Apprenticeship In Early Modern Europe

This comparative study of the European history of apprenticeship offers a comprehensive picture of occupational training before the Industrial Revolution.

Apprenticeship in early modern Europe has been the subject of important research in the last decades, mostly by economic historians; but the majority of the research has dealt with cities or countries in Northern Europe. The organization, evolution and purpose of apprenticeship in Southern Europe are much less studied, especially for the early modern period. The research in this volume is based on a unique documentary source: more than 54,000 apprenticeship contracts registered from 1575 to 1772 by the "Old Justice", a civil court of the Republic of Venice in charge of guilds and labour disputes. An archival source of such scale provides a unique opportunity to historians, and this is the first time that primary research on apprenticeship is leveraging such a large amount of data in one of the main economic centres of early modern Europe. This book brings together multiple perspectives, including social history, economic history and art history, and is the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and computer scientists. Apprenticeship, Work, Society in Early Modern Venice will appeal to students and researchers alike interested in the nature of work and employment in Venice and Italy, as well as society in early modern Europe more generally.

Apprenticeship or vocational training is a subject of lively debate. Economic historians tend to see apprenticeship as a purely economic phenomenon, as an 'incomplete contract' in need of legal and institutional enforcement mechanisms. The contributors to this volume have adopted a broader perspective. They regard learning on the shop floor as a complex social and cultural process, to be situated in an ever-changing historical context. The results are surprising. The authors convincingly show that research on apprenticeship and learning on the shop floor is intimately associated with migration patterns, family economy and household strategies, gender perspectives, urban identities and general educational and pedagogical contexts. Bert De Munck is Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he teaches social and economic history of the early modern period, history and social theory, and European ethnology and heritage. His research focuses on the history of craft guilds, 'social capital' and vocational education. Steven L. Kaplan is Professor of European History at Cornell University. He published Les ventres de Paris. Pouvoir etapprovisionnement dans la France d'Ancien Régime (Fayard, 1988), Le meilleur pain du monde. Les boulangers de Paris au XVIIIesiècle (Fayard, 1996), La fin des corporations (Fayard, 2001) and (as editor, with Philippe Minard) La France, malade ducorporatisme(2004). Hugo Soly is Professor of Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Historical Research into Urban Transformations at theVrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His writings focus on five major areas - urban development, poverty and poor relief, 'deviant'behaviour, industrialization, and craft guilds. Currently he is working on perceptions of work in pre-industrial Europe.

Curated by acclaimed scholar Nicholas Terpstra, Lives Uncovered is a captivating collection of early modern primary sources organized around the human life cycle. The collection begins with a short essay titled "How to Read a Primary Source," which helps readers recognize different kinds of primary sources and introduces the idea of critical reading. A second brief essay, "Life Cycles in the Early Modern Period," details the organization of the volume and explains each stage in the life cycle within its historical context. Over 150 readings examine men and women from different social classes and different religious and racial groups, addressing topics that include sex and sexuality, food and drink, poverty, crime and punishment, religious tension and coexistence, and migration and emigration. Using a creative range of sources such as letters, wills, laws, diaries, fiction, and poems, Terpstra gives readers a comprehensive picture of everyday life in early modern Europe and in other parts of the globe that Europeans were beginning to settle and colonize. Each of the life-cycle chapters includes a combination of longer readings, shorter readings, and images. Every reading begins with a short introduction that sets the context of the primary source, while review questions complement the main themes of the readings. Over 30 illustrations serve as non-textual primary sources. An index is also provided.

Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They set out to examine the relationship between institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.

"Guilds ruled many crafts and trades from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, and have always attracted debate and controversy. They were sometimes viewed as efficient institutions that guaranteed quality and skills. But they also excluded competitors, manipulated markets, and blocked innovations. Did the benefits of guilds outweigh their costs? Analyzing thousands of guilds that dominated European economies from 1000 to 1880, The European Guilds uses vivid examples and clear economic reasoning to answer that question. Sheilagh Ogilvie's book features the voices of honorable guild masters, underpaid journeymen, exploited apprentices, shady officials, and outraged customers, and follows the stories of the "vile encroachers"--Women, migrants, Jews, gypsies, bastards, and many others--desperate to work but hunted down by the guilds as illicit competitors. She investigates the benefits of guilds but also shines a light on their dark side. Guilds sometimes provided important services, but they also manipulated markets to profit their members. They regulated quality but prevented poor consumers from buying goods cheaply. They fostered work skills but denied apprenticeships to outsiders. They transmitted useful techniques but blocked innovations that posed a threat. Guilds existed widely not because they corrected market failures or served the common good but because they benefited two powerful groups--guild members and political elites."--Rabat de la jaquette.

Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, in the highly successful series of New Approaches, offers undergraduate students a concise introduction to a subject rich in historical excitement and interest. Bringing together the best and most innovative recent research, Mary Lindemann examines medicine from a social and cultural perspective, rather than a narrowly scientific one. Drawing on medical anthropology, sociology and ethics as well as cultural and social history, she focuses on the experience of illness and on patients and folk healers as much as on the rise of medical science, doctors and hospitals. Mary Lindemann is a distinguished scholar in the history of medicine and writes with exceptional clarity on this fascinating subject; her book will be essential reading for all students of the history of medicine, and provide invaluable context for historians of early modern Europe in general.

This Encyclopedia offers a fresh, integrated and creative perspective on the formation and foundations of philosophy and science in European modernity. Combining careful contextual reconstruction with arguments from traditional philosophy, the book examines methodological dimensions, breaks down traditional oppositions such as rationalism vs. empiricism, calls attention to gender issues, to ‘insiders and outsiders’, minor figures in philosophy, and underground movements, among many other topics. In addition, and in line with important recent transformations in the fields of history of science and early modern philosophy, the volume recognizes the specificity and significance of early modern science and discusses important developments including issues of historiography (such as historical epistemology), the interplay between the material culture and modes of knowledge, expert knowledge and craft knowledge. This book stands at the crossroads of different disciplines and combines their approaches – particularly the history of science, the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of science, and intellectual and cultural history. It brings together over 100 philosophers, historians of science, historians of mathematics, and medicine offering a comprehensive view of early modern philosophy and the sciences. It combines and discusses recent results from two very active fields: early modern philosophy and the history of (early modern) science. Editorial Board EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Dana Jalobeanu University of Bucharest, Romania Charles T. Wolfe Ghent University, Belgium ASSOCIATE EDITORS Delphine Bellis University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Zvi Biener University of Cincinnati, OH, USA Angus Gowland University College London, UK Ruth Hagengruber University of Paderborn, Germany Hiro Hirai Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Martin Lenz University of Groningen, The Netherlands Gideon Manning CalTech, Pasadena, CA, USA Silvia Manzo University of La Plata, Argentina Enrico Pasini University of Turin, Italy Cesare Pastorino TU Berlin, Germany Lucian Petrescu Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Justin E. H. Smith University de Paris Diderot, France Marius Stan Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Koen Vermeir CNRS-SPHERE + Université de Paris, France Kirsten Walsh University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada