Satanic Pacts/Diabolism

2020 ◽  
pp. 384-426
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Career Advancement ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
The West ◽  
Tit For Tat ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Devil

This chapter explores the satanic pact, the voluntary decision to sell one's soul to the devil, which emerged as an important plank in European witch lore in the early modern period. The trope of the satanic pact dates back to the early Middle Ages, and was generally associated with some kind of tit-for-tat: a sinful human would exchange his soul — and in the earliest versions it is usually a man entering such a deal — for money, career advancement, knowledge, power, or sexual favors. The idea of a satanic pact provided early modern demonologists with the causal mechanism they wanted. Fueled by invidious notions about female bodies and minds, demonologists adumbrated ideas about how women were driven by envy, greed, and insatiable lust to turn to demons to satisfy their desires. Legends of male pacts with the devil circulated in Byzantium as well as in the medieval West, and some of these stories crossed over into the Slavic Orthodox world, but they never rose to the fore in trials of witches in Russia as they did in the West. Building on this observation, subsequent scholarship has confirmed that this finding held true both in the Russian and in the Ukrainian lands and continued through the eighteenth century.

Introduction

Loyola's Bees ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Annabel Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
The West ◽  
Gradual Decline ◽  
Didactic Poetry ◽  
Special Part ◽  
Classical Traditions

From antiquity, to the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, and to the early modern period, a genre of poetry flourished in the West that has fallen out of favour in the recent times. This is didactic poetry, poetry of instruction in astronomy, hunting, farming, philosophy, and in all fields of sciences, arts, and recreational activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits produced a great quantity of Latin didactic poems. These poems revealed of the early modern Jesuits, local literary fashions, classical traditions, contemporary events and inventions, scientific developments, cultural knowledge, and social mores. Didactic poetry was the best literary genre for the cultivation of the Jesuits, the modern teaching order par excellence. The majority of Jesuit didactic poems were written by teachers, most of whom were writing in a radically transformed world of print and science, and in the scholarly language of Latin that was facing its gradual decline in the eighteenth century. Most of these poems were initially written for their fellow Jesuits and not for the proper literary classes of humanities and rhetoric. By the turn of the eighteenth century, didactic poems began to take a special place among the Jesuits, and a consciousness of contributions to the Jesuit tradition and microtradition ensued wherein the didactic poems took a special part.

Merciful Father, Impersonal State: Russian Autocracy in Comparative Perspective

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 635-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Kivelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Central State ◽  
The West ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
State Apparatus

Comparative analyses traditionally have done Russian history no favors. Invidious comparisons have situated Russia firmly in a context of backwardness relative to the West. The term ‘medieval’ customarily applies to Russia until the era of Peter the Great, that is, until the early eighteenth century, and even the least condemnatory scholars point out similarities between Muscovite Russia of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries and early medieval tribal formations of northern Europe. Along with ‘backwardness,’ comparative history has customarily found in Russia an example of extraordinarily oppressive autocratic despotism, while at the same time, and omewhat contradictorily, decrying the incompetence and rampant corruption of the central state apparatus. These and other unflattering comparative generalizations arose in the observations of Western travellers who recorded their impressions of Russia in the early modern period and have continued in the writings of scholars and journalists to this day.

The Petrine Divide and the Periodization of Early Modern Russian History

Slavic Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 410-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The West ◽  
Traditional Use ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Court Politics ◽  
Law Of Succession ◽  
Gradual Transformation

Among the chief problems in determining the boundaries of the early modern period in Russian history is die reign and reforms of Peter I the Great. In this article, Russell E. Martin situates Peter's reign within the context of dynastic marriage politics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He argues that the centuries from roughly 1500 to 1800 constitute a single, coherent period. Court politics were dominated by concerns of kinship and marriage: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the search for a domesdc bride for the Russian rulers through bride shows; then, in the eighteenth century, by the gradual transformation of court politics away from domestic brides and toward a more traditional use of dynastic marriage as a tool in foreign policy. The early modern period ends, Martin argues, only with the promulgation of a new law of succession by Paul I (as modified by Alexander I). The so-called Petrine divide, then, is elided in a periodization of Russian history that very much mirrors the boundaries that are conventional in the west.

scholarly journals Between mercantilism and market: privileges for invention in early modern Europe

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
CARLO MARCO BELFANTI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Made In

This paper aims at offering a reconstruction of the salient features of the most important formal institution introduced by European states in the Early Modern Period with the aim of recognizing and protecting the intellectual property of the inventors. Such institutions went under different names – ‘Privilegio’ in Venice, ‘Patent’ in England, ‘Privilège’ in France, ‘Cedula de privilegio de invençion’ in Spain – and, in general, took the form of the concession of a special prerogative to the inventor by the sovereign or the republic, by virtue of which he could exploit, in economic terms, his own invention through holding a monopoly. The article starts with the origins of the privileges for invention, of which the first examples are to be found in the Middle Ages, but whose official ‘genesis’ is commonly identified with the Venetian law of 1474. The fundamental characteristics of the Venetian system, which was later imitated by other European states, are analysed. In the following section, the adoption of this model by those other states – Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands – is illustrated. In fact, the majority of these would make legislation on intellectual property an instrument of mercantilist policy, under the same conditions as prevailed in Venice. Further, we will examine some of the opportunities that the diffusion of these measures offered to those involved and the way in which they – as craftsmen, merchants, and speculators – took advantage of the business of privileges. Finally, before concluding, some thoughts on the changes made in the policy of privileges given the transformations that took place in the course of the eighteenth century, in order to understand the ‘adaptive’ capacity of these institutions.

The surface’s substance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Fend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Substance P ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Organic Substance ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Complex Organ

The naked areas an artist represents when painting a human body were traditionally not conceived of in terms of skin but of flesh. This chapter discusses notions of flesh and flesh tones in the European art literature from the Middle Ages (Theophilus Prespyter, Cennino Cennini, Jean Lebèque) to French seventeenth and early eighteenth-century art theory. A focus is on the association of flesh and colour in the writings of Roger de Piles and in the technique of colour printing as theorised in Jacob Le Blon's 1725 treatise Coloritto, or the Harmony of Colouring. The chapter demonstrates how skin slowly made its entry into art theory over the course of the eighteenth century and argues that skin and flesh came to be perceived differently over the course of the early modern period. Especially the microscope changed the ways in which the bodily mater was seen: organic substance was now described with textile metaphors as texture or tissue. In accordance with the new medical understanding of the dermis as a tissue built of interwoven layers, eighteenth-century art practice and discourse turned skin into a complex organ that was supposed to be rendered via an appropriately textured painterly brushwork.

scholarly journals Neighbourhood of the City and the Provinces in Dalmatia in the Light of Chosen Examples of Early Modern French Travel Literature

2015 ◽  
pp. 83-93
Author(s):  
Wojciech Sajkowski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
Western European ◽  
The City

Neighbourhood of the City and the Provinces in Dalmatia in the Light of Chosen Examples of Early Modern French Travel LiteratureIn early modern period Dalmatia was a region which was culturally diversified. Such cities as Zadar or Split were the centres of Italian culture, while province was a part of the Slavic world. Their location on the route to Turkey made of them a frequent stop for such French travellers as Jacob Spon (1675) or Louis-François Cassas (1782), which testimonies became a basis for printed publications. In their testimonies readers could find the information about Dalmatian cities and province and differences between then. The latter issue is important, yet often neglected addition to the discussion on the shaping of the image of the Balkans.In this study we concentrate on this French approach to this problem, because it can be considered as representative for the other Western European perspectives. The French look at the issue of neighbourhood of the city and the province was characterized by a distance, which is rarely found in Venetian sources. This wide chronologic scope will allow to show changes which occurred in the French image of Dalmatia during the age of Enlightenment.The paper tries to analyse the travel literature in the perspective of the issue of image of neighbourhood of the city and province in Dalmatia and proves that this image had two perspectives. The first related to the neighbourhood of the sophisticated Italian culture (synonymous with the city) and the province, equated mostly with little known in the West Slavic world. The second perspective, which appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century dealt with these relationships in the wider context of the neighbourhood civilization and backwardness. Sąsiedztwo miasta i prowincji w Dalmacji w świetle wybranych przykładów francuskiej literatury podróżniczej z czasów nowożytnychDalmacja stanowiła w epoce nowożytnej niezwykle zróżnicowany kulturowo obszar, w którym miasta takie, jak Zadar czy Split, stanowiły przede wszystkim ośrodki kultury włoskiej, podczas gdy prowincja przynależała do świata słowiańskiego. Położenie na szlaku do Turcji sprawiało, że do miast trafiali podróżnicy tacy, jak Jacob Spon (1675), czy Louis-François Cassas (1782), którzy opisywali ich zabytki (w tym te z czasów Cesarstwa Rzymskiego), a także obyczaje ich mieszkańców. Bardzo często zwracali uwagę na kulturowy i etniczny kontrast miasta z prowincją, większy niż w przypadku zachodnioeuropejskich centrów i ich okolic – bo dotyczący również kwestii etnicznych. Francuskie spojrzenie na kwestię sąsiedztwa miasta i prowincji na obszarze Dalmacji jest o tyle istotne, że charakteryzuje się dystansem, który rzadziej spotykamy w źródłach weneckich. W owych opisach już na wstępnym etapie badań można wydzielić  dwie  perspektywy – pierwsza dotyczy spotkania wyrafinowanej kultury włoskiej (utożsamianej z miastem) i prowincji, utożsamianej najczęściej z mało znanym na Zachodzie światem słowiańskim. Druga perspektywa, która pojawiła się w drugiej połowie XVIII wieku, rozpatrywała te relacje w szerszym kontekście sąsiedztwa cywilizacji i zacofania, które łączyło wspominaną refleksję dotyczącą stosunków włosko-słowiańskich  z historyczną refleksją nad sąsiedztwem rzymskiej cywilizacji (której wiele świadectw zachowało się miastach dalmatyńskich) z barbarzyństwem – które doprowadziło do jej kresu. Szersza perspektywa chronologiczna umożliwi uchwycenie zmiany, jaka zaszła w we francuskim spojrzeniu na Dalmację, a której katalizatorem były nie tylko coraz większe zainteresowanie tym regionem (mające swoje apogeum w krótkim okresie napoleońskich rządów w Dalmacji w okresie istnienia Prowincji Iliryjskich), lecz również oświeceniowa refleksja dotycząca cywilizacji i prymitywizmu.

From Craft to Institution: Accounting in Italy from the Middle ages to the Early Modern Period

2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Professional Field

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.

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