Early Modern German History

This article provides hitherto unpublished information about the lives of the
men who translated Caspar Brulow’s plays from Latin into German. The five men, namely Isaak Fröreisen, Johann Georg Wolckenstein, Johann Christoph Stipitius, Isaac Habrecht der Jungere, and Christopher Kernmann, all shared a connection to Strasbourg’s academic institutions. The article first addresses the challenges and possibilities offered by various relevant materials in the Strasbourg municipal archives. The article then turns to presentation of biographical information about the translators. Some of the men enjoyed greater contemporary importance than the others, and as such left a larger archival footprint. Nevertheless, a surprising amount
of information survives even for the most obscure figures.

La traduzione italiana completa degli scritti e delle lettere di una delle
figure principali degli anni aurorali della Riforma non necessita alcuna
giustificazione. Essa giunge in un momento di rinnovato interesse nei
confronti degli studi italiani sulla Riforma e in contemporanea al simbolico cinquecentenario della nascita del movimento riformatore. A differenza della precedente parziale traduzione italiana curata da Emidio
Campi, essa comprende l’intero epistolario di Thomas Müntzer, fondamentale per ricostruire gli avvenimenti della sua breve e tormentata vita, e tutti i suoi scritti, fatta eccezione per alcuni frammenti manoscritti, inni e tavole musicali. Essa non si pone come obiettivo quello di sostituire le edizioni critiche e le altre traduzioni esistenti, ma di fornire uno strumento in lingua italiana quanto più completo agli studiosi e lettori, per comprendere e inserire nel suo contesto un personaggio centrale nella storia della Riforma, della cosiddetta «guerra dei contadini», dell’azione rivoluzionaria nell’Europa della prima Età moderna.

Across Europe, the parish church has stood for centuries at the centre of local communities; it was the focal point of its religious life, the rituals performed there marked the stages of life from the cradle to the grave. Nonetheless the church itself artistically and architecturally stood apart from the parish community. It was often the largest and only stone-built building in a village; it was legally distinct being subject to canon law, as well as consecrated for the celebration of religious rites. The buildings associated with the ‘cure of souls’ were sacred sites or holy places, where humanity interacted with the divine.

In spite of the importance of the parish church, these buildings have generally not received the same attention from historians as non-parochial places of worship. This collection of essays redresses this balance and reflects on the parish church across a number of confessions – Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Anti-Trinitarian – during the early modern period. Rather than providing a series of case studies of individual buildings, each essay looks at the evolution of parish churches in response to religious reform as well as confessional change and upheaval. They examine aspects of their design and construction; furnishings and material culture; liturgy and the use of the parish church. While these essays range widely across Europe, the volume also considers how religious provision and the parish church were translated into a global context with colonial and commercial expansion in the Americas and Asia. This interdisciplinary volume seeks to identify what was distinctive about the parish church for the congregations that gathered in them for worship and for communities across the early modern world.

Contents:
The early modern parish church: an introduction
Andrew Spicer
Patrician and episcopal rivalry for the Milanese parish church: San Nazaro in Brolo during French and Spanish rule,
Philippa Woodcock
Exploring the features and challenges of the urban parish church in the southern Low Countries. The case of 16th-century Ghent
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene
The Counter Reformation and the parish church in western Brittany (France) 1500-1700
Elizabeth Tingle
The body of the faithful: Joseph Furttenbach’s 1649 Lutheran Church plans
Emily Fisher Gray
Staging the Eucharist, adiaphora, and shaping Lutheran identities in the Transylvanian parish church
Evelin Wetter
Parish temples of Geneva and the Swiss Romande
Andrew Spicer
'Which of them do belong to the parish or not’. The changing rural parish in the Dutch Republic after the Reformation
Arjan Nobel
Unitarian parish churches in early modern Transylvania
Maria Crăciun
Heaven on earth: churches in early modern Hispanic America
Andrew Redden
Franciscans and the parish in early modern Brazil
Ivan Cavalcanti Filho
Parish churches, colonisation and conversion in Portuguese Goa
Mallica Kumbera Landrus
Dutch churches in Asia
Andrew Spicer
'To build up the walls of Jerusalem’: Anglican churches in 17th-century Virginia
Carl Lounsbury
Parish churches in the early modern world - afterword
Beat Kümin

This essay will analyse why few men in the early modern society were accused of witchcraft. We will be looking closely at individual trials that took place in Germany. The three major reasons are the concept of 'female weakness', the general fear of women who embody the stereotype as
the ‘female other’ , a woman who opposes to the role of mother and wife. Then, we will discuss the inequality between both sexes.

This essay was an assignment for the course 'HI1523:
Renaissances and Reformations' held at the University of Aberdeen.

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Lutherans were divided over a new style of church music as well as church music that was secular sounding.  This paper traces the spread and influence of the new style of church music from Italy through Germany, as well as the controversies surrounding it.  This style, known today as the Baroque style, divided Lutherans into two main camps.  What is interesting is that the Pietists generally opposed the new style in the church, while the orthodox generally accepted it.  Some prominent theologians from this 17th- and early 18th-century debate will be examined, such as Selneccer, Spener, Dannhauer,  Erdmann Neumeister, as well as important contributions by minor writers such as Theophilus Großgebauer, Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel and more.  The musicians of the time will also be considered, examining the perspectives of Praetorius, Schutz, Johann Kuhnau, Telemann, and more.  This historic divisions over the new Italian and secular styles of church music will be examined for application to today’s divisions and discussion over contemporary worship.

Katalog izložbe održane u sklopu međunarodne konferencije u povodu 400. godišnjice početka Tridesetogodišnjeg rata "Kronike plaćenika, legende i stereotipi". Zagreb, 9-10 travanj 2018.

Na izložbi Tko su bili ti „strašni Hrvati”? izložen je reprezentativan izbor reprodukcija arhivskoga, bibliotečnoga i likovnoga gradiva o hrvatskim postrojbama u Tridesetogodišnjemu ratu, pohranjenoga u Hrvatskome državnom arhivu u Zagrebu, Hrvatskom povijesnom muzeju u Zagrebu, Metropolitanskoj knjižnici Zagrebačke Nadbiskupije u Zagrebu, Austrijskome državnom arhivu u Beču, Arhivu Republike Slovenije u Ljubljani, Vojnopovijesnome muzeju u Beču i Vojnome muzeju u Stockholmu. Treba apostrofirati kako je zbog stanja istraženosti i kompleksnosti teme rakurs primarno hrvatski, što podrazumijeva da se nakon kratkoga uvoda u širi kontekst, izloženi materijal ponajprije fokusira na hrvatsku komponentu unutar Tridesetogodišnjega rata.


Catalogue of the exhibition held during the international conference on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the beginning of the Thirthy Years War. Zagreb, 9-10. April 2018.

The exhibition Who Were Those “Terrible Croats”? presents representative selection of reproductions of archival, library- and visual art records pertaining to the Croatian troops in the Thirty Years’ War, stored at the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb, the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb, the Metropolitan Library of the Archdiocese of Zagreb iz Zagreb, the Austrian State Archives in Vienna, Archives of the Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana, Museum of Military History in Vienna and the Military Museum in Stockholm. It should be emphasized that due to the state of research and the complexity of the subject the viewpoint is primarily a Croatian one, which means that after a short introduction into the wider context the exhibited material is primarily focused on the Croatian component within the Thirty Years’ War.

This paper surveys alternative approaches to European serfdom in the light of the evidence for early modern Germany. Traditional ‘manorial dominance’ views prove to be inconsistent with micro-studies of serf decision-making. But nor does the evidence support ‘revisionist’ views which argue that peasant unfreedom was rare, serf choices largely unconstrained, and serfdom harmless for economic growth. The paper proposes an ‘institutional’ approach that analyzes serfdom in terms of the entire framework of constraints within which rural people made decisions. It applies this approach to three key elements of German serfdom: the manor, the community, and the state.

Учебное пособие посвящено истории английской и немецкой художественной культуры Нового времени (XVI — начала ХХ в.). Представлена характеристика основных художественных направлений и стилей, доминировавших в Англии, Австрии и Германии в указанный период, приведены примеры творчества отдельных представителей этих направлений. Предназначено для студентов-историков, обучающихся по программе бакалавриата, а также может представлять интерес для студентов других гуманитарных специальностей — архивистов, философов, социологов, политологов, регионоведов и др.

Until recently the impact of the Lutheran Reformation has been largely regarded in political and socio-economic terms, yet for most people it was not the abstract theological debates that had the greatest impact upon their lives, but what they saw in their parish churches every Sunday. This collection of essays provides a coherent and interdisciplinary investigation of the impact that the Lutheran Reformation had on the appearance, architecture and arrangement of early modern churches.

Drawing upon recent research being undertaken by leading art historians and historians on Lutheran places of worship, the volume emphasises often surprising levels of continuity, reflecting the survival of Catholic fixtures, fittings and altarpieces, and exploring how these could be remodelled in order to conform with the tenets of Lutheran belief. The volume not only addresses Lutheran art but also the way in which the architecture of their churches reflected the importance of preaching and the administration of the sacraments. Furthermore the collection is committed to extending these discussions beyond a purely German context, and to look at churches not only within the Holy Roman Empire, but also in Scandinavia, the Baltic States as well as towns dominated by Saxon communities in areas such as in Hungary and Transylvania.

By focusing on ecclesiastical 'material culture' the collection helps to place the art and architecture of Lutheran places of worship into the historical, political and theological context of early modern Europe.

The print collection of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna houses four double-sided sheets dating from the sixteenth century upon which are inked, on one side, a bust-length woodcut of a Saxon prince, and on the other, a woodcut design of a vessel of some sort—a goblet, a cabinet, a trunk. The seeming unrelatedness of these two types of images, portrait and container, suggest that the pages were workshop trials. One side, having been deemed “waste,” provided a support, when flipped, to gauge the appearance of another sort of print. The repurposed paper likely functioned to test the qualities of woodblocks designed by Hans Brosamer and derivates of Lucas Cranach prototypes. The would not have been released to buyers as depictive conveyors of meaning or worth. Yet the survival of these pages, which trouble the designations of “recto” and “verso,” provides the occasion to consider how these two image types—promotions of likenesses and proposals for manufacturable storage devices—have histories that are interlinked. This essay proposes to substitute Art History’s structural model of side-by-side comparison with a consideration of the back-to-front relationship that causes one image to interfere with the appearance of another that it backs from the verso of the page. This metaphor of pressing up from behind—provided by the happenstance of a workshop survival—enables new paths to consider how the political pressures of the Reformation era restructured the relationship of rulers to the objects they owned and to the borders that contained them.

Im Zeitalter der Globalisierung gewinnt die Weltgeschichtsschreibung in besonderem Maße an Bedeutung. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht André de Melo Araújo das bislang unerforschte Gesamtspektrum des spätaufklärerischen universalhistorischen Denkens an der Universität zu Göttingen. Dabei geht er den Debatten um die Weltgeschichtsschreibung nach, die hier auf die Spitze getrieben wurden, und eröffnet den Blick auf eine dynamische Vielfalt an konkurrierenden Wissensformen.

»Ohne Zweifel schließt die Arbeit eine deutliche Lücke in der Geschichte der Göttinger Universitätsgeschichte.«
Hermann Wellenreuther, Jahrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte, 14 (2014)

»Araújo wollte einen ›Beitrag zur Genealogie des universalhistorischen Denkens [...]‹ leisten. Dies ist ihm in vollem Maß gelungen.«
Martin Gierl, Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 266/3-4 (2014)

Heinrich (Institoris) Kramer’s theories regarding maleficia are manifest in his well-known treatise on the discernment and punishment of witches, the Malleus maleficarum [1486/7]. However, Kramer also expressed his positions in lesser known texts, such as the German vernacular Nuremberg Handbook (Der Nürnberger Hexenhammer) [1491], in which Kramer, in epistolary form, condenses points of the Malleus and personal politico-ecclesiastical goals to the magistrates and ruling nobles of the free imperial city of Nuremberg.
    Kramer’s composition of the Nuremburg Handbook serves two primary functions. First, it chastises local officials for their negligent and counterproductive moral stewardship of the Nuremberg judiciary, as demonstrated by their willingness to let women with diabolical intent proliferate and reproduce under their rule. Second, it presents theological justifications for isolating women as sole practitioners and gatekeepers of maleficia. Kramer, surprisingly, relies primarily on the Hebrew Bible’s Wisdom of Ben-Sira, also known as Sirach, or the Book of Ecclesiasticus, as his uncited proof text in his Handbook. While scholars have examined the witch-hunts and the documentary evidence that the hunts produced, few have questioned what texts and social impulses inspired Kramer’s pointed advocacy for the purgation of women witches. This question is particularly compelling in its connection to the fifteenth-century Observant Reform movement, in which a new treatment of women served new specific social and religious functions. The Handbook’s clear formal and ideological reliance on The Wisdom of Ben-Sira—which is also the biblical text most cited in the Malleus itself—provides background necessary to understanding Kramer's ideas regarding an imperial city’s best use of judicial resources and his position that women alone create lineages of evil requiring purgation.
    Specifically, this paper is interested in understanding how and why Kramer believed so fervently that women possessed degenerative magical powers. This paper argues that the Handbook differs from the Malleus in important ways that allow a reader to better understand Kramer's thought-world and his rationalization of misogyny as vital to his inquisitorial eschatology. As such, the paper embarks on an exegetical analysis of the Handbook. Both in terms of form and content, The Nuremberg Handbook and The Wisdom of Ben-Sira bear marked similarities which have been unexplored by scholars. Kramer uses this ancient Hellenistic Jewish (2nd c. BCE) text to surprising interpretive ends as a fifteenth-century Dominican theologian, whose primary goal was to renew the Christian church by purging it of evil in material form carried solely by women. The largely unremarked fact that the Wisdom of Ben-Sira is the biblical source most cited in the Malleus and a clearly imitated formal source for the Nuremberg Handbook reveals that Kramer’s renewal of the ecclesia on earth involved selective re-appropriation and reinterpretation of Hebrew Bible sources, especially due to his desire to prove that women alone could generate lineages of diabolical kin, which would, if unchecked and unburnt, prevent the salvation of mankind.

Die Geschichtswissenschaft liebt die Konstruktion von Dichotomien: Bis in unsere Tage ist das Verhältnis von Religion und Naturwissenschaften entweder als grundsätzlich konfliktreich dargestellt, oder der Aufschwung der Naturwissenschaften im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert ist als Erfolg einer spezifischen Konfession interpretiert worden. Aus heutiger Sicht sind solche Interpretamente jedoch zu einseitig. Die 14 Beiträge in diesem Band – sie stammen von Autorinnen und Autoren aus sechs verschiedenen Ländern – werfen ein neues Licht auf die Komplexität des Verhältnisses von Religion, Konfession und Wissenschaften im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Sie zeigen außerdem eindrücklich, dass sich eine moderne Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit die Vernachlässigung der Wissenschaftsgeschichte nicht leisten kann.

El discurso demonológico inglés de la modernidad temprana frecuentemente ha sido considerado por los historiadores como una variante moderada de aquel producido en los territorios de Europa continental. La ausencia prácticamente absoluta de persecuciones de tipo paroxístico en Inglaterra fue asociada con la supuesta incompleta adopción del concepto acumulativo de brujería y con un mayor peso de la tradición demonológica patrística respecto de la escolástica. Tomando como referencia The Mystery of Witch-craft (1617) del pastor protestante Thomas Cooper, el presente artículo intentará demostrar que el modo en que el autor entiende la relación entre Dios, el demonio y las brujas, así como sus roles y poderes en el mundo material, presenta continuidades teóricas considerables con aquellas propuestas en el Malleus Maleficarum (1486) por el inquisidor alsaciano Heinrich Krämer, uno de los tratados demonológicos más célebres e influyentes entre aquellos escritos durante la era de la caza de brujas.

Les relations franco-allemandes de l’époque de Louis XIV ont souvent été étudiées à travers le prisme de la rivalité entre une monarchie centralisatrice et un Empire divisé. S’il est vrai que la diplomatie de la France a modifié certains équilibres politiques dans l’Empire, celle des Reichsstände est elle aussi riche en enseignements sur le fonctionnement interne du Saint-Empire, sur sa place dans l’Europe de la première modernité, et sur le rôle structurant que joue la politique étrangère dans le devenir des petites puissances. Cet ouvrage propose de suivre les efforts qu’ont déployés entre 1650 et 1730 les villes hanséatiques de Lübeck, Brême et Hambourg ainsi que les duchés de Gottorp et de Mecklembourg-Schwerin afin d’exister face à la France et dans le concert des États européens. L’influence de leur activité diplomatique sur leur survie met en lumière le lien entre affaires étrangères et existence politique. Les décideurs et les porteurs de cette politique étrangère impliqués dans cette relation dissymétrique entre »le plus grand roi du monde« et les villes et duchés du Nord sont présentés dans leur vie quotidienne. Les rouages de la prise de décision, les traditions comme celle de la Hanse, sont gages à la fois de modernisation et de survie. L’ancrage des diplomates dans une Europe divisée par les guerres mais aussi cosmopolite et avide de paix se lit dans leurs réseaux: république des lettres, réseaux marchands. Leur place dans la société pose enfin la question de leur identité.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/central-european-history/article/abs/men-who-stare-at-cathedrals-aesthetic-education-moral-sentiment-and-the-german-critique-of-french-revolutionary-violence-17931794/F7C249C1531B8DB3B81E9C33EEFA7EB4#article

The despoliation of the Strasbourg Cathedral during the Jacobin Terror of 1793-94 has long been considered a high point of revolutionary iconoclasm, which manifested for some the anti-enlightened nature of the Terror regime and the violence inherent in the French Revolution itself. The hybrid space -- linguistic, cultural, and political -- in which these vandalizing acts took place, however, brings to the fore the problem of Franco-German cultural transfer and its politics of emotion as a significant, yet previously untapped, interpretative layer. This article explores the emotional vocabularies used by both French and German commentators, which substantiated their divergent stances regarding historical consciousness, aesthetic sensibility, and national identity in the debate on the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. It argues that while it contributed to the denouement of intercultural transfer in the German-speaking sphere, the vandalism debate also had long-term consequences for German communal identity formation in a sentimental key.

The European quest for the hard paste porcelain lasted until about 1710, when the first production unit was built at Meissen in Saxony. Although, it is generally believed that Bottger discovered the European porcelain technology, this work shows that the German porcelain quest was a State affair; a collective project directed by Tschirnhaus and supported by August the Strong. It also aims to shed light to the reasons that led to Tschirnhaus's relative oblivion. Considering three distinct temporal stages, we re-examine the roles of the main contributors to the porcelain project, referring to the role of the Mercantilism system and to the philosophical roots of Tschirnhaus's method.

The article examines the context of cultural contacts between Old Novgorod and the German Hanseatic League. It was  context in which the first Russian treatise about grammar appeared. Methods of linguistic description provided by Latin and German grammars were applied by translator Dmitri Gerasimov in terms of playful search for analogies between Russian and Western languages.

There is no evidence that the constructed figure that we call Hildegard of Bingen wrote any of the 77 songs in her name, or wrote them for her nuns to sing at daily service. This music, too, appears capricious and uncontrolled, especially in its word setting. Unsettling, too, is the failure of various Hildegard biographers to place the abbess in a clear ecclesiastical or political context. This papers questions the modern cult for Hildegard in the context of recordings by nine ensembles of 'her' work.

communication presented at the 33rd annual conference of the Portuguese Association of Economic and Social History (APHES), Braga, Portugal, 15.11-16.11.2013

awarded with the 2013 price for the best research presented by young researchers of the year in the area of economic and social history

This essay traces the career of Hieronymus (Jerome) Hainhofer, nephew of the famous art dealer Philipp Hainhofer, who made his living travelling between England and the Continent as a tutor to young English noblemen throughout the Civil War. He was active as a translator was a member of the circle around Hartlib and Henry Oldenburg with connections to the Royal Society.

The article analyses one of the most spectacular urban rebellions of the early modern Holy Roman Empire of the German nation from the perspective of local acts of communication. Led by the merchant Nikolaus Gülich, the ‘Gülich rebellion’ convulsed the free and imperial city of Cologne in the 1680s. Gülich appealed to public opinion and used media impulses within the urban community to campaign successfully against the corruption of the city council.

This is a short book about some large and important topics. Its main theme is assimilation, both of things and peoples: it compares the introduction and assimilation of coffee into early modern central Europe with the experience of assimilation and accommodation of Jews into early modern German society. Liberles notes that central European Jews took to coffee drinking very quickly, and he thinks that on the whole, they did so with comparatively fewer religious or moral objections than was the case for the gentile German communities. Whereas some German communities sought to regulate or even ban coffee drinking or coffeehouses, the Jews accepted coffee as kosher from the very beginning, and it soon became an agreeable complement to their usual diet. Furthermore, many Jews became involved in the coffeehouse trade, both as patrons and as proprietors of coffeehouses, and traders in coffee. The book also addresses how Jewish participation in early modern coffee culture was understood by their gentile neighbors, and here Liberles finds evidence of gentile resistance to the assimilation of Jews into a social world that has been characterized by many historians as a sign of the emergence of a new secular and bourgeois public sphere.

L’enjeu principal de cet article est de montrer les diverses modalités de la contestation, par des petits paysans, des pouvoirs établis et des formes d’autorités qui les incarnent durant les décennies qui encadrent la Guerre de paysans de 1525.
Le premier tiers du XVIe siècle constitue pour les Etats d’Empire de la rive gauche du Rhin supérieur une période de recomposition sociale avec ses gagnants et ses perdants qui trouble les lignes de fractures sociales traditionnelles. L’explosion de la Guerre des paysans démontre de manière paroxysmique tout le potentiel révolutionnaire et émancipateur de cette recomposition. Dans l’incroyable densité des événements qui se nouent dans ces décennies de flux et reflux de l’agitation paysanne, les sources judiciaires exploitées grâce aux méthodes de la prosopographie et de la sociologie politique nous permettent de saisir des parcours d’individus issus de groupes sociaux le plus souvent silencieux pour l’historien.
Saisir la parole des dominés n’est cependant pas chose aisée. Elle est dans la plupart des cas médiatisée, instrumentalisée et déformée. L’expression politique des petites gens a souvent été réduite par les sources à des manifestations éruptives et déréglées d’une violence extrême. Pourtant cette parole, réprimée ou canalisée trouve un chemin original dans le processus politique et judiciaire du pardon. Le justiciable incriminé s’adresse à son seigneur et souverain pour solliciter sa grâce : par l’exposé et l’aveu de sa faute, il tente d’obtenir la rémission de son crime et sa réhabilitation. La parole du criminel rebelle et celle du prince sont enregistrées côte à côte dans une forme particulière qui permet de valider une version des faits sur la base de laquelle la justice annule toute procédure et toute poursuite.
Ainsi et de manière paradoxale, des petites gens trouvent une reconnaissance de la part de l’autorité. Paradoxale car le dispositif s’insère  dans la répression de la contestation de ceux qu’on a qualifiés en langue française de « Rustauds » pour en stigmatiser l’infériorité sociale, mais aussi parce qu’il vise à rétablir l’obéissance en restaurant l’ordre antérieur à la révolte. Reconnaissance malgré tout car l’autorité excuse l’égarement du suppliant dont l’amende honorable rend possible la réintégration. Ce dernier décrit ainsi ce qui l’a conduit à contester l’ordre établi et les considérants qui atténuent sa responsabilité et expliquent le pardon du prince.
De ces dizaines de lettres de rémission ou des Urfehden transparaissent à divers degrés ces tentatives de restaurer un ordre acceptable. La réintégration par le pardon des anciens rebelles a été un moyen pour l’autorité de redéfinir la place de chacun dans la société mais aussi les conditions légitimes de l’exercice du pouvoir au sein de la communauté paysanne. Cet article cherche par là à offrir de nouvelles perspectives sur la politisation et la dépolitisation par le judiciaire de l’expression contestataire paysanne dès la première modernité.