Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

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1. ConceptThe folk play (German Volksstück) was a specific form of popular theater. The term is generally used in the context of German-language theater history. The most characteristic form emerged in the Vienna  Volkstheater in the late 18th century. Its heyday came in the 19th century and it spawned successors in variants of boulevard theater as well as (to this day) in sophisticated, sometimes socially critical plays. The Volkstheater [5] was relatively unstandardized and adopted effective modes of portrayal from a range of stage traditions, including m…

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1. History of nutrition 1.1 Issues and scope of inquiryAccording to the school of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, nutrition counted as a social “complete phenomenon,” which, in the sphere of the everyday (Everyday world), “is inextricably linked to other forms of existence” [31]. In the course of the social-historical paradigm shift from the late 1960s, the concept of nutrition became the focus of strong interest for the first time. In German-speaking research, it was economic history, social history, and the history of everyday li…

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1. England, France, Germany In the early modern era, food riots were closely connected to actual food shortages (Famine and food riots), but were also partly driven by rumor and reactions to it. Fundamentally, rioting was mostly over bread, but there were also general food riots over price rises or shortages of various grocery items (Food). To a certain extent, these riots were a part of everyday life in the early modern era, although there were significant differences between individual regions suc…

1. General Even before the early modern era, creation of shelf-stable foods was one of the fundamental processes designed to secure the food supply of a greater proportion of the population. The unpredictability of harvest yields (see Famine and food riots), as well as the seasonally dependent supply of specific foods, called for stockpiling. With long-distance trade of foodstuffs in its infancy, people in the Middle Ages and the early modern era were obliged to preserve a significant portion of t…

See Bread | Fat consumption | Fisheries | Food | Fruit | Meat consumption | Milk | Vegetable

1. General In the early modern era, urban consumers spent a large percentage of their income on food. As a natural consequence, many people found employment in the foodstuffs trade. Bakers and butchers comprised the most numerous profession in the towns (including market towns); millers, brewers, and fishermen were also strongly represented. Additionally, there were numerous ancillary trades among the core professions and activities of the foodstuffs industry to supply the cities (Provisions, urban supply of[6. 35–38]).Reinhold Reith 2. Millers and bakers Given the impo…

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1. Concept and definition The term  Narrenliteratur (“fool’s literature”) is already attested in the  Deutsches Wörterbuch of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and in the second half of the 19th century it established itself as a catch-all term for satirical, didactic, and entertaining texts with figurations of the fool and folly at their center. Unlike Narrensatire, the concept also includes stage works (Schwank). Narrenliteratur is defined as specifically an early modern phenomenon that emerged from late medieval urban culture. Its heyday was between 1490 and 1…

1. Definition Sport historians often date the history of football only from the codification of the modern rules by the Football Association, founded in 1863 at London [3]. This, however, was not football per se, but rather “association football,” abbreviated to “soccer.” Clearly, football existed before it was institutionalized by the association, even if it looked different from today, and more closely resembled present-day rugby or American football.In the early modern period, football was a wild, anarchic game of battling for a ball, which could be addre…

A footnote is a notation, such as a commentary or a reference to literature or sources, placed at the bottom of the page for ease of reading, usually in a smaller font. They are indexed in the main text by means of superscript numbers or special symbols like the asterisk.The glosses and annotations in medieval theological and juristic literature can be seen as the forerunners of the footnote. With the invention of printing, printed marginalia represented a further progression. As well as clarifications and notes on sources, these marginali…

Foraging denotes mostly the collecting of wild food resources [11. 278] - wild plants and parts thereof (fruits, seeds, flowers, buds, leaves, roots, bark) and animal products (e.g. snails, shellfish, birds’ eggs). In the early modern period, wild resources were extremely widely used as foods, herbs, spices, and human and animal medicines (Plants, medicinal), and they were consumed at many stages of processing, for example as vegetables, purees, salads, sauces, jams, dried fruits, juices, fruit punches and brandies, oils, vinegars, and medical preparations.On the one ha…

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