- Department of History - 049
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521, USA
Randolph Head
University of California, Riverside, History, Faculty Member
- I research the history of European archives, and also specialize in Switzerland, the history of confessional relation... moreI research the history of European archives, and also specialize in Switzerland, the history of confessional relations and religious coexistence in post-Reformation Europe, and early modern world history.
I will list new presentations and publications from time to time; other publications are listed on my CV.edit
Cambridge University Press, 2019
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Publication of the INVENT.ARQ project (Maria de Lurdes Rosa, Lisbon, PI). Twelve essays and a catalog of 36 inventories from Portuguese noble family archives from the late 15th to late 19th centuries, with analysis of their production,... more
Publication of the INVENT.ARQ project (Maria de Lurdes Rosa, Lisbon, PI). Twelve essays and a catalog of 36 inventories from Portuguese noble family archives from the late 15th to late 19th centuries, with analysis of their production, the history of transmission, and formal archival descriptions.
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My contribution appears in the newly published collection of articles on archival practices in pre-modern Europe and its colonial world, published by Garnier under the editorship of Maria Pia Donato. This is a great collection; my article... more
My contribution appears in the newly published collection of articles on archival practices in pre-modern Europe and its colonial world, published by Garnier under the editorship of Maria Pia Donato. This is a great collection; my article addresses the relative suitability or unsuitability of medieval European archival practices -- which depended on extensive documentary simplification that rested on shared assumptions about power and property -- for the very different circumstances of colonial encounters of trade and governance.
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Uses the author's own project to reflect on the challenges and opportunities that comparative case studies provide for better understanding archival traditions and their formation.
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Considers the paradox between the conceptualization of archives as fundamentally having a public dimension, and the reality of private noble archives across Europe from the High Middle Ages to the 19th century.
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Published in the Historical Journal, 56, 4 (2013), pp. 909-930. Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica, whose importance for diplomatics and the philosophy of history is well recognized, also contributed to the seventeenth-century European... more
Published in the Historical Journal, 56, 4 (2013), pp. 909-930.
Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica, whose importance for diplomatics and the philosophy of history is well recognized, also contributed to the seventeenth-century European debate over the relationship among documents, archives, and historical or juridical proof. This article juxtaposes early works on diplomatics by Mabillon, Daniel Papebroche, and Barthélémy Germon against German ius archivi theorists including Rutger Ruland and Ahasver Fritsch to reveal two incommensurate approaches that emerged around 1700 for assessing the authority of written records. Diplomatics concentrated on comparing the material and textual features of individual documents to authentic specimens in order to separate the genuine from the spurious, whereas the ius archivi emphasized the publica fides (public faith) that documents derived from their placement in an authentic sovereign’s archive. Diplomatics’ emergence as a separate auxiliary science of history encouraged the erasure of archivality from the primary conditions of documentary assessment for historians, however, while the ius archivi’s privileging of institutional over material criteria for authority foreshadowed European state practice and the evolution of archivistics into the twentieth century. This paper investigates these competing discourses of evidence and their implications from the perspective of early modern archival practices."""
Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica, whose importance for diplomatics and the philosophy of history is well recognized, also contributed to the seventeenth-century European debate over the relationship among documents, archives, and historical or juridical proof. This article juxtaposes early works on diplomatics by Mabillon, Daniel Papebroche, and Barthélémy Germon against German ius archivi theorists including Rutger Ruland and Ahasver Fritsch to reveal two incommensurate approaches that emerged around 1700 for assessing the authority of written records. Diplomatics concentrated on comparing the material and textual features of individual documents to authentic specimens in order to separate the genuine from the spurious, whereas the ius archivi emphasized the publica fides (public faith) that documents derived from their placement in an authentic sovereign’s archive. Diplomatics’ emergence as a separate auxiliary science of history encouraged the erasure of archivality from the primary conditions of documentary assessment for historians, however, while the ius archivi’s privileging of institutional over material criteria for authority foreshadowed European state practice and the evolution of archivistics into the twentieth century. This paper investigates these competing discourses of evidence and their implications from the perspective of early modern archival practices."""
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Close analyis of developments in Innsbruck in the 1520s that produced a distinctive form of registry, with a family of associated practices.
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Considers how early modern European archivists deployed diverse conceptions of space in organizing collections of documents, with particular focus on the algorithmic use of spatial boundaries as a finding-aid.
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Introduces the collection of articles collected in the special issue "Knowledge Cultures.”
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The comparative study of archival inventories in early modern Switzerland reveals that three major regimes of inventorying logic emerged from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. Early inventories constructed as lists gave... more
The comparative study of archival inventories in early modern Switzerland reveals that three major regimes of inventorying logic emerged from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. Early inventories constructed as lists gave way first to ideal-topographical inventories that relied on a double mapping of conceptual spaces against archival space and inventory pages, succeeded eventually by taxonomic inventories oriented around an active state apparatus and its needs. Synchronic and diachronic comparisons that focus on major reorganizations have proven effective in illustrating the scope and effectiveness of each of the successive regimes. A similar approach applied to major inventory projects across early modern Europe may identify further systems for making accumulating documents accessible to rulers, and may also allow us to trace genealogies of inventory practice regimes as they appeared in different regions, at different scales, and in diverse political contexts.
Traces the diverse ways Zurich chancellery officials and the city government read key foundational documents, such as the 1531 2nd Peace of Kappel, that established the principle of confessional coexistence in Swiss subject territories.... more
Traces the diverse ways Zurich chancellery officials and the city government read key foundational documents, such as the 1531 2nd Peace of Kappel, that established the principle of confessional coexistence in Swiss subject territories. After an initial period in which the general principles of the Peace were frequently cited, but not the text itself, closer attention to the text in inter-confessional disputes led Zurich official first to seek alternative sources of authority, such as testimony from retired pastors, before turning to hermeneutic approaches that questioned every word in the Peace's text.
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Archives play a fundamental role in historical research, yet archivality as a human cultural product subject to enormous variation across cultural systems and across time has received little substantive and almost no comparative... more
Archives play a fundamental role in historical research, yet archivality as a human cultural product subject to enormous variation across cultural systems and across time has received little substantive and almost no comparative attention. We propose a collaborative project to investigate the formation, use, and representation of archives around the globe in the pre-modern period. By bringing together scholars with the necessary linguistic skills, specific historical knowledge, and diverse theoretical and epistemological approaches, this project will contribute to enriched research on the various areas included. Of equal importance, however, will be the project’s contribution to understanding how archival accumulation has shaped legal, political, memorial and not least historiographical expectations and production in different civilizational contexts. In light of the last half-century’s theoretical and methodological insights, it is no longer tenable to write history from the archives without understanding the history of the archives.
I hope to establish a network of interested scholars, working in any region of the world, to help develop the themes sketched above. On the agenda are a workshop to help define terms and categories (May 2013), an informal meeting in Europe to bring together interested scholars (September 2013), and further events.
The long run goal is to develop a larger project capable of supporting research by PhD students and post-docs, as well as established scholars, and produce a series of studies that probe non-Western and contextualize Western archivalities as political, legal, social and cultural phenomena central to historical understanding as well as to historical research.
I hope to establish a network of interested scholars, working in any region of the world, to help develop the themes sketched above. On the agenda are a workshop to help define terms and categories (May 2013), an informal meeting in Europe to bring together interested scholars (September 2013), and further events.
The long run goal is to develop a larger project capable of supporting research by PhD students and post-docs, as well as established scholars, and produce a series of studies that probe non-Western and contextualize Western archivalities as political, legal, social and cultural phenomena central to historical understanding as well as to historical research.
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Chapter on Reformation movements in the Swiss region during the 16th century in a new Handbook on the Protestant Reformation
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Analyzes the changing political role of aristocratic families in the Republic of the Three Leagues (Graubünden) from the mid-16th to mid-18th century.
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Chapter on the 16th century for a new comprehensive history of Switzerland
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At the central moment of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, the founding fathers of the Swiss Confederacy swear," Let us be a single brotherhood, Inseparable in danger and in need." 1 Schiller argued that... more
At the central moment of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, the founding fathers of the Swiss Confederacy swear," Let us be a single brotherhood, Inseparable in danger and in need." 1 Schiller argued that fraternity had replaced noble dominion in fourteenth-century Switzerland, and he thought it should do so in eighteenth-century Europe as well. In most respects, Schiller followed older Swiss versions of the Tell myth in creating his play, but in this key passage-one often repeated in modern Switzerland-he echoed the language of ...
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Résumé/Abstract S'appuyant sur des extraits de procès de l'Inquisition à Venise entre 1548 et 1580, l'A. s' interroge sur la frontière entre les appartenances religieuses juives et chrétiennes. Il distingue deux... more
Résumé/Abstract S'appuyant sur des extraits de procès de l'Inquisition à Venise entre 1548 et 1580, l'A. s' interroge sur la frontière entre les appartenances religieuses juives et chrétiennes. Il distingue deux critères essentiels: le baptême d'une part (qui affirme un lien irrévocable avec l'Eglise catholique et donne son identité religieuse au baptisé, la circonscision étant considérée plus comme inclination que comme identité sacramentelle) et la pratique religieuse d'autre part
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For 1988, the bibliography continues its customary coverage* of secondary writings published on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world since 1900 in western European languages. It includes monographs, notes and articles in... more
For 1988, the bibliography continues its customary coverage* of secondary writings published on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world since 1900 in western European languages. It includes monographs, notes and articles in scholarly periodicals, substantial reviews and review essays, and chapters in edited volumes and Festschriften focused primarily on slavery or slave trading. Readers unfamiliar with other technical aspects of the presentation may refer to the notes introducing previous supplements in this ...
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Although record keeping and record using were widespread in Classical and early European societies, the medieval archivium and the early modern archive each represented a distinct form of practice and discourse, quite different from... more
Although record keeping and record using were widespread in Classical and early European societies, the medieval archivium and the early modern archive each represented a distinct form of practice and discourse, quite different from record-keeping practices that emerged after 1800. Using examples from across Europe around 1500, this paper argues for the importance of comparative research, both to provincialize European archival patterns as well as to delineate the range of possibilities that those practices allowed. I will focus on the organizational and contextual features that distinguished early modern archives from other forms of record keeping. Some of these, like extensive reliance on codex technologies and the conviction that properly preserved records provided proofs at law, tied early modern archives to medieval practices; others, notably the belief that accumulated records could become political armories of information, pointed to later developments. Examples from Lisbon and Würzburg shortly after 1500 will illustrate the comparison. Early modern European archivality took profoundly heterogeneous organizational forms, but archives always possessed close connections to juridical and state power, which attributed great value to stored records even as it silenced them or displaced them from view.
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The ways in which written records created potent knowledge for governance and for control over property in Europe changed profoundly from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. As documents’ role in relations of power, possession and... more
The ways in which written records created potent knowledge for governance and for control over property in Europe changed profoundly from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. As documents’ role in relations of power, possession and representation changed, so too did the ways they circulated, and the ways that the growing staff of specialist agents responsible for them organized and stored them in diverse depositories. In this paper, I will draw on comparative studies of archival repositories and their finding-tools across early modern Europe, seeking to revise and dynamize older periodizations that define this era of archival history primarily in terms of a transition from treasuries of charters to arsenals of authority (Bautier). I will recast developments from the fourteenth to eighteenth century in terms of differentiating repositories: in this view, the treasury-archive of early modern imagination was just as much a product of fifteenth-century developments as was the new repository mode known as registry (Registratur), both of which contributed in turn to the heterogeneous state archives and to the emerging sciences of diplomatics and archivistics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The process of differentiation, I will argue, took shape through three interlocking processes, often driven by archival failure in the face of changing political demands: evolving scribal practices for creating and managing records and their metadata, the adoption and adaptation of codex technologies and their associated organizational logics, and changing contexts of governmentality that formalized administration as a distinct mode of political action that interacted with and inflected other modes of exercising power. The complex interactions of these processes led to great heterogeneity in the forms and practices by which records were preserved (or not) and made accessible (or not) to different actors; nevertheless, the shared discourses and practices that shaped outcomes from Portugal to Prussia clearly identify early modern European archives as diverse exemplars of a single socio-cultural system.
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The extraordinary set of illuminated parchments registers produced in Lisbon between 1504 and 1552 at royal behest, and known as the _Leitura Nova_, long formed the backbone of the royal chancellery's _archivium_, its treasury of royal... more
The extraordinary set of illuminated parchments registers produced in Lisbon between 1504 and 1552 at royal behest, and known
as the _Leitura Nova_, long formed the backbone of the royal chancellery's _archivium_, its treasury of royal acts from the Middle
Ages. The series has been examined in depth for its connections to European traditions of book illumination and in the context of
Portuguese Humanism, but has not been viewed comparatively as the product of chancellery practice in an era when probative,
performative and administrative functions of formal records were interacting in novel ways. This paper argues that the Leitura Nova
as well as its precursors, the 'reformed' Chancellarias produced during the reign of Afonso V, responded to the documentary
needs of a patronage state intent on demonstrating as well as documenting its monopoly on political generosity centered on the
person of a proto-absolute monarch. By comparing this massive project to parallel but quite different developments in registry
practice elsewhere in Europe, its distinctiveness becomes clear.
as the _Leitura Nova_, long formed the backbone of the royal chancellery's _archivium_, its treasury of royal acts from the Middle
Ages. The series has been examined in depth for its connections to European traditions of book illumination and in the context of
Portuguese Humanism, but has not been viewed comparatively as the product of chancellery practice in an era when probative,
performative and administrative functions of formal records were interacting in novel ways. This paper argues that the Leitura Nova
as well as its precursors, the 'reformed' Chancellarias produced during the reign of Afonso V, responded to the documentary
needs of a patronage state intent on demonstrating as well as documenting its monopoly on political generosity centered on the
person of a proto-absolute monarch. By comparing this massive project to parallel but quite different developments in registry
practice elsewhere in Europe, its distinctiveness becomes clear.
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Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... A Poisoned Chalice. By Jeffrey Freedman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xviii + 236. $24.95. ISBN 0-691-00233-9. ... A Poisoned... more
Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... A Poisoned Chalice. By Jeffrey Freedman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xviii + 236. $24.95. ISBN 0-691-00233-9. ... A Poisoned Chalice. By Jeffrey Freedman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xviii + 236. $24.95. ISBN 0-691-00233-9. ... A Poisoned Chalice. By Jeffrey Freedman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xviii + 236. $24.95. ISBN 0-691-00233-9.
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Andreas Suter, Der schweizerische Bauernkrieg von 1653: Politische Sozialgeschichte–Sozialgeschichte eines politischen EreignissesDer schweizerische Bauernkrieg von 1653: Politische Sozialgeschichte–Sozialgeschichte eines politischen Ereignisses. By Andreas Suter Frühneuzeit‐Forschungen, volume 3...more
Book talk (online) on November 10, 2020, 3 PM Pacific Standard Time. Please see attached flyer for registration information
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Over the past generation, interest in the history of recordkeeping in all periods has exploded, stimulated by the current revolution in digital technologies of making, keeping and using records. European medievalists and early... more
Over the past generation, interest in the history of recordkeeping in all periods has exploded, stimulated by the current revolution in digital technologies of making, keeping and using records. European medievalists and early modernists have been reassessing how records came to be created and preserved, the organization of the resulting accumulations, and the changing uses that contemporaries envisioned for stored records of various kinds through the centuries. Closer examination also raises questions about how European recordkeeping differed from that of other civilizations, and whether European conceptions and terminology about archives need to be provincialized in order to enable more fruitful comparative scholarship. Since scholars across the disciplines continue to rely on today’s archives for their research, reassessing the trajectory of archival formation, organization and survival offers the promise of enriching current research in a wide variety of fields.
Over two weeks, the course will focus on three major themes that currently play a major role in research on the history of archives. The first week will consider practices of creating and organizing archival records, with close attention to the material substrates (paper, parchment), and medial forms and productive practices (calligraphy, registration) that gave rise to large accumulations of material in many European repositories. We will also consider the techniques of organization (spatial, material, textual) by which secretaries, registrators, and other users sought to master the challenge of using records in the exercise of power.
In the second week, we will turn to the ways that archival accumulations became, and still are, sites of activity on the part not only of archival staff, but also of historians and other scholars. We will also consider the variety of archival types that have survived from the Middle Ages to the present, and the challenges of ongoing preservation and transmission in the digital age. Finally, we will turn to the particularities of European archiving in contact with and in comparison to practices in other parts of the early modern world, considering both imperial archives outside Europe and the archivalities of the Islamic tradition. Drawing on the rich collections of handbooks and material at the Herzog August Bibliothek as well as in the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel, the course will give students a richer understanding of the formation of archives, of the meanings that archives had for their contemporaries, and of how they were transformed during their transmission to the modern world.
Mornings will be devoted to presentations and workshops led by senior scholars in the field. Key readings will be circulated in advance. Students will also be invited to present on aspects of their own research as part of the daily seminars. In the afternoons, participants will be able to use the holdings of the Herzog August Bibliothek for their own work and will have opportunities to hold individual or group discussions with those teaching the course. We are also planning a field trip to local archives to gain a richer understanding of the material, organizational and theoretical challenges of reconsidering archival material. There will also be two additional evening lectures by our partners from Marbach and Weimar.
Course tutors:
Dr. Megan Williams (History, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Dr. Diego Navarro Bonilla (Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid)
Dr. Markus Friedrich (History, University of Hamburg)
Michael Riordan (Archivist of St. John’s College and The Queen’s College, Oxford)
Dr. Maria de Lurdes Rosa, (History, Universidade Nova, Lisbon)
Dr. Natalie Rothman (History, University of Toronto-Scarborough)
The 2017 International Summer School is part of the programme of the MWW Research Association, founded in 2013 (www.mww-forschung.de/en/) and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Applications:
The call for applications is addressed to masters or doctoral students. The seminars will be conducted in English.
The library offers up to fifteen places for participants and will cover their expenses for accommodation and breakfast. Each participant will receive a subsidy of 200 Euros to cover living costs. Travel expenses are reimbursed in accordance to the flat-rate allowances of the DAAD.
There are no application forms. Applicants should state their reasons for wishing to participate in the course and send a c.v. which describes their academic career and their current research. Please also supply the address of an academic referee who may be contacted to supply a reference if needed. The deadline is 28th February 2017.
International participants, who have a concrete interest in the holdings, may informally apply in their cover letter for a week-long archival research visit following the summer school. If approved, the MWW Research Association will cover the additional accommodation expenses in Wolfenbüttel.
Applications should be submitted, preferably by email, to:
forschung@hab.de
Herzog August Bibliothek, Postfach 13 64, D-38299 Wolfenbüttel, Fax-Nr.: +49 5331- 808 266
Over two weeks, the course will focus on three major themes that currently play a major role in research on the history of archives. The first week will consider practices of creating and organizing archival records, with close attention to the material substrates (paper, parchment), and medial forms and productive practices (calligraphy, registration) that gave rise to large accumulations of material in many European repositories. We will also consider the techniques of organization (spatial, material, textual) by which secretaries, registrators, and other users sought to master the challenge of using records in the exercise of power.
In the second week, we will turn to the ways that archival accumulations became, and still are, sites of activity on the part not only of archival staff, but also of historians and other scholars. We will also consider the variety of archival types that have survived from the Middle Ages to the present, and the challenges of ongoing preservation and transmission in the digital age. Finally, we will turn to the particularities of European archiving in contact with and in comparison to practices in other parts of the early modern world, considering both imperial archives outside Europe and the archivalities of the Islamic tradition. Drawing on the rich collections of handbooks and material at the Herzog August Bibliothek as well as in the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Wolfenbüttel, the course will give students a richer understanding of the formation of archives, of the meanings that archives had for their contemporaries, and of how they were transformed during their transmission to the modern world.
Mornings will be devoted to presentations and workshops led by senior scholars in the field. Key readings will be circulated in advance. Students will also be invited to present on aspects of their own research as part of the daily seminars. In the afternoons, participants will be able to use the holdings of the Herzog August Bibliothek for their own work and will have opportunities to hold individual or group discussions with those teaching the course. We are also planning a field trip to local archives to gain a richer understanding of the material, organizational and theoretical challenges of reconsidering archival material. There will also be two additional evening lectures by our partners from Marbach and Weimar.
Course tutors:
Dr. Megan Williams (History, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Dr. Diego Navarro Bonilla (Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid)
Dr. Markus Friedrich (History, University of Hamburg)
Michael Riordan (Archivist of St. John’s College and The Queen’s College, Oxford)
Dr. Maria de Lurdes Rosa, (History, Universidade Nova, Lisbon)
Dr. Natalie Rothman (History, University of Toronto-Scarborough)
The 2017 International Summer School is part of the programme of the MWW Research Association, founded in 2013 (www.mww-forschung.de/en/) and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Applications:
The call for applications is addressed to masters or doctoral students. The seminars will be conducted in English.
The library offers up to fifteen places for participants and will cover their expenses for accommodation and breakfast. Each participant will receive a subsidy of 200 Euros to cover living costs. Travel expenses are reimbursed in accordance to the flat-rate allowances of the DAAD.
There are no application forms. Applicants should state their reasons for wishing to participate in the course and send a c.v. which describes their academic career and their current research. Please also supply the address of an academic referee who may be contacted to supply a reference if needed. The deadline is 28th February 2017.
International participants, who have a concrete interest in the holdings, may informally apply in their cover letter for a week-long archival research visit following the summer school. If approved, the MWW Research Association will cover the additional accommodation expenses in Wolfenbüttel.
Applications should be submitted, preferably by email, to:
forschung@hab.de
Herzog August Bibliothek, Postfach 13 64, D-38299 Wolfenbüttel, Fax-Nr.: +49 5331- 808 266
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The Freestate of the Three Leagues in the Grisons, a rural confederation of peasant villages in the Swiss alps, was one of the most unusual political entities found in early modern Europe. Its inhabitants enjoyed popular sovereignty and... more
The Freestate of the Three Leagues in the Grisons, a rural confederation of peasant villages in the Swiss alps, was one of the most unusual political entities found in early modern Europe. Its inhabitants enjoyed popular sovereignty and remarkable local autonomy, and many of them insisted on political equality among citizens, and on political leaders' responsibilities to their communities. The author uses pamphlets and political documents to trace the Freestate's evolution, focusing on its institutional structure and on the political ...
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Recent efforts to understand the political culture of early modern Europe have looked beyond the policies of rulers and the theories of intellectuals to concentrate on how government was practiced under complex and rapidly changing... more
Recent efforts to understand the political culture of early modern Europe have looked beyond the policies of rulers and the theories of intellectuals to concentrate on how government was practiced under complex and rapidly changing circumstances. Spurred by increasingly sophisticated insights into the “technologies of power” available in the medieval and early modern periods, a central realization of newer studies has been that political change resulted not simply from greater centralization and efficiency in the military, fiscal, ...
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Page 1. BOOK REVIEWS 97 is in danger of collapsing depending on whether Prince Pribina was or was not based in Nitra. The importance of the Moravian question lies within the (sometimes barely accessible) realities of the ...
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This chapter analyzes Reformation events in the Swiss Confederation as local manifestations of pan-European movements of religious change. After setting the early emergence of strong evangelical and radical movements for reform in the... more
This chapter analyzes Reformation events in the Swiss Confederation as local manifestations of pan-European movements of religious change. After setting the early emergence of strong evangelical and radical movements for reform in the political and cultural context of the Confederation—a distinctive polity within the Holy Roman Empire—the article traces a trajectory from early reform movements triggered by Ulrich Zwingli’s preaching through a period of political and social settlements from the 1530s to 1560s. The specific settlements reached in Switzerland, notably the Second Religious Peace of Kappel (1531) in turn required the region’s inhabitants to re-imagine their social, cultural and political lives for a world with multiple rival Christian confessions.
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Fruhe Neuzeit Interdisziplinar's (FNI's) first conference in 1995 established that early modern German studies could benefit from a project that brought together historians, art historians, and specialists in literature, music and... more
Fruhe Neuzeit Interdisziplinar's (FNI's) first conference in 1995 established that early modern German studies could benefit from a project that brought together historians, art historians, and specialists in literature, music and other fields, a conclusion only reinforced by the three subsequent conferences in 1998, 2001 and 2005. The study of orthodoxies and heterodoxies requires people to examine the limits that such categories face, either as dimensions of experience for those in the early modern German lands, or as analytical categories for those who study them. Hildegard Elisabeth Keller gives special attention to Bullinger's Anklag und ernstliches ermanen Gottes Allmaechtigen . In this work, Bullinger transformed the Old Testament covenant between God and his chosen people, bringing it forward to represent the relationship between God and his special people in the Swiss Confederation. In this essay, the author encounters the orthodox and heterodox not in the religious but in the political sphere. Keywords: Fruhe Neuzeit Interdisziplinar (FNI); German heterodoxies; Hildegard Elisabeth Keller; orthodoxies
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Reden. Rufen. Zeichen Setzen: Politisches Handeln Während des Berner Twingherrenstreits, 1469–1471. By Regula Schmid. Zurich: Chronos.1995. Pp. 320. DM 68.00. ISBN 3-905311-78-X. - Für den gemeinen Nutzen: Politisches Handeln und politikverständnis von Rat und Bürgerschaft in Augsburg im Spätmitt...more
Reden. Rufen. Zeichen Setzen: Politisches Handeln Während des Berner Twingherrenstreits, 1469–1471. By Regula Schmid. Zurich: Chronos. 1995. Pp. 320. DM 68.00. ISBN 3-905311-78-X.Für den gemeinen Nutzen: Politisches Handeln und... more
Reden. Rufen. Zeichen Setzen: Politisches Handeln Während des Berner Twingherrenstreits, 1469–1471. By Regula Schmid. Zurich: Chronos. 1995. Pp. 320. DM 68.00. ISBN 3-905311-78-X.Für den gemeinen Nutzen: Politisches Handeln und politikverständnis von Rat und Bürgerschaft in Augsburg im Spätmittelalter. By Jürg Rogge. Studia Augustana: Augsburger Forschungen zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte, vol. 6. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 1996. Pp. ix + 332. DM 100.00. ISBN 3-484-16506-5. ... Reden. Rufen. Zeichen ...
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Page 1. Glenn Ehrstine Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523 -1555 Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. This study examines the sociocultural context often plays performed during the formative years of the Bernese Reformation. ...
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At the central moment of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, the founding fathers of the Swiss Confederacy swear," Let us be a single brotherhood, Inseparable in danger and in need." 1 Schiller argued that... more
At the central moment of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, the founding fathers of the Swiss Confederacy swear," Let us be a single brotherhood, Inseparable in danger and in need." 1 Schiller argued that fraternity had replaced noble dominion in fourteenth-century Switzerland, and he thought it should do so in eighteenth-century Europe as well. In most respects, Schiller followed older Swiss versions of the Tell myth in creating his play, but in this key passage-one often repeated in modern Switzerland-he echoed the language of ...
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The Freestate of the Three Leagues in the Grisons, a rural confederation of peasant villages in the Swiss alps, was one of the most unusual political entities found in early modern Europe. Its inhabitants enjoyed popular sovereignty and... more
The Freestate of the Three Leagues in the Grisons, a rural confederation of peasant villages in the Swiss alps, was one of the most unusual political entities found in early modern Europe. Its inhabitants enjoyed popular sovereignty and remarkable local autonomy, and many of them insisted on political equality among citizens, and on political leaders' responsibilities to their communities. The author uses pamphlets and political documents to trace the Freestate's evolution, focusing on its institutional structure and on the political ...
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Handbooks form a long-established genre and make important contributions to knowledge—aptly captured by the German expression Handbuchwissen. Archives, meanwhile, form a category that plays an important role in many disciplines, not only... more
Handbooks form a long-established genre and make important contributions to knowledge—aptly captured by the German expression Handbuchwissen. Archives, meanwhile, form a category that plays an important role in many disciplines, not only through its traditional epistemological centrality for historiography and archival science, but also in critical theory, literature, and media and cultural studies. Creating a Handbuch Archiv (as part of a series that also includes a Handbuch Bibliothek and Handbuch Museum) therefore represents an important contribution to scholarship, and particularly to scholarly methodology in multiple disciplines. The challenges that this volume faces, however, go beyond the tension between interdisciplinarity and canonicity implicit in a handbook that crosses disciplinary lines, because of the diverse and indeed incommensurable ways the terms the archive or archives are approached in the disciplines involved. The editors, both active in literary archives, are well aware of the terms’ instability and modestly describe their work as a “Perspektivierung” that aims to bridge the “Graben wechselseitiger Missverständnisse” (viii) among the disciplines that give (the) archive(s) a central place in their work. Such misunderstandings arise primarily from the way that first Michel Foucault and then Jacques Derrida deployed the term archive in their contributions to critical theory in The Archaeology of Knowledge and Archive Fever, respectively. Their broad metaphorical appropriation has directly shaped work in literature, continental philosophy, and cultural studies and has had significant resonance— but also generated significant pushback—among historians and archivists. Handbuch Archiv consists of a series of substantial essays on topics across this broad range of meaning, written by authors whose specializations range from literature and law to digital technology and document preservation. To bring these voices into dialogue, the editors have chosen to divide the Handbuch into six perspectival sections: “Erfindung des Archivs,” “Archivgeschichte,” “Archivpolitik,” “Archivmaterial,” “Archivpraktiken,” and “Produktivität des Archivs.” Each section comprises contributions that rest on differing epistemological assumptions; among these, “Erfindung des Archivs” is particularly heavy on philosophical and theoretical approaches, whereas “Archivpraktiken” leans primarily toward practical knowledge articulated by working archivists. The editors’ choices often succeed in juxtaposing perspectives. While this architecture leads to considerable repetition, it is also frequently productive because it allows key questions to be approached from different vantage points. Readers seeking an overview and literature on topics
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Kaspar von Graffenried, theLandvogtor administrator in this polemic from ca. 1617, was a Bernese patrician serving for two years as highest authority in the Swiss subject territory known as the County (Grafschaft) of Baden. He acted as an... more
Kaspar von Graffenried, theLandvogtor administrator in this polemic from ca. 1617, was a Bernese patrician serving for two years as highest authority in the Swiss subject territory known as the County (Grafschaft) of Baden. He acted as an agent not of the Bernese city-state that had appointed him, but of all eight of the cantons that shared possession of Baden and its surroundings; his tenure fit into a rotation of administrators from the other cantons according to a precisely determined two-year cycle that had been in place since the early fifteenth century. In many respects the SwissLandvogtof Baden therefore looked far different from the local feudal nobles who had served the Habsburgs as administrators back when William Tell was supposed to have lived—though this evidently contributed nothing to Graffenried's standing with the author of the verses above.