Authors:Ilaria Berti Pages: 1 - 21 Abstract: According to the historical sources, the members of the Creoles elite were ambiguous in their dietary choices: if they mainly had British food when they shared their meals with British colonists, in their private sphere, the dishes served were mainly and with strong traces of slaves cuisine. We hypothesise that their incongruous behaviour was connected with a white planters’ supposed feeling of inferiority for which British ingredients, along with British people, were believed of superior quality and more appropriate to be eaten when they believed British observed them. However, because food tastes and distastes were and are connected with familiar habits, the local élite chose to have their local dishes in their private daily lives. This attitude was connected with the construction of the identities in the colonial space in which food played a significant role, too. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12052 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Giacomo Orsini Pages: 22 - 23 Abstract: As a mutual constituent of sameness, otherness defines belonging by demarcating the boundaries of what is similar and acceptable against what is different and, eventually, unacceptable. Mobilized to establish the limits of inclusion and exclusion, otherness transforms over time depending on contextual relations of power. As such, through history, selected groups of people have come to be represented as dangerous ‘others’ – and eventually as a threat for everyone else’s safety and security. Accordingly, while minorities had both to adapt or resist marginalization and exclusion, others concurrently reinforced their political, economic, cultural and social positions of power through their strategic mobilization of alterity. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12723 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Dana Caciur Pages: 28 - 43 Abstract: This paper aims to present various types of documents referring directly or indirectly to the Morlachs and the Uskoks, in order to answer to questions such as which main activities these people developed, and how they influenced daily life in Dalmatia. A significant characteristic and paradox of both the Morlachs and Uskoks is that their names are conventions and denominations found mostly in external sources. Frequently mentioned in sixteenth-century Venetian documents, despite the little additional information provided, the archival material investigated nevertheless offers the opportunity to understand these very active, mobile and adaptable populations, especially with regard to their role as cross-cultural and transimperial subjects. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12193 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:David Do Paço Pages: 44 - 59 Abstract: This article analyses how food, recipes, and techniques and manners introduced as foreign were integrated in eighteenth-century German cookbooks. Doing so it intends to transfer a methodology recently developed in social history to history of food in order to get a better understanding of how eighteenth-century European societies defined foreignness. It claims that cookbooks should be considered as topographies of the table and presents the Holy Roman Empire as a particularly rich field of study for history of circulation in the early modern world. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12198 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Giacomo Orsini, Andrew Canessa, Luis G. Martínez del Campo Pages: 60 - 75 Abstract: The border separating/unifying Gibraltar with Spain is reproduced in public discourse as a threat and an obstacle to the normalisation of political life in the small enclave. Yet, an in-depth socio-historical analysis of local cross-border relations over the 20th century, shows how the Gibraltarian national identity and local government originate from the border rather than in opposition to it. The fencing of the frontier imposed by the Franco’s regime between 1969-1985 allows the discursive (re)production of a Gibraltarian identity distinct from that of the Spanish neighbours - and, in part, from that of the English colonisers. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12503 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:José María Pérez Fernández Pages: 76 - 80 Abstract: Invented in China and brought to Europe by Muslim merchants across the Silk Road, the use of paper in the West took off in the Mediterranean towards the end of the Middle Ages. Overshadowed in cultural and media history by the invention of print, paper has played a fundamental role as the media infrastructure for innumerable processes involving the registration and communication of knowledge and value in communities and institutions, from religious orders, mercantile societies, to global empires. This thematic section of Cromohs features four essays. Three essays examine particular cases of paper as a medium for the codification and exchange of knowledge, information and value, whereas the fourth outlines the state of the art on the history of the so-called paper revolution and methodological issues illustrated with relevant case studies. These essays exemplify the research conducted by the Paper in Motion workgroup within the People in Motion COST action. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12572 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:José María Pérez Fernández Pages: 81 - 112 Abstract: This essay intends to use a series of case studies to exemplify the role of paper as (1) material medium for communication and consequently for the establishment of human communities and institutions, including the normative patterns employed in their administration and the emotional ties that generated and pervaded them, and (2) as a trope that denotes the nature and the function of the information, emotions and values it is used to record and convey. After a survey of the current state of the art, the case studies will illustrate how the different uses and functions of paper determined strategies and methods employed in the administration of the movement of people, ideas, and goods, and in the creation of complex networks (political, economic, religious, and intellectual) across the Mediterranean and beyond. There will be a particular focus upon the circulation of texts and documents involved in the articulation of discursive varieties for the expression of both subjective and collective emotional identities and for the establishment of the norms that regulated their public and social dimensions. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12025 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:William Zammit Pages: 113 - 134 Abstract: This contribution discusses the vital role of paper in the context of an early modern Mediterranean island-state. From a commerical, but also from a political perspective, the increased amount of seaborne communication not only characterised statehood but indeed made it possible. Paper-based communication was the main channel of formal but also of informal communication, with the latter comprising the exchange of news, rumours, and hearsay between the geographically isolated community and the rest of the Mediterranean and beyond. Such paper transactions comprised manuscript but also increasingly printed genres. The role of these and of other typologies of printed commercial literature went beyond a purely utilitarian one, as very often such forms included decorative iconographical representations asserting either political sovreignity or religious power. Paper-based communication enabled such an island community not simply to receive news but also to be a net distributer of it.
Authors:Joëlle Weis Pages: 135 - 149 Abstract: In 1773 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, at that time librarian of the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel, criticised his predecessors of only being interested in the history of the library’s augmentation, of the library’s „genealogy“. According to the famous writer, former librarians were so fixated on the catalogues that they forgot the real purpose of telling a collection’s history: showing how it contributed to scholarship. Of course, Lessing has a point, the history of a collection and its holding institution should not be told simply by enumerating objects, but he might have underestimated the potential of catalogues and book lists as sources for the history of scholarship, indeed the history of knowledge. Library catalogues should not only be seen as valuable sources for the reconstruction of an as-is state of the library at a specific moment of the collection’s life but that a much broader perspective can be taken. Using the example of the Wolfenbüttel manuscript catalogues dating from the mid-17th to the 18th century, the catalogues can be read as behavioural guidelines, as an instrument for representation, as a witness for scholarly practices or as legal papers. Just as for literary documents, they invite to read between the lines, to analyse their specific style as well as to discover the different communicative strategies and hidden messages. Using Lessing’s image, the catalogues help with the composition of an enhanced genealogy, positioning every item into a network of objects, texts, practices, and ideas. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12027 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Elizabeth Harding Pages: 150 - 168 Abstract: Auction catalogues are considered a key source in different fields of historical research and are exploited both by traditional scholarship as well as more recent, digital, big data approaches regarding the information supplied on the offered objects (books, art works, or other trade goods). By focusing on auction catalogues as objects, their properties and uses, this contribution seeks to unveil its potential for scholarship on trade, the history of knowledge and, in the case of interleaved copies, early modern note taking practices, in their links to interaction. Indeed, it argues, auction catalogues played a pivotal, productive role, as they facilitated social interaction und advanced knowledge. Moving beyond a data harvesting approach, it opens up a new praxeological perspective on auction catalogues. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12075 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Rosita D’Amora Pages: 169 - 178 Abstract: Giancarlo Casale is Chair of Early Modern Mediterranean History at the European University Institute in Florence, as well as a permanent member of the history faculty at the University of Minnesota. His new book, Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe will be released in summer 2021 from the University of California Press. Casale is also the author of award-winning Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2011), and since 2010 has served as executive editor of the Journal of Early Modern History. PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12587 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Stefan Schöch Pages: 179 - 182 Abstract: Review of Stefan Bauer, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio Between Renaissance and Catholic Reform, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12002 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Elisa Frei Pages: 183 - 185 Abstract: Review of Encounters Between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, Eds Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Robert Aleksander Maryks, and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2018) PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12724 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Elisa Frei Pages: 186 - 188 Abstract: Review of Giulia Falato, Alfonso Vagnone’s Tongyou Jiaoyu (On the Education of Children, c. 1632): The Earliest Encounter Between Chinese and European Pedagogy (Boston-Leiden: Brill, 2020) PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12725 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Silvia Cinnella Della Porta Pages: 189 - 193 Abstract: Review of Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton_ An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019) PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12726 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Geri Della Rocca De Candal Pages: 194 - 198 Abstract: Review of Paolo Sachet, Publishing for the Popes: The Roman Curia and the Use of Printing (1527–1555) (Leiden: Brill, 2020) PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12730 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
Authors:Ian F. Hathaway Pages: 199 - 204 Abstract: Review of Luca Scholz, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) PubDate: 2021-03-24 DOI: 10.36253/cromohs-12729 Issue No:Vol. 23 (2021)
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