Solomon ibn Verga was one of the victims of the decrees expelling the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, and hisShevet Yehudah(The Scepter of Judah, ca. 1520) numbered among the most popular ...Hebrew books of the sixteenth century. Its title page lured readers and buyers with a promise to relate "the terrible events and calamities that afflicted the Jews while in the lands of non-Jewish peoples": blood libels, disputations, conspiracies, evil decrees, expulsions, and more.
The book itself preserves collective memories, illuminates a critical and transitional phase in Jewish history, and advances a new vision of European society and government. It reflects a world of renaissance, reformation, and global exploration but also one fraught with crisis for Christian majority and Jewish minority alike. Among the multitudes of Iberian Jewishconversoswho had received Christian baptism by the end of the fifteenth century, ibn Verga experienced the destruction of Spanish-Portuguese Jewry just as the Catholic Church began to lose exclusive control over the structures of Western religious life; and he joined other Europeans in reevaluating boundaries and affiliations that shaped their identities.
InA Historian in Exile, Jeremy Cohen shows howShevet Yehudahbridges the divide between the medieval and early modern periods, reflecting a contemporary consciousness that a new order had begun to replace the old. Ibn Verga's text engages this receding past in conversation, Cohen contends; it uses historical narrative to challenge regnant assumptions, to offer new solutions to age-old problems, to call Jews to task for bringing much of the hostility toward them upon themselves, and to chart a viable direction for a people seeking a place to call home in a radically transformed world.
We are so accustomed to use digital memories as data storage devices, that we are oblivious to the improbability of such a practice. Habit hides what we habitually use. To understand the worldwide ...success of archives and card indexing systems that allow to remember more because they allow to forget more than before, the evolution of scholarly practices and the transformation of cognitive habits in the early modern age must be investigated. This volume contains contributions by nearly every distinguished scholar in the field of early modern knowledge management and filing systems, and offers a remarkable synthesis of the present state of scholarship. A final section explores some current issues in record-keeping and note-taking systems, and provides valuable cues for future research.
Bringing together an international group of literary scholars, intellectual historians, and cultural historians, this book discusses history in its various forms, either as texts or images in the ...early modern period (1500-1800).
Early Modern Genres of History explores different genres and representational modes regarded as history before history became a scientific discipline during the nineteenth century. It does not seek to show how the modern discipline of history as an academic study developed, but rather to examine the ways in which historical texts and images became part of a wider field of early modern knowledge formations. This volume demonstrates how history was connected to the developments in the public sphere, how antiquarian historians used genres in their work, how history evolved and functioned in the visual field, and how historical genres travelled across different contexts. Overall, Early Modern Genres of History reveals how the diversity of historical representations in the early modern period has contributed to the broader foundations of history as it is understood in the twenty-first century.
This volume is of great use to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in early modern Europe and the history of knowledge across both the history and literature disciplines.
This open access edited collection brings together established and new perspectives on Cold War civil defence in Western Europe within a common analytical framework that also facilitates comparative ...and transnational dimensions. The current interest in creating disaster-resilient societies demands new histories of civil defence. Historical contextualization is essential in order to understand what is at stake in preparing, devising, and implementing forms of preparedness, protection, and security that are specifically targeted at societies and citizens. Applying the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to civil defence history, the chapters of this volume cover a range of new themes, from technology and materiality to media, memory, and everyday experience. The book underlines the social embeddedness of civil defence by detailing how it both prompted new forms of social interaction and reflected norms and visions of the ‘good society’ in an age where nuclear technology seemed to hold the key to both doom and salvation.
This book aims to rewrite the narrative of women and power in medieval society. Based on a rich corpus of sources – systematically collected for the first time – it reveals female monasteries as ...central and economically able agents in feudal society. With a chronological focus on the late Middle Ages, this book focuses on four powerful convents located in modern-day France, Germany, and Switzerland. Three of these institutions were aristocratic convents founded in the early Middle Ages. They were endowed with far-ranging feudal prerogatives that were largely, but not exclusively, derived from landed possessions. The fourth convent originated in the thirteenth century and disposed of a primarily monetary economy. Observed from a longue-durée perspective, Monastic Women and Secular Economy in Later Medieval Europe reveals strategies of adaptations that allowed these different institutions to weather the significant economic changes of the late Middle Ages. Within the context of medieval feudal society, these abbesses and prioresses were authoritative figures. They ruled over territories, dispensed justice, appointed priests, and even sent soldiers to war. Late medieval convents acted as urban landlords and gave credits – they were thus major economic players in the rising cities. These observations of this monograph will force medievalists to reconsider the traditional image of both the “male” feudal Middle Ages and medieval monetary economy.
This open access book explores knowledge practices by five women from different European contexts. Contributors document, analyze, and discuss how women employed practices of privacy to pursue ...knowledge that did not necessarily conform with the curriculum prescribed for them. The practices of Jane Lumley in England, Camila Herculiana in Padua, Victorine de Chastenay in Paris, as well as Elisabeth Sophie Marie and Philippine Charlotte in Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, will help us to exemplify the delicate balance between audacity and obedience that women had to employ to be able to explore science, literature, philosophy, theology, and other types of learned activities. Cases range from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, presenting continuities and discontinuities across temporal and geographical lines of the strategies that women used to protect their knowledge production and retain intact their reputations as good Christian daughters, wives, and mothers. Taken together, the essays show how having access to privacy—the ability to regulate access to themselves while studying and learning—was a crucial condition for the success of the knowledge activities these women pursued. This is an open access book.
Ages of Woman, Ages of Man Hanks, Merry Wiesner; Chojnacka, Monica
2002, 20140611, 2014, 2014-06-11, 20020101
eBook
The collection is organized around two main principles, stages of life and gender, and is divided into eight chapters: childhood, youth and sexuality, courtship and weddings, married life, economic ...life, networks and communities, and widowhood and old age. The sources address the numerous and varied ways in which women and men’s notions of themselves affected their lives, and explore how accepted norms of masculine and feminine behaviour influenced social, economic, and religious change. Guided by a general editors' introduction and then an introduction to each chapter, the user will find this an invaluable reference companion to early modern gender history.
Merry Wiesner Hanks has published several books on women in early modern Europe, including Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2000) and is the co-editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal. She is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee.
Monica Chojnacka is the author of Working Women of Early Modern Venice (2001). She is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia.
Geographic table of contents. Introduction I. CHILDHOOD 1. Birth and Infancy 2. Education and training 3. Orphans 4. Inheritance II. YOUTH, SEXUALITY, AND THE SINGLE LIFE 5. Advanced Education 6. Restrictions on single people 7. Sexuality 8. Images of Youth III. COURTSHIP, LOVE, AND WEDDINGS 9. Choosing a spouse 10. Engagement negotiations 11. Marriage contracts and agreements 12. Love 13. Weddings IV. MARRIED LIFE 14. Definitions of marital status 15. Love and companionship 16. Marriage as partnership 17. Conflict V. ECONOMIC LIFE 18. Ownership and management of property and goods 19. Sales and trade 20. Production 21. Medical care 22. Servants, soldiers, and slaves VI. RELIGION 23. Defining and maintaining orthodoxy 24. Religious activities 25. Competing traditions VII. NETWORKS 26. Family bonds 27. Friendship networks and neighborhoods 28. Professional networks 29. Religious communities 30. Conflict VIII. WIDOWHOOD AND OLD AGE 31. Carrying on the family business 32. Widows and widowers as financial administrators 33. Widowhood, age, and power 34. Hardship. List of Contributors.
Despite the large amount of work on Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, there are some problems that require attention, the most important being the alleged effect of the Council of Trent on ...this picture, which was withdrawn from the cult from 1583 to 1697: the usual interpretation that it had become unorthodox appears to be without foundation. There are also some questions about its iconology, which raise interesting conjectures about syncretic inputs.
This open access book uses Finland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an empirical case in order to study the emergence, shaping and renewal of a nation through histories of experience and ...emotions. It revolves around the following questions: What kinds of experiences have engendered national mobilization and feelings of national belonging? How have political and societal conflicts turned into new communities of experience and emotion? What kinds of experiences have been integrated into, or excluded from, the national context in different instances? How have people internalized or contested the nation as a context for their personal, family and minority-group experiences? In what ways has the nation entered and affected people’s intimate spheres of life? How have “national” experiences been transmitted to children in the renewal of the nation? This edited collection points to the histories of experience and emotions as a novel way of studying nations and nationalism. Building on current debates in nationalism studies, it offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the historical construction of “lived nations,” and introduces a number of new methodological approaches to understand the experiences of the nation, extending from the investigation of personal reminiscences and music records to the study of dreams and children’s drawings.
