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Singing the News of Death
Author Una McIlvenna brings the execution ballad to life in Singing the News of Death, uncovering the relationship between punishment and music throughout Europe from 1500-1900 with an unprecedented breadth of study and ambition.
A Lutheran Plague
To kill someone purely in order to be sentenced to death and then to die at the hands of the executioner! Such murders were alarmingly frequent in eighteenth-century Lutheran Europe. The book traces the complex motives behind these crimes – an investigation that leads not only to the Pietist interest in saving the souls of those sentenced to death but also into some of the central elements of Lutheran soteriology and the idea of capital punishment as being divinely ordained. The murders prompted special legislation and challenged the religious basis of the death penalty, and the killings and the logic behind them played an important role in debates about capital punishment, following Becca...
Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts
This book presents a social and cultural history of 'dishonourable people' (unehrliche Leute), an outcast group in early modern Germany. Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the 'dishonourable' by virtue of their trades. This dishonour was either hereditary, often through several generations, or it arose from ritual pollution whereby honourable citizens could become dishonourable by coming into casual contact with members of the outcast group. The dishonourable milieu of the city of Augsburg from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is reconstructed to show the extent to which dishonour determined the life-chances and self-identity of dishonourable people. The book then investigates how honourable estates interacted with dishonourable people, and how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honourable society.
Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments
This 2001 book charts the history of the States General - the parliament - of the Netherlands and its relations with two phases of monarchical rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unlike the English parliament, the States General was a composite body, representing the local estates of the separate provinces which were anxious to keep their autonomy. The history of the States General was determined by this structure, and by its relations with the monarchy: dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, and Spanish Habsburgs in the sixteenth. Ideally, everyone was meant to cooperate. In practice, there was already a major crisis by the 1480s, and divisions from the 1560s led to decades of civil war. By 1600 the Netherlands had split between the United Provinces - a parliamentary regime, governed as a republic by the States General - and the Spanish Netherlands.
The Witch in the Western Imagination
In an exciting new approach to witchcraft studies, The Witch in the Western Imagination examines the visual representation of witches in early modern Europe. With vibrant and lucid prose, Lyndal Roper moves away from the typical witchcraft studies on trials, beliefs, and communal dynamics and instead considers the witch as a symbolic and malleable figure through a broad sweep of topics and time periods. Employing a wide selection of archival, literary, and visual materials, Roper presents a series of thematic studies that range from the role of emotions in Renaissance culture to demonology as entertainment, and from witchcraft as female embodiment to the clash of cultures on the brink of the...
Bacchus and Civic Order
German taverns where there was lots of beer-drinking and brawling have a long history, we learn, in Tlusty's account of the social and cultural functions of tavern life in Augsburg in the 16th-18th centuries. Though the language of a social theorist occasionally intrudes'a deadly duel is emasculated by its definition in terms of "conformance to social norms" and "ritualized forms of violence"?Tlusty's depth of knowledge about the Augsburg taverns makes this a fascinating read on early modern life. The author teaches history at Bucknell U. in Maine. c. Book News Inc.
The Other Prussia
This book considers the phenomenon of nation-building before the age of modern nationalism. It focuses on royal (Polish) Prussia - the 'other' Prussia - a province of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1466 to 1772/3, and its major cities Danzig, Thorn and Elbing. As an integral part of the Polish state the Prussian estates took pride in their separate institutions and privileges. Although its urban elites became predominantly Protestant and German-speaking, they formulated a republican identity deliberately hostile to the competing monarchical-dynastic myth in neighbouring ducal Prussia, ruled by the Brandenburg-Hohenzollerns from 1618. After 1700, the Polish crown increasingly antagonized the Prussian burghers by its centralizing policies and its failure to protect the integrity of the Commonwealth's borders. The decline of Poland and the partitions of 1772-93 guaranteed that it was not the tradition of liberty but the Hohenzollern version of Prussian identity that survived into the modern era. Joint winner of the Orbis book prize, The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach
Analysing novels and autobiographies from Bach's Germany, this book presents new insights into the lives, mindset and status of musicians.
Executing Magic in the Modern Era
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This book explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodies of Roman gladiators were used as a source of curative blood, for instance. In early modern Europe, a great trade opened up in ancient Egyptian mummies and the fat of executed criminals, plundered as medicinal cure-alls. However, this is the first book to consider the demand for the blood of the executed, the desire for human fat, the resort to the hanged man’s hand, and the trade in hanging rope in the modern era. It ends by look at the spiritual afterlife of dead criminals.
Trade and Taboo
Applies new methodological approaches to the study of ancient history
