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Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.
A major new biography of the iconic Austrian empress that challenges the many myths about her life and rule Maria Theresa (1717–1780) was once the most powerful woman in Europe. At the age of twenty-three, she ascended to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, a far-flung realm composed of diverse ethnicities and languages, beset on all sides by enemies and rivals. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides the definitive biography of Maria Theresa, situating this exceptional empress within her time while dispelling the myths surrounding her. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Stollberg-Rilinger examines all facets of eighteenth-century society, from piety and patronage to sexuality and childc...
Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 1 examines debates about religious and constitutional liberties, as well as exploring the tensions between free will and divine omnipotence across a continent of proliferating religious denominations. Debates about freedom have been fundamental to the construction of modern Europe, but represent a part of our intellectual heritage that is rarely examined in depth. These volumes provide materials for thinking in fresh ways not merely about the concept of freedom, but how it has come to be understood in our own time.
In The Gniezno Summit Roman Michałowski analyses the reasons behind the founding of the Archbishopric of Gniezno during Otto III’s encounter with Bolesław Chrobry in Gniezno in 1000. For Michałowski there were two main reasons. One was the martyrdom of St. Adalbert, the Apostle of the Prussians. His body was buried in Gniezno, which put the Gniezno bishopric on a par with bishoprics founded by the Apostles. This was an important argument in favour of Gniezno being raised to the rank of archbishopric. The other reason was Otto III’s spirituality. The emperor was fascinated with the idea of asceticism and abandoning the world. Hence his political programme, the Renovatio Imperii Romanorum, also had religious aims, and Otto tried to support missions among the pagans. To that end he needed an archbishopric on the north-eastern outskirts of the Empire.
This study seeks to examine a number of themes relating to the roles of the women's court of the central European Habsburgs. These include its role in helping consolidate their holdings in central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire and structure their relations with the rest of Europe.
This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe. It surveys the diversity of views about the structure and nature of the movement, pointing toward the possibilities for further research. The volume presents a series of comprehensive treatments on the process and interpretation of Catholic Enlightenment in France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Malta, Italy and the Habsburg territories. An introductory overview explores the varied meanings of Catholic Enlightenment and situates them in a series of intellectual and social contexts. The topics covered in this book are crucial for a proper understanding of the role and place not only of Catholicism in the eighteenth century, but also for the social and religious history of modern Europe. Contributors include: Jeffrey D. Burson, Richard Butterwick, Frans Ciappara, Harm Klueting, Ulrich L. Lehner, Michael Printy, Mario Rosa, Evergton Sales Souza, and Andrea J. Smidt.
With the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship, Germany not only experienced a deep political turning point but the private life of Germans also changed fundamentally. The Nazi regime had far-reaching ideas about how the individual should think and act. In "A Third Reich, as I See It" Janosch Steuwer examines the private diaries of ordinary Germans written between 1933 and 1939 and shows how average citizens reacted to the challenges of National Socialism. Some felt the urge and desire to adapt to the political circumstances. Others felt compelled to do so. They all contributed to the realization of the vision of a homogeneous, conflict-free, and "racially pure" society. In a detailed manner and with a convincing sense of the bigger picture, Steuwer shows how the tense efforts of people to fit in, and at the same time to preserve existing opinions and self-conceptions, led to a close intertwining of the private and the political. "A Third Reich, as I See It" offers a surprisingly new look at how the ideological visions of National Socialism found their way into the everyday reality of Germans.
Explores how the social sciences and clinical medicine contributed to the understanding and treatment of offenders in three disparate political regimes
Concepts of visual communication form an explanatory framework for discussing the visual expressions of urban symbolic communication in urban life in towns in the center of Europe in the late medieval and early modern period, including the dramatic times of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This book examines the role of images and visual representation by concentrating on the varieties of symbolic communication in towns that made a range of relationships visual: the status and role of urban civic, professional, and religious communities and the relations between the town and its lord or powerful families and individuals. The geographical framework of this book is the region in the fo...
Between the middle of the eighth century and the late ninth century in western Europe, the course of legal history was shaped by interaction with religious ideas, especially with regard to the meaning of confession, suffering, and the balance of protections for an accused individual and the welfare of the community. This book traces those themes through a selection of Carolingian texts, such as archbishop Hincmar's legal analysis of a royal divorce, the decrees of church councils, the biography of a Saxon holy woman, anti-Judaic treatises, and Hrotswitha's dramatisation of the legend of Thaïs, in order to make audible the lively debates over the boundaries of clerical and lay authority, the nature and extent of permissible intervention in the spiritual condition of the empire's inhabitants, and distinctions between the private and public domains. This work thus reveals the profound relation between law and penitential ideologies promoted by the Carolingian imperial court.