Energy In The Early Modern Home

Uncovering, for the first time, the role played by home users in fostering energy changes, this book explores the effects of energy transitions between the medieval and industrial era on the everyday life of Europeans and considers how cultural, social and material changes in the home facilitated the transition towards a more energy-demanding world. This book delves deeper into the interactions between early modern consumers and the ecological constraints of the world surrounding them. Experts on specific aspects of domestic energy use departing from different case studies in early modern Europe confront these central issues. This book therefore offers a wide range of approaches within a long-term and comparative perspective. Different ‘material cultures of energy’ across time and space and across different climates in Europe are explored. Ultimately, this book aims to consider how the early modern home not just adapted to energy changes, but perhaps even prepared the way for our modern addiction to fossil energy. Energy in the Early Modern Home is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern Europe, premodern environmental history, the history of consumption and material culture, and the history of science and technology.

Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective The Matter of Song in Early Modern England considers the implications of reading song not simply as lyric text but as an embodied and gendered musical practice. Animating the traces of song preserved in physiological and philosophical commentaries, singing handbooks, poetic treatises, and literary texts ranging from Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalmes to John Milton's Comus, the book confronts song's ephemerality, its lexical and sonic capriciousness, and its airy substance. These features can resist critical analysis but were vital to song's affective workings in the early modern period. The volume foregrounds the need to attend much more closely to the embodied and musical dimensions of literary production and circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It also makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of women's engagement with song as writers and as performers. A companion recording of fourteen songs featuring Larson (soprano) and Lucas Harris (lute) brings the project's innovative methodology and central case studies to life.

Prague in the seventeenth century is known as home to a scintillating imperial court crammed with exotic goods, scientists, and artisans, receiving ambassadors from Persia, and also as a city suffering plagues, riots, and devastating military attacks. But Prague was also the setting for a complex and shifting spiritual world. At the beginning of the century it was a multiconfessional city, but by 1700 it represented one of the most archetypical Catholic cities in Europe. Through a material approach, Cosmos and Materiality pieces together how early modern men and women experienced this transformation on a daily basis. Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague presents a bold alternative understanding of the history of early modern religion in Central Europe. The history of religion in the early modern period has overwhelmingly been analysed through a confessional lens, but this book shows how Prague's spiritual worlds were embedded in their natural environment and social relations as much if not more than in confessional identity in the seventeenth century. While texts in this period trace emerging discourses around notions of religion, superstition, magic, and what it was to be Catholic or Protestant, a material approach avoids these category mistakes being applied to everyday practice. It is through a rich seam of material evidence in Prague - spoons, glass beakers, and amulets as much as traditional devotional objects like rosaries and garnet encrusted crucifixes - that everyday beliefs, practices, and identities can be recovered.

Emphasizing the voices of activists, this book’s diverse contributors examine communities’ common experiences with environmental injustice, how they organize to address it, and the ways in which their campaigns intersect with related movements such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous sovereignty. The global COVID-19 pandemic exposed the ways in which BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities and white working-class communities have suffered disproportionately from the crisis due to sustained exposure to toxic land, air, and water, creating a new urgency for addressing underlying conditions of systemic racism and poverty in North America. In addition to exploring the historical roots of the Environmental Justice movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the volume offers coverage of recent events such as the DAPL pipeline controversy, the Flint water crisis, and the rise of climate justice. The collection incorporates the experiences of rural and urban communities, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Indigenous peoples in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The chapters offer instructors, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers a range of accessible case studies that create opportunities for comparative and intersectional analysis across geographical and ethnic boundaries.

Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song’s capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences.

Until the widespread harnessing of machine energy, food was the energy which fuelled the economy. In this groundbreaking 2011 study of agricultural labourers' diet and material standard of living, Craig Muldrew uses empirical research to present a much fuller account of the interrelationship between consumption, living standards and work in the early modern English economy than has previously existed. The book integrates labourers into a study of the wider economy and engages with the history of food as an energy source and its importance to working life, the social complexity of family earnings, and the concept of the 'industrious revolution'. It argues that 'industriousness' was as much the result of ideology and labour markets as labourers' household consumption. Linking this with ideas about the social order of early modern England, the author demonstrates that bread, beer and meat were the petrol of this world, and a springboard for economic change.

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The European World 1500–1800 provides a concise and authoritative textbook for the centuries between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. It presents early modern Europe not as a mere transition phase, but a dynamic period worth studying in its own right. Written by an experienced team of specialists, and derived from a successful undergraduate course, it offers a student-friendly introduction to all major themes and processes of early modern history. This fully updated fourth edition is structured in six parts – Starting Points, Society and Economy, Religion, The Wider World, Culture, Politics – and includes two new chapters on the Environment and Food and Drink Cultures. Specially designed to assist learning, The European World 1500–1800 features: expert surveys of key topics written by an international group of historians suggestions for seminar discussion and further reading extracts from primary sources and generous illustrations, including maps a glossary of key terms and concepts a full index of persons, places and subjects and a companion website, offering colour images, direct access to primary materials, and interactive features which highlight key events and locations discussed in the volume. The European World 1500–1800 is essential reading for all students embarking on the discovery of the early modern period. For support with the early modern historiographical debates see the partnering volume Interpreting Early Modern Europe edited by C. Scott Dixon and Beat Kümin.- https://www.routledge.com/Interpreting-Early-Modern-Europe/Dixon-Kumin/p/book/9781138799011.