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The story of Seville’s Archive of the Indies reveals how current views of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based on radical historical revisionism in Spain in the late 1700s. The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and mediaarchaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain’s pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructe...
'Music and Ceremony' reconstructs musical life at the court of Charles V, examining the compositions which emanated from the court, the ordinances which prescribed ritual and ceremony, and the Emperor's prestigious chapel which reflected his power and influence.
In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanisa businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynastysought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truthespecially historical truthcan be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.
This interdisciplinary edited collection explores the relationship between literature and diplomacy in the early modern world and studies how texts played an integral part in diplomatic practice.
This book investigates the history of writing as a cultural practice in a variety of contexts and periods. It analyses the rituals and practices determining intimate or ‘ordinary’ writing as well as bureaucratic and religious writing. From the inscribed images of ‘pre-literate’ societies, to the democratization of writing in the modern era, access to writing technology and its public and private uses are examined. In ten studies, presented by leading historians of scribal culture from seven countries, the book investigates the uses of writing in non-alphabetical as well as alphabetical script, in societies ranging from Native America and ancient Korea to modern Europe. The authors emphasise the material characteristics of writing, and in so doing they pose questions about the definition of writing itself. Drawing on expertise in various disciplines, they give an up-to-date account of the current state of knowledge in a field at the forefront of ‘Book History’.
Offers an original and holistic approach to understanding the impact of the plague in late sixteenth-century Spain.
Particularly in the humanities and social sciences, festschrifts are a popular forum for discussion. The IJBF provides quick and easy general access to these important resources for scholars and students. The festschrifts are located in state and regional libraries and their bibliographic details are recorded. Since 1983, more than 659,000 articles from more than 30,500 festschrifts, published between 1977 and 2011, have been catalogued.
This book analyses the processes of formation, consolidation and dissolution of the migrant community in Ancona, a sixteenth-century Italian port city, connecting it to the wider development that took place in Europe and the Mediterranean. The book initially looks at why migrants decided to leave their homelands in parts of the Aegean region ruled by the Ottoman, Venetian, and Genoese; it then goes on to describe the mechanisms of settlement, professional insertion, and integration that migrants undertook in the social fabric of their new host city. The book examines how migrants organised themselves into a devotional confraternity and the role this institution played in the growth of the community. Finally, it looks at how the community dissolved during the late sixteenth century, faced with increasing pressure from the reformed Catholic clergy after the Council of Trent. Offering fresh insights into the history of Greek diaspora, this book explores the dynamics of migration and community in the early modern Mediterranean through the lens of social connections.
Compares the archives of European states after 1500 to reveal changes in how records supported memory, authority and power.
This book is the culmination of a research project funded by the University of Pisa's internationalisation support programme of 2008-10. The project's underlying idea is that the Mediterranean is of decisive importance for any investigation into the political and commercial relations between states of different size and constitutional structure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It thus scrutinises the practices, institutions and cultural tendencies of the region's ruling classes, from those of the Italian small states to those of the great powers. Salerno, Edigati, Angiolini, Addobbati and Zamora examine the theme of the small state by focusing on the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and it...