Late Medieval And Early Modern Fight Books

Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books offers insights into the cultural and historical transmission and practices of martial arts, based on interdisciplinary research on the corpus of the Fight Books (Fechtbücher) in 14th- to 17th-century Europe.

In The Fight for Status and Privilege in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile, 1465–1598, Michael Crawford investigates conflicts about and resistance to the status of hidalgo, conventionally understood as the lowest, most heavily populated rank in the Castilian nobility. It is generally accepted that legal privileges were based on status and class in this premodern society. Crawford presents and explains the contentious realities and limitations of such legal privileges, particularly the conventional claim of hidalgo exemption from taxation. He focuses on efforts to claim these privileges as well as opposing efforts to limit and manage them. Although historians of Spain acknowledge such conflicts, especially lawsuits associated with this status, none have focused a study on this extraordinarily widespread phenomenon. This book analyzes the inevitable contradictions inherent in negotiation for and the implementation of privilege, scrutinizing the many jurisdictions that intervened in these struggles and debates, including the crown, judiciary, city council, and financial authorities. Ultimately, this analysis imparts important insights about the nature of sixteenth-century Castilian society with wide-ranging implications about the relationship between social status and legal privileges in the early modern period as a whole.

A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Augsburg distills the extraordinary range and creativity of recent scholarship on one of the most significant cities of the Holy Roman Empire into a handbook format.

This collection of fifteen studies brings together scholars of late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Italy to reflect on the multifaceted world of ritual. The scope is expansive, covering four centuries, and the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula. Because of older presumptions about the modernity of the Renaissance and hence its supposed aversion to the irrational, scholarship on ritual life in Italian city-states of the Renaissance has lagged behind the historiography on symbols and rituals in monarchies north of the Alps. Only by the 1990s had a wide range of scholars across disciplines become interested in these subjects and approaches for the late medieval and early modern Italian city-state; yet no synthesis or comparative work on rituals and symbols has peered across the regional enclaves of Italy. Through original research in libraries and archives across the Italian peninsula, these essays analyze the richness and importance of ritual at the heart of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation states, the importance of oaths, ritual space, the power of images, processions, curses, guild ceremonies, saints, and more. The wide geographic and disciplinary range of these essays provides a new platform for viewing the significance of ritual and symbolic power in Renaissance and early modern Italy.

This book presents a uniquely broad and pioneering history of premodern toxicology by exploring how late medieval and early modern (c. 1200–1600) physicians discussed the relationship between poison, medicine, and disease. Drawing from a wide range of medical and natural philosophical texts—with an emphasis on treatises that focused on poison, pharmacotherapeutics, plague, and the nature of disease—this study brings to light premodern physicians' debates about the potential existence, nature, and properties of a category of substance theoretically harmful to the human body in even the smallest amount. Focusing on the category of poison (venenum) rather than on specific drugs reframes and remixes the standard histories of toxicology, pharmacology, and etiology, as well as shows how these aspects of medicine (although not yet formalized as independent disciplines) interacted with and shaped one another. Physicians argued, for instance, about what properties might distinguish poison from other substances, how poison injured the human body, the nature of poisonous bodies, and the role of poison in spreading, and to some extent defining, disease. The way physicians debated these questions shows that poison was far from an obvious and uncontested category of substance, and their effort to understand it sheds new light on the relationship between natural philosophy and medicine in the late medieval and early modern periods.

This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.

This book attempts to challenge the canonical gender concept while trying to specify what gender was in the medieval and early modern world. It tests, verifies, and challenges the methodology and use the concept(s) of gender specifically applicable to the period of great change and transition. The volume contains theoretical discussion supplemented by case studies of specific practices such as mysticism, witchcraft, crime, and sexual behavior.

A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Siena introduces the once-powerful commune to a wider audience. Edited by Santa Casciani and Heather Richardson Hayton, this collection explores how Siena built a distinctive civic identity and institutions that endured for centuries.