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This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference 'The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500' in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.
In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Throughout the medieval era, the Latin Church denounced and prohibited dancing, often aligning it with demonic intervention, lust, pride, and sacrilege. However, Ringleaders of Redemption reveals how the historical sources - including biblical commentaries, sermons, saints' lives, ecclesiastical statutes, mystical treatises, vernacular literature, and iconography from France, Italy, Germany, England, Spain, and beyond - tell a different story. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice.
This book offers a survey of the constitution of the French memoir tradition, and explores in detail the works of four representative authors: Philippe de Commynes, Louise de Savoie, Philippe de Cheverny, and François de Bassompierre. Works of self-writing were usually printed under the title of “memoirs” and have been often considered a uniform genre. These early forms of self-writing were in fact highly heterogenous works at the crossroads of multiple genres, from the account book to the astrological diary. Their writing, printing, and circulation challenge modern notions of autobiographical genres: their authorship is often questionable and collective, and they tended to be compiled in large collections for political ends, without regard to the authors’ intention.
When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the 'disorder' being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, 'choreomania' emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author K lina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformations-of bodies and body politics-she shows how prejudi...
The nature, conditions and place of medieval theatre performance remain somewhat mysterious, with scholarship in the field tending to be devoted to its context, and to the texts themselves. The essays in this volume seek to address this omission. They consider such matters as the nature of performance in theatre/dance/puppetry/automata; the performed qualities of such events; the conventions of performed work; what took place in the act of performing; and the relationships between performers and witnesses, and what conditioned these relationships.
Kaum etwas hat den europäischen Raum im Mittelalter so geprägt wie die Zeit der Hanse. Auch Kiel war lange Zeit eine Hansestadt und Mitglied dieser einzigartigen Handelsvereinigung, bis die Mitgliedschaft zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts endete. Was war passiert? Wie ging es weiter mit Kiel? Und was genau war denn nun eigentlich die Hanse? Diesen Fragen widmet sich das von der Gesellschaft für Kieler Stadtgeschichte herausgegebene Buch. Der Autor Thomas Hill trägt neueste Forschungen und Quellenstudien zum Thema Stadtgeschichte und Hanse-Forschung zusammen und legt überzeugend dar, wie die Hanse sich entwickelte, welche Interessen Kiel in der Hanse verfolgte und warum Kiel schließlich aus der Städtegemeinschaft ausschied.
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.
In Mapping the ‘I’, Research on Self Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, the contributors, working with egodocuments (autobiographies, diaries, family chronicles and related texts), discuss various approaches to early modern concepts of the person and of personhood, the place of individuality within this context, genre and practices of writing. The volume documents the cooperation between the Berlin and Basel self-narrative research groups during its first phase (2000-2007). Next to addressing crucial methodological issues, it also demonstrates the richness of egodocuments as historical sources in contributions concentrating, for example, on the body and illness, on food, as well as on the early modern economy, group cultures and autobiographical considerations of one's own suicide. Contributors include Andreas Bähr, Fabian Brändle, Lorenz Heiligensetzer, Angela Heimen, Gabriele Jancke, Gudrun Piller, Sophie Ruppel, Thomas M. Safley, Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz, and Patricia Zihlmann-Märki.
News Networks in Early Modern Europe attempts to redraw the history of European news communication in the 16th and 17th centuries. News is defined partly by movement and circulation, yet histories of news have been written overwhelmingly within national contexts. This volume of essays explores the notion that early modern European news, in all its manifestations – manuscript, print, and oral – is fundamentally transnational. These 37 essays investigate the language, infrastructure, and circulation of news across Europe. They range from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas, focussing on the mechanisms of transmission, the organisation of networks, the spread of forms and modes of news communication, and the effects of their translation into new locales and languages.
The Cursed Carolers in Context explores the interplay between the forms and contexts in which the tale of the cursed carolers circulated and the meanings it had for medieval and early modern authors and audiences. The story of the cursed carolers has circulated in Europe since the eleventh century. In this story, a group of people in a village in Saxony skip Christmas mass to perform a circle dance in the cemetery, only to be cursed and forced to keep dancing for a whole year. By approaching the story in specific historical contexts, this book shows how the story of the cursed carolers became a space in which medieval readers, writers, and listeners could debate the meaning and significance ...