Enduring Loss In Early Modern Germany

Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.

The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of "conversion." One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change- conversion-had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies. David M. Luebke is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His publications include His Majesty's Rebels: Factions, Communities, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest (Cornell University Press 1997) and many articles, most recently "Confessions of the Dead: Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late Reformation" (Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101: 2010). Jared Poley is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. He is the author of Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Peter Lang 2005). Daniel C. Ryan is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston. He was awarded his PhD in 2008 from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a study on conversion and peasant protest in Imperial Russia. David Warren Sabean is the Henry J. Bruman Endowed Professor of German History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge University Press 1990) and Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge University Press 1998). He recently edited, with Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu, Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development, 1300-1900 (Berghahn Books 2007).

Both in our time and in the past, death was one of the most important aspects of anyone’s life. The early modern period saw drastic changes in rites of death, burials and commemoration. One particularly fruitful avenue of research is not to focus on death in general, but the moment of death specifically. This volume investigates this transitionary moment between life and death. In many cases, this was a death on a deathbed, but it also included the scaffold, battlefield, or death in the streets. Contributors: Friedrich J. Becher, Benedikt Brunner, Isabel Casteels, Martin Christ, Louise Deschryver, Irene Dingel, Michaël Green, Vanessa Harding, Sigrun Haude, Vera Henkelmann, Imke Lichterfeld, Erik Seeman, Elizabeth Tingle, and Hillard von Thiessen.

How did German composers brand their music as Venetian? How did the Other fare in other languages, when Cabeza’s Relación of colonial Americas appeared in translations? How did Altdorf emblems travel to colonial America and Sweden? What does Virtue look like in a library collection? And what was Boccaccio’s Decameron doing in the Ethica section? From representations of Sophie Charlotte, the first queen in Prussia, to the Ottoman Turks, from German wedding music to Till Eulenspiegel, from the translation of Horatian Odes and encyclopedias of heraldry, these essays by leading scholars explore the transmission, translation, and organization of knowledge in early modern Germany, contributing sophisticated insights to the history of the early modern book and its contents.

This companion volume seeks to trace the development of ideas relating to death, burial, and the remembrance of the dead in Europe from ca.1300-1700.

Early Modern Emotions is a student-friendly introduction to the concepts, approaches and sources used to study emotions in early modern Europe, and to the perspectives that analysis of the history of emotions can offer early modern studies more broadly. The volume is divided into four sections that guide students through the key processes and practices employed in current research on the history of emotions. The first explains how key terms and concepts in the study of emotions relate to early modern Europe, while the second focuses on the unique ways in which emotions were conceptualized at the time. The third section introduces a range of sources and methodologies that are used to analyse early modern emotions. The final section includes a wide-ranging selection of thematic topics covering war, religion, family, politics, art, music, literature and the non-human world to show how analysis of emotions may offer new perspectives on the early modern period more broadly. Each section offers bite-sized, accessible commentaries providing students new to the history of emotions with the tools to begin their own investigations. Each entry is supported by annotated further reading recommendations pointing students to the latest research in that area and at the end of the book is a general bibliography, which provides a comprehensive list of current scholarship. This book is the perfect starting point for any student wishing to study emotions in early modern Europe.

Reading the Early Modern Diary traces the historical genealogy, formal characteristics, and shifting cultural uses of the early modern English diary. It explores the possibilities and limitations the genre held for the self-expression of a writer at a time which considerably pre-dated the Romantic cult of the individual self. The book analyzes the connections between genre and self-articulation: How could the diary come to be associated with emotional self-expression given the tedium and repetitiveness of its early seventeenth-century ancestors? How did what were once mere lists of daily events evolve into narrative representations of inner emotions? What did it mean to write on a daily basis, when the proper use of time was a heavily contested issue? Reading the Early Modern Diary addresses these questions and develops new theoretical frameworks for discussing interiority and affect in early modern autobiographical texts.

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women’s lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.