Suchergebnisse

This essay attempts something a little peculiar: a study of the genesis of a concept within discourses which did not, in fact, use the word. This is at least true of "sustainability" in English. The emergence of the German equivalent,Nachhaltigkeit, which might also be expressed by the idea of "lasting-ness", is, however, usually dated to the use of the wordnachhalthendeby Hanns Carl von Carlowitz in hisSylvicultura oeconomicaof 1713, the first great forestry manual of the eighteenth century. In fact, the term can be found in the 1650s.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the development of formal poor-relief provision across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in rural Germany, through a case study of a district of the Duchy of Württemberg. It presents a detailed picture of practices to support the poor, whether through payments and alms from the poor chest, institutions providing credit, common rights or village and town granaries. In building up a picture of institutional practice, it also presents extensive information on the recipients of relief. It is argued that both the institutional framework and new trends in its development during the period ante-dated the Reformation, and that this society enjoyed a wide and varied capacity to support the poor that bears comparison with the English Old Poor Law. However, in a differing socio-economic context, demand for support remained more limited, and the demographic catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War arrested trends towards increasingly formalized collections, pensions and doles.

This article examines the engagement of peasant cultivators with the grain market in Germany in the seventeenth century. It demonstrates a differentiated propensity to sell in regard to different grains; a preference among cultivators for retaining subsistence foodstuffs; the importance of payment in kind in the labour market; and the lack of a clear‐cut social structural divide between grain sellers and buyers among those who cultivate arable land. It is thus argued that the analytical concept of 'the peasant' retains its use in understanding this society, but that attitudes displayed by the peasantry to 'the market' must be clearly set in the context of the specific product markets and practices to retain any analytical value.