Land and Lordship Brunner, Otto; Kaminsky, Howard; Melton, James Van Horn
07/2015
eBook
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.
In "Poor, Sinning Folk," W. David Myers investigates the sixteenth-century fate of the medieval Christian sacrament of penance, the process of confessing to a priest in secret one's sins against God ...and other humans.
•Extensive beech and spruce dieback observed after hot droughts in 2018 and 2019.•Dead and healthy spruce and beech trees from central Germany were investigated.•Ca. 50% (7%) of all sampled spruce ...(beech) trees already died in 2018.•Drought signal enhanced by edaphic conditions and species-specific responses.•Dying trees showed lower growth and higher drought sensitivity than healthy trees.
Anthropogenic climate change pushes forest ecosystems globally beyond their limits. Widespread events of forest die-off have been attributed to direct and indirect impacts of increasingly frequent and intense droughts. Here, we focus on an extensive mortality event in Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) H. Karst.) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica (L.)) forests in Germany, following the successive 2018 – 2019 hot droughts. To examine whether this die-off indeed attributed to observed trends in drought occurrence and intensity, we sampled 143 beech and 186 spruce trees at three low-elevation sites (Spessart, Hassberge, Fichtelberg) with different edaphic properties in northern Bavaria. We analysed long-term hydroclimatic sensitivity and growth responses to extreme events of five site- and species-specific tree-ring width chronologies, including a reference site for each species. Growth of beech was sensitive to drought in April to June, whereas spruce growth was strongly related to drought during June to August, except at slightly higher elevations at the Fichtelberg site, where a summer temperature signal was observed. Trees at the Spessart and Hassberge sites showed an increased response to hydroclimatic conditions in April following the extreme drought in 1976 and from the 1990s onwards at the Fichtelberg site. Spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus L.) outbreaks during the 2018 drought accelerated the high mortality rates in around 50% of the trees at the Spessart and Hassberge site. In 2018, around 7% of all beech trees died at the Hassberge site, the site with the highest clay content. Our results suggest that these widespread mortality events can be attributed to an increasing drought sensitivity and were accelerated by the consecutive recent drought years. Sustainable forest management practices for these ecologically and economically important tree species are required to mitigate the effects of global warming in the future.
Music, Piety, and Propaganda explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Going beyond a ...musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres, the book examines how music and sound shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Sound—including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony—not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries. Surviving sources illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state’s dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured: Protestant vernacular song, Lutheran church chorales, and popular “noise” more generally remained resilient in the face of official censure. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.
At the center of this investigation is the great modernization effort of a West German state, Bavaria, in the 1970s and 1980s, by means of a reform of the smaller units of local government. The ...reforms were meant to abolish all autonomous local governments serving populations of fewer than 3,000, thereby reducing the number of local governments in Bavaria from more than 7,000 to less than 2,000. Based on interviews, surveys, and statistical research, this study chronicles fifteen communities and their challenges, developments, and social changes from post-1945 up to the present. While this book explores the decline of the iconic village community, it also reveals the survival of medieval towns in a contemporary world, and despite the modern desire for comprehensive and well-integrated services, there remains a seemingly perennial appeal of small town and village life.
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