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"Knowledge, Sociology of History 18th century."
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‘Getting to Denmark’: the role of agricultural elites for development
We explore the role of elites for development and the spread of industrialized dairying in Denmark in the 1880s. We demonstrate that the location of early proto-modern dairies, introduced by landowning elites from northern Germany in the eighteenth century, explains the location of industrialized dairying in 1890: an increase of one standard deviation in elite influence increases industrialized dairying by 56 percent of the mean exposure in one specification. We interpret this as evidence for a spread of ideas from the elites to the peasantry, which we capture through measures of specialization in dairying and demand for education and identify a causal relationship using an instrument based on distance to the influential first mover. Finally, we demonstrate that areas with cooperatives enjoyed greater wealth by the twentieth century, and that they are today associated with other Danish cultural attributes: a belief in democracy and individualism.
Journal Article
Transformations of Knowledge in Dutch Expansion
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, objects, texts and people travelled around the world on board Dutch ships. The essays in this book explore how these circulations transformed knowledge in Asian and European societies. They concentrate on epistemic consequences in the fields of historiography, geography, natural history, religion and philosophy, as well as in everyday life. Emphasizing transformations, the volume reconstructs small semantic shifts of knowledge and tentative adjustments to new cultural contexts. It unfolds the often conflict-ridden, complex and largely global history of specific pieces of knowledge as well as of generally-shared contemporary understandings regarding what could or could not be considered true. The book contributes to current debates about how to conceptualize the unsettled epistemologies of the early modern world.
eBook
On Practical Uses of Ten Sefirot: Material Readings in an Early Modern Kabbalistic Collectaneum (MS Michael 473)
By the end of the sixteenth century, textual manifestations of kabbalah—a variety of Jewish mysticism that first emerged in medieval Provence and Catalonia—achieved the status of elite but authoritative lore in Eastern and Central Europe, even if at times they stirred religious opposition. At the same time, and especially in the seventeenth century, the so-called practical kabbalah, associated with magic and a talismanic approach to religious ritual, gained substantial popularity among Ashkenazi (i.e., Eastern and Central European) Jews. This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. By zooming in on a single codex, this article foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts. The article showcases a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, in order to focus on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.
Journal Article
Spaces of Enlightenment Science
Spaces of Enlightenment Science explores the places, spaces, and exchanges where science of the Early Modern period got done, bringing together leading historians of science to examine the geographies of knowledge in the Enlightenment period.
eBook
Midwives in Health Sciences as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Legislation, Training and Health (XV–XVIII Centuries)
Background and Objectives: The first inquisitorial processes were developed against Muslims and Jews. Then, they focused on women, especially those dedicated to care. Progressively, they were linked to witchcraft and sorcery due to their great assistance, generational and empirical knowledge. The health historiography of the 15th–18th centuries still has important bibliographic and interpretive gaps in the care provided by women. The main objective was to analyse the care provided by midwives in the legislative and socio-sanitary context of New Castile, in the inquisitorial Spain of the 15th–18th centuries. Materials and Methods: A historical review was conducted, following the Dialectical Structural Model of Care. Historical manuals, articles and databases were analysed. Results: The Catholic Monarchs established health profession regulations in 1477, including midwives. However, all legislations were annulled by Felipe II in 1576. These were not resumed until 1750. Midwives assumed a huge range of functions in their care commitment (teaching, care and religion) and were valued in opposing ways. However, many of them were persecuted and condemned by the Inquisition. They used to accompany therapeutic action with prayers and charms. Midwives were usually women in a social vulnerability situation, who did not comply with social stereotypes. Conclusions: Midwives, forerunners of current nursing and health sciences, overcame sociocultural difficulties, although they were condemned for it. Midwives achieved an accredited title, which was taken from them for two centuries. They acted as health agents in a society that demanded them while participating in a “witch hunt”.
Journal Article
Faces in the Wilderness: a New Network of Crossdated Culturally-Modified Red Pine in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Northern Minnesota, USA
New dates from culturally modified red pine rediscovered in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota provide an opportunity to merge tree-ring records of human land use with archaeological records, historical travel accounts, and traditional knowledge to enhance understanding of Anishinaabeg land tenure in the Wilderness. Records from 244 culturally modified trees (CMTs) demonstrate varying intensities of human use along historical water routes, notably the Border Route that connected Grand Portage to Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods during the North American fur trade. Crossdated modification years from 119 CMTs provide direct evidence of human-landscape interaction along historical travel routes utilized by Anishinaabeg and Euro-American traders from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s. This CMT network preserves a fading biological record of fur-trade-era cultural history that contributes to a growing cross-cultural conversation on the storied traditional use of a cultural landscape that is now the most visited federal wilderness area in the United States.
Journal Article
Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University
Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the \"Protestant Ethic\" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world. William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of \"lecturing with applause\" and \"publish or perish,\" and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.
eBook
Rival Mission, Rival Science? Jesuits and Pietists in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century South India
Two European missionary teams, one Catholic and the other Protestant, encountered each other in the Tamil country in the first decade of the eighteenth century. They acted as if and thought that their goals were irreconcilable, even if the Protestants in Tranquebar admitted that the Catholic Jesuit proselytism in the region had been efficient as “preparatio evangelicae” for the Protestant mission. Jesuits and Pietists were not only rivals; they also collaborated, uneasily and unequally, in collecting, processing, and disseminating knowledge. Missionary linguistic and medico-botanical expertise was considered an indispensable proselytizing tool, and it showcased their “scientific” achievements that were admired and envied in Europe. Both Pietists and Jesuits of this period were fighting the early Enlightenment atheists while feeding them the materials from the missions. Both missionary groups were also victims of Enlightenment historiography. Despite their theological differences, they were far closer in their practices than either the missionaries themselves or their historians, who have mostly written from the same denominational perspective, have been willing to acknowledge. In part this was because the Protestants, especially their mission's founders, relied on both texts and converts produced by their Catholic rivals.
Journal Article
'To Know One's Chains for What They Are Is Better Than to Deck Them with Flowers'
Lila Corwin Berman, Kate Rosenblatt, and Ronit Y. Stahl's argument that the study of \"American Jewish continuity is embedded within patriarchal and misogynistic structures\" (168) raises important sociological questions about the production of knowledge. By analyzing how a prevailing set of ideas is shaped by broader social forces and how a group of scholars is deeply enmeshed in a historical context, the authors offer a sociology of knowledge approach that highlights the relationship between society and categories of thought. At the same time that dominant institutions shape questions that are asked (as well as those that are not asked), the answers in turn reinforce the status quo. Being aware of the connection between inquiry and structure enlarges our lenses and challenges the academy to engage in the liberating enterprise of recognizing potential sources of bias. The article \"Continuity Crisis\" makes us see how the continuity paradigm is bound by ideological chains of time and place and reminds us of Rousseau's eighteenth-century principle: \"To know one's chains for what they are is better than to deck them with flowers.\"
Journal Article