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This book charts the lives of (suspected) thieves, illegitimate mothers and vagrants in early modern Frankfurt. The book highlights the gender differences in recorded criminality and the way that they were shaped by the local context. Women played a prominent role in recorded crime in this period, and could even make up half of all defendants in specific European cities. At the same time, there were also large regional differences. Women’s crime patterns in Frankfurt were both similar and different to those of other cities. Informal control within the household played a significant role and influenced the prosecution patterns of authorities. This impacted men and women differently, and created clear distinctions within the system between settled locals and unsettled migrants.
Examines a variety of texts from late Enlightenment Germany to provide a nuanced rethinking of women's roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers, creators of the cultural spaces of the home. Domesticity, a set of practices, emotions, and values culminating in a nourishing emotional and physical ambience - the "feel" of being at home and belonging - connects one's subjective experience to the material environment. In late Enlightenment Germany, writers from Joachim Heinrich Campe and Theodor von Hippel to Sophie La Roche imagined the home as a space where true "humanity" would be realized. The high-stakes cultural formation of domesticity was part of a complex discourse on the pursuit of happ...
The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from ...
This book explores the history of the international order in the eighteenth and nineteenth century through a new study of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens (1758). Drawing on unpublished sources from European archives and libraries, the book offers an in-depth account of the reception of Vattel’s chief work. Vattel’s focus on the myth of good government became a strong argument for republicanism, the survival of small states, drafting constitutions and reform projects and fighting everyday battles for freedom in different geographical, linguistic and social contexts. The book complicates the picture of Vattel’s enduring success and usefulness, showing too how the work was published and translated to criticize and denounce the dangerousness of these ideas. In doing so, it opens up new avenues of research beyond histories of international law, political and economic thought.
This book addresses early modern concepts of the body and the self – focussing on three self-narratives authored by the nobleman Osvaldo Ercole Trapp (1634–1710), a body description from head to foot, autobiographical writings, and a brief chronicle of the House of Trapp-Caldonazzo. Approaching the complex theme of the question of the early modern self and the historical body, this book intertwines consistent contextualisation and historicisation of self-interpretation and biography. This is done in three steps: first, the content and function of these self-narratives are analysed with reference to current research on early modern self-narratives. In a second step, the life and family hi...
This volume explores familial wealth arrangements and gendered property from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries in Italian, German and Austrian territories (including Florence, Trento, Tyrol, and Vienna), Nordic countries, Western Pyrenees, and England. Family property as capital in the form of houses, land, movables, financial assets, and rights were of great importance in the past. Arrangements of such property were characterised by a high degree of negotiating competence but likewise they entailed competition between the parties involved and were highly conflict prone. Fifteen contributors from Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK address different marital property regimes in relation to the practices and legal regulations of inheritance patterns with consideration to inter-familial negotiation, conflict, and resolution. Contributors are: Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga, Laura Casella, Isabelle Chabot, Siglinde Clementi, Simona Feci, Ellinor Forster, Andrea Griesebner, Christian Hagen, Margareth Lanzinger, Janine Maegraith, Silvia Mattivi, Beatrice Moring, Craig Muldrew, Regina Schäfer, and Georg Tschannett.
Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.The reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was pivotal for both politics and opera in Britain. In this study, Thomas McGeary brings together a wide range of sources to show how the worlds of politics and opera were entwined. The associations that Italian singing and singers acquired by the 1690s were used in partisan Whig-Tory writings. Rather than a foreign invasion, McGeary shows how the introduction of Italian-style opera was a native product that grew out of plans for a new theatre in the Haymarket. A crucial event for opera was Handel's arrival in London...
'The Talk of the Town' explores everyday communication in a 16th-century small town and the role it played in the circulation of information across and within early modern communities, using the notebooks of the St Gall linen trader Johannes Rütiner to gain unusual insights into an oral world, and show how conversation could shape society.