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Lives Uncovered: A Sourcebook of Early Modern Europe Nicholas Terpstra full chapter instant download
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LIVES
UNCOVERED
A SOURCEBOOK OF
EARLY MODERN EUROPE
LIVES
UNCOVERED
A SOURCEBOOK OF
EARLY MODERN EUROPE
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Title: Lives
Toronto, uncovered
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Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers:
Title: Canadiana
Global ecopolitics 20190091096
: crisis, governance,|and
ISBN 9781442607323
justice / Peter J. Stoett (softcover) | ISBN 9781487594510
with Shane Mulligan.
(hardcover)
Names: Stoett, Peter J. (Peter John), 1965–, author. | Mulligan, Shane, 1970–, author.
Description: Second Life
Subjects: LCSH: edition. | Includes
cycle, Human bibliographical
– History –references
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Europe – History – 1492–1648 –(softcover)
Sources.| ISBN 9781487587901
(hardcover)
Classification: LCC HN373 L58 2019 | DDC 306.094 – dc23
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cooperation – Case studies. | LCSH: Environmental justice – International cooperation – Case
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Contents
List of Figures xi
Acknowledgements xiii
v
Contents
VI Working Life 79
6.1 Instructions for the Ideal Servant—An Employer’s View (1681) 79
6.2 Learning a Trade on the Job (1525) 80
6.3 The Apprentice’s Overseer (1795) 82
6.4 Peasant Protest and Rebellion (1502; 1525) 83
6.5 Workers and Employers at Odds (c. 1465) 86
6.6 Women and the Guilds: Gold Spinners in Germany (1500s) 88
6.7 Apprenticeship Contract for a Daughter in France (1610) 89
6.8 Apprenticeship Contract for a Female Orphan (1700) 90
6.9 Protecting Local Industry (1687) 92
6.10 The Rural Woman’s Guide to Hard Work (1550) 93
Reading Questions 94
vi
Contents
vii
Contents
viii
Contents
Sources 271
Index 277
ix
Figures
3.1 Bloodletting Points 12
3.2 Cupping 13
3.3 Beer Drinking 24
4.1 Positions of the Foetus in the Womb 41
4.2 The Nursery 53
5.1 The Idle Apprentice 67
6.1 Ale Wife 85
6.2 Women Spinning Silk 91
7.1 The Marriage Balance 103
7.2 Signing a Marriage Contract 107
7.3 The Wandering Husband 118
8.1 Master of Anthony of Burgundy, German Bathhouse (c. 1470) 130
8.2 Venetian Public Prostitute 132
9.1 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon (c. 1650) 144
9.2 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Young Beggar (c. 1650) 157
10.1 Seven Men on the Gallows 173
10.2 The Death of Thomas Cranmer at the Stake, Burned for Heresy in 1556 177
10.3 Executioner Franz Schmidt Executing Hans Fröschel on 18 May 1591 179
11.1 Renouncing Christ to Follow the Devil 190
11.2 Witches Roasting Babies 193
11.3 Witches Destroy a Town 198
12.1 A Morisca and Her Daughter (1529) 214
12.2 The Wandering Jew (1640) 227
13.1 King of Kongo Giving Audience to the Portuguese and His Subjects (1400s) 233
13.2 Portolan Chart (1492) 240
13.3 Job, Son of Solomon, High Priest of Bonda (1734) 250
14.1 The Dance of Death at Basle 262
14.2 The Dissection of the Body of Tom Nero 264
xi
Acknowledgements
The readings here represent voices from the past that sometimes seem distant and some-
times strangely familiar. I’d like to acknowledge that these midwives, students, merchants,
nuns, philosophers, and sailors had no sense of how their words and lives might be pub-
lished in a distant future they could hardly imagine. We share their private letters and public
accounts so that students now can gain a deeper sense of a distant past and of frequently
difficult lives that many find equally hard to imagine. I’ve been privileged to see in many
classes what happens when voices past and present engage together—we’ve had intense
discussions, puzzled queries, and many “aha!” moments when things suddenly came in to
focus. My thanks to students in Regina, Toronto, Siena, Oxford, and Tours who shortened
the distance between past and present and who made the conversations live with their curi-
osity and excitement. Thanks as well to Allison Graham and Alexandra Logue for seeking
out some of these voices, to John Christopoulos and Kristina Francescutti for researching
their contexts, and to Sienna Lee-Coughlin, Spirit Rose Waite, and Sarah Patterson for
helping to organize them. The idea to turn an informal course reader into a more formal
published collection came from Natalie Fingerhut of University of Toronto Press, and I
would like to thank her for her ongoing support and above all for her great patience in a
journey that took a little longer than any of us anticipated.
xiii
I
How to Read a
Primary Source
This section helps students recognize different kinds of primary sources—diaries, letters,
laws, poems, and so on—and think about how these sources are written for different
purposes and audiences. It introduces the idea of reading with a few critical questions in
mind: who wrote a piece, what it is, why it was written, who it was written to or for, when
it was written, and what it says. Students learn what kinds of information to expect from
different kinds of sources and how to read those sources critically.
Every time we write a note, a message, a list, or an essay, we have someone in mind that
we are writing to. It may be hundreds or thousands of friends on social media, or a couple
of teachers or professors for an essay, or an employer for a report, or a single person for a
private card or letter. We may even write to ourselves, with a quickly scrawled shopping
list, or a note reminding us of things we need to do today, or a diary of what we actually
did. Sometimes we write to persuade our reader, sometimes to record our likes or dislikes,
and sometimes to express private things we don’t want or expect anyone else to read. Our
writing may be “official” or personal; it may be public or private; it may be something we
want the world to remember or something we want everyone to forget.
We change the tone of what we write depending on who we are writing to, when we
are writing, and what we are writing for. With public writing, we know that readers will
get a sense of who we are through what we write, so we think more about the impact of
what we write: What do we want to tell our readers? What details have to be included? If
some group that we are part of appoints us to write something on behalf of the group—a
petition, a set of rules, minutes of a meeting, or a report on an event—then we may be less
personal and more formal in what we write. We may think more about reporting fairly and
clearly, and we may even have to include some views of the group that we don’t personally
share. When we write privately, that seldom happens—we are free to write what we think
and feel. But do we always do that? What we share with a parent or grandparent will be
different from what we share with someone we love in a more intimate way—or someone
we hate. We may hide some things we don’t want them to know, or exaggerate other things
if we want to please or impress them. Whether we write publicly or privately, we know that
those who read us will get some sense of who we are.
People living in Europe in the early modern period, roughly 1500–1700, wrote for much
the same purposes and in much the same way. They argued, boasted, and bragged. They
recorded details carefully or made them up entirely. They wrote what they believed to be
true or what they knew to be false. They wrote letters, diaries, rules, proposals, newspaper
1
LIVES UNCOVERED
reports, stories, and poems. Reading what they wrote opens a window into what they
thought about—what worried them or excited them or amazed them about each other and
about their world. These are the people whose daily lives made up the history we study.
A letter from a woman in Peru to her brother in Spain trying to convince him to take the
long voyage to join her. A midwife giving advice on how to conceive a boy or girl and how
to have a healthy pregnancy. A young student on his way to university who has to think
quickly to avoid getting beaten up and robbed. A lawyer giving instructions to judges on
how to prosecute a witch. A mother telling her son who he must marry, or a son telling
his mother why he married the girl he loved instead. A dying father leaving instructions
on how he wants his children to be raised, or a guardian making promises on how he will
care for an orphan.
Reading these letters, wills, and diaries narrows the distance between early modern
people and ourselves, because we see that sometimes they expressed hopes and fears that
we can easily identify with. Sometimes it does the opposite, as when we read medical
advice about how to keep our bodies cool by eating chicken or hot by choosing cabbage.
We have to read carefully so that we don’t misunderstand things that seem very close to
our own experience or misinterpret things that seem very different.
If we read with a few questions in mind, we can get more out of reading documents
written a few hundred years ago:
As we play with these questions, and go back and forth from one to the other, we will
find that each casts a bit of light on the others. What may seem like simple words on a page
can take on different meaning if they are written by a woman or a man, if they are written
for a child or an adult, if they are written to persuade the reader to do something, or if
they are written to report on what others have done. And while today we avoid plagiarism,
many early moderns embraced it—some of the authors here borrowed freely from other
authors, and sometimes from other languages, often without acknowledgment. This makes
critical reading all the more complicated and all the more necessary.
Some sources offer advice, set down rules, or advocate a course of action; since they pre-
scribe actions, we often call these prescriptive. Medical treatises, laws, sermons, and advice
literature all count as prescriptive examples. Other sources offer accounts of events that
have taken place; since they describe actions, we often call these descriptive. Court records,
letters, diaries, and chronicles are examples of descriptive writings. But not all documents
fall neatly into these two categories: A mother writing a letter to her son will move back and
forth from description to prescription as she gives news about a sibling and advice about a
cold. A doctor writing a medical treatise may offer advice about childbirth that combines
dictates from the respected Islamic authority Avicenna with eye-witness experiences of
a local midwife. And even within these categories, we have to read critically with an eye
and an ear to who is writing and why. A court reporter’s transcript of an interrogation
may not overtly show how an illiterate peasant defendant is awed or cowed by the learned
magistrates posing their questions. The voice of the accused was filtered initially through
the learned judicial system and is filtered again in our modern translations. When we
read that transcript in modern English, we have to work to pick up the subtle differences
between questions asked in formal French, German, or Spanish (or Latin) and answers
2
I H o w t o R e a d a P ri m a r y S o u rc e
given in the simple vernacular or local dialect of 500 years ago. And on it goes: Pamphlets
and chronicles that reported news from the period almost never presented facts objectively
but instead had propagandistic purposes. The more questions we ask about these passages,
the closer we come to understanding their different levels of meaning.
The more levels of meaning we recognize, the better we understand how these sources
uncover lives that were often quite different from—or surprisingly similar to—our own.
What foods we eat and why; how we fall in love and whether we marry; what reactions
we may have to those from other cultures, cities, or social classes, and how our views and
values will then shape whether we help, punish, embrace, or flee the other—all of these
experiences are also found in the sources here. Reading them challenges us to see with the
eyes of those who wrote them and to understand their world from the inside: Why did so
many people fear witches? How did men understand women, and vice versa? What was
fair, or just, or good? Looking at these issues as they looked at them helps us understand
the societies they built. Each document fits into a larger picture or view of the world.
That view of the world extended beyond sight and the other four senses. It extended
beyond birth and death. Early modern people had a strong sense of the universe as a place
powered by forces and spirits. They believed in a God who created and sustained this uni-
verse, who knew them, and who held them accountable both for what they did and for what
they let their neighbors do. The readings here aim to open windows onto Christian, Jewish,
and Muslim experiences, and to show how much of daily life was shaped by a strong sense
that all actions by individuals, families, and societies would either please or anger God.
Who, what, when, where, and why. One question informs another, and as you go back
and forth between them you may find that a document says the opposite of what you first
thought. Don’t be frustrated—take this as a challenge and maybe even a mystery. The more
carefully you train your ear with these questions, the more clearly you will hear the voices
of those behind these letters, diaries, laws, and treatises, and the better you will understand
the world that they made.
3
II
Lives Uncovered:
Life Cycles in the Early
Modern Period
This reader is organized around the human life cycle, and it illustrates what realities and
concerns dominated at each stage of life from birth through youth and adulthood to death.
It offers overviews of the life cycles of males and females from different social classes and
different religious/racial groups in parts of Europe and notes the importance of other
themes such as sex and sexuality, poverty, crime and punishment, religious tension and
coexistence, and migration and emigration.
Our path from cradle to grave begins with some medical images about the body and
about health and illness. We then move through advice about conception, pregnancy, and
birth, and on through childhood, schooling, and adolescence before turning to marriage,
which most early modern people took to be the threshold into adult life. From here the path
diverges into some side areas. We’ll have already looked at work and workplaces by this
point, since most people began their working lives well before they reached their teenage
years. Many thought that they could not even consider marriage until they had developed
their skills, saved some money, and perhaps seen a bit of the world.
Their experiences as adults varied widely, and the readings aim to uncover many differ-
ent sides of life. Some may challenge our assumptions about early modern life, and others
may highlight unexpected similarities and differences between our life today and theirs
back then. We may suspect that gender roles were tightly defined, and that may in turn
make some of the practices around sex and prostitution a bit puzzling to us. The back-
ground for some of this was poverty: Most people could expect that they would spend at
least part of their lives in serious poverty, and often this followed the life cycle, too, with
childhood and old age being the most vulnerable times. All early modern societies aimed
to ease the way for children and the aged, whom they considered most deserving of care.
They could be quite harsh on others, like young men and women, who were thought to
have only themselves to blame if they didn’t have clothes, shelter, or a meal. It’s perhaps no
surprise that crime and violence were more common as a result, since some disadvantaged
men and women were forced to find by theft what they could not earn by work. Most
societies took a very hard view of crime and saw punishment as something that must give
lessons to more than just the one charged with a crime. They were far quicker to whip,
5
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Cerebral arteries, atheroma, v. 991
paralysis, v. 917
Cholera, i. 715
Chorea, v. 439
of the larynx, iii. 76
renal, iv. 42
Copodyscinesia, v. 504
Coryza, iii. 41
Cretinism, v. 138
D.
Degenerations, i. 72
Dementia, v. 164
Dengue, i. 879
Diphtheria, i. 656
Dreams, v. 368
Dyslalia, v. 571
E.
Eclampsia, v. 464
Ecstasy, v. 339
Effusions, i. 67
Elephantiasis, iv. 675
Epilepsy, v. 468
Epistaxis, iii. 50
Erythema, iv. 593, 595, 596
Erysipelas, i. 629
F.
Farcy, i. 909
G.
Glanders, i. 909