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The phrase "the just Figure" - a quotation from Upon Appleton House - is the central theme of this thesis as it aptly describes Marvell's repeated use of shape, harmony and proportion to suggest morality and virtue. The poet's concern with geometrical imagery is conveyed by the word "figure", which also is another term for a metaphor or conceit. The word "just" suggests not only moral appropriateness, but also mathematical exactness or fit. The thesis consists of five chapters, each dealing with an aspect of the imagery of shape and form which pervades so many of Marvell's lyrics. The first chapter, "Moral Geometry", deals with the way in which Marvell uses the imagery of lines, angles and curves. In some poems the lines are curved, as in Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borrow, where the graceful downward curved line of the hill conveys Fairfacian humility. Symmetry and circularity are discussed in the second chapter. The poet uses the perfect shape of the circle to depict objects which convey a moral significance. Similarly, several of the lyrics are themselves quasi-circular with their closing lines echoing their openings. Chapter Three deals with liquid spheres. Marvell explores the nature, shape and texture of tears in poems such as Eyes and Tears and Mourning; and in On a Drop of Dew uses the shape of the dew drop to suggest the perfection of the heavenly realm from which it has been parted. In several of the lyrics, Marvell places a frame around his poems to create an enclosed world in which his poetic creations exist. These enclosed, or framed, worlds are discussed in Chapter Four. The final chapter, "Beyond The Frame", describes how some of the lyrics suggest a move from the world within to the world beyond the frame of the poem.This can either be a movement from confinement to release, or from the seen world to worlds unseen. Shape, harmony and proportion are the qualities which Marvell uses to convey morality and humility and a vision of the world based on what is, in the various senses of the word, "just".

The diploma thesis deals with manual that was created in Kožlany in the 18th century and tries to present the history of early modern liege small town and Kožlany municipality at the time. The main text of the thesis is divided into four chapters. At the beginning, the history of Kožlany is outlined with regard to early modern times. The following two chapters are devoted to the transcription and the original of manual. In these chapters the transcription is compared with the origin book, then follows the internal and external analysis of this town book, and paleographic analysis and segmentation of records to the category are formed. The fourth chapter deals with the town's administration, where all municipal officials are mentioned. In addition, this chapter contains a subchapter dedicated to municipal office, burgesses admission, and the economy. In conclusion are summarized the findings. The text is complemented with image attachments, which demonstrate manuscripts of individual scribes, tables and graphs related to the actual manual or the city administration.

1 Veronika Kucrová: Proměna kulturní krajiny v zázemí hlavního města: Dolnobřežansko v 16. - 19. století Abstract Transformation of the cultural landscape in the vicinity of the capital city: Dolnobřežansko in 16th-19th century This study is dealing with the development of cultural landscape in the Dolní Břežany Estate in the early modern times, specifically from late 16th century to the middle of 19th century. The focal points of the study are three important elements: the development of the built-up areas of the selected villages, the monitoring of the transformation of the landscape out of the built-up and uninhabited areas (forests in particular), and finally the detection of agricultural and other objects in the landscape - the reason of their origin, use and potential downfall. The Dolní Břežany Estate is located 16 km south of Prague, it was established gradually starting in 14th century but its biggest growth was during the beginning of 17th century. Minor aristocratic owners were replaced by influential representatives of the Czech state (the Želínský family of Sebuzín, Michna of Vacínov) until the Prague Archbishopric became the new owner in 1713. Thanks to that, most historical written sources come from the Prague Archbishopric Archive, alternatively from the manor farm estate archive. Using the...

Early Modern Players of Folly Thesis Abstract This thesis examines the ways in which folly is used in early modern literature. It asks: how is it that such an ephemeral concept proliferated and endured in the culture of early modern Europe? My understanding of early modern folly as a discursive phenomenon that was used as a way of questioning the knowledge of the ostensibly reasonable world is illustrated by case studies of four characters-four players of folly. Dedicated a chapter each, they are Till Eulenspiegel, the great German jester; Pomet Trpeza, a typically Ragusan wit of Marin Držić's Dundo Maroje; Brother Jan Paleček, a Bohemian representative of holy folly; and Sir John Falstaff, the embodiment of folly in Shakespeare's 1 and 2 Henry IV. Although they emerge from different cultural, linguistic and generic traditions, they nonetheless share a propensity for employing folly in ways that uncover possibilities for new understandings and challenge rigid certainties of the world around them. Early modernity, the era that produced the works I explore, has become associated with shifts and instabilities. In this Age of Discovery, man was compelled to understand afresh a suddenly unfamiliar world. However, where man and his reason reign, folly gladly follows. I read each of my four players of folly as...

This paper looks at three significant instances of the representation of abolitionist martyrdom in nineteenth-century America to first sketch the abolitionist discourse and its varied conceptualizations of martyrdom and second question the rationale and success of this strategy for manumitting slaves. Accordingly, I start with Brown, who (with help from sympathetic northerners and the megaphone of the Associated Press) appealed to the martyrological tradition in order to transform his paramilitary failure at Harper’s Ferry into a powerful symbol of his own abolitionist righteousness over and against the state’s iniquity. Though the superficial differences between Brown and arch-sentimentalist Harriet Beecher Stowe have discouraged their comparison, a look at the logic of martyrdom reveals a similar strategy at work in both Brown’s martyrization and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which makes death an argument for the manumission of slaves. I argue that this hugely successful novel reveals the potency of martyrological thinking in 19th-century America as it also reveals martyrdom and its logic to be the foundation of sentimentalism like Stowe’s. Finally, I look at the speeches and nonfiction of Frederick Douglass to argue that his own martyrization of John Brown is different than what we see in Brown and Stowe because it provokes change rather than validating abolitionism that already exists. To various degrees, these writers seem aware that there may be a problem in the rhetorical use of martyrdom against the putatively secular state; they consequently employ different strategies for negotiating the meaninglessness of suffering and death with the soteriological and eschatological assumptions of their day. These negotiations reveal the extent to which martyrdom could be taken seriously as a hammer of abolitionism by different authors and thus also indicate the degree to which martyrdom can be taken seriously as a political solution whatsoever. Ultimately, I want to argue that martyrdom and its logic are at best dubious when applied to secular politics precisely because it relies upon the analogy to Jesus Christ as savior, which cannot hold outside Christianity. Simply put, the death of a mortal cannot register eschatologically and, more importantly, death does not make a cogent argument for anything. Instead, martyrdom is preaching to the choir par excellance; whether the choir is Christian, abolitionist, or something else, martyrological appeals do not grow its membership, as martyrologists since early modernity have assumed.

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European legal history, as a field of scientific enquiry, is a relatively young discipline that can trace its roots back to the German jurist Savigny, whose work on the jurists of the medieval ius commune is commonly seen as the first of its kind. As one of the foremost German scholars of the nineteenth century and a fierce opponent of German codification, Savigny laid the foundation for generations of subsequent historians, not only in terms of the scope, but also in terms of the method of enquiry. Thus, in the generations after Savigny, European legal history tended to be approached in terms of general narratives charting the development of the European legal order through successive historical epochs. Within these narratives, jurists played a prominent role. Thus, the creation of the legal order of Europe was based upon a translatio studii from the Roman jurists via the medieval ius commune to civil codes of the nineteenth century. By grouping jurists into “schools” or “movements”, modern commentators, so it was argued, were able to assess the impact of these on the narrative of European legal history. Although, since the end of the Second World War, this narrative has become more nuanced, the jurists remain central to it. This has had a number of consequences. The main consequence of this focus on jurists (mostly academic figures teaching at universities) has been the marginalisation of legal practice and legal practitioners in the narrative of European legal history. And yet, as recent research on the rise of central courts in Europe has shown, legal practice clearly had an impact on the development of the European legal order. In light of these insights, this thesis seeks to contribute to the narrative of European legal history by focusing not on the works of academic jurists, but on the activities of legal practitioners. This statement requires delimitation. Rather than focusing on a number of legal practitioners over a long period of time, this thesis will focus on a single legal practitioner who flourished during a specific period in European history using the principles of a microhistory. The individual in question is the French lawyer Nicolas Bohier (1469-1539). The reasons for this specific focus are twofold. First, a focus on a specific individual and his works allows for greater scrutiny in depth, thus providing a counterbalance to (and also a means of testing and verifying) the broad sweep accounts found in most works on European legal history. In second place, Nicolas Bohier and his oeuvre cry out for a critical analysis and, until now, remain largely unstudied. As a practising lawyer and eventually president of the regional court of Bordeaux, Bohier was at the coalface of French legal practice in the sixteenth century. As a prolific writer and editor, Bohier left a rich corpus of work consisting of records of decisions of the court in Bordeaux, legal opinions as well as customs of the region. Furthermore, sixteenth-century France is a particularly exciting topic of investigation. This period not only saw the rise and solidification of Royal authority, but also saw the beginning of the homologation of customary law in France. On an intellectual level, the sixteenth century saw the rise of “legal humanism”, a particularly controversial intellectual movement in the context of European legal history as shown by recent research. This then brings us to the central point of this thesis. If, during the sixteenth century, the medieval ius commune was being replaced by “national” legal orders across Europe, as the general surveys of European legal history state, the works of a legal practitioner would show it much more clearly than the works of academic jurists. This thesis will therefore examine Bohier’s use of the term ius commune across his works to assess not only his understanding of the term, but also to assess how this concept operated in relation to other “sources of law”, for example statute and custom. Although the results of a microhistory study should not be generalised too far, it will permit us to interrogate the general narratives of European legal history of the early modern period.

This study of the term politique during the French Wars of Religion (c. 1562-98) argues that it is a keyword in the sense that it is is active and actively used in French explorations of the political, in the forming and undermining of collective identities in a period of civil crisis, and in the self-fashioning gestures of a shifting political class. I sample and analyse a range of texts - from treatises that form part of the canon of early modern French political writing (such as Bodin's Six livres de la Republique [1576] and the Satyre ménippée [c. 1593]) to anonymous polemical pamphlets - all of which feature prominent uses of the term politique. Certain of these sources gave rise to a longstanding historiographical impression that politique referred, in the period, to a coherent third party in the religious wars as well as to a related kind of expertise and its practitioner. This thesis builds on and extends recent work showing that there was no such party and no one in the period who directly identified as politique. Rather than seeking to identify the 'real' politiques or to establish a corrected definition of the term as used in sixteenth-century French, I argue that the term is strikingly and increasingly mobile across the period, coming at times to refer to mobility itself in conceptions of politics and political action. Dialogue emerges in the thesis as a key conceptual arena and discursive mode for writers attempting to work out what they and others mean by the term politique. I use philological and word-historical methods to examine writers of the period who seek to determine what makes a good or bad politique, to present themselves as politique, or to condemn politiques as morally bankrupt, and - in some cases - to do all of the above in the same text. Almost every text I analyse in the thesis offers its own definition of politique, and attempts to be definitive, but I show that all these attempts to make the reader recognise the 'true' meaning of politique are extending the drama rather than concluding it.

My thesis explores the way in which the Italian language and literary culture contributed to John Milton’s early development as a poet (over the period up to 1639 and the composition of Epitaphium Damonis). I begin by investigating the nature of the cultural relationship between England and Italy in the late medieval and early modern periods. I then examine how Milton’s own engagement with the Italian language and its literature evolved in the context of his family background, his personal contacts with the London Italian community and modern language teaching in the early seventeenth century as he grew to become a ‘multilingual’ poet. My study then turns to his first published collection of verse, Poems 1645. Here, I reconsider the Italian elements in Milton’s early poetry, beginning with the six poems he wrote in Italian, identifying their place and significance in the overall structure of the volume, and their status and place within the Italian Petrarchan verse tradition. After considering the significance of the Italian titles of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, I assess the impact of Italian verse forms (and particularly the canzone) upon Milton’s early poetry in English and the question of the nature of the relationship between Milton’s Mask presented at Ludlow Castle and Tasso’s ‘favola boschereccia’, Aminta. Finally, I consider the place in Milton’s career of his journey to Italy in 1938-9 and its importance to him as a personal ‘conquest’ of Italy. I suggest that, far from setting him upon the path toward poetic glory, as is often claimed, his return England marked the beginning of a lengthy hiatus in his poetic career. My argument is that Milton was much more Italianate, by background, accident of birth and personal bent, than has usually been recognised and that an appreciation of how this Italian aspect of his cultural identity contributed to his poetic development is central to an understanding of his poetry.