History

This examination of the everyday lives of ordinary Jews in Germany focuses on emotions, perceptions, and mentalities. How did they construe changes brought about by industrialization? How did they decide to enter new professions? How did they fit into newly flourishing organizational life? Could one both be a German and a Jew? How did Jews re-evaluate their multiple identities before and after emancipation, during the Weimar era, under Nazi persecution? Jews' attitudes toward and observances of their religion shifted not only over time, but also within a lifetime. Within frequently hostile political, social, and, cultural structures, Jews were not just victims, but also agents: they deciphered and re-framed events, and even when they adapted to German culture, often did so through a process of negotiation, retaining elements of Jewish culture. Nonetheless, a pervasive antisemitism affected self-reliance, self-respect and self-determination. Still, from the mid-19th century through the Weimar Republic, Jews achieved success amidst and despite antisemitism. In Imperial Germany, Protestants and Catholics, Prussians and Bavarians, and workers and employers were more hostile to each other than to the tiny Jewish minority — hovering at around 1 per cent of the population. A variety of German behaviors emerge in the everyday history of Jewish life that would rarely be apparent from other perspectives. This approach forces us to acknowledge diversity among Germans and inhibits the tendency to read the history of Jews and Germans backwards from the Holocaust.

Johann Heinrich Alsted, professor of philosophy and theology at the Calvinist academy of Herborn, was a man of many parts. A deputy to the famous Synod of Dort and greatest encyclopaedist of his age, he was also a pioneer of Calvinist millenarianism and a devoted student of astrology, alchemy, Lullism, and the works of Giordano Bruno. From the mainstream Reformed tradition, Alsted and his circle inherited the zeal for further reformation of church, state, and society; but with this they blended hermetic dreams of a general reformation and the restoration of primordial perfection to the fallen human nature through Lullist and alchemical panaceas. However paradoxical from a strictly Calvinist standpoint, this loose synthesis helped prepare the programme of Alsted's greatest student, Johann Amos Comenius, and the following generation of central European universal reformers. Alsted's intellectual biography opens up unexpected perspectives on the reforming movements of the 17th century, and provides an invaluable introduction to many of the central ideas, individuals and institutions of this neglected era of central European intellectual history.

Although the history of the book is a booming area of research, the journeymen who printed 16th-century books have remained shadowy figures because they were not thought to have left any significant traces in the archives. However, Griffin’s research on unpublished trial-records and a mass of associated inquisitional correspondence reveals a clandestine network of Protestant-minded immigrant journeymen — printers who were arrested by the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal in the 1560s and 1570s at a time of international crisis. A startlingly clear portrait of these humble men (and occasionally women) emerges allowing the reconstruction of what Namier deemed one of history’s greatest challenges: ‘the biographies of ordinary men’. We learn of their geographical and social origins, educational and professional training, travels, careers, standard of living, violent behaviour, and even their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions. In the course of this study, other subjects are addressed: popular culture and religion; heresy; the history of skilled labour; the history of the book and of reading; the Inquisition; foreign and itinerant workers and the xenophobia they encountered; popular patterns of sociability; and the ‘double lives’ of lower-class Protestants living within a uniquely vigilant Catholic society. This study is relevant not only to the Iberian Peninsula or to the printing industry. It fills a gap in our knowledge of artisan history in the 16th-century throughout Europe. This study of the lives of immigrant workers in a society intolerant of foreigners and of religious diversity has much to say to readers in the early 21st century.

This is a double biography of Jean-Marie Roland (1734–1793) and Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, later Madame Roland (1754–1793), leading figures in the French Revolution. J.‐M. Roland was minister of the Interior for a total of eight months during 1792. The couple were close to Brissot and the Girondins, and both died during the Terror. Mme Roland became famous for her posthumous prison memoirs, and is the subject of many biographies, but her husband, despite being a key figure in administration of France, seldom out of the limelight during his time in office, is often marginalized in histories of the Revolution, This book examines the Roland marriage from its beginnings in an ancien regime mésalliance, opposed by both families, through its close cooperation in the 1780s, to its final phase as a political partnership during the Revolution. Both Roland’s actions as minister and Mme Roland’s role as a woman close to power were praised and blamed at the time, and the controversies have persisted. Based on manuscript sources including unpublished letters, this study sets out to examine an unusual companionate marriage over the long term: its intimacy, parenthood, everyday life in the provinces, friendships, academic cooperation, political enthusiasms and quarrels, and finally its dramatic ending during the Revolution.

This work sets out to show how the popes of the mid-sixteenth century sought to reassert and project their authority over the Catholic Church during the first phase of the Counter-Reformation. Its narrative focus is the trial of Cardinals Carlo and Alfonso Carafa, nephews of Paul IV (1555–9), who, together with Carlo’s brother Giovanni, were arrested and indicted by their uncle’s successor Pius IV (1559–65) on charges of murder, theft, and corruption. Taking place from June 1560 to April 1561 as preparations were under way for a resumption of the Council of Trent, this was the only occasion in the early modern period in which a papal family was impeached for actions in government and it provided a well-publicized forum in which questions about the nature and extent of the pope’s authority were raised, contested, and answered by different groups within the Roman political and ecclesiastical elite. While the trial has previously been understood to have been primarily of importance to the development of papal nepotism, the work demonstrates how Pius used it as a vehicle by which to intimidate the College of Cardinals and to reimpose stricter hierarchical control over the institutions of the Catholic Church.

For too long the history of seventeenth-century Spain has been dismissed as a story of imperial decline after the achievement of the sixteenth century. Resilience of the Spanish monarchy presents a fresh appraisal of the survival of Spain and its European and overseas empire under the last Spanish Habsburg, Carlos II (1665–1700). Hitherto it has largely been assumed that in the ‘Age of Louis XIV’ Spain collapsed as a military and naval power, and only retained its empire because states which had hitherto opposed Spanish hegemony came to its aid. Spain's allies did play a role, but this view seriously underestimates the efforts of Carlos II and his ministers to find men for Spain's various armies – in Flanders, Lombardy and Catalonia – and to ensure a continued naval presence in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. These commitments were costly, adding to the fiscal pressure upon Carlos's subjects, and to political tensions within the monarchy, but Spain managed the burden of imperial defence more successfully than has been acknowledged. This was due to various factors, including the continued contribution of Castile and American silver, some administrative development, and the contribution of both the non-Castilian territories within Spain and the non-Spanish territories within Europe, such as Naples. This book revises our understanding of the last decades of Habsburg Spain, which is shown to have been a state and society more committed to the retention of empire and more successful in doing so than a preoccupation with the ‘decline of Spain’ has recognised.

From the early Middle Ages to the 20th century, capital punishment in France, as in many other countries, was staged before large crowds of spectators. This book traces the theory and practice of public executions over time from the perspective of the executioners and government officials who staged them, as well as from the vantage point of the many thousands who came to “see justice done.” While penal theorists often stressed that the fundamental purpose of public punishment was to strike fear in the hearts of spectators, the eagerness with which crowds flocked to executions and the extent to which spectators actually enjoyed the spectacle of suffering suggests that there was a wide gulf between theoretical intentions and actual experiences. Moreover, animal executions and the execution of effigies and corpses point to an enduring ritual function that had little to do with exemplary deterrence. In the eighteenth century, when a revolution in sensibilities made it unseemly for individuals to take pleasure in or even witness the suffering of others, capital punishment became the target of penal reform. From the invention of the guillotine, which reduced the moment of death to the blink of an eye, to the 1939 decree which moved executions behind prison walls, the death penalty in France was systematically stripped of its spectacular elements.

This book examines the paradoxical emergence of political antislavery and institutional racism in the century prior to the French Revolution. The author shows how the political culture of late Bourbon France created ample opportunities for contestation over the meaning of freedom. Based on various archival sources, this work will be of interest not only to historians of slavery and France, but to scholars interested in the emergence of modern culture in the Atlantic world.