Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

1. ConceptName days and birthdays are “anniversaries shared collectively but celebrated individually” and located in the calendar [7. 79]. They became popular celebrations in the early modern period (Festival), with name days becoming distinctly Catholic in tone and birthdays distinctly Protestant. The celebration of the name day is based on a cyclical concept of time. The festivity is not focused on the individual, but on the annual return of the memory of the saint whose name the day marks. In contrast, the c…

1. ForenamesEarly modern naming was governed by religious, cultural, and political trends. In Germany, forenames of Christian connotation (especially after New Testament figures and saints) generally prevailed at the beginning of the period. Unlike in Romance Europe, the forename Maria was avoided in the German-speaking lands until the 16th century out of religious discretion, only then becoming widespread in both confessions. At first, the Reformation changed little. The inventory of New Testame…

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1. Introduction The term “Napoleonic Wars” denotes the warfare in Europe between 1798/99 or 1803, and 1815. The attribute “Napoleonic” emphasizes the central role of Napoleon Bonaparte, who placed his political and military mark on this period in European history. As Emperor of the French, he took responsibility for a far-reaching hegemonic policy of conquest across Europe, the successes and ultimate failure of which were military in origin. The term Napoleonic Wars is mainly used in the English and French-speaking worlds [8]; [23]; [10]; [22], and it distinguishes this pha…

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1. ConceptA national assembly is a popular representative body that meets as a legislature (Parliament) to debate and decide fundamental issues of state. In the case of constituent assemblies, those issues generally relate to establishing the institutional basis for the political organization of a nation, specifically promulgating a constitution. Where they meet in conditions of disruption to state power, their legitimacy is often disputed. A national assembly gains its authority through a regula…

1. DefinitionThe phrase shares the vagueness of it elements ‘nation’ and ‘church’. It is therefore not clearly definable legally or theologically, and scholars often use it descriptively (“efforts toward a national church”). In strict usage, it denotes an autonomously constituted church that embraces a nation (defined politically or ethnically) or is recognized by most of the nation’s members as “their” church. In a broader sense, the expression also denotes churches of individual states or ethni…

1. Concept and characteristicsThe term “national history” denotes on the one hand the construct of a past context of events that is identified with the destiny of a nation, and on the other hand the historiographic process of describing that context, and thus also to some extent of fabricating it. To preserve the distinction between these two senses, it seems wise to use the term “national myth” to refer to the construct of the past – “myth” here not implying fiction or falsehood, but rather a narr…

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1. IntroductionIt is self-evident to citizens of Europe today that the languages of their home countries function as means of communication on all political levels of the European Union on an equal basis. Yet the process whereby the languages of the European nations were defined and developed into effective instruments of communication in all fields of life was a long and problematic one. Even today, there is still a widespread view that the history of the national languages of Europe began in th…

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National monuments in the broadest sense are large sculptural or architectural objects that symbolically evoke a community that perceives itself as a nation, or are themselves intended to engender such an “imagined order.” They may express a society’s understanding of itself and serve the public dissemination of political, cultural, and social values or ideas by calling to mind historical figures, groups, and events or representing an idea. Such sacral places of commemoration may be structures of a wide range of types, including columns, temples, or churches.Modern nationalism…

1. Concept and introductionAny narrative giving an account of factual or fictional events as a contribution to the construction and cohesion of a nation may be called a national myth. Every ruling organization produces “consolidated histories” (“fundierende Geschichten”) [13. 52] attesting to its heroic origins and a past marked by tough challenges successfully passed, and prophesying a great future. In this way, power structures acquire the appearance of a higher necessity, and rulers and ruled become integrated into a unique and…

National style offers just one possible category for differentiating musical phenomena according to stylistic peculiarities. Others include epoch, genre, or personal style, while recently musical style has also been defined as “a replication of patterning [...] in human behavior” [4. 3]. As a historical construct, national style is itself a subject of research, which illustrates the “fundamental methodological problems” inherent in the use of this category [3. 35].After first beginnings from the 14th century [3], the idea of attributing stylistic differences to n…

A national symbol may be any object, sign, or emblem that carries additional meaning and represents a cultural or political nation. It is a basic element of national identification and communication, and of national action. The meanings of national symbols may evolve and be replaced, being invoked, or indeed constructed, in their political, social, and cultural application. As a rule, they are closely associated with the real or invented tradition of the “imagined order” of the nation…

1. ConceptA national theater today is a highly renowned, often subsidized theatrical institution of a state or country, usually in its capital city. In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, it was a model venue for performances in the national language. The first institution endowed with this role as cultural policy was the Comédie Française (or Théâtre Français), founded in 1680 by King Louis XIV to merge the two leading Parisian troupes of actors and cultivate the works of Molière, Corneille, a…

1. Terminological historyTo this day, the nation remains a central political concept of apparently uninterrupted allure. It has claimed for itself the status of a supreme, quasi-religious value. In its name, public servants are sworn in, judgments passed, wars waged, and masses of people mobilized.  Despite the growing importance of supra-national institutions, the collapse of state structures in many parts of the world, the revival of religion as a political driving force in the Islamic world, an…

1. Nation and stateA key concept of political modernity, the “nation” aims to bring together a multiplicity of people in a permanent community of shared values and support with the help of an integrative ideology (Nation, nationalism). Modern studies of nationalism have shown that, despite purportedly existing since time immemorial as a quasi-natural element of the political order, nations only come about where a practical reference to a particular territorial area coincides with at least the begin…

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1. IntroductionA natural catastrophe is generally defined as an extreme event of natural origin that has a direct and destructive impact on people and areas of human settlement. Three basic types are distinguished by cause:(1) Geotectonic natural events. These include, primarily, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and consequent  mass-wasting events (landslides, rock falls, mudslides, avalanches, etc.) triggered by tremors in the earth’s crust.(2) Extreme natural events caused by short, medium, and long-term weather phenomena. Sudden or persistent he…

1. “Economy” of nature as a cultural conceptJust as human beings frequently imagined their gods anthropomorphically, so too have they used terminology from human culture in their observations and descriptions of nature. An apparently extra-human nature, observed by this culture, could be conceptualized in familiar terms. An example is the application of the term “household” or “household economy” as an orderly whole, methodically uniting the most diverse functions, to nature, which then appears as a co…

1. Concept and prior historyWith astronomy, natural history is one of the oldest sciences in the written record. Mesopotamian cuneiform texts listing plant and animal names survive from as far back as the early 2nd millennium BCE. This text type, known as “list science,” probably originated as practice material in the training of scribes, but in all early written cultures (including India and China) it very quickly took on lexical and encyclopedic forms [29. 32–47]. In terms of systematic and argumentative structure, these ancient traditions reached an early zenith i…

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1. Concept The Natural History School (German: Naturhistorische Schule) was a tendency of the first half of the 19th century in clinical medicine, distinguished by its strictly empirical procedures and rejecting on principle the use of general theories of illness (e.g. humoralism, vitalism, Broussaiism, Brunonianism, homeopathy, etc.; cf. Therapeutic concepts). It was therefore in conscious opposition to schools of medical thought based on natural philosophy (e.g. that of Schelling). Instead, it advocat…

1. Terminological historyA general understanding of naturalism as the representation of nature in art was closely associated in the early modern period with theories of the imitation of nature (Latin  imitatio naturae; cf. Mimesis). Yet the fact that nature was studied is not evidence in itself of naturalism (cf. Nature study [art]). Study in nature (as opposed to working in the studio) was a possible positive connotation of naturalism, but the term could equally be negative in tone, indicating a breach of the norms of imitatio, which aimed at a representation of nature that wa…

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1. Introduction 1.1. TerminologyPhilosophy of law (Latin  philosophia iuris; French  philosophie du droit; German  Rechtsphilosophie) is understood to be a subdiscipline of jurisprudence and philosophy that is dedicated to fundamental philosophical questions about law and the state and the investigation of certain legal problems from a philosophical perspective. The term natural law (Latin  ius naturae or  naturale; French  droit de la nature; German  Naturrecht) designates a complex of legal norms that are presumed to be valid independent of positive…

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1. Concept and research positionsThe term “natural philosophy” lacks a unanimous definition. In the first centuries of the early modern period, it was still largely synonymous with a general science of nature that was a central component of philosophy. As empirical knowledge came to be regarded as the prototype of reliable (philosophical) knowledge (Empiricism; see below, 3.), so the term natural philosophy even began to be used as a synonym for experimental physics – it was still so used at Scottis…

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1. ConceptNatural science today denotes the fields of science that strive for understanding of natural processes and conditions, as distinct from the social, economic, technical, and human sciences that deal with human culture and technology (Humanities). There is recurrent debate over whether medicine should be counted among the natural sciences or treated as a separate field in its own right. Natural science denotes not only a specific subject of study, but also a professional field and a group…

1. Introduction Natural science and the Christian religion generally coexisted productively in the European early modern period, until the advent of mechanism and materialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, which brought them in some respects into opposition.The notion that early modern natural history had emerged from a secularization of nature and an emancipation of nature study from Christianity, and indeed that it represented an act of human self-assertion against the authority of an omnipotent God and his church [5. 22 f., 135, 229–233], requires some revision.…

1. BackgroundThe term natural theology goes back to pre-Christian Greek philosophy, where – distinguished critically from mythical theology and political theology – it denoted philosophical knowledge of God appropriate to the divine nature. Early Christian theology adopted this tradition but also went beyond it by referring to the knowledge of God acquired through revelation. But while Augustine, for example, still assumed that the Christian doctrine of God coincides with the true form of natural th…

1. Definition and etymologyThe natural philosopher Robert Boyle, concerned that the idea of nature as an active agent was infringing on that of the omnipotence of God, complained in his Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686) that “the generality of men, though they will acknowledge that nature is inferior and subordinate to God, do yet appear to regard her more than him” [32. 347, 350]. Paraphrasing Boyle, the chemist Johann von Löwenstern-Kunckel around 1700 derided the uncertainty of the word “nature” in use, while making a statement…

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1. Definition, functions, and related topoiThe concept of the “nature of things” is a topos that has been used from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, a formulaic expression that is supposed to refute an argument or justify a decision. Citing the nature of things represents an attempt to make an outcome seem self-evident and objective with reference to a pre-existing order.  The decision in question is presented as determined by “nature,” thus by the “structure” or “essence” of a certain living or…

1. IntroductionThe relation to nature is a historical phenomenon. Its conventions depend on whatever, on the basis of religious, philosophical, cultural, or social dispositions (Culture), happens to be codified as nature. Intellectual presuppositions structure patterns that generate practice, such as the interpretive practice of the history of mentality, the history of science, or of the study of cultural [4. 118–131]. Technological, environmental, and economic histories, on the other hand, derive this relationship from the degree to which nature …

1. ConceptThe term “nature religion” is today mostly applied to religions that, unlike the major book religions, make nature itself the sacred heart of their belief system. Such a nature religion has even been declared an essential feature of American cultural history, a position that has been adopted in self-identification by neo-pagan groups espousing modern, nature-based spirituality [1]. This description may be seen as a positive re-interpretation of an older, negative category, namely the idea of nature religions as religions of “natural pe…

1. DefinitionThe term nature study, in art, denotes a practice determined by direct visual contact between the drawer or painter and the natural subject. The creative act is determined by the interplay of eye and hand, with the aim of committing what is seen to the paper or canvas at hand (cf. fig. 1; Mimesis). Nature study is an expression of the early modern relation to nature (Nature, relation to), and is closely associated with the emergence of a pictorial culture that was indebted to visual experience in a particular way.Traces of the artistic practice are found dating back to…

1. Concept and origins The term “naturism” was adopted in English from the French naturisme as originally denoting “a view which attributes everything to nature as a sage, prescient and sanative entity” (OED, attested 1848: Robley Dunglison, Medical Lexicon: A New Dictionary of Medical Science, 7th edition, 1848). Early in the 20th century, it acquired specific connotations of nudity under the influence of the wide range of movements across Europe advocating lifestyle reform, natural therapy, “free body culture” (German  Freikörperkultur), sport, and youth, as well as Ar…

1. ConceptNaturopathy in the strict sense took shape in the German-speaking world in the early 19th century, inspired by Rousseau’s demand “back to nature” (Rousseauism). It vehemently opposed allopathic school medicine, its dangerous drugs, and its excessive use of bleeding and voiding therapies, and promoted instead a turn to natural methods of healing and living. To begin with, the focus was entirely on hydrotherapy (Baths, therapeutic) and vegetarianism. This core was expanded over the course…

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