Brepols

This interdisciplinary study takes as its subject the multi-faceted genre of didactic literature (the literature of instruction) which constituted the cornerstone of literary enterprise and social control in medieval and early-modern Europe. Following an introduction that raises questions of didactic meaning, intent, audience, and social effect, nineteen chapters deal with the construction of the individual didactic voice and persona in the premodern period, didactic literature for children, women as the creators, objects, and consumers of didactic literature, the influence of advice literature on adult literacy, piety, and heresy, and the revision of classical didactic forms and motifs in the early-modern period. Attention is paid throughout to the continuities of didactic literature across the medieval and early-modern periods — its intertextuality, reliance on tradition, and self-renewal — and to questions of gender, authority, control, and the socially constructed nature of advice. Contributors particularly explore the intersection of advice literature with real lives, considering the social impact of both individual texts and the didactic genre as a whole. The volume deals with a wide variety of texts from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, written in languages from Latin through the European vernaculars to Byzantine Greek and Russian, offering a comprehensive overview of this pervasive and influential genre.

The British Isles, Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and Eastern Canada, alongside many small islands, form a broken bridge across the northern extremities of the Atlantic Ocean. This ‘North Atlantic World’ is a heterogeneous but culturally intertwined area, ideally suited to the fostering of an interest in all things northern by its people. For the storytellers and writers of the past, each more northerly land was far enough away that it could seem fabulous and even otherworldly, while still being just close enough for myths and travellers’ tales to accrue. This book charts attitudes to the North in the North Atlantic World from the time of the earliest extant sources until the present day. The varied papers within consider a number of key questions which have arisen repeatedly over the centuries: ‘where is the North located?’, ‘what are its characteristics?’, and ‘who, or what lives there?’. They do so from many angles, considering numerous locations and an immense span of time. All are united by their engagement with the North Atlantic World’s relationship with the North.

The decade that gave rise to the term ‘the Hungry Forties’ in Europe is often regarded, and rightly so, as one of deprivation, unrest, and revolution. Two events, the Great Irish Famine and the various political events of ‘1848’, stand out. This book is the first to discuss the subsistence crisis of the 1840s in a truly comparative way. This subsistence crisis may be divided into two rather distinct elements. On the one hand, the failure of the potato caused by the new, unfamiliar fungus, phytophthera infestans, which first struck Europe in mid-1845, resulted in a catastrophe in Ireland that killed about one million people, and radically transformed its landscape and economy. Poor potato crops in 1845 and in the following years also resulted in significant excess mortality elsewhere in Europe. On the other hand, this period, and 1846 in particular, was also one of poor wheat and rye harvests throughout much of Europe. Failure of the grain harvest alone rarely resulted in a subsistence crisis, but the combination of poor potato and grain harvests in a single place was a lethal one. Connections between the local and the global, between the economic and the political, and between the rural and the industrial, make the crisis of the late 1840s a multi-layered one.

This book offers a comparative perspective on the causes and the effects of what is sometimes considered as the ‘last’ European subsistence crisis. It begins with an extensive introduction that treats the topic in comparative perspective. The subsistence crisis had its most catastrophic impact in Ireland, and three chapters in the current volume are concerned mainly with that country. A fourth chapter uses price data to shed comparative perspective on the crisis, while the remaining nine chapters are case studies covering countries ranging from Sweden to Spain and from Scotland to Prussia. Throughout, the contributors focus on a range of common themes, such as the extent of harvest deficits, the functioning of food markets, fertility and mortality, and public action at local and national levels.

Cormac Ó Gráda is professor of economics at University College, Dublin. He has worked extensively on the history of famines in Ireland and worldwide.

Richard Paping teaches economic and social history and economics at University of Groningen. He has done extensive research on developments in standard-of-living, economy and demography in the Netherlands.

Eric Vanhaute is professor social and economic history and world history at Ghent University. He has mainly published on the history of the rural society and of labour markets in Flanders and outside.

Table of contents:

Eric Vanhaute, Richard Paping and Cormac Ó Gráda, The European Subsistence Crisis of 1845-1850: a Comparative Perspective

PART I - The Irish Famine in an International Perspective

Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Great Famine. An overview - Mary E. Daly, Something Old and Something New. Recent Research on the Great Irish Famine - Peter M. Solar, The Crisis of the Late 1840s. What Can Be Learned From Prices? - Peter Gray, The European Food Crisis and the Relief of Irish Famine, 1845-1850

PART II - A Potato Famine Outside Ireland?

Tom M. Devine, Why the Highlands Did Not Starve. Ireland and Highland Scotland During the Potato Famine - Eric Vanhaute, “So Worthy an Example to Ireland”. The Subsistence and Industrial Crisis of 1845-1850 in Flanders - Richard Paping and Vincent Tassenaar, The Consequences of the Potato Disease in the Netherlands 1845-1860: a Regional Approach - Hans H. Bass, The Crisis in Prussia - Gunter Mahlerwein, The Consequences of the Potato Blight in South Germany - Nadine Vivier, The Crisis in France. A Memorable Crisis But Not a Potato Crisis - Jean Michel Chevet and Cormac Ó Gráda, Crisis: What Crisis? Prices and Mortality in Mid-Nineteenth Century France - Pedro Díaz Marín, Subsistence Crisis and Popular Protest in Spain. The Motines of 1847- Ingrid Henriksen, A Disaster Seen From the Periphery. The Case of Denmark - Carl-Johan Gadd, On the Edge of a Crisis: Sweden in the 1840s

This book offers a new and innovative approach to the study of magic and witchcraft in Italy between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Unusually, this subject is explored not through inquisitorial trial records or demonological literature, but through the sermons and confession manuals produced by Observant Franciscan friars, focusing on the so-called ‘pastoral’ approach to folklore, superstition, and witchcraft - an approach that appears to have been notably less harsh than that taken by inquisitors and dedicated demonologists.

Central to this research are the writings of a number of friars active at the friary of St Angelo’s in Milan. Among them were preachers and confessors such as Bernardino Busti, who treated superstition as part of a model that categorized the beliefs and behaviours of the faithful, as well as dedicated intellectuals such as Samuele Cassini, who took scepticism towards elements of belief in witchcraft still further, ultimately leading to a clash with groups such as the Dominicans.

By considering the writings of these men in their wider literary and pastoral context, and in the light of the broader reforming aims of the Franciscans, this unique study not only offers new insights into the late medieval understanding of superstition and witchcraft, but also makes an important contribution to the history of pastoral care.

This collection of essays compares and discusses women’s participation and experiences in credit markets in early modern Europe, and highlights the characteristics, common mechanisms, similarities, discrepancies, and differences across various regions in Europe in different time periods, and at all levels of society. The essays focus on the role of women as creditors and debtors (a topic largely ignored in traditional historiography), but also and above all on the development of their roles across time. Were women able to enter the credit market, and if so, how and in what proportion? What was then the meaning of their involvement in this market? What did their involvement mean for the community and for their household? Was credit a vector of female emancipation and empowerment? What were the changes that occurred for them in the transition to capitalism? These essays offer a variety of perspectives on women’s roles in the credit markets of early modern Europe in order to outline and answer these questions as well as analysing and exploring the nature of women, money, credit, and debt in a pre-industrial Europe.

During the English Civil Wars and Revolution (1640-60), the affairs of Church and State came under a crucial new form of comment and critique, in the form of public petitions. Petitioning was a readily available mode of communication for women, and this study explores the ways in which petitioning in seventeenth-century England was adapted out of and differed from pre-Revolutionary modes, whilst also highlighting gendered conventions and innovations of petitioning in that period.

Male petitioning in the seventeenth century did not have to negotiate the cultural assumptions about intellectual inferiority and legal incapacity that constrained women. Yet just because women did not claim separate (and modern) women’s rights does not mean that they were passive, quiescent, or had no political agency. On the contrary, as this study shows, women in the Revolution could use petitioning as a powerful way to address those in power, precisely because it was done from an assumed position of weakness. The petition is not simply a text, authored by a single pen, but a series of social transactions, performed in multiple social and political settings, frequently involving people previously excluded from participation in political discussion or action. To the extent that women participated in collective petitioning, or turned their individual addresses into printed artefacts for public scrutiny, they also participated in the public sphere of political opinion and debate.

In the last few decades, the study of women in the arts has largely increased in terms of scholars involved in research and investigation, with the reception of the outcomes especially acknowledged by museums which are dedicating part of their mission to organizing exhibitions and/or acquiring the works of women. The Annual International Women in Arts Conference seeks to advance contemporary discussions on how female creativity has helped shape European culture in its heterogeneity since the Middle Ages. This volume collects the proceedings of the first conference organised in Rome, in October 2021. It focuses on the role of women in literature, art,　and architecture. Throughout history, these domains were often seen as very masculine. Yet, there have been many women who have made their mark as writers, illuminators, artists and architects, or have played a decisive role as patrons and supporters in these arts. This collection of essays aims to bring these women to the fore and sheds a new light on the heritage and legacy of women in the creative arts and architecture from the Middle Ages until the 20th century.

There has long been a tendency among monastic historians to ignore or marginalize female participation in monastic life, but recent scholarship has begun to redress the balance, and the great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are now attracting increasing attention. This interdisciplinary volume draws together scholars from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Transylvania, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and offers new insights into the history, art history, and material culture, and the religiosity and culture of medieval religious women.

The different chapters within this book take a comparative approach to the emergence and spread of female monastic communities across different geographical, political, and economic settings, comparing and contrasting houses that ranged from rich, powerful royal abbeys to small, subsistence priories on the margins of society, and exploring the artistic achievements, the interaction with neighbours and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the spiritual lives that were led by their inhabitants. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as patronage and relationships with the outside world, organizational structures, the nature of Cistercian observance and identity among female houses, and the role of male authority, and in doing so, they seek to shed light on the divergences and commonalities upon which the female religious life was based.

The roles played by women in history, and even the very idea of what it is to be female, have always been in flux, changing over centuries, between cultures, and in response to diverse social and economic parameters. Even today, women’s roles and women’s rights continue to face changes and pressures. In establishing the series Women of the Past: Testimonies from Archaeology and History, the ambition is to build on the profound theoretical and empirical developments that have taken place over the last fifty years of gender-focused research and to explore them in a contemporary context.

The aim of this series is to shed light on not just the outstanding and extraordinary women who were trendsetters of their time, but also the not quite so outstanding women, often overshadowed by outstanding men, and the ordinary women, those who simply went about their everyday life and kept their world turning in their own quiet way. This edited volume, Women of the Past, Issues for the Present, is the inaugural volume of the series and shows the wide span of the series chronologically, geographically, and socially in terms of the research presented. From Roman slaves to Viking women, and from medieval wet-nurses to the nineteenth-century wives who supported their archaeologist husbands on excavation, this groundbreaking volume opens a new vista in our understanding of the past.