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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 word aviso (plural: avisos) is a communications term that was introduced into several European languages in the 16th century from Italian ( avviso: news, warning, advice). It soon came to play a key part in the postal system (Mail) in the sense of a “cover letter” and became the usual term for “news” in the new medium of periodically printed newspapers, until it was supplanted by more recent terms. Since the postal system was introduced by the de Tassis family (from 1651 on, Thurn und Taxis) to Austria, Germany, t…

1. Definition Animal metamorphosis was not only widespread in fairy tales and myths, but also had a role to play in popular European belief and Christian theology until some way into the early modern period. From the Renaissance on, the idea of a physical transformation of men or women into animals, effected by magic, divine power, or divine imposition, was reinforced by the reception of ancient texts, such as the respective Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius. Although these may be fictional texts, they were cited until the 17th century as evidence of the possibili…

1. Consumption Whereas wine consumption dominated Southern Europe and France in the early modern period, the consumption of beer was a fundamental constant of everyday life in the north and east of the continent (Everyday world). In these regions, beer was a staple foodstuff and – when brewed to greater strength - Lenten fare [1]. From the Late Middle Ages, there was a profound shift in habits of consumption in Central Europe, with wine replaced by beer as an everyday beverage. The reason for this was a process of technological innovation as hop…

Aviatics is the skill of using wings or other airfoils to stay up in the air, in other words the art of flying like a bird (Latin  avis). Medieval chronicles already contain many accounts of individuals who tried to imitate avian flight. Most such “flights” from high towers ended in disaster. Stories of attempted flights with a level of detail that enhances their credibility occur in increasing numbers from the second half of the 15th century, one example being the case of Giovanni Battista Danti (ca. 1477-1517), who mad…

1. Concept The concept of communication with the afterlife depends on a binary opposition between “this world” as the world of the living and the afterlife, the world of the dead, of spirits, and gods - or in the monotheistic religions, the one God. Death marks the boundary between these worlds. Death marks the boundary between these worlds. The Enlightenment relegated the existence of the “otherworld” to the realm of fantasy. In the Christian view, the dead rest until the Day of Judgem…

1. Prior history of the superstition discourse The project of a Bibliotheca Magica (“Magical Library”) belongs in the context of the struggle between science (Knowledge) and superstition. On the initiative of Christian Thomasius, who as an expert witness as late as 1696 would have endorsed the execution of a witch had colleagues not restrained him, past debates about witchcraft were revisited early in the 18th century for political purposes (abolition of witchcraft trial and torture). The jurist Johann Reiche, whom Thomasius supervised in his doctoral dissertation, De crimine mag…

1. Educational ideal From the Renaissance on, Humanist pedagogues attempted to associate the love of ball games with ancient traditions (e.g. Galen), but the modern term derives not from the Latin pila but from the Germanic  ball (Italian  palla). Humanist teachers and princes’ tutors of the 15th century, like Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona, ennobled the ball game by placing it alongside equestrian exercises. Baldassare Castiglione’s Courtier ( Cortegiano, 1528) admitted it to the Olympus of noble education. Ball games went to the heart of the ed…

1. Term The word calendar derives from the name of the first day of the month in Ancient Rome (Latin Kalendae). From Latin kalendarium (‘debt-book’), it later came to refer to the whole system of reckoning time (Time, reckoning of). All known calendars are based on the alternation of day and night, the recurrent phases of the Moon (OE mona = “Moon”; monađ = “month”), and the course of the seasons through the solar year.Wolfgang Behringer 2. Chronology: early manifestations In all cultures, astronomical phenomena (Astronomy) determine the chronological units of year, month,…

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 …

1. Terminology The term “aeronautics” means literally “traveling by ship [Latin  nautare] through the air [Latin  aer].” Possibly inspired by mythological accounts, 14th-century proponents of Aristotelian physics (Albert of Saxony and Nicole d’Oresme) had already suggested the possibility that the accepted theory of the elements implied that a ship filled with a fiery substance could sail upon the sea of the air. The discussions of flying in the 15th and 16th centuries were focused entirely on the principle of …

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. Overview The town hall (Latin  domus consulum, Italian  palazzo pubblico, French  hôtel de ville, German Rathaus) presupposes the emergence of municipal self-government (Latin  consules; Council [administrative]) as distinct from being under a royal, episcopal, or noble town overlord, as had been common in Europe since the high Middle Ages.Town halls as expressions of municipal republican self-confidence appeared for the first time in the 13th century in northern and central Italy and spread northwards during the Renaissance (c. 1300–1600)…

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…