Suchergebnisse

Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Life and Works of Alexander Francis Cowan -- Bibliography of Alexander Cowan -- Introduction -- Witches' Words -- 1 Oral Transfer of Ideas about Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Norway -- 2 St Helena and Love Magic: From the Spanish Inquisition to the Internet -- Words on Trial -- 3 The Power of the Spoken Word: Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court: Power, Resistance, and 'Orality' -- 4 Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts -- Preaching the Word -- 5 Tears for Fears: Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France - a Double Performance -- 6 Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer's Preaching and the Jews in Medieval Castile -- 7 'A Most Notable Spectacle': Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons -- Word on the Street -- 8 Orality and Mutiny: Authority and Speech amongst the Seafarers of Early Modern London -- 9 'A Blabbermouth Can Barely Control His Tongue': Political Poems, Songs, and Prophecies in the Low Countries (Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries) -- 10 Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England -- Gossip and Gossipers -- 11 The Meanings of Gossip in Sixteenth-Century Venice -- 12 Gossip and Social Standing in Celestina: Verbal Venom as Art -- Prayer, Teaching, and Religious Talk -- 13 Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France -- 14 The Seducer's Tongue: Oral and Moral Issues in Medieval Erotodidactic Schooltexts -- 15 Preaching God's Word in a Late-medieval Valencian Convent: Isabel de Villena, Writer and Preacher -- 16 Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index

One morning in the middle of May 1558, the chief constable of the Governor of Rome led a detachment of his police to Monte Rotondo, a rural town some twenty miles north of the capital. There was nothing unusual in his mission, which was to capture two outlaws, who, though banished from the papal states for homicide, had returned to live under the shelter of the local lords. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the first response of the villagers, who, caught between their signori on the one hand and the state on the other, did their best to lend the police a very feeble hand. What was more unusual was what happened next, when, half by design and half by mischance, the village rose up in arms against the police and, for much of the day, held them hostage. In this essay, we will study the tangled events of that day, not so much as an example of a rural insurrection as, rather, a handsome illustration of a particular style of negotiation. Thus, settlement as much interests us here as does conflict, for it illustrates well the dense interplay of liberty and constraint. The burden of our exposition is that, to extricate themselves from a perilous impasse, the villagers, their magistrates, and the city's police could all bargain cannily with all sorts of risks, not only their adversaries', but also their own. Not only did they threaten one another, but, to their own profit, they pointed out external dangers and cited the perils they themselves faced.

A complex geography -- Roman tribunals in the early modern period -- The "new" inquisition and the pope's city -- The theater of justice -- Restless nobles -- Collaboration and conflicts : governors, bishops, inquisitors -- Sins and crimes -- Inside the family -- Disciplining the clergy -- Buon governo : between Utopia and reality -- Little fatherlands : local identity and central power -- Rivers of ink : petitions, memorials, letters -- Justice represented, justice recounted

Cultural history of early modern European streets : an introduction / Riitta Laitinen and Thomas V. Cohen -- Urban landscapes : houses, streets and squares of 18th century Lisbon / Maria Helena Barreiros -- Mechanisms of the hue and cry in Kolozsvár in the second half of the sixteenth century / Emese Bálint -- Urban order and street regulation in seventeenth-century Sweden / Riitta Laitinen and Dag Lindström -- To pray, to work, to hear, to speak : women in Roman streets, c. 1600 / Elizabeth S. Cohen -- Gossip and street culture in early modern Venice / Alexander Cowan -- To see and to be seen : beauty in the early modern London street / Anu Korhonen

The social historian, searching for the basis of a culture, often turns to a study of ordinary people. Perhaps one of the most revealing places to find them is in a court of law. In this presentatoin of nine criminal trials of sixteenth-century Rome (1540-75), where magistrates kept verbatim records, Thomas and Elizabeth Cohen paint a lively portrait of a society, one that is reminiscent of Boccaccio. These stories, however, are true. Each trial transcript is followed by an essay that interprets the beliefs, codes, everyday speech, and personal transactions of a world that is radically different from our own. The people on trial include assassins, a spell-caster, an exorcist, an adulterous wife, several courtesans, and the peasant cast of a bawdy, sacrilegious play. Out of their often pognant troubles, and their machinations, comes a vivid revelation of not only the tumultuous street life of Rome but also rituals of honour, the power and weakness of women, and the realities of social and economic hierarchies. Like cinema-verite, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome gives us an intimate glimpse of a people and their world.

In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt published his view, still influential today, of an artful, urban Italian Renaissance that launched Europe on its passage to modernity. A lively revisionary scholarship has challenged Burckhardt on many points, but his famous formulae still resonate: the state as work of art; the development of the individual; the discovery of the world and of man. Although we now know that Italy did not alone invent the new age, it was for many years a trendsetter, especially in the domains of cultural production at the centre of this collection of essays. Republican and princely polities alike framed these developments, but, whoever ruled, Italy's unusually intense urbanization (paired with that in another well-spring of culture in the Low Countries) fostered innovation. In Renaissance cities, people and groups invested heavily in special actions, objects and places – charismatic cultural products empowered by holiness, beauty, fame and ingenuity – that fortified solidarity and resilience in uncertain times. This essay collection addresses a conjunction of urban culture and society distinctive to Renaissance Italy: an array of encounters of artifacts with ways of living in community.

A partir des témoignages devant un magistrat de la cour papale, instruisant un cas de proxénétisme, nous pouvons dénouer les fils d'une intrigue amoureuse et domestique. Cette affaire oppose un mari brutal et jaloux à la frêle coalition d'une épouse adultère et de sa servante qui connive avec elle. Une lecture serreé des textes – les évènements domestiques et les termes employés pour les décrire – permet de reconstituer les stratégies des trois antagonistes. De l'interaction des intérêts personnels et des responsabilités de chacun d'eux, de l'éthique sociale et des structures légates naît une tactique de ce ménage, qui, à une moindre échelle, copie les moeurs politiques de la société en général.