Browsing by Subject "European history"

This dissertation challenges depictions of witchcraft as a sensational or disruptive phenomenon, presenting witch beliefs instead as organically woven into everyday community life, religious beliefs, and village culture. It argues that witch beliefs were adaptive, normal, and rational in regions that never suffered convulsive witch persecutions. Furthermore, this dissertation, the first to work systematically through Spanish secular court witch trials, upends scholars’ views about the dominance of the Spanish Inquisition in witchcraft prosecutions. Through a serial study of secular court records, this dissertation reveals that the local court of Navarra poached dozens of witch trials from the Spanish Inquisition, and independently prosecuted over one hundred accused witches over one hundred-and-fifty years. These overlooked local sources document witch beliefs in far greater detail than Inquisition records and allow the first reconstruction of village-level witch beliefs in Spain. Drawing from historical, anthropological, and literary methods, this dissertation employs a transdisciplinary approach to examine the reports from villagers, parish priests, and jurists, produced under the specific local and older accusatorial judicial procedure. Free of the Inquisitorial filter that has dominated previous studies of Spanish witchcraft, these sources reveal the way villagers—not Inquisitors—conceived of, created, feared, and survived in a world with witches and sorceresses.

Using these local sources, this dissertation illuminates the complex social webs of witchcraft accusations, the pathways of village gossip, and the inner logic of witch beliefs. It reveals the central role of Catholic performativity and the grave consequences of being marked as a mala cristiana, the importance of fama and kin ties, and reveals the rationality of the curious and pervasive presence of the common toad (Bufo bufo) in Navarra’s witch trials. By moving away from the prevalent focus given to the more spectacular witch panics and trials, this work demonstrates the value of local trial records. This dissertation argues that far from irrational or absurd, witchcraft beliefs in early modern Navarra were internally coherent and intellectually informed by an amalgamation of religious, social, and legal forces.

In both medicine and theology, the early modern period was one of flux, characterized by Reformation and Revolution. Scholars tend to analyze shifts in natural philosophy and theology separately. This dissertation brings them together to question how early modern Christians understood their own bodies and souls, the diseases to which they were prey, and the physicians and medicine that treated them.

In doing so, it highlights one influential group of thinkers who addressed these questions: late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Lutheran physicians, theologians, and natural philosophers in the so-called Wittenberg Circle. As shown in chapter one, out of inter- and intra-confessional debates in theology, the study of anatomy, and the study of the soul building on the long Aristotelian De anima commentarial tradition, Lutheran thinkers helped create a field of study called anthropologia. Enshrined in the basic curriculum for all students, including physicians, theologians and philosophers, this discipline endeavored to synthesize the fundamental findings of anatomy, philosophy, and theology to explain the nature of human bodies and souls. Building on the intellectual background sketched in chapter one, the second chapter shows how Lutheran physicians attempted to understand bodies and disease in light of this system of thought. To do so, they called on two principal sources of authority: the Bible and medical theory. Following this overview of basic intellectual commitments, the thematic chapters three and four trace evolving notions of (1) the physician as healer of body and of soul, an imitator of Christus Medicus and (2) the spread of learned ideas about body and soul in vernacular literature, and the way patients should understand and cope with their own sicknesses of body and soul.

This dissertation builds on a wide body of academic Latin and popular vernacular sources, from theological and medical treatises to sermons, commentaries, and devotional literature. It highlights the influence of Philip Melanchthon’s commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, and those of his students and friends, as well as the influential writing of the prominent Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert. In books of prayer, sermons, and biblical commentaries that treat disease and healing, Lutheran pastors and theologians utilized academic medicine and theology to console patients and to popularize pious understandings of body, soul, and medicine. Together these sources reveal a set of beliefs about the relationship of body and soul and their relationship to material and spiritual forces that permeated every level of society.

After the First World War, Germany lost its overseas territories, becoming Europe's first post-colonial nation. After 1919, and especially between 1933 and 1945, however, German colonialists advocated for the return of these colonies and for their central importance to Germany. This dissertation tells the paradoxical story of these colonialists' construction of a German national character driven by overseas imperialism despite the absence of a colonial reality to support this identity. In contrast to views of colonialism as marginal in Germany after the First World War or the colonialist organizations as completely subsumed under the Nazi regime, this dissertation uncovers both the colonialist organizations' continuing public presence and their assertive promotion of their overseas goals in the Third Reich. It also reveals the space available for debates over the contours of national identity in the public sphere of the Third Reich.

Using organizational records of colonialist groups and Nazi propaganda offices, the colonialist press and other publications, photography, graphics, films, and public opinion reports, this dissertation examines the vibrant two-million-strong colonial revisionist movement that flourished in the Third Reich. German colonialists, straddling between anachronistic fantasy and the National Socialist world-view, reintegrated overseas imperialism into Nazi Germany and thereby reinterpreted the meaning of Germanness. They proclaimed a new vision of German national identity that drew on the imagined glories of the past but also held out the promise of a revitalized future for Germany through Africa. They did so however in conflict with the Nazi regime's expansionist goals in Eastern Europe. Colonialists, however, elided disagreements in favor of projecting a public image that emphasized the deep interconnectedness of overseas colonialism and Nazi goals. Through their public agitation and cultural products, colonialists affirmed the continuing relevance of overseas colonialism to Germans in the Third Reich.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Great Britain's computing industry led the world in the development and application of computers for business and administrative work. The British government and civil service, paragons of meritocracy in a country stratified by class, committed themselves to implementing computerized data processing techniques throughout the sprawling public sector, in order to modernize their economy, maintain the competitiveness of British high-technology industries, and reconsolidate the nation's strength and reputation worldwide. To succeed in this project, the British government would need to leverage the country's existing expertise, cultivate the heterogeneous field of computing manufacturers, and significantly re-train labor.

By the 1970s, Britain's early lead in the field of computing had evaporated, government computing projects had produced disappointing results, and the nation's status as a world power had declined precipitously. This dissertation seeks to explain why British computing achieved so few of its intended results by looking at the intractable labor problems within the public sector during the heyday of the Britain's proclaimed "technological revolution." The dissertation argues that the interpretation of, and solutions for, these labor problems produced disastrous effects.

Sources used include government documents, civil service records, records of the nationalized industries (the Post Office, National Health Service, Central Electricity Generating Board, Coal Industry, Railways, and others), computing industry records, press accounts, and oral interviews. By using methodologies from the history of technology, institutional history, and labor history, as well as gender analysis, this dissertation shows that despite the government's commitment to both high technology usage and labor meritocracy, competing claims of technological expertise and management tradition led the government to misjudge the role of computing within the public sector and the nation.

Beginning with a labor situation in which women did the majority of computing work, and seeking to achieve a situation in which young men and management-level technocrats tightly controlled all digital computing, the British government over-centralized its own computing endeavors, and the nation's computing industry, leading to a dangerous winnowing of skill and expertise within the already-small field. The eventual takeover of the British computing market by IBM, and purchase of the last viable British computing company by Fujitsu, marked the end of any hope for Britain's computing dominance in either their home market or the global market.

While multiple factors contributed to the failures of government computing and the British computing industry--including, but not limited to, American competition, inability to effectively create a global market for British machines, and misjudging the public sector's computing needs--this dissertation argues that labor problems, arising largely from gendered concerns about technological change and power, constituted a critical, and unrecognized, stumbling block for Britain's government-led computing revolution.

This dissertation examines the emergence of Far West adventure tales in France across the second colonial empire (1830-1962) and their reigning popularity in the field of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (BD), or comics, in the era of decolonization. In contrast to scholars who situate popular genres outside of political thinking, or conversely read the “messages” of popular and especially children’s literatures homogeneously as ideology, I argue that BD adventures, including Westerns, engaged openly and variously with contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Chapter 1 relates the early popularity of wilderness and desert stories in both the United States and France to shared histories and myths of territorial expansion, colonization, and settlement. Across the nineteenth century, as the United States acquired territories west of the Mississippi and assembled its continental empire, France annexed and incorporated Algeria as “national” space and expanded its second colonial empire into Africa and Asia. I show that tales of white heroics in dramatic frontier landscapes traveled between and across both empires and served the colonizing and civilizing missions of both. Chapter 2 charts the emergence of the Western genre on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century and its conquest of French audiences by the interwar period. I demonstrate how Western storylines across media – in fiction, in the arena, in comics, and on screen – responded to shifting sentiment in America and France regarding past conquests, the livability of the industrial present, and the viability of colonial rule. Chapter 3 argues that BD adventures from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, including Westerns, worked through the challenges, legacies, and impasses of empire-building and colonization, even as censorship in France during the Algerian war of independence levied content restrictions on the children’s press. Moral referenda on comics in general steered the adventure into “acceptable” territory, which for the overlapping postwar, Cold War, decolonizing periods meant future-oriented stories in which cowboy heroes far from home played out the winning of the “West” across France’s own frontiers in Africa and Asia. My final chapter takes up BD Westerns published in France across the final decades of empire. I argue that tales of cowboys and Indians both circumvented censure and provided adolescents with a variety of ways to think within and beyond empire by displacing contemporary concerns about the wars in Indochina and Algeria onto the mythico-historical context of the settling of the American West. Using key examples from Sitting Bull, Jerry Spring, and Blueberry, I show that realist Westerns invited young baby boomers to envision different futures for France, explore taboo subjects, and work through contested histories and memories of colonial occupation in ways that colonizer tales set in Africa did not.

Victorian England was the first empire in history to imagine itself as liberal, believing that its own power could bring law to the darkest and most unruly corners of the world. But despite covering nearly the entire period known as the Pax Britannica, Victoria's long reign did not include a single year without war.

The conceptual knots presented by England's global power forced some of the century's most canonical authors to confront, and attempt to solve, contradictions fundamental to their self-consciously liberal society. Because law was understood by many Victorian theorists as the opposite of violence, it was when metropolitan thinkers came up against the fringes of civilization's ordering power, in the empire, that the violence underwriting peace become most uncomfortably plain. "Out there," said jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, "you see real government." But if what Stephen called the liberal state's quiet but crushing force emerged most explicitly at the peripheries of law's reach, literary forms composed at the center of the imperial network --London-- reveal the problem of liberal violence as absence, as silence: as a problem. These problems became dilemmas of narrative and poetic form that I argue are legible across linked areas of Victorian literary production: from the realist masterpiece (The Mill on the Floss) and the philosophical treatise (A System of Logic) to works of political historicism (On Liberty), sensation fiction (Armadale), and apparently apolitical poetry about flowers (Poems and Ballads). Forms of Empire looks to show how the Victorian state's interrelated forms --literary and political, conceptual and historical-- expose the violence liberal theory could not see.

Forms of Empire builds on and seeks to advance work on the pairing of "liberalism and empire" in the broad area of cultural studies. To do so it works dialectically, placing Victorian liberalism's vision of perpetual peace in the context of the empire's endless war and tracking loose networks of London-based thinkers as they confronted the problem of how violence relates to law. This process exposes live debates, both explicit and implicit, about just what force secured Victorian England's so-called Age of Equipoise. What emerges is a particularly literary analysis of how linked coteries of Victorian writers, through the height and decline of a great world power, attempted to make sense of the uneasy links they saw (and did not see) between liberalism and empire, the forms of law and the disorder of violence --the vexed connection, that is, between peace and war.

The project's focus on literary structure and political theory is also historical, tracing Victorian global rule from its phase of hegemonic globalization at mid-century (the so-called Age of Equipoise) into its more openly war-torn, post-1870 decline, a structure that corresponds to the project's two halves. While reframing existing periodizations of empire in Victorian Studies, this genealogical procedure also particularizes what is often studied as a homogenous "imperial discourse." Forms of Empire is necessarily interdisciplinary, since it charts the conceptual cross-pollination among semi-autonomous fields of Victorian knowledge: political theory, anthropology, economics, philosophy, and literature, among others. But it is also focused on method, showing that theoretical debates among Victorians themselves --about the dilemmas of their hegemony-- can illuminate controversies about liberalism, violence, and method in a newer moment of empire, ours.

Development has been studied as a project pursued by imperialist nations to strengthen the social and economic order of empire and to curb communism. It was deployed just as frequently, however, in sovereign spaces. This project examines the efforts of the Italian intellectuals who led the Svimez thinktank to organize the economic development of southern Italy in the post-war era. I draw upon materials from Italy’s national archive and those published by Svimez between 1968 and 1988. Whereas imperial development sought to strengthen empire, Italian development sought to strengthen the nation. To understand the intellectual origins of post-war Italian development I turn to events that rocked the nation during the interwar period and appeared to many as a national crisis. That included labor uprisings in response to rising prices beginning in 1919 and the financial crisis of the 1930s. These events oriented technical intellectuals within Milan’s Catholic and socialist milieu to social issues and the wholeness of the nation. After the war, Svimez leaders continued to focus on such questions. They deployed statistical and economic techniques to show southern stagnation was also a crisis that threatened the nation’s integrity.

To address it, they turned to capital. Industrial capital would extend the nation’s economic fabric to the places where it was most irrational and produce the homogeneity believed to be a defining characteristic of a nation. Christian Democracy, experiencing its own electoral crisis, supported the calls for a regional development agency but reframed it as a project of social justice. This language derived from documents they drafted while organizing their party in 1942, which imagined catholic social doctrine as the foundation of the post-fascist state. Italian development became part of the post-fascist project to renew the state’s moral authority and its role as a mediator between capital and labor. I conclude Italian development was response to a national crisis that envisioned a restoration and expansion of the conditions of Italian capitalism.

How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.

Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.

Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.

This dissertation asks how Europe’s multinational states legitimized themselves in the face of new, nation-based theories of sovereignty around the turn of the twentieth century. It answers this question by analyzing the production, reception, and circulation of the concept of “empire” in and between Central and Eastern Europe, and between the European continent and European colonies. It argues that a binary distinction between “modern,” unitary, mononational states and backward, decentralized, multinational “empires” emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century among European nationalist jurists, who used these paired concepts to justify both ethnonational homogenization and overseas expansion. It also shows that Habsburg subjects in linguistically and religiously diverse regions of the Dual Monarchy, and especially Hapsburg Jews, successfully challenged this discursive construction of multinational states as abnormal, archaic, and “imperial.” The redefinition of Austria as an “empire,” that is, an association of nations with historic rights to territory, posed challenges that could only be overcome, scholars from the Monarchy realized, by replacing the dichotomy of nation and empire with a new set of legal, political, and sociological concepts. Social analysis of the state provided, they believed, the means by which to produce these new concepts. A century before the “imperial turn” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, legal scholars from Habsburg Austria turned to the sociology of the state and articulated an influential, if now forgotten, critique of the increasingly hegemonic nationalist legal principles that both undergirded European imperial projects and threatened the continued existence of pluralistic multinational states.

Identifying the major figures and institutions involved in the elaboration of this critique, this dissertation reveals an alternative to Britain, France, and Germany’s national-imperial sociologies and a distinct tradition of international law. Members of this alternative school reconfigured “society” as a transnational category of analysis and the state as a space of competition and negotiation between interest groups. They also highlighted the processes of internal colonization that produced supposed nation-states and drew attention to the hazy boundary between the European metropole and colony. Some even questioned the distinction between “multiracial” Western European and “multinational” Eastern European states and the reality of the nation as a transhistorical entity. The Bukovinian-Jewish sociologist of law Eugen Ehrlich, for example, reframed international law as an already-existing global network of transborder normative communities and legal pluralism as a fundamental element of, rather than hindrance to, political modernization, while the Galician-Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz advanced the thesis that the origin of states, including supposed nation-states, lay in foreign conquest and imperial expansion, rather than in the organic growth of pre-existing ethnic units. These jurists-turned-sociologists were enthusiastically received by scholars in other ethnolinguistically diverse and stratified regions of the European periphery, such as by Manuel González Prada in Peru and Benoy Kumar Sarkar in Bengal, who creatively adapted Habsburg critiques of the European nation-state to their own political needs.

By offering a transnational legal and intellectual history of “empire” and its contested transition from a discursive to an analytical category, this dissertation contributes to larger debates about the viability of Europe’s multinational monarchies, the roots of twentieth-century federalism and internationalism, and the relationship between the social sciences, nationalism, and imperialism. It bridges the divide between two transformational moments in twentieth-century global history: the partial, though, to many, deeply significant, nationalization of European empires before 1918 and the frustrated efforts of anticolonial leaders to construct multiracial, democratic European empires in the era after 1945. Methodologically, my research challenges historians to look beyond more familiar intra-imperial and inter-colonial networks of exchange, to reconsider our use of “empire” and “nation-state” as units of comparative historical analysis, and to break down the artificial distinction between “Europe” and non-Europe that was drawn by nationalist social scientists in the late nineteenth century. Most significantly, it compels us to see methodological nationalism as a geographically and temporally limited phenomenon whose rise to dominance in the twentieth century was resisted by both European and non-European actors.

The cemetery reforms of the Napoleonic era formulated a heavily regulated, health-conscious system of burial throughout the French empire that, in its most radical move, ensured all citizens would have the right to a separate plot within a public cemetery, regardless of socioeconomic status or religious affiliation. This not only transformed the manner in which people were buried, but also how the lives of otherwise unremarkable individuals would be commemorated, remembered, and valued. Particularly as the middle classes of Paris acquired greater social mobility, the cemetery increasingly became a place of social distinction. Yet burial space was only guaranteed for five years, unless one purchased a concession: a private land grant that transformed the public space of burial into parcels of private property either temporarily (up to 15 years) or in perpetuity. As only a small fraction of the population could afford to purchase plots in perpetuity, the vast majority of burials were, from their conception, temporary. Consequently, it has typically been only the most expensive tombs that have survived into the present day, leaving scholars with little material evidence with which to study the commemorative practices of the general population.

Contrary to past studies of French cemeteries, which have tended to prioritize architects and sculptors, this dissertation critically assesses the role of the marbrier (stonecutter) as the chief producer of funerary monuments, and their middle-class clients as central to the visual culture of commemoration in nineteenth-century urban burial spaces. Since extant examples of these more vernacular monuments are rare, this dissertation takes a database-driven approach to analyze commercial almanacs, work logs, and burial records in order to compensate for losses in the material record. This allows for the identification of significant patterns in the development of the funerary monuments industry, which—when contextualized among more traditional forms of art-historical evidence such as model books, plans and caricatures—reveals the peculiar relationship between funerary practices and the emerging consumer culture and urban reform campaigns of nineteenth-century Paris. This work firstly contributes to discussions of how database-driven methodologies can be used to more accurately reconsider subjects in visual and material culture studies, especially in cases where the objects of inquiry have not tended to survive into the present; and, secondly, provides the first study dedicated to the popular market for funerary monuments in France and the regulatory environment that spurred its development within the context of urban, social, and economic changes at the beginning of the Modern period.

Abstract

There is a population of individuals classified as having Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This group of people should be included in places of worship, the schools they attend and the communities where they reside. Consequently, they are sometimes excluded from some occurrences that others experience.

Utilizing personal stories (of successes and sometimes failures), ASD parent interviews and research, I will offer suggestions for inclusion and enlighten the areas where there tends to be exclusion. My focus is the church and how church leaders may become involved in the lives of ASD parishioners to enhance inclusion in not only the church, but the school and the community as well.

My research shows that ASD parents would like their children to experience church as they have. Although willing, most churches, may lack the ability to oblige for various reasons. Schools where inclusion is not encouraged, rests primarily on the shoulders of the principals. Like pastors in churches, principals in schools have influence and can spearhead inclusion efforts in their respective entities. Community entities are willing to accommodate ASD clientele and have done so when approached to comply.

I contend where any of these entities are not willing to foster inclusion, then the church can and most often should become involved to assist, with the necessary training. In other words, the church must do what the church has always done – stand up for those who are unable to do so for themselves.

Keywords: Autism, church, community, inclusion, parents, school

Abstract

There is a population of individuals classified as having Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This group of people should be included in places of worship, the schools they attend and the communities where they reside. Consequently, they are sometimes excluded from some occurrences that others experience.

Utilizing personal stories (of successes and sometimes failures), ASD parent interviews and research, I will offer suggestions for inclusion and enlighten the areas where there tends to be exclusion. My focus is the church and how church leaders may become involved in the lives of ASD parishioners to enhance inclusion in not only the church, but the school and the community as well.

My research shows that ASD parents would like their children to experience church as they have. Although willing, most churches, may lack the ability to oblige for various reasons. Schools where inclusion is not encouraged, rests primarily on the shoulders of the principals. Like pastors in churches, principals in schools have influence and can spearhead inclusion efforts in their respective entities. Community entities are willing to accommodate ASD clientele and have done so when approached to comply.

I contend where any of these entities are not willing to foster inclusion, then the church can and most often should become involved to assist, with the necessary training. In other words, the church must do what the church has always done – stand up for those who are unable to do so for themselves.

Keywords: Autism, church, community, inclusion, parents, school

Marinus Van Reymerswaele's painting of 1542, The Lawyer's Office, was a completely new type of image in the history of art. It shows a lawyer and his assistant behind a desk strewn with briefs, wax seals and money. A complex set of historical circumstances at the interface of art, economics, and legal history in sixteenth century Antwerp explain this painting's appearance and significance. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Antwerp became a locus of unprecedented artistic production caused by the dramatic growth of its mercantile population, its highly organized commercial infrastructure, and its competitive business atmosphere. These developments stimulated a new sophistication in the art market and an energetic approach to acquiring and collecting, supported by publicly-funded venues to mass-market paintings. Over the course of the sixteenth century, artists invented new subjects to meet public demand. Many of these were radically new. One of these artists, Marinus Van Reymerswaele (c. 1490-1546) made distinctive paintings of lawyers, bankers, and moneychangers which relate to fundamental changes in the legal and commercial infrastructure in the sixteenth century. In just one generation, the Habsburg authority centralized the political and legal landscape in the Netherlands. As the prized economic and cultural center of Habsburg territories, Antwerp was transformed.

This dissertation links the development of consumption practices and the rise of new pictorial subjects introduced in Antwerp with the changing business and legal climate of the city during the sixteenth century. Through an investigation of unpublished home inventories recorded between 1528 and 1588, it clarifies the acquisition preferences of the Antwerp public at large, considering both changing preferences for panel and linen paintings as well as for novel and traditional images alike. This reassessment of painting consumption reveals a starkly more conservative approach to buying images than previously assumed, underscoring the rarity of everyday life subjects in Antwerp domestic spaces. As a painter operating within this market, Marinus van Reymerswaele invented a new brand of painting -- the new old master painting -- that not only addressed broad social concerns sparked by Habsburg political, mercantile, and legal reforms, but also built on long-established Netherlandish visual traditions. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, his paintings became more desired by collectors but lost their topicality as memories of Antwerp's political anxieties faded into the past.

This dissertation examines the contributions of apothecary craftsmen and their medicinal retailing practices to emerging cultures of scientific investigation and experimental practice in the Italian port city of Venice between 1565 and 1730. During this important period in Europe’s history, efforts to ground traditional philosophical investigations of nature in a new material culture of empirical and experimental practice elicited significant debate in scholarly communities. Leading the way in advancing the authority of “experience” were Europe’s medical practitioners divided between university-trained physicians and guild-regulated apothecaries and surgeons. In Italy, humanist praise for the practical arts and new techniques of analyzing inherited texts influenced sixteenth-century university physicians to redefine the medical discipline in terms of its practical aims to intervene in nature and achieve useful effects. This led to an important revival in northern Italian universities at Ferrara and Padua of the classical Greek writings on the empirical disciplines of anatomy and pharmacy. In the sixteenth century the university at Padua, under the patronage of the Republic of Venice, was the site of Europe’s first public botanical garden, anatomical theater and clinical demonstrations. The university also hosted important experimental practitioners such as Andreas Vesalius, Galileo Galilei and William Harvey, and remained a leading center of medical investigation attracting an international faculty of students and professors until the eighteenth century. At the same time, the study of Aristotelian natural philosophy in original Greek texts was largely emancipated from the faculty of theology at Padua, nurturing innovative discourses on experimental method by figures such as Giacomo Zabarella and the anatomist Fabricius Aquapendente.

The unique intellectual climate at Padua has thus attracted significant scholarly attention in the history and philosophy of early modern science. However, the university’s important relationships with the thriving world of artisan guilds and their commercial practices in the nearby city of Venice have not received due attention in historical scholarship. To address this issue, this dissertation focuses upon a unique group of guild-trained medical practitioners in Venice – apothecaries – to trace the circulations of materials, skills, and expertise between Padua and the Venetian marketplace. Drawing on the methods of urban history, medical anthropology, literary studies and intellectual history, I conceptualize Venice as an important “contact zone,” or space of dialogue between scholarly and artisanal modes of investigating and representing nature between the latter sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, I focus upon emerging apothecary strategies for retailing nature to public audiences through their medicinal creations, printed books, licensing petitions, and their pharmacy shops. Through these practices, apothecaries not only marketed commercial remedies during a period of growing interest in pharmaceutical matters, but also fashioned their own expertise as learned medical practitioners linking both theory and practice; head and hand; natural philosophy and practiced skill. In 1565 Venice’s apothecaries made their first effort to define their trade as a liberal profession in establishing a College of Apothecaries that lasted until 1804. Already by the turn of the eighteenth century, however, Venice’s apothecaries had adopted the moniker as “Public Professors” and engaged in dialogue with leading professors at Padua for plans to institute a new school of “experimental medical chemistry” with the prior of the apothecary college proposed as its first public demonstrator. Looking to a wide variety of statements on the urban pharmacy in Venice in published medical books, pharmacopeias, trade manuals, literary works, civic rituals and archival licensing and regulatory decrees, I trace the evolution of the public apothecary trade in Venice, paying particular attention to the pharmacy’s early modern materialization as a site of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the artisan workshop and the university world inhabited by scholars.

My readings of these sources lead to three important conclusions regarding the significance of apothecary retailing to the scientific culture of early modern Italy. First, the urban terrain of artisan practice in a merchant republic must be placed alongside the traditionally studied princely courts and universities as a fertile ground for dialogue between artisans and scholars in the study of nature. Second, apothecary investments in processing and retailing nature during this period made significant contributions to the material culture of early modern science in both mediating a growing pharmacopeia of exotic materials imported from around the globe, and in fashioning workshop models for the first university chemical laboratories instituted at Padua in the eighteenth century. And third, apothecary marketing strategies expressing their own medical expertise over nature’s materials articulated a fusion of textual learning and manual skill that offered some of the earliest profiles of the experimental practitioner that was eventually adopted in the public discourse of the experimental New Sciences by the latter seventeenth century.

As a saint with no biblical or historical basis for her legend, St. Anne could change radically over time with cultural and doctrinal shifts even as her status as Mary's mother remained at the core of her legend and provided an appearance of consistency. "Mother, Matron, Matriarch: Sanctity and Social Change in the Cult of St. Anne, 1450-1750" takes issue with the general view that the cult of St. Anne in Northern Europe flourished in the late Middle Ages, only to wither away in the Reformation, and advances a new understanding of it. It does so by taking a longer view, beginning around 1450 and extending to 1750 in order to show how St. Anne's cult and the Holy Kinship elucidated long-term shifts in religious and cultural mores regarding the relationships between domesticity and sanctity, what constituted properly pious lay behavior, and attitudes towards women (in particular older women). Materials used include vita, devotional texts, confraternal records, sermons, treatises, and works of art across the time period under investigation. After a definite period of decline during the mid-sixteenth century (as evidenced by lower pilgrimage statistics, confraternity records, and a lack of text production), St. Anne enjoyed a revival in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholicism in a "purified" form, reconfigured to suit new religious and social norms which emphasized patriarchal authority within the household and obedience to the Catholic Church among the laity. In this context, St. Anne became a humble, pious widow whose own purity serves as proof of Mary's Immaculate Conception, and whose meek devotion to her holy daughter and grandson exemplified properly obedient reverence for the laity.

This thesis offers an analysis of the Venetian empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from a new perspective. In the past many historians tended to view the empire as the construction of the merchant elites in Venice itself as they sought to aggrandize and control territories in northern Italy, the Adriatic, and the eastern Mediterranean. Still other scholars have interpreted these efforts at expansion and control in terms of colonialism. Yet, these attempts generally fail to unpack the geopolitical complexities of Venice’s varied subject populations, while casting them as passive bystanders, if not victims. Focusing on the Adriatic – which included most of the dominions of the Venetian Stato da mar – this work breaks away from center-periphery analyses and the colonializing models of the past, and argues that Venetian imperial sovereignty was established through the interactions of local populations with the metropole. Ultimately, I argue, the Venetian empire was made by this very interaction. Petitions, the legal medium through which subjects established a direct contact with the sovereign authority, are central to this study. With their requests and grievances, the petitioners not only expressed their political agency, but also provided the inputs that set in motion the Venetian state machine. The textual analysis of these petitions – informed by a variety of interpretative tools borrowed from cultural anthropology, legal sociology and linguistics – reveals that the imperial discourse of power between sovereign and subjects, although asymmetrical, was a dialectical one. The study of the rhetorical structures and tropes of the petitions shows that the relationship was articulated according to the cultural paradigms of Mediterranean honor and grace. The idiom of honor appears to be the common ground, the shared values that allowed the communication between sovereign and subjects, and it is perceptible at every level of the interaction, gendering hierarchies at both the micro and macro level. The two case studies that emerge from painstaking research in Italian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Greek archives make apparent how the diverse interests and experiences of the subjects determined the juridical particularism through which Venice expressed its sovereignty. More specifically, the first study, centered in the island of Corfu, shows how local tensions between old élite groups and newcomers became an imperial concern for the Venetian government. The Corfiot parties, the Venetian representatives and the sovereign bodies of the Republic engaged in legal rituals in which each party knew the role they played and anticipated the other’s response, reshaping accordingly their mutual interaction. The second case study further problematizes the imperial dimension, moving to the Ottoman-Venetian frontier between Albania, Montenegro and Dalmatia. This microhistorical analysis explores the life of a cultural broker of Kotor, on which Venice relied to manage the region and the relationship with neighboring population and Ottoman authorities. Following the ways in which he developed his communication with Venice, this second study emphasizes how the model of Mediterranean honor not only defined the strategies of the subjects, but also undergirded the behavior of the Venetian institutions towards petitions, establishing and justifying both hierarchical order and reciprocity. The picture of the Venetian empire that emerges is one (almost) literally made by a myriad of particular interests that required to be checked and measured, and that needed the interventions of the Venetian governing bodies to be legitimized. In other words, the Republic, exercising sovereignty through its jurisdiction, depended upon the proactive role of the subjects who constantly provided inputs that demanded to be addressed. Thus, Venice needed a continuous frenetic exchange within its empire, in order to reaffirm its self-proclaimed image of Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic.

The second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own so as to govern them better. Overlooking the contributions of many of these colonial officials, most historians have located the genesis of the French social theory used to understand these differences in the hallowed halls of Parisian universities and research institutes. This dissertation instead argues that colonial experience and study drove metropolitan theory. Through a contextualized examination of the published and unpublished writings and correspondence of key thinkers who bridged the notional metropolitan-colonial divide, this dissertation reveals intellectual networks that produced knowledge of societies in North and West Africa and contemplated the nature of colonial rule. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, a succession of soldiers and administrators engaged in dialogue with their symbiotic colonial sources to translate indigenous ideas for a metropolitan audience and humanize French rule in Africa. Developing ideas in part from a reading of native African written and oral sources, these particular colonial thinkers conceived of social structure and race in civilizational terms, placing peoples along a temporally-anchored developmental continuum that promised advancement along a unique pathway if nurtured by a properly adapted program of Western intervention. This perspective differed significantly from the theories proposed by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim, who described "primitivity" as a stage in a unilinear process of social evolution. French African political and social structures incorporated elements of this intellectual direction by the mid-twentieth century, culminating in the attempt by Jacques Soustelle to govern Algeria with the assistance of ethnological institutions. At the same time, Pierre Bourdieu built on French ethnological ideas in an empirically grounded and personally contingent alternative to the dominant structuralist sociological and anthropological perspective in France.

Approached as an interdisciplinary study, this dissertation considers colonial knowledge from a number of different angles. First, it is a history of French African ethnology viewed through a biographical and microhistorical lens. Thus, it reintroduces the variance in the methods and interpretations employed by individual scholars and administrators that was a very real part of both scientific investigation and colonial rule. Race, civilization, and progress were not absolutes; definitions and sometimes applications of these terms varied according to local and personal socio-cultural context. This study also considers the evolution of French social theory from a novel perspective, that of the amateur fieldworker in the colonies. Far from passive recipients of metropolitan thought, these men (and sometimes women) actively shaped metropolitan ideas on basic social structure and interaction as they emerged. In the French science de l'homme, intellectual innovation came not always from academics in stuffy rooms, but instead from direct interaction and dialogue with the subjects of study themselves.

As a multinational state with a population that spoke eleven different languages, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was considered an anachronism during the age of heightened nationalism leading up to the First World War. This situation has made the search for a single Austro-Hungarian identity so difficult that many historians have declared it impossible. Yet the Dual Monarchy possessed one potentially unifying cultural aspect that has long been critically neglected: the extensive repertoire of marches and patriotic music performed by the military bands of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army. This Militärmusik actively blended idioms representing the various nationalist musics from around the empire in an attempt to reflect and even celebrate its multinational makeup. Much in the same way that the Army took in recruits from all over the empire, its diverse Militärkapellmeister - many of whom were nationalists themselves - absorbed the local music of their garrison towns and incorporated it into their patriotic compositions. Though it flew in the face of the rampant ethnonationalism of the time, this Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik was an enormous popular success; Eduard Hanslick and Gustav Mahler were drawn to it, Joseph Roth and Stephan Zweig lionized it, and in 1914, hundreds of thousands of young men from every nation of the empire marched headlong to their ultimate deaths on the Eastern Front with the music of an Austro-Hungarian march in their ears. This dissertation explores how military instrumental music reflected a special kind of multinational Austro-Hungarian state identity between 1867 and 1914. In the first part of my dissertation, I examine the complex political backdrop of the era and discuss the role and demographic makeup of the k.u.k. Armee. I then go on to profile the military musicians themselves, describe the idiomatic instrumentation of the military ensembles, and analyze significant surviving works from this repertoire by Julius Fucik and Carl Michel Ziehrer. The results of this study show how Austro-Hungarian Militärmusik synthesized conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism to create a unique musical identity that, to paraphrase Kaiser Franz Joseph, brought together the best elements of each nation for the benefit of all.

On Christmas Day in 1788, on the eve of a year which was to see the entire Atlantic world once more convulsed with revolution and war, a struggling farmer and occasional fisherman from the village of Mousehole in western Cornwall turned his back on the sea. William Carvosso had never found maritime life to his liking, and for some time been looking for an opportunity to, in his words, support himself and his family "wholly on the land." So when that opportunity finally did arise Carvosso was quick to move his young family to a rented farm near the inland village of Ponsanooth. With a little capital and zealous stewardship Carvosso began to thrive in his new home. The move, which at first glance seemed to take the family from cosmopolitan littoral to parochial isolation, was actually the first step of an intergenerational journey that saw Carvosso's children and grandchildren witness convict hangings in Van Diemen's Land, the Tai-ping Rebellion in Shanghai, Blackfoot and Plains Cree horse raids on the Great Plains, and the trafficking of indentured labor from India to the Caribbean. The vehicle which transported the Carvossos about the globe - and which facilitated their rise as a family from the laboring classes to the lower reaches of respectability and beyond - was the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion and its ancillary Missionary Society. The following dissertation is concerned with the Carvossos' movements, and the ideology by which they encouraged, made sense of, and justified their imperial adventures.

The Carvossos left evidence of their activities scattered about the globe. The greatest concentration of material is in church and missionary collections in London, but they also have a presence in a wide range of provincial and colonial archives and newspapers. Their movement allows us to attend to not just the Empire and the Nation, but to the transnational and the local, the provincial and the metropolitan, and the mutual constitution of those various categories. They were never fixed in one site but travelled from their original home in the village of Mousehole, to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Shanghai, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, Jamaica and frequently back to England. The Carvossos identified themselves by turn as Cornish, English, British, or Colonial, depending on their circumstances. Their active participation in transatlantic Methodism, global Evangelicalism, and Cornish Revivalism further complicated the issue of their various imperial identities, and helps reveal the complexities and contradictions of colonial life in the nineteenth-century British Empire.