Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500-1620

Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500-1620 PDF Author: Henry Heller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893800
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
For a generation, the history of the ancien régime has been written from the perspective of the Annales school, with its emphasis on the role of long-term economic and cultural factors in shaping the development of early modern France. In this detailed 1995 study, Henry Heller challenges such a paradigm and assembles a huge range of information about technical innovation and ideas of improvement in sixteenth-century France. Emphasising the role of state intervention in the economy, the development of science and technology, and recent research into early modern proto-industrialisation, Heller counters notions of a France mired in an archaic, determinist mentalité. Despite the tides of religious fanaticism and seigneurial reaction, the period of the religious wars saw a surprising degree of economic, technological and scientific innovation, making possible the consolidation of capitalism in French society during the reign of Henri IV.

Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500-1620

Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500-1620 PDF Author: Henry Heller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893800
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
For a generation, the history of the ancien régime has been written from the perspective of the Annales school, with its emphasis on the role of long-term economic and cultural factors in shaping the development of early modern France. In this detailed 1995 study, Henry Heller challenges such a paradigm and assembles a huge range of information about technical innovation and ideas of improvement in sixteenth-century France. Emphasising the role of state intervention in the economy, the development of science and technology, and recent research into early modern proto-industrialisation, Heller counters notions of a France mired in an archaic, determinist mentalité. Despite the tides of religious fanaticism and seigneurial reaction, the period of the religious wars saw a surprising degree of economic, technological and scientific innovation, making possible the consolidation of capitalism in French society during the reign of Henri IV.

Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France

Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France PDF Author: Sanja Perovic
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441185291
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Challenging the master narrative of secularization, an exploration of the persistent influence of religious categories in the cultural landscape of Europe's first secular state.

Instruments of Knowledge

Instruments of Knowledge PDF Author: Jean-François Gauvin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004504613
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
In a bid to claim ‘scientific objects’ as requiring a significant amount of conceptual labor, this book looks sequentially at instruments, habits, and museums. The goal is to uncover how, together, these material and immaterial activities, rules, and commitments form one meaningful and credible blueprint revealing the building blocks of knowledge production. They serve to conceptualize and examine the entire life of an instrument: from its ideation and craft to its use, reuse, circulation, recycling, and (if not obliterated) its final entry into a museum. It is such an epistemological triptych that guides this investigation.

Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France

Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France PDF Author: Jotham Parsons
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801454980
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Coinage and currency—abstract and socially created units of value and power—were basic to early modern society. By controlling money, the people sought to understand and control their complex, expanding, and interdependent world. In Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France, Jotham Parsons investigates the creation and circulation of currency in France. The royal Cour des Monnaies centralized monetary administration, expanding its role in the emerging modern state during the sixteenth century and assuming new powers as an often controversial repository of theoretical and administrative expertise. The Cour des Monnaies, Parsons shows, played an important role in developing the contemporary understanding of money, as a source of both danger and opportunity at the center of economic and political life. More practically, the Monnaies led generally successful responses to the endemic inflation of the era and the monetary chaos of a period of civil war. Its work investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters shone light into a picaresque world of those who used the abstract and artificial nature of money for their own ends. Parsons’s broad, multidimensional portrait of money in early modern France also encompasses the literature of the age, in which money’s arbitrary and dangerous power was a major theme.

From Oikonomia to Political Economy

From Oikonomia to Political Economy PDF Author: Germano Maifreda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317131983
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Renaissance Europe witnessed a surge of interest in new scientific ideas and theories. Whilst the study of this 'Scientific Revolution' has dramatically shifted our appreciation of many facets of the early-modern world, remarkably little attention has been paid to its influence upon one key area; that of economics. Through an interrogation of the relationship between economic and scientific developments in early-modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how a new economic epistemology appeared that was to have profound consequences both at the time, and for subsequent generations. Dr Maifreda argues that the new attention shown by astronomers, physicians, aristocrats, men of letters, travellers and merchants for the functioning of economic life and markets, laid the ground for a radically new discourse that envisioned 'economics' as an independent field of scientific knowledge. By researching the historical context surrounding this new field of knowledge, he identifies three key factors that contributed to the cultural construction of economics. Firstly, Italian Humanism and Renaissance, which promoted new subjects, methods and quantitative analysis. Secondly, European overseas expansion, which revealed the existence of economic cultures previously unknown to Europeans. Thirdly factor identified is the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century crisis of traditional epistemologies, which increasingly valued empirical scientific knowledge over long-held beliefs. Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, the book illuminates new economic sensibilities within a range of established and more novel scientific disciplines (including astronomy, physics, ethnography, geology, and chemistry/alchemy). By tracing these developments within the wider social and cultural fields of everyday commercial life, the study offers a fascinating insight into the relationship between economic knowledge and science during the early-modern period.

The Body of the Artisan

The Body of the Artisan PDF Author: Pamela H. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226764265
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Since the time of Aristotle, the making of knowledge and the making of objects have generally been considered separate enterprises. Yet during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two became linked through a "new" philosophy known as science. In The Body of the Artisan, Pamela H. Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source-artists and artisans. From goldsmiths to locksmiths and from carpenters to painters, artists and artisans were much sought after by the new scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials and the ability to manipulate them. Drawing on a fascinating array of new evidence from northern Europe including artisans' objects and their writings, Smith shows how artisans saw all knowledge as rooted in matter and nature. With nearly two hundred images, The Body of the Artisan provides astonishingly vivid examples of this Renaissance synergy among art, craft, and science, and recovers a forgotten episode of the Scientific Revolution-an episode that forever altered the way we see the natural world.

Noble Power During the French Wars of Religion

Noble Power During the French Wars of Religion PDF Author: Stuart Carroll
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521624046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Noble affinities were the essence of power in sixteenth-century France. This is the first book to analyse the development of a noble following during the whole course of the Wars of Religion and the first substantial study of the Guise - the most powerful family of the period - to appear for over a century. The Guise, champions of the catholic cause, were the largest landowners in the province and used Normandy as a base for their support of catholicism in the British Isles. The family exploited religious dissension to build a formidable ultra-catholic party in Normandy which ultimately challenged the monarchy. This study breaks new ground by illuminating the relationship between high politics and popular confessional solidarities, especially the rise of radical catholicism. It exploits new archival sources to consider all groups in political society, reinterpreting court politics and discussing groups usually excluded from the traditional political narrative, such as the peasantry.

The Other Prussia

The Other Prussia PDF Author: Karin Friedrich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521027755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A study of national identity in Royal Prussia - the 'other Prussia', part of the Polish state from 1454 to 1793.

Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598-1621

Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598-1621 PDF Author: Antonio Feros
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521025324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A reappraisal of the reign of Philip III of Spain (1598-1621), and the king's favourite, first published in 2000.

Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-century France

Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-century France PDF Author: Henry Heller
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802036896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
He also discusses the important role of anti-Italian xenophobia in the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Estates-General of Blois in 1576-7, the Catholic League revolt, and the triumph of Henri IV.".