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This book explores two areas of interest: the Papal Inquisition in Modena and the status of Jews in an early modern Italian duchy. Its purpose is to deepen existing insights into the role of the former and thus lead to a better understanding of how an Inquisitorial court assumed jurisdiction over a practising Jewish community in the seventeenth century. The book highlights one specific aspect of the history of the Jews in Italy: the trials of professing Jews before the Papal Inquisition at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Inquisitorial processi against professing Jews provide the earliest known evidence of a branch of the Papal Inquisition taking judicial actions against Jews on an unprecedented scale and attempting systematically to discipline a Jewish community, pursuing this aim for several centuries. The book focuses on Inquisitorial activity during the first 40 years of the history of the tribunal in Modena, from 1598 to 1638, the year of the Jews' enclosure in the ghetto, the period which historians have argued was the most active in the Inquisition's history. It argues that trials of the two groups are different because the ecclesiastical tribunals viewed conversos as heretics but Jews as infidels. The book emphasizes the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure regarding Jews, as well as the evidence examined, especially in Modena. This was where the Duke uses the detailed testimony to be found in Inquisitorial trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community.
This book provides a complete reappraisal of Welsh medical history in the early modern period. It investigates some of the factors affecting the types and spread of disease in Wales. Studies of disease and the body in popular cultural sources, such as poetry and vernacular verse, contribute to a wider assessment of a 'Welsh' bodily concept. The book explores the importance of geography and regional variation in affecting the sickness experience. It then examines the pathways through which medical information travelled in Wales, through detailed analyses of both oral and literate cultures in early modern Wales. The book also investigates medical material culture within the home in early modern Wales. It further analyses the 'sick role' and the ways in which sufferers both experienced and described their symptoms, foregrounding the growing impact of literacy and letters in sickness self-fashioning. The book looks at the availability of medical care in the early modern community, arguing that sickness served to create a temporary medical family, who provided a comprehensive structure of support from visiting to the provision of physical care. Finally, it argues that Welsh practitioner's desire to adopt English medical nomenclature points to a growing wish to be seen as 'legitimate' practitioners, a view backed up by the increasing numbers of medical licences granted to Welsh physicians.
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
comparison, we have been working by meager candlelight to recover something of early modern communities facing the cold fire, patients experiencing phantom pain, and amputee-patrons commissioning iron hands. To be sure, there are some familiar resonances: the patient deliberates with her social circle before deciding on an amputation procedure, and her continuing activities to obtain and adjust prosthetic feet tailored to her various needs and interests would be familiar enough to amputee-patrons with mechanical hands. Even the
their symptoms, foregrounding the growing impact of literacy and letters in sickness self-fashioning. Chapters 7 and 8 look in more detail at the availability of medical care in the early modern community, arguing that sickness served to create a temporary medical family drawn from friends, neighbours and the wider community, who provided a comprehensive structure of support from visiting to the provision of physical care. Whilst the historiography of poor law provision in Wales often downplays the extent of support, studies of parish records here are used to argue
the smaller German princes than for the major ones, as the former had to take active measures to be recognized in Europe’s early modern community of states. Royal subsidizers and princely German troop providers Taking a closer look at the two parties involved in subsidy treaties allows us to identify interesting similarities, both on the side of the subsidizing states and on that of the subsidized territories which provided mercenary troops and their princes. On the side of the powers that paid subsidies, we find governments paying huge amounts of money in order to
returning from, Leeds itself, easing some of the uncertainties of record linkage created by heavy short distance migration in early modern communities.26 A second reason for the suitability of this collection of townships is that while they are all nominally located in the woollen district of the West Riding, they had very different occupational structures, allowing a contrast of the scale, depth and functionality of kinship networks across a number of different socio-economic typologies which may have wider echoes with communities elsewhere. There is not the space here
, descriptions, and representations of violence are also arguments about lawfulness and legitimacy. Uncovering early modern meanings of violence provides insight into the structural and cultural worlds of early modern communities, while resisting the temptation to fit them into anachronistic narratives of modernity. Categories of large-scale violence – for example, whether something is a rebellion or a war – can serve as justification pre- or post-conquest. Such categories also capture cultural differences in styles of warfare, as well as differences in political protests. As
and geographers have also already used the Irish registers as sources for the study of Early Modern communities in, for example, Wicklow, Dublin, Wexford and Derry. Brian Gurrin, Celestine Rafferty, Valerie Morgan and Colin Thomas have coaxed them to reveal valuable information on topics like mortality and population change; baptism and naming practices; courtship and marriage; illegitimate birth, family life and parenthood; mobility and immobility; and the role of networks of kinship, friendship and association within