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This book chronicles one of the wealthiest German merchant families of the sixteenth century and their business interests in long-distance trade, mining, state finance, and overseas ventures. Their family story provides a glimpse into the social mobility, cultural patronage, religion, and values during the Renaissance and Reformation.
This collection of essays re-examines ideas of change and movements for change in early modern Europe without presuming that "progressive" change was the outcome of "reforms". "Reform" today implies rational, incremental change to public institutions and procedures. "Improvement" has a more general application, emphasising the positive outcome to which "reform" is oriented. But the language of reform is today used of historical personalities and movements that did not themselves use the term, and who in many cases were not necessarily seeking the progressive change that we would understand today. The activities of "reform" were embedded in contemporary politics, and while "improvement" was p...
Utilizing evidence from numerous imperial cities, this book offers an explanation for the spread and survival of urban reform during the sixteenth century. By analyzing the operation of regional political constellations, it reveals a common process of negotiation that shaped the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire. It reevaluates traditional models of reform that leave unexplored the religious implications of flexible systems of communication and support among cities. Such networks influenced urban reform in fundamental ways, affecting how Protestant preachers moved from city to city, as well as what versions of the Reformation city councils introduced. This fusion of religion and politics meant that with local variations, negotiation within a regional framework sat at the heart of urban reform. The Negotiated Reformation therefore explains not only how the Reformation spread to almost every imperial city in southern Germany, but also how it survived imperial attempts to repress religious reform.
English In Eine wahrhaft königliche Stadt, Daniela Kah describes how contemporary residents and visitors were able to experience and perceive the presence of the Holy Roman Empire (or its representatives, e.g., the king) in three late medieval cities -- Augsburg, Nürnberg and Lübeck. After receiving privileges from the king, these cities initiated large construction projects designed to assert their imperial status. These projects had a major impact on everyday life and made the Empire visible and graspable within the city. However, in the 13th century the cities increasingly deployed symbols and signs to represent their self-understanding as 'imperial'. ‘Being immediate to the Empire...
While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them.
Tracing Hospital Boundaries explores, for the first time, how the forces of both integration and segregation shaped hospitals and their communities between the eleventh and twentieth centuries in Europe, North America and Africa. Within this broad comparative context it also shines a light on a number of case studies from Southeastern Europe. The eleven chapters show how people’s access to, and experience of, healthcare institutions was affected by social, cultural and economic, as well as medical, dynamics. These same factors intersected with developing healthcare technologies to shape hospital design and location, as well as internal policies and practices. The volume produces a new history of the hospital in which boundaries – both physical and symbolic – are frequently contested and redrawn. Contributors are Irena Benyovsky Latin, David Gentilcore, Annemarie Kinzelbach, Rina Kralj-Brassard, Ivana Lazarević, Clement Masakure, Anna Peterson, Egidio Priani, Gordan Ravančić, Jonathan Reinarz, Jane Stevens Crawshaw, David Theodore, Christina Vanja, George Weisz, and Valentina Živković.
Of all European landscapes and regions, the Rhine is one of the most heavily overlaid with cultural and political meaning. Cradle of Romanticism, tourism, and the picturesque, bone of contention between the German and French spheres of cultural and geopolitical influence, the Rhine has attracted armies, artists, activists and tourists for centuries and has featured prominently the key writings of Europe’s literary and intellectual history from Byron to Lucien Febvre. This volume brings together eminent literary and cultural historians to present materials and analyses from various of the central nexus of European culture. The volume also contains a unique and comprehensive anthology of key texts (historical, poetical and polemical) related to the Rhineland and its contested position. Contributors are: Reinhard Baumann, Manfred Beller, Hans-Werner Breunig, Giovanna Cermelli, Joep Leerssen, Elmar Scheuren, Helmut J. Schneider, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz.
New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed. Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental...