This book explores two areas of interest: the Papal Inquisition in Modena and the status of Jews in an early modern Italian duchy. Its purpose is to deepen existing insights into the role of the former and thus lead to a better understanding of how an Inquisitorial court assumed jurisdiction over a practising Jewish community in the seventeenth century. The book highlights one specific aspect of the history of the Jews in Italy: the trials of professing Jews before the Papal Inquisition at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Inquisitorial processi against professing Jews provide the earliest known evidence of a branch of the Papal Inquisition taking judicial actions against Jews on an unprecedented scale and attempting systematically to discipline a Jewish community, pursuing this aim for several centuries. The book focuses on Inquisitorial activity during the first 40 years of the history of the tribunal in Modena, from 1598 to 1638, the year of the Jews' enclosure in the ghetto, the period which historians have argued was the most active in the Inquisition's history. It argues that trials of the two groups are different because the ecclesiastical tribunals viewed conversos as heretics but Jews as infidels. The book emphasizes the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure regarding Jews, as well as the evidence examined, especially in Modena. This was where the Duke uses the detailed testimony to be found in Inquisitorial trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community.
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
the smaller German princes than for the major ones, as the former had to take active measures to be recognized in Europe’s early modern community of states. Royal subsidizers and princely German troop providers Taking a closer look at the two parties involved in subsidy treaties allows us to identify interesting similarities, both on the side of the subsidizing states and on that of the subsidized territories which provided mercenary troops and their princes. On the side of the powers that paid subsidies, we find governments paying huge amounts of money in order to
returning from, Leeds itself, easing some of the uncertainties of record linkage created by heavy short distance migration in early modern communities.26 A second reason for the suitability of this collection of townships is that while they are all nominally located in the woollen district of the West Riding, they had very different occupational structures, allowing a contrast of the scale, depth and functionality of kinship networks across a number of different socio-economic typologies which may have wider echoes with communities elsewhere. There is not the space here
tribunals viewed conversos as heretics but Jews as infidels. It emphasizes the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure regarding Jews, as well as the evidence examined, especially in Modena where the Duke did not have the power during the period in question to reject Inquisitorial trial procedure, and uses the detailed testimony to be found in Inquisitorial trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community. The Archivio di Stato in Modena houses a complete Inquisitorial archive, a ‘unicum’ as Paolo Prodi has
pre- and early modern communities: it enabled them to be self-sustaining; it made the people and their land sustainable. There are several rich accounts of the history of the watermill in Britain – for example by Reynolds (1983), Steven S. Kaplan (1984) and Martin Watts (2006) – and Beryl Rowland (1969, 1970) has surveyed literary (including classical) representations of milling and millstones. Reynolds suggests that its very ubiquity in history and literature has made the watermill an overlooked subject for contemporary cultural and ecocritical study (1983: 3
, descriptions, and representations of violence are also arguments about lawfulness and legitimacy. Uncovering early modern meanings of violence provides insight into the structural and cultural worlds of early modern communities, while resisting the temptation to fit them into anachronistic narratives of modernity. Categories of large-scale violence – for example, whether something is a rebellion or a war – can serve as justification pre- or post-conquest. Such categories also capture cultural differences in styles of warfare, as well as differences in political protests. As
pregnant would have been seen as a disturbing abdication of the proper responsibilities of an expectant mother.18 The Dürrs’ bad marriage was probably a source of concern for their neighbours. Early modern communities valued harmonious marriages as these were least likely to disrupt the communal peace or to necessitate the intervention of outside authorities in the settling of disputes. And, while neighbours were capable of blaming violent husbands for bad marriages, it seems likely that what communal sympathy existed for the Dürrs in Standorf probably lay with Hans; his