Esther und ihre Töchter. Geschlechterrollen und Wirtschaftstätigkeit jüdischer Frauen in der Vormoderne

Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England, London, Macmillan Press, 1998, pp. xxvii + 453, hb. £47.50, ISBN: 0333625714This is a wonderful book. Craig Muldrew's re-examination of credit should provoke a redefinition of the way we should think about early modern history. His is a large book in four parts. In the first the author identifies a major expansion in the ownership of goods between the 1550s and 1580. As one would expect, such new standards of material comfort were concentrated in the homes of successful farmers and tradesmen, rather than those of the labouring poor. Most goods were bought on credit, and involved long-drawn-out bargains, initiated in the urban market-place, but also, increasingly, in shops. The huge increase in buying and selling that accompanied economic expansion produced a dense network of middlemen operating within a new 'market culture'. Bargains were made orally, witnesses were the most important form of security. Tradesmen used account books only infrequently (65), many households continually overspent and most conflated domestic and trading accounts. An ingenious attempt to estimate the number of purchases in King's Lynn demonstrates that this relatively modest town of some two thousand households made about 642,000 separate purchases per year, which translates to a relatively low level of economic activity. There was plenty of time for negotiation and socialising as part of early modern business, which was just as well, since conversation to establish the credit and reputation of all parties to a transaction was the very stuff of this 'economy of obligation'. Since the supply of money failed to keep pace with the demand for it, cash formed less than one in ten of all exchanges (100) and was used in relatively unusual circumstances. All households were thus bound up in a complex mesh of credit relationships, usually informal agreements based on trust. Even though lending money (at interest) was done, increasingly, on bonds, such informal credit arrangements remained the dominant mode of exchange throughout our period.The second part of the book explores this 'culture of credit'. Essentially the growth of credit placed the question of trust, and the enforcement of bargains and contracts centre stage. The Protestant religion's 'emphasis on faith was mirrored by an increasing emphasis on trust within everyday social relations' (132) that were perceived to be increasingly necessary when credit networks were growing ever more complex. For the middling sort, trust in God and neighbours, 'credit' rather than capital accumulation, was at the foundation of their economic activities. Every member of a community should live soberly, lend modestly and preserve their reputation and order in their household. Moral lapses and defamation were therefore serious matters and prosecuted ever more vigorously in the courts.Despite such emphasis on trust and the cultivation of appropriate and trustworthy behaviour, and as is already well known from the work of Chris Brooks, economic expansion not only multiplied credit transactions but produced a mounting tide of debt-related litigation. Whereas central courts saw an expansion in business generated by the use of formal credit instruments, Muldrew shows that there was, in fact, a parallel rise in litigation in local borough courts seeking to enforce oral agreements. Such litigation increased sharply after 1560 and was, predictably, most common in the 1580s. In the third part of the book, Muldrew estimates that over one million actions were being initiated locally in the 1580s, thereafter real rates of litigation declined as individuals became more adept at managing new levels of credit. Not surprisingly, then, going to law was experienced by virtually everybody. Although, as one would expect, the wealthy had more litigation pending and were more likely to take cases further, in a community like King's Lynn, even aged paupers sued their neighbours for outstanding debts. …

and the domestic is a dauntingly capacious rubric for a short review essay, and Geraldo U. de Sousa's At Home in Tragedies and Frederic B. Tromly's Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: Debt Never Promised have little in common other than a place within that category. De Sousa's book takes as its topic the material space of the home and, more specifically, the dramatic function of dwelling places in the tragedies (3), arguing that Shakespeare represents domestic space as a web of tragic (9). Tromly, on the other hand, focuses more narrowly on common patterns in the relationships between fathers and sons in plays, without singling out a specific genre (although, notably, there are no comedies included in his study). Both of these monographs have been preceded by several decades of historicist and feminist literary scholarship crossing what were once traditional disciplinary boundaries between literary studies, history, sociology, and anthropology creatively explore literary texts as sites of knowledge on the politics and bonds of marriage, family, and the household. Both make contributions this interdisciplinary pursuit, although neither breaks new ground. Of studies that fall under the rubric of and the Domestic, articles and books on marital bonds, customs, and hierarchies are by far the most numerous, too numerous review here in full. Among the most significant studies of marriage from the past thirty years that deserve mention, however, are Linda Fitz's 1980 'What Says the Married Woman': Marriage Theory and Feminism in the English Renaissance; Carol Neely's 1989 Broken Nuptials in Plays; Mary Beth Rose's 1988 Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama and her more recent The Heroics of Marriage in Renaissance Tragedy (1998); B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol's 2003 Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage; and Loreen L. Giese's recent contribution, Courtship, Marriage Customs, and (2006). Laurie Shannon's Nature's Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness (2000) also needs be mentioned, as it offers a crucial corrective the heterocentric view most modern critics have taken affective bonds, marriage, and the cultural work of Shakespearean comedy, the genre most often associated with the triangulated nexus of sexual love, romance, and family. Other important queerings of include Mario DiGangi's Queering the Shakespearean (1996); Julie Crawford's The Homoerotics of Elizabethan Comedies (2006); and Valerie Traub's work, such as The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy (1992), The (In) Significance of 'Lesbian' Desire in Early Modern (1992), and Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992). As DiGangi points out, however, Shakespeare's contemporaries often present a fuller picture [than Shakespeare] of the early modern household and the same sex relations enabled by its particular functioning and composition (270). Catherine Belsey's 1999 and the Loss of Eden: Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture is a curious example as a monograph with overt political intentions to historicize and thus denaturalize family values (xiv) but which nevertheless maintains heteronormative assumptions and elides any discussion of homoerotic and homosocial ties in the early modern household. It also focuses solely on the nuclear family of husband, wife, parents, and siblings, although an important distinction between the early modern family and the modern family was the presence in the early modern family of non-kin inmates, sojourners, boarders or lodgers ... as well as indentured apprentices and resident servants (Stone 26-27). In the introduction her edited collection, Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England (2002) (which includes two essays on plays by Shakespeare), Kari Boyd McBride gives attention the extended nature of the early modern family, particularly female servants. …

Shtadlanut (Jewish intercession/advocacy) and tzedakah (charity/righteousness) are often associated with the early modern period and closely assigned to Jewish figures that represented Jewish commu...

In 1515, a group of German, later also Swiss and Italian or Savoyard merchants received permission to settle in Vienna and to deal wholesale during the entire year. These so-called „warehousers“ kept their status of being foreign, mostly protestant, inhabitants of the Habsburg capital for almost three centuries. During the early modern period, the warehousers dominated the Viennese wholesale trade, participated in the early establishment of factories from the late 17th century onwards and acted as Imperial creditors. Even if the warehousers are often mentioned in studies on Viennese and Austrian social and economic history, their commercial activities, business contacts and also family relationships are hardly known. As a pilot study, this article offers a broad overview of the current state of research and the most important primary sources. It discusses the wider context of the warehousers’ business activities (the development of the Austrian lands, Imperial commercial policy, markets in Upper and Lower Austria, and consumption in Vienna and its hinterland). The last chapter of the article provides an introduction to some prominent warehouser companies in the age of mercantilism and offers the earliest complete survey of all warehousers drawing on a list from the year 1725.

Tracing the Itineraries of Working Concepts across African History Kathryn M. De Luna (bio) This essay takes as its starting point a question: do historians of Africa's early and more recent pasts need each other's labor histories when studying the relationship between work and mobility?1 A response in the negative foregrounds the differences between the economic and political worlds of Africans living before the fifteenth century and the economic and political worlds of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialism, independence, and neoliberalism.2 This answer suggests that as people moved for the purpose of work from the early modern period, the ties forged (and severed) between people and with objects were dramatically changed from the strategies of earlier communities. We may well ask whether "labor" is even an applicable concept for periods before interactions between Africans and Europeans. It is easy to agree that there are great differences in the histories of movement and work across the chronological divides that structure African historiography. But we might also imagine these divides as thresholds through which we peer, gaining a rich but necessarily partial view of each other's knowledge about the common problems and questions that animate our scholarship in different ways. When we survey each other's fields to (at the very least) keep abreast of trends that impact our teaching, we [End Page 235] recognize change and continuity differently: what is foreign on one side of the threshold is often well-known and well-studied on the other side. Practices that appear novel in the early modern and modern periods might look like an iteration of a durable strategy from the perspective of the medieval and early African pasts, not the least because specialists in these periods tend to write about much longer periods of time. Some of the articles in this issue already straddle such chronological thresholds, looking both forward and back to draw out continuities and changes. Martino, for example, recognizes parallels between the colonial labor regimes of the plantations of Spanish Fernando Pó and earlier regimes of slavery. These similarities have inspired some scholars, Martino explains, to suggest the emergence of "neo-slavery" in West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, Martino also insists that the legal framework of the labor contract changed significantly the strategies of touts, "recruiters," who would have been responsible for enslavement in an economy based on neo-slavery. The efforts of touts were, Martino argues, a unique, non-violent form of banditry that was entirely dependent on the skill and savoir-faire of trickster-recruiters. In contrast, Keese looks forward in time. He describes the complex history of forced labor in the French Congo and compares the strategies of the colonial state to those of the post-colonial state. Keese uses Jean-François Bayart's argument that political control and labor control depended on corporeal punishment in independent Africa, seeing in Bayart's thesis great continuity with the colonial period, even while keeping open the possible influence of Soviet labor regimes on post-colonial labor practices.3 Like Martino and Keese, this essay seeks to peer across chronological thresholds, albeit from the perspective of a student of earlier periods. The insistence that "precolonial" pasts matter is by no means a new perspective. For well over a decade historians have called for (and demonstrated the significance of) greater attention to histories that predate colonialism in efforts to understand the twentieth century.4 The success of the earliest such calls have, themselves, been called into question, as historians increasingly focus on writing postcolonial histories and as fewer train in the methods of recovering earlier, undocumented pasts.5 But it is possible to perceive in recent scholarship a (perhaps growing) interest in connecting the recent past to much older histories. New work tracks across centuries and sometimes millennia how earlier ideas about race and ethnicity, perceptions of the environment, and changing practices of faith, motherhood, and politics inform the histories of colonialism and even the decades after Independence.6 A few have even suggested that, in some cases, the colonial period—the focus of most essays in this collection—was more like a pause [End Page 236...

This chapter builds on reflections raised in Elizabeth Ewan’s 1992 seminal essay ‘Scottish Portias’ by returning to the position and treatment of Scottish women in early modern legal sources to better understand women’s varied interaction with the courts in daily life. It re-examines the view of women held by early Scottish men of law, with particular focus on the legal status of married women, and considers their treatment by and participation in the Scottish legal system at a local and central level. It challenges some previous conclusions on the relationship between married women and the law, arguing that married women’s access to justice in early modern Scotland was considerably more fluid and multi-layered than has been previously recognised. It concludes by calling for a closer consideration of women’s rights within standard narratives of classical Scottish legal history and mainstream Scottish history.

Notes on Contributors

Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern LegacyMarriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Frances E. Dolan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 235.

Notes on Contributors

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

Allegories of Creation: Glassmaking, Forests, and Fertility in Webster’s<i>The Duchess of Malfi</i>

Reviewed by: Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocriticism ed. by Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher Giulia Pacini Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocriticism. Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher, eds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. Pp. 309. € 99. This volume engages a captivating question first raised by Louisa Mackenzie during an MLA roundtable: “What can early modern French literature do for contemporary ecocriticism?” In response, eleven essays, well framed by the editors’ introduction and an excellent epilogue in which Mackenzie reexamines this initial question, all highlight the ecocritical thinking of authors such as François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne, and Jean Bodin. Early Modern Écologies puts this literary corpus into productive dialogue with that of contemporary theorists Tim Morton, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Jane Bennett, and Michael Marder, looking for both conceptual alignments and theoretical challenges that might open up new ways for us to understand ecological thought today. Given the predominance of modern and contemporary British models in this critical field, focusing on early modern French texts represents a most welcome move. Through its many close readings, the volume demonstrates that early modern ecological thinking was much more than a simple meditation on environmental issues. Yes, Ronsard lamented the destruction of the Gâtine forest and miners’ violent plundering of the earth, and in their different ways Rabelais, Montaigne, and Olivier de Serres can certainly show us how being ecological in the early modern period meant thinking in sustainable terms. The volume also offers an apt critique of zoocentric thought as it addresses early modern representations of vegetal life: it considers the materiality of Ronsard’s rose; traces the cultural significance of weeds in Joachim du Bellay; and reflects upon the ethical dimensions of Montaigne’s plant philosophy. More [End Page 170] important, however, these ecologies encourage us to rethink our relationship to a vibrant world of matter in which both texts and authors are ultimately embedded. More generally, it demonstrates how early modern writers had already worked with “messily enmeshed” metaphors (the term is Jennifer Oliver’s), often evoking notions of a nature-culture web or an outside-within. This literary corpus is rife with figures that connect the local with the cosmic and the human with the nonhuman—at times in beautiful pastoral scenes and at times in darker modes. Early modern ecological thinking also expressed itself through strangely disorienting scale-shifting and perspectival alterations. It questioned the tidy logic of linear causality and explored the dynamics of mutually-constitutive relationships along with their potentially weird feedback loops. Equally intriguing is the volume’s contention that texts themselves can be ecological actants. Kat Addis’s study of Ronsard’s Franciade suggests that ecological thought is a rhetorically-governed practice that encourages us to connect our present to other times and places. Along similar lines, the editors remind us that literary criticism requires a respect for the ever-shifting otherness of a text even as we search for possibilities of meaningful contact and understanding. As a result, Hassan Melehy proposes, studying these early modern works may be in and of itself a practice of humility that can teach us “greater intellectual sensitivity to other ecological phenomena” (26). This is fascinating material. Giulia Pacini William & Mary Copyright © 2021 L’Esprit Créateur

While much important work has been done on the early modern fascination with the political nature of bees and bee societies, this essay instead takes a closer look at the conflation of honeybees, women, and domestic spaces within the multi-generic textual ecology of early modern beekeeping. In the early modern period women were the primary beekeepers. As key participants in this art of sustained and intimate collaboration across species and environment, these women managed their own hives using the multifaceted skills of the early modern housewife, including textile arts, brewing, distilling, medicine, horticulture, and husbandry. This essay highlights the tension between knowledgeable women apiarists and male textual authorities in early modern apiary treatises and husbandry manuals and focuses on the persistent descriptive slippage between both bees and women and the hive and home in early modern sources. In early modern texts women’s bodies, domestic spaces, and hives are all over-determined entities invested in containment, preservation, and productivity. This essay emphasizes the ways in which early modern women and the occupants of the hives they cared for resisted and worked within the allegorical, anthropocentric, and patriarchal frameworks provided for them in the textual narratives of the early modern period.

Varieties of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English radicalism in context, edited by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan, Famham & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2011, xiv + 271 pp., £65.00/$124.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6905-0The rule of moderation: violence, religion and the politics of restraint in early modern England, by Ethan H. Shagan, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press, 2011, xiii + 381 pp., £19.99/$32.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-13556-6Despite their repeated efforts, historians are never immune to making anachronisms and misinterpretations. We either use modern terms to designate early modern phenomena or, conversely, we too often understand early modern terms in their modern sense, which inevitably influences our approach to a given subject. These two books aim to rectify this each in their own way and ought as a result to be read together. Both came out the same year and are arranged chronologically; they respectively cover the first and second half of the early modern period, with an overlap on the seventeenth century and the English Revolution in particular. Both brilliantly challenge our understanding of two key-related notions characterising the turmoils of the early modern period: radicalism and moderation. Since one can hardly go without considering the other, a combined reading seems more appropriate and fruitful in the present case.Shagan's Rule of Moderation focuses on the English Reformation and therefore should be considered first. Right from the introduction, the author debunks our modern idea of by looking at contemporary definitions of the term. Moderation, as he demonstrates, denoted an exertion of authority through restraint and often proved aggressive, coercive, brutal, and violent. In other (modern) words, early modern was immoderate, a definition that the editors of Varieties find sometimes unnecessarily restrictive (12).After considering the moral of sin, the passions, and women in Part I, Shagan examines its political implementation in Tudor England. His account of the execution of six priests (three Catholics and three Evangelical reformers ) by Henry VIII in 1540 is a fascinating case in point of royal via media in a heterodox religious landscape. The Anglican middle way was not one of compromise and negotiation between two extremes or radicalisms, but rather a powerful weapon enforcing Royal authority and public order. Subsequent chapters explore the rhetoric of in a religious context in the Elizabethan period, showing how Anglicans used to enforce their authority, whilst nonconformists did the same to emphasise self-discipline as part of a moderation (177).Although some of its contributors also draw on early Reformation heterodoxy, Varieties does not begin until the English Civil Wars. The book is the product of an interdisciplinary conference held in 2006 at Goldsmiths, London. It offers a fresh and much needed look at the subject with twelve essays challenging modern semantics applied to early modern case studies. The editors do a remarkable job at surveying definitions and approaches to radicalism in their introduction. They successively examine the nominalist approach to radicalism (2), which advocates purging modern concepts from the early modern reality, and a substantive approach, especially favoured by Marxist historians seeking to legitimise their own political views by constructing an English radical tradition (13-17). Hessayon and Finnegan object to these two approaches, settling instead for a third one called functional. Despite the risk of anachronisms and inconsistencies it involves, this functional approach uses radicalism as a workable term easily understood by the modern reader, but also calls in return for greater and systematic contextualisation in order to truly grasp its practical implications.Like Tudor and Stuart moderation, the twelve case studies in Varieties suggest not one, but many forms of radicalism in the seventeenth century. …

Volume 51 (2021)