Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online
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Subject: History
Executive editor of the English version: Graeme Dunphy
The Encyclopedia of Early Modern History is the English edition of the German-language Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit. This 15-volume reference work, published in print between 2005 and 2012 and here available online, offers a multi-faceted view on the decisive era in European history stretching from ca. 1450 to ca. 1850 ce. in over 4,000 entries.
The perspective of this work is European. This is not to say that the rest of the World is ignored – on the contrary, the interaction between European and other cultures receives extensive attention.
New articles will be added on a regular basis during the period of translation, for the complete German version see Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit Online.
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Abandoned settlement
(1,094 words)
1. Concept and terms The modern German term for abandoned settlements,
Wüstungen (from 14th century
wustunge), relates to both abandoned settlements and abandoned agricultural areas [8. 113]. In order to cover the variety of instances of abandonment, the concept has been refined and broadened since the early days of scholarly research in the mid-19th century. Cases of abandonment are thus distinguished into abandoned villages and abandoned cadastral areas villages and abandoned cadastral areas, according to the element…
Date:
2019-03-20
Abbildungsverzeichnis zu den Ergänzungen (ab 2017)
(551 words)
Wir haben uns bemüht, für alle Abbildungen die entsprechenden Inhaber der Rechte zu ermitteln. Sollten dennoch Ansprüche offen sein, bitten wir um Benachrichtigung.
Amerika Abb. 1: Martin Waldseemüller, Globensegmentkarte (Weltkarte aus 12 Holzschnitten, nach 1507). München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Universitätsbibliothek. Cim. 107#2 (= 2 Math. 499#2). Abb. 2: Diego Gutiérrez/Hieronymus Cock, Americae sive quartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio (Landkarte, Antwerpen 1562).
Brasilien Abb. 1: Jodocus Hondius, America (Landkarte, in: Gerhar…
Date:
2017-11-28
Abolition
(3,315 words)
1. Concept and origins of the movement Abolition (from Latin
abolitio) refers to the process that brought modern slavery to an end, and the initiatives and movements associated with it. The term was first used in this specific sense around the mid-18th century in Britain and North America, and at first it primarily referred to the abolition of the slave trade. In general, it was Britain that gave the lead in abolition, having dominated the transatlantic slave trade for centuries and profited the most from…
Date:
2019-03-20
Abolitionist society
(1,244 words)
During the Enlightenment, the concepts of freedom and equality, rooted in natural law together with the conviction that slavery was contrary to Christian teaching, led to increasing criticism of the slave trade in Western Europe. In North America, Quaker groups founded abolitionist societies in Philadelphia, New York, and other cities beginning in 1775. The 1780s saw the establishment of the first such societies in Great Britain. There, too, the central role of nonconformist Protestant movemen…
Date:
2019-03-20
Absolute music
(910 words)
The expression “absolute music,” which was probably first used in 1846, has been as successful as it is vague. The term seems succinct, but from what the music is actually to be “detached” (i.e. “absolute”) is generally not specified. While it may be argued that the primary intent was to establish the independence of music from everything incidental to the notes – for instance functional contexts in liturgie (see also Worship), courtly representation and dance, the depiction of particular affect…
Date:
2019-03-20
Absolutism
(4,175 words)
1. Term The term “absolutismˮ denotes firstly the form of government of the increasingly centralized early modern princely state, and secondly the epoch from the early 17th to the late 18th century (Age of Absolutism) that was dominated by such princely states, a constitutive foundation of modern Europe. Like the term
Ancien Régime (“Former Regimeˮ), it originated in journalistic discourse of the French Revolution (1789) and indicates, likewise with a delimitative and pejorative bias, “absoluteˮ sovereign monarchy as despotic rule. The slogan gai…
Date:
2019-03-20
Academic freedom
(1,075 words)
In its original sense, academic freedom meant the rights of a university as a corporation and the privileges its members derived from them. It was based on an imperial privilege from 1158 (
Authentica habita) that granted scholars free choice of legal venue at their place of study (
libertas scholastica). Initially limited to students in Bologna, because these measures were adopted in papal and imperial university privileges, they came to exert lasting influence on the development of the status of all university members. In 1540, on the basis of
ius commune and the customary law of…
Date:
2019-03-20
Academic prizes
(943 words)
1. Introduction Academic prizes were important discursive instruments of the Enlightenment. With their association with publicity, authority, and the systematic organization of knowledge (Knowledge, organization of) in the service of public information (Knowledge), they represent (even more than knowledge media such as the periodical and encyclopedia, vital then as now) the most typical hallmark of the Enlightenment public sphere.Taking up the Humanist tradition in which learned societies crowned poets (e.g. the Viennese Collegium poetarum atque …
Date:
2019-03-20
Academy
(2,734 words)
The development of formative public institutions was a central element in the history of the modern period. Next to the university, the academy as an institution played a fundamental role in the organization of knowledge and culture. 1. Concept In 387 BC, Plato had acquired a house in a cultural complex north-west of Athens, named after the Attic hero Akademos, for his philosophical school, to which the sanctuary with gymnasium, gardens, and cult sites gave its name,
Akadḗmeia. Although a structured establishment with scholarch, “elders”, and “disciples”, it had no cu…
Date:
2019-03-20
Academy of Arts
(2,672 words)
1. Introduction The emergence of the Academy of Arts is closely connected with the development of art theory and of artists’ view of themselves in the Renaissance [10]. Art, which had been merely an artisanal skill, now became, as it was enriched with knowledge through the study of nature and the formative principles of art in proportion theory, perspective, anatomical studies, and the rediscovery of Antiquity in writings, images, and architecture, a scholarly discipline. This process had its roots in Humanism and 16th-c…
Date:
2019-03-20