Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

1. Introduction Like masculinity, femininity is a cultural construct manufactured in discourses and social practices.  The concept relates to a principle that emerged in the 19th century of a gender order in which the feminine was opposed to the masculine and naturalized. In this context, femininity was on the one hand designed as complementary to masculinity in a system of separate spheres (public/private, culture/nature) and associated with qualities of being passive, weak, in need of protection…

See Dame | Gender roles

1. Definition Fencing today is a combat sport involving swords. Both senses of the English word fence, a perimiter barrier and a form of swordsmanship, derive etymologically from the word defence, and the synonymous Old High German term skirmen or  skrimen (Dutch  schermen, Italian  scherma, French  escrime, Spanish  esgrima, Polish  szermierka, Czech  sermovat) also indicates that originally fencing was understood defensively. On the other hand, the German term fechten, or Fechtkunst, from Middle High German term  vehten or  vuhten – like Swedish  fäkta and Russian  fechtov…

See Convent | Ladies' foundation

Fermentation (from the Latin  fermentum; “fermentation agent”, “leaven”) is one of the oldest biotechnological methods for conserving foodstuffs and manufacturing alcoholic beverages (e.g. Beer; Wine). Today, all technical transformations of a biological substrate using microorganisms or enzymes is called fermentation, but until the 19th century, the term denoted biological reactions in the absence of air, especially alcoholic fermentation. The theory of fermentation in this period was at the heart …

1. Definition In medicine and demography,  fertility (from Latin  fertilis, “fruitful, productive, fertile”) refers to human fertility, the ability (in the biological sense) to produce offspring (“fruit”; cf. fruit of the womb as a designation of the human fetus). The term  fertility is firmly rooted in human history; the central role of the ability to father and to bear children finds universal expression, in all cultural environments, in fertility rites and symbols, as well as in religions: for example in the biblical creation …

Fertility rites are ritual actions of many different kinds that aim to improve the fertility of plants, animals, or people. They are attested in many periods and a great many different regions, and their universal distribution is explained by the immense importance to human existence of fertility in plants and other living things. They played a key role in the preindustrial agrarian societies of the early modern period, particularly when climate change at the onset of the so-called Little Ice Ag…

See Manuring

1. General 1.1. OccasionsFestivals (from Latin  festus, “joyful, festive”) interrupt the routine of the everyday world, to which they contrast as a temporally and spatially limited “anti-structure” of which they are the structuring element [21]. In the early modern period, festivals marked the phases of natural, social, or individual chronologies, which could be either cyclic or linear. Cyclic chronologies included the annual agricultural cycle, the economic cycle, the church year with its recurring saint's days (Saint), and …

1. Occasions and forms Festival decorations are temporary (ephemeral) artifacts made of materials like wood, plaster, canvas, and papier maché, created only for the duration of a festival. In the literature, the term is subsumed under the concept of festival architecture. Important decorations in the early modern period were primarily made for events of political importance, whether sacred or profane (triumphal entry of a ruler, coronation, military victory, peace celebrations, births, marriages, an…

1. Concept The word ‘fetish’ derives from the Portugues feitiço (“spell”, “amulet”), which in turn derives from the Latin facticius (“artificial”) and is related to  feitiçeiro (“sorcerer”) and  feitiçaria (“sorcery”). The term became established in Portugal from the Late Middle Ages, and subsequently enjoyed an astonishing career in the early modern period, through to Karl Marx’ “commodity fetishism” in the 19th century [5. 13 f.].Jörn Sieglerschmidt 2. Africa Feitiços were already mentioned in Portugal in the first edict against witches (1385), and the word …

See Soil

A feud is a formally declared enmity and in that context the violent assertion of rights on one’s own authority. The requirements of a “right feud” were personal justification, legal grounds, declaration (for instance, by feud letter), and the use of permitted means, although there was no generally valid definition for several of these criteria. This was especially true of the justification for a feud; distinctions were frequently drawn between conventional blood vengeance and “knights’ feuds.” The archaic roots of feuds stretch far back in Germanic prehistory.Contrary to the con…

1. Concept and general development The term  feudalism (German Lehnwesen or   Feudalismus, from Latin  feodum/feudum) originated in the early modern period; it was generally used primarily to describe the constitutional and social situation in the Middle Ages. When the term is used in the context of the early modern period, it generally denotes feudal society. This usage adopts the perspective of 18th-century France, which characterized the society of the  ancien régime as a  société féodale, a social order characterized by landowners (usually nobles) and estatist …

1. Definition and originsThe basis for the state of feudal law in the early modern period was laid in the Middle Ages; its development was virtually complete by 1500 and it remained in force until the 19th century. Together with territorial law, municipal law, and manorial law (see Weistum), feudal law was one of the areas of law that constituted the general legal order of European states. The relationship between local, territorial law and feudal law in particular was complementary: where the former dominated, feudal law retreated, and vice versa.…

1. History of terminology and scholarship Early modern society did not call itself feudal or a feudal society but a society of estates (Estates, society of). It was labeled a feudal society in the French Revolution (1789), a term that also served to characterize the break with the society of the  ancien régime [6]. Feudal society represented the polemical and ideological antithesis of the revolution that produced bourgeois society, which was to supersede feudal society (see fig. 1). In historiography the term  feudal society was given a prominent place by the French histori…

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1. Definition The most infallible and timeless subjective markers and symptoms in general are the sudden, unexpected, and even unnatural perceived increase in temperature in the body, accompanied by sweating, paradoxical-seeming fits of shivering, debility, and, often, aches and pains. Texts on fever from European Antiquity define fever as significant, even when there was no distinguishing criterion in the governing theory of disease of the time to allow for further differentiation.In the 15th and 16th centuries, the conception of fever originating with Hippocrat…