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In Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France, Jonathan Dewald explores European aristocratic society by looking closely at one of its most prominent families. The Rohan were rich, powerful, and respected, but Dewald shows that there were also weaknesses in their apparently secure position near the top of French society. Family finances were unstable, and competing interests among family members generated conflicts and scandals; political ambitions led to other troubles, partly because aristocrats like the Rohan intensely valued individual achievement, even if it came at the expense of the family’s needs. Dewald argues that aristocratic power in the Old Regime reflected ongoing processes of negotiation and refashioning, in which both men and women played important roles. So did figures from outside the family—government officials, middle-class intellectuals and businesspeople, and many others. Dewald describes how the Old Regime’s ruling class maintained its power and the obstacles it encountered in doing so.
These essays, three of them previously unpublished, explore the competing claims of innovation and tradition among the lower orders in sixteenth-century France. The result is a wide-ranging view of the lives and values of men and women (artisans, tradesmen, the poor) who, because they left little or nothing in writing, have hitherto had little attention from scholars. The first three essays consider the social, vocational, and sexual context of the Protestant Reformation, its consequences for urban women, and the new attitudes toward poverty shared by Catholic humanists and Protestants alike in sixteenth-century Lyon. The next three essays describe the links between festive play and youth groups, domestic dissent, and political criticism in town and country, the festive reversal of sex roles and political order, and the ritualistic and dramatic structure of religious riots. The final two essays discuss the impact of printing on the quasi-literate, and the collecting of common proverbs and medical folklore by learned students of the "people" during the Ancien Régime. The book includes eight pages of illustrations.
How do gender and power relationships affect the expression of family, House and dynastic identities? The present study explores this question using a case study of the House of Orange-Nassau, whose extensive visual, material and archival sources from both male and female members enable the authors to trace their complex attempts to express, gain and maintain power: in texts, material culture, and spaces, as well as rituals, acts and practices. The book adopts several innovative approaches to the history of the Orange-Nassau family, and to familial and dynastic studies generally. Firstly, the authors analyse in detail a vast body of previously unexplored sources, including correspondence, artwork, architectural, horticultural and textual commissions, ceremonies, practices and individual actions that have, surprisingly, received little attention to date individually, and consider these as the collective practices of a key early modern dynastic family. They investigate new avenues about the meanings and practices of family and dynasty in the early modern period, extending current research that focuses on dominant men to ask how women and subordinate men understood 'family' and 'dynasty', in what respects such notions were shared among members, and how it might have been fractured and fashioned by individual experiences. Adopting a transnational approach to the Nassau family, the authors explore the family's self-presentation across a range of languages, cultures and historiographical traditions, situating their representation of themselves as an influential House within an international context and offering a new vision of power as a gendered concept.
The first major scholarly investigation into the rich history of the marked body in the early modern period, this interdisciplinary study examines multiple forms, uses, and meanings of corporeal inscription and impression in France and the French Atlantic from the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries. Placing into dialogue a broad range of textual and visual sources drawn from areas as diverse as demonology, jurisprudence, mysticism, medicine, pilgrimage, commerce, travel, and colonial conquest that have formerly been examined largely in isolation, Katherine Dauge-Roth demonstrates that emerging theories and practices of signing the body must be understood in relationship to each other and to the development of other material marking practices that rose to prominence in the early modern period. While each chapter brings to light the particular histories and meanings of a distinct set of cutaneous marks—devil’s marks on witches, demon’s marks upon the possessed, devotional wounds, Amerindian and Holy Land pilgrim tattoos, and criminal brands—each also reveals connections between these various types of stigmata, links that were obvious to the early modern thinkers who theorized and deployed them. Moreover, the five chapters bring to the fore ways in which corporeal marking of all kinds interacted dynamically with practices of writing on, imprinting, and engraving paper, parchment, fabric, and metal that flourished in the period, together signaling important changes taking place in early modern society. Examining the marked body as a material object replete with varied meanings and uses, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France shows how the skin itself became the register of the profound cultural and social transformations that characterized this era.
In Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France, Jonathan Dewald explores European aristocratic society by looking closely at one of its most prominent families. The Rohan were rich, powerful, and respected, but Dewald shows that there were also weaknesses in their apparently secure position near the top of French society. Family finances were unstable, and competing interests among family members generated conflicts and scandals; political ambitions led to other troubles, partly because aristocrats like the Rohan intensely valued individual achievement, even if it came at the expense of the family’s needs. Dewald argues that aristocratic power in the Old Regime reflected ongoing processes of negotiation and refashioning, in which both men and women played important roles. So did figures from outside the family—government officials, middle-class intellectuals and businesspeople, and many others. Dewald describes how the Old Regime’s ruling class maintained its power and the obstacles it encountered in doing so.
The Power of Religious Societies in Shaping Early Modern Society and Identities studies the value system of the French Catholic community the Filles de la Charité, or the Daughters of Charity, in the first half of the seventeenth century. An analysis of the activities aimed at edifying morality in the different strata of society revealed a Christian anthropology with strong links to medieval traditions. The book argues that this was an important survival strategy for the Company with a disconcerting religious identity: the non-cloistered lifestyle of its members engaged in charity work had been made unlawful in the Council of Trent. Moreover, the directors Louise de Marillac and Vincent de Paul also had to find ways to curtail internal resistance as the sisters rebelled in quest of a more contemplative and enclosed vocation.
The lives of William Cavendish, first duke of Newcastle, and his family including, centrally, his second wife, Margaret Cavendish, are intimately bound up with the overarching story of seventeenth-century England: the violently negotiated changes in structures of power that constituted the Civil Wars, and the ensuing Commonwealth and Restoration of the monarchy. William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, and his Political, Social and Cultural Connections: Authority, Authorship and Aristocratic Identity in Seventeenth Century England brings together a series of interrelated essays that present William Cavendish, his family, household and connections as an aristocratic, royalist case study, relating the intellectual and political underpinnings and implications of their beliefs, actions and writings to wider cultural currents in England and mainland Europe.
Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony. Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.
Introduction -- Part I. Holy Roman Empire -- Political language in the Holy Roman Empire 1500-1700 -- Jülich: pamphlets and Cologne get-togethers (1640s-1650s) -- Hesse-Cassel: alleged sedition and law-suits (1640s-1650s) -- Part II. Kingdom of France -- Patriots' in France, political talks between 1500-1700 -- Brittany: pay d'états and don gratuit (1648-1652) -- Part III. Conclusion -- Comparison of the cases.