Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

See Weaving, patterned

1. Concept The word samurai (earlier  saburai; derived from  samurau/ saburau, “to serve”, “to wait on”) refers today in general to members of the warrior class in early modern Japan. Until the Heian period (794-1192), saburai were servants of the nobles at the imperial court. Only in the centuries after that did the word acquire an increasing military connotation. In early modern Japanese literature,  bushi was the usual term for members of the warrior caste (it is familiar in the west from the term bushido, “way of the warrior”), and  buke for the caste itself.Early modern Eur…

Sanitary refurbishment or urban renewal (German  Assanierung) in the Central European urban hygiene discourse denotes structural alterations made for hygienic, technical, social, or traffic-related reasons [6. 26], with particular emphasis on hydraulic engineering.1. HygieneConcepts of water hygiene based on the evidence of the senses were already widespread in pre-industrial society. Ever since the trauma of the devastating plague epidemic in the mid-14th century, the “pestilential” air and contaminated soil associated with…

See Sanitary refurbishment | Urban sanitation

1. Concept“ Sans-culottes,” declared the  Annales patriotiques et littéraires of August 25, 1793, “are not the ‘trouserless ones’ as generally asserted. It was the arrogant presumption of the aristocracy that invented this term [...], yet precisely because they were so called by the aristocrats, the friends of liberty took this epithet as a badge of honor. They call themselves  sans-culottes in order to make clear [...] that they want nothing to do with the aristocrats and stand with the broad populace.”As this newspaper notice indicates, sans-culottes (without knee-breeches) …

1. Concept“Satire” denotes not so much a certain literary form as a principle of aggressive critical portrayal that can manifest itself in literature, other arts (e.g. pictorial or graphic caricature), or forms of conduct in everyday communication. Even as a literary term, “satire” cannot be said to refer to any particular genre tradition, but rather to a way of writing that can arise in any relevant genre (prose satire in narrative texts, satirical comedy in drama, or satirical poetry) or text f…

Criticism and satire have accompanied the scholar and scholarly work since classical antiquity, when the Greek sophists for the first time in Europe created the conditions for professional intellectual work by teaching for money. Aristophanes’  Clouds (423 bce) then founded the genre of scholarly satire. At the ‘Thinkery,’ the philosophical retreat presided over by Socrates, Aristophanes creates a caricature of the art of proving oneself right by means of nitpicking and wordplay. This early example established three subject a…

1. Concept and definitionThe Sattelzeit (saddle period) is defined as the period from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. The term was coined by Reinhart Koselleck to denote a phase of historical transformation during which medieval and early modern language and the political and social conditions associated with it were superseded by the modern terminological world that continues to this day. In terms of its metaphorical character, the image of the Sattelzeit is structurally comparable to other concepts of transitional phases or interim epochs, such as the “Mi…

In Ancient Greece, a satyr play was originally a staged dance performed by actors costumed as satyrs (wild, lustful hybrid creatures). Aristotle in his  Poetics (book 4) sees them as one of the three origins of tragedy (the others being Homeric epic and the dithyramb, a form of Dionysiac choral recitation). By the 5th century bce, the satyr play (Greek satyrikon drama) had developed alongside tragedy to become a dramatic form in its own right. Satyrs played central roles in it, turning familiar myths into coarse comedies, for instance, as Euripides’  Cyclops (5th century bce) does …

See Noble savage

1. Idea and beginningsSavings banks are financial institutions that emerged in the late 18th century, inspired by the Enlightenment. There had been similar projects in Northern Europe earlier, such as the  mont-de-piété (mount of piety, a public pawn shop as a charitable institution based on an Italian ecclesiastical model) of Hugues Delestre in Paris (1611) and Daniel Defoe’s project of a “pension office” in England (1697), conceived on the principle of the mutual savings funds for mariners and widows. Both may be thought o…

1. ConceptSaxon law (German Sächsisches Recht, Sächsisch-magdeburgisches Recht) was a relatively coherent complex of norms in the Saxon jurisdiction (Saxony, Prince-Bishopric of Magdeburg, Thuringia, Anhalt, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Guelph territories, parts of Holstein and Silesia; Particular law), which formed in the late Middle Ages on the basis of the  Sachsenspiegel and Magdeburg municipal law and acquired relatively autonomous form alongside the  ius commune (which had developed from the reception of other legal systems) [19]. During the early mode…

See Fachwerk

1. Metaphysical rootsAccording to a well-known theory of Arthur O. Lovejoy, the idea of a scala naturae, a great chain of being, literally a “ladder of nature,” according to which all beings constitute a hierarchical sequence based on their degree of perfection, dominated natural philosophy and natural history until well into the 18th century. According to Lovejoy, this idea was rooted in three metaphysical principles: the principle of fullness, which holds that anything that can be thought of also exists; the…

1. Definition and metaphorThe primary purpose of scales is to determine weights. The original principal was to compare an existing, defined weight with a second weight to be determined, using a double-sided lever responding to the force of gravity. The principle of balancing opposed torsional moments also accounts for the difficulties involved in the ideal construction of scales and in their use. In his  Idiota de staticis experimentis (1450; “The Layman on Experiments Done with Weight-Scales”), the philosopher and mathematician Nicholas of Cusa considered sc…

1. DefinitionThe term scandal – from Greek  skándalon, “(trigger of a) snare” (Latin  scandalum, especially biblical, “cause of offence,” “stumbling block”) – appeared in French in the 17th century as a (pejorative) synonym for “public sensation”; like the verb scandalize (create a sensation), it was then borrowed by the other European languages (German at the beginning of the 18th century [4]. It denotes both a sensational public event and the sensation itself, that is, discussion of it.  Scandal can thus be defined as the sum of reactions to a flagrant offense again…

See Stage design

1. DefinitionA Schenkung (donation) in German usage is a legal transaction in which one party (donor) conveys property to another (donee) without receiving return consideration. A Schenkung may take the form of a manual donation [5. 74–103], whereby the gifted object is immediately delivered to the donee and the form of a promise of a later donation. Schenkungen are generally possible only inter vivos, but donations  mortis causa arranged between living parties but not taking effect until the death of the donor are also possible. The lack of return cons…

1. SurveyThe term  schísma (cleavage, separation) is a Greek loanword that was taken over untranslated into Church Latin and modern languages. It denotes (1) the process of separating from the church, (2) the resulting status, and (3) the separated group. A schism differs from a heresy in being directed not against the faith but against the unity of the church. Augustine provided a succinct formula around 400: “Schism exists when when someone who shares the same belief and observes the same rites as the others relishes solely the breakup of the community” ( Contra Faustum 20.3). His …

See Religion, wars of