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1. Term Carnival is derived from the Latin carnislevamen and Italian carnelevare (‘removal of meat’) or simply the jocular Latin interjection carne vale (‘Meat, farewell!’), and denotes abstention from all “fleshly” pleasures at the beginning of the Lenten fast. The term carnival is widely used in the Romance languages and English, and since the 17th century in the Rhineland (German Karneval). Elsewhere in the German-speaking world, the usual terms are Fastnacht or Fasnet, and in Bavaria and Austria Fasching is commonplace (from MHG vast-schanc, the last drink before Lent).Wolfga…

The term ‘fairy’ is derived, via French, from the Vulgar Latin fata (“goddess of destiny”; fatum = fate). The most intensive transmission of the fairy concept, which incorporates traditions from Classical Antiquity and elsewhere in the Indo-European world, has been in Celtic literature, where the enchantress Morgan le Fay (hence  “Fata Morgana”) in the world of Arthurian legend represents its most famous manifestation. The fairy tradition, already apparent in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (14th century), was rediscovered in the 16th century and given new dire…

1. DefinitionZedler’s Universal-Lexicon defined pleasure in 1746 as “the affect that arises from beholding or enjoying perfections,” whether in music, in architecture, or scientific knowledge. The act of enjoyment constitutes pleasure, whereby the “pleasures of the mind [ Gemüth] are the purest and most beneficial.” In the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy, pleasure comes close to the goal of felicity [1. 748–750]. Krünitz’  Oeconomische Encyclopädie (1851) associates pleasure somewhat more corporeally with “delight, sensuality, joy, amusement, etc.” …

1. Name and sources The Fuggerzeitung was a collection of letters, composed in the second half of the 16th century and containing reports and messages on political and economic matters, sent to the Augsburg merchant dynasty the Fugger family. With 27 surviving volumes of these letters from all over Europe, the Fuggerzeitung is the biggest collection of its kind.In an inventory written on the death of Octavian Secundus Fugger (1600), it was described as “a miscellany of German and Romance-language reports written between 1569 and 1599 on white parchme…

1. TerminologyAlthough the term  influenza appears as early as 1504 in the chronicle of the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci, a coherent terminology was not established until 1742/1743. According to a report in the  London Magazine of 1743 (“News from Rome of a Contagious Distemper Raging There, Call’d the Influenza”), the term was borrowed into English on the occasion of the influenza epidemic of that year. At roughly the same time, people in France began to call the illness  la grippe.While the Italian term focused on the supposed cause – the “influence of the stars” ( influenz…

1. DefinitionToday, as the Swiss, Austrians, or Bavarians go on  Ferien, the English enjoy holidays (from holy-days), or the French take  vacances, most Germans take an  Urlaub; these different terms have historical roots. The early modern definition of  Urlaub differs fundamentally from today’s definitions, which are associated with free time [10] and change of location or travel. The German term  Urlaub is associated etymologically with  erlauben (allow); according to Zedler’s  Universal-Lexicon, it means “nothing other than the permission, indulgence, …

1. General In the modern period, theoretical reflections and experiments devoted to flight were flanked by reports of supposed or actual aerial voyages, which could serve as a narrative framework for the presentation of scientific observations or a social utopia. They reflected the cosmological notions of the period and—especially in the era of the Scientific Revolution—the transition from the geocentric to the Copernican model of the world (Copernican Revolution) or from Aristotelian physics to the world view of Giordano Brunos and Isaac Newtons [3]. With the progress …

Today the couriers of the early modern period are frequently confused with post riders (Mail) or messengers. All three – couriers, post riders, and messengers – had to overcome distances and bring news under the dictates of speed (Quickness)The literature on the history of communication makes a clear distinction between mail and the courier system [6]. A courier was not an employee of a messenger service or a postal organization, but was instead “a person dispatched to distant places to convey complex oral or written news regarding important matters” [1], in other words a…

1. Theoretical aspects 1.1. The everyday world as a key historical categoryThe everyday world is both a universal and a particular category. It encompasses material circumstances and their subjective perception and interpretation in thought and feeling (Mentality), recurring behavioral routines (Rituals, games [Play, game], Sports), in some cases beings concentrated to become a habitus (Honors, Festivals, Popular culture); in a more extended sense, it also encompasses the media of perception and symbol sys…

Local time is the time related to the meridian of the place of observation, the same for all places of the same geographical longitude. “True local time,” as shown for instance by a sundial, is dictated daily by the culmination of the sun, and fluctuates with the rhythm of the equation of time. “Mean solar time,” that is, the solar time calculated in reference to the ecliptic and the elliptical shape of the Earth's orbit, as yet had no practical role, but the social acceleration in communication…

1. Term The English word “bell” is onomatopoeic, like the Latin  tintinnabulum. The corresponding German term Glocke derives, like Irish cloch, Flemish klok, Swedish klocka, French cloche and presumably also Russian kolokal from MLat. clocca. Whether the latter goes back to a Celtic clocc is disputed. It too may be onomatopoeic.Wolfgang Behringer 2. Casting and suspension The casting of bells as the preferred form of manufacture extends back into the ancient Near Eastern Bronze Age. From the 6th century it spread through the whole of Europe, but not …

The first attempts to establish social acceleration as a “historical epistemological category” cited the years around 1800, understood by many historians as an “axial age” [4. 368 f.]. Since then the entire early modern period has come to be viewed as a period in which the tempo of life increased. At the outset, the fast-moving 1520s might come to mind (the period of the wars of religion [Religion, wars of]), the revolutionary 1640s, or the “Atlantic” revolutions of the late 18th century, in which the rapid change in co…

Although the mail in Central Europe was not an institution of the Holy Roman Empire, it was felt to be “imperial” from the outset. This was because it was the King of the Romans, Maximilian I (Holy Roman Emperor from 1508), who in 1490 – during the lifetime of his father, Emperor Friedrich III – invited the Lombard family of postal pioneers, the Tasso/de Tassis/Taxis family to Innsbruck. In the early 16th century, when the mail became a public facility, it was already receiving funding from Maxi…

Pallamaglio was one of the most popular ball games of the early modern period, along with real tennis, the racquet game played with a small ball (French  jeu de paume; German  kaetsspiel; ancestor of modern tennis), the handball game pallone, played with a large, inflated ball, and soccer (Football). It was a game of striking a ball (Italian  palla) with a wooden mallet ( maglio). It required a very long, straight playing area, with an iron goal at the end. The aim was to hit the ball into the goal with as few strokes as possible. The Italian term was ad…

1. Definition In German-language scholarship, Frühe Neuzeit (literally “early new era”; cf. Italian prima età moderna; French and English lack equivalent terms) is a term denoting a subdivision of the early modern period (in the definition followed in this encyclopedia, equivalent to the German  Neuzeit, from  neue Zeit, literally “new era”), with which it shares a common start date ( c. 1450) and many defining characteristics. Among these is the precondition of the conceptual triad of a splendid Antiquity ( aetas antiqua), dark Middle Ages ( media aetas), and a radiant pres…

1. DefinitionMaterial culture is a constitutive element of the real everyday world; it is “the most conspicuous and tangible element of culture” [16]. Its production is dependent on intellectual and mental processes and ultimately on specific forms of social organization (Society [community]) – economics, language, religion, ethics, and law [16. 72]. Material culture comprises such diverse things as food (Sustenance) and clothing (Apparel), architecture and domestic culture, tools and weapons, utensils and machines, jewelry and luxury goods, …

1. Concept and subject Unlike autobiographies, ego documents are not intentionally manufactured testimonies of individuals. They therefore encroach from the conscious tradition into the sphere of what J.G. Droysen called the Überreste (“remains”). The type can include documents created in the context of administrative procedures and legal proceedings (e.g. Supplication, interview records, witness interrogations) as well as products of arts and crafts. Decipherment of the factual “remains” often requires knowledge of the hist…

1. DefinitionThe Landespost (“territorial mail”) was a form of mail service, peculiar to the Holy Roman Empire, that unlike the empire-wide Reichspost was limited to a single princely territory or group of territories. Competition between the two institutions was a consequence of the dualistic structure of the Holy Roman Empire and the transfer of most regalities to the territorial princes. The contradiction did not arise in empires or monarchies with strong central authority, such as the Ottoman …

1. Terminological historyBy the late Middle Ages or earlier, the piazza (Italian “public square”) was acquiring a public significance in Italian city states that went far beyond the simple function of a marketplace (Market). The open space surrounded by buildings in the center of a town was a venue of public life and of the political public sphere of the city and the environs it ruled (Italian  contado). It was, in other words, the central venue of communication.The role of the piazza becomes clear in intercultural comparison. Not every civilization conceived a ce…

1. General remarksPunctuality is one of those time-related social rules whose observance is subject to major cultural variations. Over the course of the early modern period, punctuality became increasingly associated with precision (French  accuratesse) and reliability, while lateness was associated with impoliteness and lack of respect. It would be a mistake, however, to situate the virtue of punctuality solely in the context of social discipline, since the fundamental processes of increased division of labor and social accele…