Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

In France the term  estable, based on Latin  stabulum (“stable”) and Vulgar Latin  staplus (related to German  Stapel, “pile, batch”), came to denote a staple with a sales monopoly on all kinds of goods. From the mid-15th century on,  estappe/ étape meant the totality of the food and fodder that had been assembled in a single place to supply the military. After the mid-16th century, this led to an independent system for provisioning the army, closely related to the arrangements for provisioning the general population. With the appearance of increasingly large bodies of tr…

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1. Definition and major typesEthics (Greek  ethikḗ [ téchnē], “ethics,” the art of  ḗ thos, “custom,” “practice,” “nature”) is reflection on what constitutes good and just conduct – “conduct” understood as human actions performed in freedom and thus capable of being imputed to responsible agents. Despite its character as an autonomous theoretical approach, ethics emerges from a lived ethos; despite its claim to universality, every ethics initially posits particular cultural, religious, or ideological convict…

1. DefinitionEthnicity is generally understood as consciousness of belonging to an ethnos or ethnic group. The term has only been in use since the mid-20th century. It has become a key category in the social sciences since the 1970s, with the evident failure of the expectation that immigrant groups in the United States would fully assimilate in the medium term (the “melting-pot” ideology) and with the emergence of regionalist movements in Western Europe (e.g. Scots, Basques, Corsicans) and indigenous organizations elsewhere in the world (e.g. Native North and South Americans) [11…

The term “ethnography” (from the Greek  éthnos, “people”; gráphein, “to write”) denotes the description of a certain, primarily foreign culture. In a scholarly context, ethnography is a subdiscipline of ethnology, providing the empirical data for ethnological interpretation. The basis for scholarly descriptions of a culture is information obtained in stationary field research, primarily through interviews and participatory observation [2].The roots of ethnography go back to Antiquity. The father of the discipline was the Greek historian Herodotus. O…

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1. Concept and research historyEurocentrism, formerly Europocentrism, is a key concept in the world perception of the modern age and is a subject of intense discussion in recent historiography that is influenced by theories of postcolonialism. The issue is not merely a European variant of the ethnocentrism that is a constant in human history (Humankind), nor merely a particular, fundamental European attitude wedded to prejudices against outsiders (Foreignness). Rather, the concept concerns the categ…

1. Europe as a historiographic concept 1.1. The rediscovery of Europe in contemporary historiographyThe discourse on Europe has intensified since the European Economic Community (EEC) developed into the European Union (EU) and the expansion of the EU acquired a new dynamic. At the beginning of the process of Europeanization, in the mid-1950s, there was nothing to compare with today's deluge of essays and learned treatises from all possible corners of intellectual and political life, probably because no one y…

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1. Definition and Concept The research concept and presentation model of a history of European religion [11] relate to specific developments in Europe that reached an initial climax in the Renaissance and were fully developed in the early modern period. After the phase of evangelization between the 6th and 14th centuries, traditional histories of Europe’s religion (Religion, history of) [4]; [18]; [7] – with varying chronological and territorial boundaries –  divide the continent neatly into distinct Christian and non-Christian components.Instead of such an “additive” hist…