Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

1. Concept The concept of communication with the afterlife depends on a binary opposition between “this world” as the world of the living and the afterlife, the world of the dead, of spirits, and gods - or in the monotheistic religions, the one God. Death marks the boundary between these worlds. Death marks the boundary between these worlds. The Enlightenment relegated the existence of the “otherworld” to the realm of fantasy. In the Christian view, the dead rest until the Day of Judgem…

1. Terminology Age distribution indicates the composition of a population according to age or the relationship of individual age groups to one another. It is the product of the complex interplay of several demographic factors, especially Fertility (which influences the proportion of infants and small children and, over the long term, also the proportion of higher age groups), age-specific mortality and life expectancy (which reflect the effect of disease and mortality risks in individual age group…

1. Staircase of Life In the normative model of the human curriculum vitae, as represented concretely in the image of the life stairs widespread in Germany and Northern Europe from the beginning of the modern period into the late 19th century, the position of old ages was prominently defined [5]. The course of human life was modeled as a curve: its rise (Latin  incrementum) represented early childhood, youth, and young adulthood, its crest represented full adulthood, and its decline ( decrementum) represented  advancing years and old age.The early life staircases of the 16th and …

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See Age distribution | Aged person | Curriculum vitae | Generation | Life expectancy | Life stairs | Old age | Youth

See Person

1. Early modern period Agency in its legal sense is an individual’s power under the law to carry out legally significant actions for and against another person, especially declarations of intention.The modern period took from Roman and canon law numerous institutions that, in today’s parlance, conferred a right of agency. Down to the present day, terminologies used in European languages document the abundance and variety of traditions spread throughout Europe (French représentation, English agency, German Stellvertretung). Distinctions have to be made between Latin ter…

See News agency

See Agent, putting-out

1. General The Early Modern Period imagined history as a closed succession of different ages of the world (Latin aetas mundi). These distinguished the different eras of world history from one another. Eschatological motives underlay this periodization until well into the 18th century. Especially during the Enlightenment, however, the interpretation of historical processes was no longer dominated by Christian teleology but rather by a comprehensive program of the progress of civilization. Open epochs took the place of closed ages.Georg Eckert 2. Sacred definitions The Christi…

See Violence

Often referred to in sources in the German-speaking areas of Europe by the use of such terms as Viehverstellung, Viehgemeinderschaft, Rinder-Miete (Cattle), Halbvieh (Métayage), Teilvieh, Bestandvieh, Zinskühe etc., agistment is a particular form of rural credit practised initially in parts of Italy, Spain, and Germany, by aristocratic and monastic seignorial institutions (Landowner) in particular, but also by non-aristocratic credit providers and medieval hospitals [6. 251–259], from the Late Middle Ages onwards [9. 105–116]. It continued to be an element of the r…

The term “agrarian capitalism”, like agricultural revolution, may be ascribed to Karl Marx. In his book Capital, he characterizes the class of tenant farmers that arose in England in the 15th and 16th centuries (Lease) as “agrarian capitalists”, and agricultural bookkeeping as a distinguishing feature of “capitalist agriculture” [1. 135 ff.]; it is also in this context that he turns his attention to the “genesis of capitalist ground rent”. Marx related the concept of agrarian capitalism both to a system of agricultural management oriented towa…

1. Definition In contrast to the concept of a land use system, which refers to the technical and operational aspects of agriculture, the term “agrarian constitution” refers to the institutional conditions that constitute the basis for economic activity in rural areas. Both formal norms such as law, contracts, legislation etc., and informal, culturally specific codes of conduct related to the control of goods and transactions (Property) may be considered institutions in an economic sense.Earlier German research on the agrarian constitution grew out of the legal histo…

1. Concept and review of scholarship The theory of a late medieval agrarian crisis is a widespread concept in the economic assessment and chronological definition of the Late Middle Ages (1350–1450). It was based originally on the theories of  Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, representatives of the classical school of economics. It also influenced M. Postan’s studies of economic history [10] and E. Le Roy Ladurie’s interpretation of European history as a whole on the basis of agricultural markets [8]. The theory of  W. Abel, which shaped academic discussion of the agrar…

The concept agrarian individualism, coined by Marc Bloch, the leading French agrarian historian between the First World War and the Second [2], describes the endpoint of agricultural development after the early modern agricultural revolution. Agrarian individualism designates the abandonment of all collective forms of land cultivation in favor of unlimited individual use with full private ownership (Property). The preconditions of agrarian individualism were the enclosure of the common land and the abolition of all…

1. Concept The term “agrarian reform” encompasses all public regulations that contributed to abolishing the complex economic system that had existed since the High Middle Ages that had tied the feudal collection of surpluses produced by peasants to collectively organized agriculture and village life. The most prominent agrarian reform is the abolition of serfdom, which was intended to create a society of free landowners in the countryside. This reform was complemented by the privatization of commo…

See Agrarian constitution | Agriculture

See Trade agreement

Since Antiquity, organic and mineral manuring has been used to improve crop yield. In the 17th century, Paracelsism gave the initial stimulus to a chemical investigation of surface soil and plant constituents. But chemical fertilization, in the form suggested during the English Revolution by the reformist circle of Samuel Hartlib [6. 384–402] or by the chemist Johann Rudolf Glauber, remained ineffective, because key questions of plant nutrition remained unanswered. While some, following Johann Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644), saw the supposed…