explained. Laments over peasant suffering as expressed in the literature might have a stylized quality, but this book shows how they were appropriated and shaped by peasants themselves, especially in the large-scale rebellions that characterized the late Middle Ages.
Download or read book The Polish Peasant in Europe and America written by William Isaac Thomas and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the immigrant family, this title brings together documents and commentary that is suitable for teaching United States history survey courses as well as immigration history and introductory sociology courses. It includes an introduction and epilogue.
Download or read book Peasants into Frenchmen written by Eugen Weber and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.
Download or read book Peasants in the Middle Ages written by Werner Rosener and published by Polity. This book was released on 1996-09-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets out to redress the balance of history in favor of the peasants. Reminding us that peasants made up the vast majority of the population in medieval Europe, Rösener's research illustrates that their lives were just as complex and interesting as those of the nobility. Rösener first considers the social, economic and political foundations of peasant life, in particular how occupational and land divisions determined the relative freedom of the rural population. At the height of the Middle Ages, the peasant condition improved as the seigneurial system was gradually replaced by tenant farming and progress in agricultural technology increased productivity. Peasant colonists now left overcrowded villages to farm less fertile or barely populated terrains. Forms of village settlement diversified and relationships among the peasants developed into more complex communal networks. Changes were also apparent in the quality and variety of clothing and the design of farmhouses and farmyards. The author also sheds new light on successful peasants who owned land and began to form "peasant republics" independent of the nobility. As the peasant population swelled, however, economic and ecological concerns became of vital importance to a community which derived its living from the soil. This book is a lively refutation of those preconceptions which see peasant existence either as a rural idyll or a life of unmitigated oppression and poverty. Rösener's detailed study has unearthed a rich peasant culture which flourished alongside and was frequently in conflict with the medieval nobility. Peasants in the Middle Ages will be welcomed by historians of medieval Europe and by sociologists and anthropologists interested in the Middle Ages or comparative studies.
Download or read book The Peasantry of Europe written by Werner Rösener and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1994 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Peasantry in the French Revolution written by Peter Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988-10-13 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contention of Georges Lefebvre that the peasantry occupied center stage during the early years of the Revolution is vindicated with the support of fresh evidence culled from archives, unpublished theses and other sources.
Download or read book European Peasants and Their Markets written by William N. Parker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays discuss principal and much-debated issues in European agrarian history within the context of the general economic history of northwestern Europe. The authors endeavor to explain the phenomena with explicit use of economic reasoning, and several of the papers draw on fresh historical source materials. The use of economics provides a relevance beyond the specific historical context, at the same time making possible a broader understanding of the reasons for the persistence, spread, and variation of certain peasant practices and forms of organization. The topics discussed include: the origin, persistence, and demise of the famous open or common field system of village agricultural organization; the development of peasant and rural industry preceding and during the Industrial Revolution; and the nineteenth-century adjustments of agriculture on the continent to world competition. A foreword by William N. Parker describes the economic and social setting to which the essays are relevant and an afterword by Eric L. Jones relates the papers not only to traditional concerns of economic development and European economic history, but also to the history of the European physical and biological environment in the past several centuries. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Peasant and French written by James R. Lehning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-04-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the negotiation of French national identity during the nineteenth century in terms of the relationship between the French and their rural cultures.
Download or read book Knights and Peasants written by Nicholas Wright and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1998 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exciting and provocative... Overall, this courageous, well-written book provides us with a ground-breaking survey. It brings out a story of the Hundred Years War that has long needed to be told, and will deservedly form an essential addition to reading on the subject. HISTORY TODAY This alternative account of peasant life during crisis is a welcome addition to the historiography of late-medieval France... a useful corrective to most standard interpretations of warfare and peasantry. SPECULUM This study of the soldier-peasant relationship in the context of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) aims to bring out the realities of the situation. It seeks an understanding of different attitudes: how aristocratic soldiers reconciled the ideals of chivalry with exploitation of non-combatants, and how French peasants reacted to the soldiery, drawing on the late-medieval literature of chivalry and political commentary in England and (especially) in France. Employing additional documentary material, including the largely unpublished records of the French royal chancery, the book also describes the ways in which individual peasants and village communities were exploited by soldiers, and how, in order to survive, they adjusted to and reacted against their treatment.
Download or read book Peasants Lords and State Comparing Peasant Conditions in Scandinavia and the Eastern Alpine Region 1000 1750 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peasants, Lords, and State: Comparing Peasant Conditions in Scandinavia and the Eastern Alpine Region, 1000-1750 compares peasant self-determination in relation to manorial and territorial power structures in Scandinavia and the eastern Alpine region between 1000 and 1750.
Download or read book The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia written by Paul Freedman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1991 book is an examination of Catalonian peasants in the Middle Ages integrating archival evidence with medieval theories of society.
Download or read book Peasants and King in Burgundy written by Hilton L. Root and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-12-04 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The example of Old Regime France provides a source for many of the ideas about capitalism, modernization, and peasant protest that concern social scientists today. Hilton Root challenges traditional assumptions and proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between state and society.
Download or read book The Emergence of Modern Europe written by Kelly Roscoe and published by Encyclopaedia Britannica. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The sixteenth century in Europe was a period of vigorous economic expansion that led to social, political, religious, and cultural transformations and established the early modern age. This resource explores the emergence of monarchial nation-states and early Western capitalism during this period. Also examined in depth are the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, which exacerbated tensions between states and contributed to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Readers will come to understand how these events developed, how they led to the age of exploration, and how they inform modern European history."
Download or read book The Polish Peasant in Europe and America written by William Isaac Thomas and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book A Tale of Two Villages written by Alina Mungiu and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union. "One of Romania’s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country’s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of “predatory elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population’s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”
Download or read book Peasant Maids City Women written by Christiane Harzig and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No way but out: German women in Mecklenburg / Monika Blaschke -- To be matched or to move: Irish women's prospects in Munster / Deirdre Mageean -- Maids in motion: Swedish women in Dalsland / Margareta Matovic -- Land and loyalties: contours of Polish women's lives / Maria Anna Knothe -- Creating a community: German-American women in Chicago / Christiane Harzig -- Making sense and providing structure: Irish-American women in the parish neighborhood / Deirdre Mageean -- Embracing a middle-class life: Swedish-American women in Lake View / Margareta Matovic -- Recent arrivals: Polish immigrant women's response to the city / Maria Anna Knothe.
Download or read book Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century written by Eric R. Wolf and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century provides a good short course in the major popular revolutions of our century--in Russia, Mexico, China, Algeria, Cuba, and Viet Nam--not from the perspective of governments or parties or leaders, but from the perspective of the peasant peoples whose lives and ways of living were destroyed by the depredations of the imperial powers, including American imperial power."-New York Times Book Review "Eric Wolf's study of the six great peasant-based revolutions of the century demonstrates a mastery of his field and the methods required to negotiate it that evokes respect and admiration. In six crisp essays, and a brilliant conclusion, he extends our understanding of the nature of peasant reactions to social change appreciably by his skill in isolating and analyzing those factors, which, by a magnification of the anthropologist's techniques, can be shown to be crucial in linking local grievances and protest to larger movements of political transformation."--American Political Science Review "An intellectual tour de force."--Comparative Politics
