17th century Europe

The world, and first and foremost the West, is in crisis. A crisis that is at once financial, monetary, economic, social, geostrategic, political, scientific, energy, and at the same time sees an erosion of morals and morals as well as an ecological crisis.

This great crisis is of a particular character that we call, like others long before us, the crisis of the spirit.

We must necessarily understand the deep origin of this one in order to overcome it. A spiritual crisis can only be fully resolved by starting with the restoration of the spiritual, that is, metaphysical, plane. Guénon, then Evola, have already explained the main supporters in a masterful way. We are part of this continuity.

We choose to approach the spiritual crisis in the West, studying it here from a point of view limited to the traces in history of certain extremely particular religious movements that appeared from the 17th century onwards, whose existence and influence are still largely unknown.

Our general approach is first and foremost a bibliographical compilation of works by world-class specialists, published in French, English and German and whose authors have followed an academic historiographical approach based on works written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Polish, Latin, Turkish, French and German, which are the primary historical references.

A very large part is deliberately left to quotations from excerpts from these works.

This approach to the history of religions is necessarily complemented in conclusion by some reflections on the philosophy of human history, and by elements of metaphysics.

Právní systém a normy raného novověku byly poměrně propracované. Zatímco o některých sporech se nám v archivech zachovaly jen letmé zmínky, o jiných jsme informování poměrně podrobně. Ke druhému ze jmenovaných typů náležel také spor o dědictví náležející Anně Šudové ze Semanína odehrávající se ve 20. letech 17. století. Tento právní konflikt je zajímavý hned z několika důvodů – v podstatě se totiž jednalo o střet mezi měšťany dvou měst (Chrudimě a Nymburka) a navíc v něm figurovali příslušníci šlechtické rodiny žijící trvale ve městě. Pozoruhodný je pak i z obecného hlediska, jelikož ukazuje, jakým způsobem fungovala v některých ohledech ochrana sirotčího majetku a poručnická správa.

Chrudim inheritance of Anna Maria Šudová of Semanín (probe into the inheritance dispute in Chrudim during the Thirty Years War). The described dispute about inheritance is fairly detailed and it is documented by written sources from the 20s of the 17th century. The dispute was a controversy between the two cities burghers (Chrudim and Nymburk). It was attended by members of an aristocratic family who lived permanently in the city. The dispute shows how to operate the protection of property of orphans and how it was managed by curators.

Mikuláš Štraus is mainly known as a publisher of newspapers and leaflets after the Battle of White Mountain. The article builds on the analysis of the decorative material used by his printing workshop and provides some new conclusions concerning the illustrations of four books published by Štraus: a German translation of Hájek’s Kronika česká [Bohemian Chronicle], Barthold’s hymn-book Hymnorum sacrorum, Luython’s mass-book Liber I. missarum and the verse adaptation of an Old German legend published under the title Sumovní kronika. It identifies some illustrations as the work of the remarkable illustrator Jan Willenberg and thus indicates the wide range of motifs used by this hitherto undervalued artist.

http://www.cir17.info/colloques/princeton
Ce colloque pluridisciplinaire se propose d'examiner la place des pratiques collaboratives dans la culture française du XVIIe siècle. Alors que se renforce la monarchie absolue, incarnée par un souverain unique, il règne dans le domaine des arts et des lettres un esprit (ou impératif) de collaboration d'où résultent de nombreuses oeuvres plus ou moins collectives. Il s'agira d'étudier ces productions sous tous leurs aspects (genèse et réception, formes et idées, style et sens), d'interroger leur réussite ou échec, et de les situer par rapport aux ouvrages plus « solitaires ». Pourquoi écrire à quatre mains, voire plus ? Comment peut-on travailler en commun avec son frère ou son maître, un compositeur ou un graveur ? La Bruyère avait-il raison d'écrire : « L'on n'a guère vu jusques à présent un chef-d'oeuvre d'esprit qui soit l'ouvrage de plusieurs » ?

Heslo v Encyklopedii českých právních dějin, X. svazek (R-Říš). Plzeň-Ostrava, 2017, s. 683
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Rudolf  II's Letter of Majesty for Silesia (1609)
Majestätsbrief für Schlesien (1609) von Rudolf II.
List majestatyczny Rudolfa II dla  Śląska (1609)

The Theses LVI belong to a series of hitherto unpublished early manuscripts of the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) that were acquired by the University of Leiden in 1864. It is not certain when the Theses were written, but preliminary research on the physical manuscript and the sources cited indicate two possible windows. The first is around 1602-1605, that is roughly at a time when Grotius was also working on his Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (De Iure Praedae Commentarius). The second dating places the genesis of the manuscrbipt around 1613-1615.
In the context of Grotius’ writings, the Theses LVI assume an important position for several reasons: They raise questions about state formation, the duty of citizens to the state and the right of political resistance in far greater detail than in any other work of the celebrated Dutch humanist. The Theses LVI also feature important reading notes that yield priceless insights into the sources that Grotius directly consulted and their influence on his ideas. The manuscript grants modern scholars a unique glimpse into the working mind of its author. Evidence points not only to the ferocious haste with which Grotius wrote his works, but also the occasional sloppiness of his reading and research habits."""

(English Summary: Baptism and Baptismal Vessels in Post-Reformation Saaremaa pp. 126-136).

This article examines the changes that occured in the use and location of baptismal vessels and fonts in Saaremaa during the Early Modern Period. It also discusses the alteration of the sacrament and rites of baptism on island during the 16th and 17th centuries. The questions and alterations pertaining to the place of baptism and baptismal fonts are connected with the rest of the ecclesiastical space and church furnishings. The conversion of Catholic churches into Lutheran ecclesiastical space was a complex process and the changes were carried out gradually. Saaremaa is one of the few, if not the only area, in Estonia today were the changes that took place in the process of conversion from Catholicism to Lutheranism can be viewed in rural churches. Information about the church furnishings in Saaremaa during the 16th-17th centuries (Danish and Swedish Period) is available from practically every local church.

This article presents an overview of the long term trends in the trading patterns for salted herring in the area of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea and their hinterlands in the period of c. 1600-1850. The market is defined as ‘the interaction between supply and demand to determine the market price and corresponding quantity bought and sold.’  In this period the north European herring market underwent several changes. This is analysed from four different points of view:
The first main section examines the main trading routes for herring in Northern Europe by use of records from the Sound toll registers as well as from accounts of herring imports in the German North Sea and Baltic cities. Then a number of price series for various parts of northern Europe give indications for the long term development of prices of herring. Following this an analysis of the consumption patterns of salted herring is carried out, and finally the influence of mercantilist policies is evaluated.

A closely-researched and detailed study of the operations and tactics of early modern armies, it uses the French and Savoyard invasion of Spanish Lombardy in 1636 to explore warfare through a neo-Darwinian lens. This emphasizes the universal features of human behavior and psychology as they relate to violence and war. Oxford University Press, January 2016, Paperback version 2018; Italian translation LEG 2018.

La Guerra Civil Inglesa de 1642 a 1651 fue un período de beligerancia social, disputas religiosas, experimentación política e inestabilidad en Inglaterra, Escocia e Irlanda. Sin embargo, se sabe menos, pero se debate mucho, sobre las causas ya que no parecían ser propensas a producir los conflictos, sólo el tipo de ellos. Algunos historiadores se han centrado en la sociedad y las masas, otros en las élites, otros en aspectos socioeconómicos y muchos más en el funcionamiento de la iglesia y el estado. Otros se quejan de los enfoques de arriba hacia abajo, de demasiado enfoque en Escocia e Irlanda, y de interpretaciones erróneas de los documentos dejados por realistas y parlamentarios. Hay quienes argumentan que fue un conflicto religioso, mientras que otros argumentan que fue retratado por algunos contemporáneos como una guerra santa. Aunque muchos todavía no están de acuerdo, existe un consenso creciente entre los historiadores de que la religión desempeñó un papel primordial en la causa de los conflictos. Los años que condujeron a la Guerra Civil fueron un período de errores de cálculo por parte de la realeza, revueltas escocesas e irlandesas debido principalmente a tensiones religiosas, discusiones religiosas entre realistas y parlamentarios, y celo religioso que produjo una guerra civil inesperada y no deseada. Si bien los agravios políticos y constitucionales parecían haber desencadenado los conflictos y aumentar la tensión, la religión fue el principal factor subyacente.

Nations like narratives, lose their origins in the myth of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye. Such an image of the nation-or narration-might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. Homi K. Bhabha / Nation and Narration Abstract In the quadricentennial of the founding of Plymouth Plantation, recent challenges in the United States politics and society raise critical questions on American identity and American democracy. Thus, calling for a revisit on the seventeenth century northeastern American experience of English colonizers, contemporary academia is engaged in new approaches and perspectives on American history and historicism, whereby a peculiar sense of past and act of remembrance count for present day cultural and political dilemmas across the United States. The legacy of early founders and pioneers of New England colonies provides a host of historicism on Anglo-American identity, which was elaborately imprinted in colonial accounts on material culture, legal, military, political and religious practices in the nexus of intra-and extra-imperial encounters of metropole and the colony itself.

Stejně jako vedle obecných „velkých“ dějin stojí koncept mikrohistorie, tak vedle „velký“ dějin módy lze postavit každodenní oděvy sledované v jedné lokalitě napříč společenskými vrstvami.  Průzkumem lokálních památek, archeologického materiálu a textových pramenů se autorka pokusila zachytit proměny oděvu v oblasti západních Čech v období 15. až 17. století a aplikovat na výzkumný materiál metody historické antropologie. Součástí knihy jsou rovněž popisy používaných historických textilních technik, textilních materiálů a obsáhlý katalog citovaných předmětů a ikonografie.

PILNÁ, Veronika: Oděv západních Čechách 15. – 17. století. NPÚ ÚOP v Plzni, Plzeň 2018. ISBN ISBN 978-80-58035-52-0.

The political and religious symbolism of buildings is of enduring interest in historical archaeology. Similarly, ideal concepts in urban planning, and utopian communities have been of recent concern. This paper moves beyond iconography and ideology to examine how a new, post-Civil War English elite tried to implement a policy of reforming their town as a New Jerusalem. A group of merchant houses reveals an attempt to build Scripture into the physical environment, and establish the elite as Elect " watchmen " over the lives and souls of the townspeople. Contemporary sermons are integral to the analysis, as are the agency and interrelationships of a tightly-knit social group. There are two strands to this paper: one is the relationship between the iconography of buildings and their inhabitants; the other is the concept of ideal relationships at the heart of settlement planning. The two come together in the analysis of an extraordinary group of merchant houses built in the town of Newcastle upon Tyne in the NorthEast of England, in the mid-seventeenth century, in the period following the execution of King Charles I, when England was ruled as a republic and a severely Protestant or puritan Commonwealth under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The prominent external characteristics of the houses are the rows of windows in three horizontal bands, seemingly continuous, and giving the impression of a unifying, though not uniform, façade. The archaeological study of ideal urban forms ranges across the centuries. For example, Lilley (2004a, 2004b, 2007) has pursued a sustained project to examine the planning and iconography of medieval towns between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. He proposes that planned towns of this period were intended to represent ideals of the Heavenly Jerusalem on earth. However, these ideals were only apparent

Located at the northern tip of Dirk Hartog Island in Western Australia, Cape Inscription is one of the most significant cultural heritage sites in Australia.  It marks the accidental landfall of Dutch skipper Dirk Hartog and his crew on 25 October 1616. Historical events associated with Hartog’s landfall and successive European visits to the Cape Inscription site are firmly embedded within the context of the exploration of the Indian Ocean region and Australia in the post-Medieval period.

This chapter provides an historic overview of Dirk Hartog’s life and seafaring activities. It also places his arrival in Western Australia into the broader setting of seventeenth-century Dutch exploration. Finally, it investigates the archaeological and historical context of the Hartog Inscription Plate, emphasising the nature of similar monuments left by European explorers in the Indian Ocean region and contemporary ship communication practices.

The “Majestätsquaterne” of the Moravian Land Registries. Admission
to the Estates in Moravia after 1628 and Written Records of them in
the Years 1642–1852.
The essence of the study is an analysis of the so-called Majestätsquaterne”, special series of the Moravian Land Registers (Landtafeln), which recorded the admission of new members to the community of Moravian land estates in the period 1642–1852. As part of this so-called habilitation process in the land, the applicant had to prove that he had an incolat and aristocratic status (by means of an incolat and ennoblement charter), swear a personal oath of loyalty to
the monarch (by means of intimation of the Court Chancery) and submit a binding statement in the written form of Relation to the Land (Revers zum Lande) to the land government (i.e., a written oath to uphold the land’s constitution, laws, and customs). The study outlines the
habilitation process in the land and then goes on to address: the formal and content aspects of the “Majestätsquaterne”; the role of the court and land administrations involved; and individual depositors and the written material produced by them. It reconstructs the practise of
registration and shows the resulting compositional scheme of individual registred documents and their classification according to traditional diplomatic categories, including an evaluation of selected internal and external features.

This paper employs the concept of Protestant Hierotopy to explore the spiritual roots of Dutch Golden Age Painting. Hierotopic methodology focuses on the creation of sacred spaces as a form of human creativity. Though the Reformation may have done away with ecclesiastical sacred spaces, it introduced a new kind of hierotopy in their place: a sacralization of the whole of Creation, with a focus on human environments. Protestant admiration for nature was imbued with religious feelings, while cleanliness and domesticity came to be seen as closely akin to holiness. In this paper I interpret Dutch Golden Age Painting as an iconography of this new form of sacrality. I argue that what we find in this art ought to be understood, not as a purely descriptive, objective realism conceived for its own sake, but rather as a passionate or even sacred naturalism motivated by admiration for God's marvelous creation and enhanced by a Protestant sense of co-working with the Creator.

Gabriel Tatton's collection of manuscript charts is the sole surviving example of original marine surveying in the East Indies by the English in the first half of the seventeenth century. An earlier sea atlas of the East also survives now in the Bodleian Library, drawn by Martin Llewellyn, later steward of St Bartholomew's Hospital, probably on the basis of personal observations made on the First Dutch Voyage of 1595-7. The significance of these particular charts by Tatton, however, rests on their immediacy as a record of the ships' routes, drawn by the professional chart maker Gabriel Tatton (fl.ca 1600-d.1621), while on an English East India Company (EIC) voyage to Japan, China and the Spice Islands 1620-1 as part of an Anglo-Dutch fleet. The voyage and charts are described and compared with the work of Hessel Gerritsz, Hydrographer to the Dutch United East India Company (VOC), 1617-32. Gerritsz had prepared a set of experimental charts from Bantam to Japan in 1618 and then produced a final set in 1619 for the Dutch Company, neither of which survives. The Tatton charts, apparently, cover some of the same coastlines. The coincidences of the timing of the joint Anglo-Dutch fleet and of the work of the two chart makers suggest a close connection. The subsequent history of the collection also casts further light upon the approaches of the Dutch and English Companies to chart-making at this time.

This thesis offers a contextual examination of the 1675 imperial festival which took place in Edirne (Adrianople) during the reign of Mehmed IV (r. 1648-1687). It intends to present a holistic approach to the festival, after the study of Özdemir Nutku in 1972. Distinctively, this study manifests the grounds of the Ottoman court’s affairs for a festival gargantuan in scale at the late seventeenth century, as well as show many unseen layers of the festival. For the first time in the field, it introduces the firework expenses of a state-sponsored festival, revealing previously unexamined phases of such pyrotechnics broadly.

Each section of this work crosschecks textual narratives of the primary sources, including the most known as well as unfamiliar festival books, eyewitness diaries, and state annals, taking into consideration the context of the authors. In addition, this study investigates ignored dimensions of this event, such as the construction of time and space in the festival. Hence this thesis presents a renewal of the conventional narration regarding this princely festival.

In this paper I argue that there is an important sense in which we should regard Leibniz as an advocate of mysticism. I make the case for this claim by considering the complex phenomenon of mysticism itself and Leibniz's discussion of what he terms 'false mysticism' (I.e., quietism) and what he refers to as the "true mystical theology" in an article of that name. The principle claim is that Leibniz is a "rational mystic", i.e., one who thinks that we have the capacity to be directly acquainted with God via our innate idea of God.

Lange hat sich die Forschung nur für solche Gesandtenberichte interessiert, in denen von Bündnissen, Friedensschlüssen oder diplomatischen Verhandlungen die Rede ist. Hier lenkt eine praxeologische Perspektive den forschenden Blick auf die Berichte selbst – auf die Berichte als Artefakte, auf die Praktiken des Berichtens und den Umgang mit den Berichten. Diplomatische Kommunikation kann so von ihrer Alltagspraxis her begriffen werden. Dadurch werden spezifische kommunikative Herausforderungen sichtbar, die das scheinbar so selbstverständliche Berichten für die Schreibenden wie die Lesenden in der Frühen Neuzeit mit sich brachte. Mit seiner ausführlichen Einleitung, den sieben Explorationsstudien und dem pointierten Kommentar leistet der Band folglich einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Vermessung des Untersuchungsfeldes der Neuen Diplomatiegeschichte.