Urban Elections And Decision Making In Early Modern Europe 1500 1800

Everyday political business in early modern cities took place under many different sources of tension. De facto establishment of the oligarchy in the government collided with the urban community’s expectations of participation and with the responsibility for common welfare which was supposed to be the guideline for policies in the municipal boards. Urban Elections and Decision-Making in Early Modern Europe offers new interpretations of the governmental techniques applied by urban elites to cope with these tensions. Written by leading historians of urban history and based on a broad foundation of previously unpublished research the volume explores the procedures of decision-making in early modern cities from an international and micrological point of view. It examines the attempts of delegating and stabilising power through elections, asks for the different ways of developing and demonstrating consent or dissent within the cities’ walls—urban revolts included—and offers a new theoretical framework to describe and understand these phenomena adequately.

Examines how urban citizenship gave many people a real stake in their own communities, even before the rise of modern democracy.

The discipline of social history has still not given enough attention to the ways in which the perceptions and roles of "ordinary" people changed over time. In these fascinating British and Dutch cases, we see how the study of this evolution imparts historical texture and enables us to understand early modernity with greater clarity.

Tracing Hospital Boundaries explores how the forces of integration and segregation shaped hospital communities and structures in theory and practice between the eleventh and twentieth centuries. The eleven chapters consider hospitals in Europe (particularly Southeast), North America and Africa.

An essential introductory survey of the towns, villages and parishes in which people lived in the medieval and early modern periods. Beat Kumin assesses the similarities, differences and the wider significance of these communities for European society prior to 1800.

Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe examines the norms and practices of collective decision-making across pre-modern European history, east and west, and their influence in shaping both intra- and inter-communal relationships. Bringing together the work of twenty specialist contributors, this volume offers a unique range of case studies from Ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, and explores voting in a range of different contexts with analysis that encompasses constitutional and ecclesiastical history, social and cultural history, the history of material culture and of political thought. Together the case-studies illustrate the influence of ancient models and ideas of voting on medieval and early modern collectivities and document the cultural and conceptual exchange between different spheres in which voting took place. Above all, they foreground voting as a crucial element of Europe’s common political heritage and raise questions about the contribution of pre-modern cultures of voting to modern political and institutional developments. Offering a wide chronological and geographical scope, Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe is aimed at scholars and students of the history of voting and is a fascinating contribution to the key debates that surround voting today.

The Arab spring, protest movements in the EU, Russia, Turkey or elsewhere, are often labeled as twitter-revolutions. A crucial role is attributed to the new media, coverage of events abroad and ensuing mutual reactions. With the dissemination of print, revolts in early-modern times faced the challenge of a similar media-revolution. This influenced the very face of the events that could become full-fledged propaganda wars once the insurgents had won access to the printing press. But it also had an impact on revolt-narratives. Governments severely persecuted dissident views in such delicate issues as revolts. Observers abroad had no such divided loyalties and were freer to reflect upon the events. Therefore, the book focuses mainly on representations of revolts across borders.

The Holy Roman Empire has often been anachronistically assumed to have been defunct long before it was actually dissolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The authors of this volume reconsider the significance of the Empire in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Their research reveals the continual importance of the Empire as a stage (and audience) for symbolic performance and communication; as a well utilized problem-solving and conflict-resolving supra-governmental institution; and as an imagined political, religious, and cultural "world" for contemporaries. This volume by leading scholars offers a dramatic reappraisal of politics, religion, and culture and also represents a major revision of the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period.

Concepts of visual communication form an explanatory framework for discussing the visual expressions of urban symbolic communication in urban life in towns in the center of Europe in the late medieval and early modern period, including the dramatic times of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This book examines the role of images and visual representation by concentrating on the varieties of symbolic communication in towns that made a range of relationships visual: the status and role of urban civic, professional, and religious communities and the relations between the town and its lord or powerful families and individuals. The geographical framework of this book is the region in the former Habsburg countries north of the Danube River embracing the region between western Bohemia and what is today eastern Slovakia, including the borderland towns of northern Austria. Two studies focus on specific local and occupational communities in the Prague towns, but most of the texts in this book focus on small towns by contemporary European standards in which many forms of urban topography, buildings, objects, and monuments survive, even though few written sources have been preserved. Accessing a wide range of literature in regional languages and German for English speakers, this collection describes typical urban landscapes in early modern Central Europe outside the well-known Central European urban centers and traditional areas of study. The book is a relevant new contribution to medieval and early modern studies, not only covering an underappreciated geographical area but also addressing general questions about the history of rituals and performance as well as visual culture, communication, and identity discourses in late medieval and early modern urban space.

Factional Struggles' explores the dynamics of conflicts among ruling elites within cities, dynastic courts, rural areas and regional noble lineages during the early modern period. Building on case studies from France, Italy, the Empire and the Swiss Confederation, the essays collected by Mathieu Caesar in this volume highlight how factions were formed and how they shaped political society from the late Middle Ages. The authors have especially focused on how political and religious ideologies contributed to the formation of partisanship, the role of propaganda, and the significance and strategies of factional leaders. The volume shows how factions, despite the generally negative view of them held by theologians and jurists, were in practice accepted and used as political tools.