Apprenticeship in early modern Europe has been the subject of important research in the last decades, mostly by economic historians; but the majority of the research has dealt with cities or countries in Northern Europe. The organization, evolution and purpose of apprenticeship in Southern Europe are much less studied, especially for the early modern period. The research in this volume is based on a unique documentary source: more than 54,000 apprenticeship contracts registered from 1575 to 1772 by the "Old Justice", a civil court of the Republic of Venice in charge of guilds and labour disputes. An archival source of such scale provides a unique opportunity to historians, and this is the first time that primary research on apprenticeship is leveraging such a large amount of data in one of the main economic centres of early modern Europe. This book brings together multiple perspectives, including social history, economic history and art history, and is the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and computer scientists. Apprenticeship, Work, Society in Early Modern Venice will appeal to students and researchers alike interested in the nature of work and employment in Venice and Italy, as well as society in early modern Europe more generally.

This comparative study of the European history of apprenticeship offers a comprehensive picture of occupational training before the Industrial Revolution.

This study centres around three leading military statesmen who served under Oliver Comwell but were also his kin and shared the experiences of the civil wars, John Disbrowe (1608–80), Henry Ireton (1611–51), and Charles Fleetwood (1618–92). It seeks to develop our picture of their positions from the context of their kin link to Cromwell and how their private worlds shaped their public roles, how kinship was part of the functioning of the Cromwellian state, how they were seen and presented, and how this impacted on their own lives, and their kin, before and after the Restoration. Cromwell's career can be explored further by considering figures in his kinship network to show how the public and private overlapped and influenced each other through their interaction before and after 1660. This study aims to consider the trajectory of elements of Cromwell's network and how its functioning and the interaction of its constituent parts over time shaped the politics of the years 1643 to 1660 but also how the survival of some networks after 1660 were continuing communities of those willing to own their memories of the civil wars, regicide, and Cromwell. A study of aspects of Cromwell's kin also provides examples of the continuities between those who resisted the Stuarts in the 1640s and 1650s and did so again in the 1680s. Suitable for specialists in the area and students taking courses on early modern British, European and American history as well as those with a more general interest in the period.

Images of Change focuses on the visual propaganda employed by Catholic popes in Rome during the time of Tridentine Reform. In 1563, at the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church decided to reform its own use of imagery, in response to Protestant criticism. This volume examines how different sixteenth-century popes dealt with church reform by looking at the variety of artworks that were commissioned particularly in the city of Rome, the immediate sphere of influence of papal power. Based on original research in the Vatican archives, the book argues that because of the contradictory media strategies employed by individual popes, the papacy began to lose its spiritual and temporal influence and power. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in the Roman Catholic Church in and around the sixteenth century, as well as Early Modern religious reform and Papal influence.

This is the first study to focus specifically on destitute children who became part of the early British Empire, uniting separate historiographies on poverty, childhood, global expansion, forced migration, bound labor, and law. Britons used their nascent empire to employ thousands of destitute children, launching an experiment in using plantations and ships as a solution for strains on London’s inadequate poor relief schemes. Starting with the settlement of Jamestown (1607) and ending with Britain’s participation in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), British children were sent all around the world. Authorities, parents, and the public fought against the men and women they called "spirits" and "kidnappers," who were reviled because they employed children in the same empire but without respecting the complexities surrounding children’s legal status when it came to questions of authority, consent, and self-determination. Children mattered to Britons: protecting their liberty became emblematic of protecting the liberty of Britons as a whole. Therefore, contests over the legal means of sending children abroad helped define what it meant to be British. This work is written for a wide audience, including scholars of early modern history, childhood, law, poverty, and empire.

Due to high adult mortality and the custom of remarriage, stepfamilies were a common phenomenon in pre-industrial Europe. Focusing on East Central Europe, a neglected area of Western historiography, this book draws essential comparisons in terms of remarriage patterns and stepfamily life between East Central Europe and Northwestern Europe. How did the specific economic, military-political, legal, religious, and cultural profile of the region affect remarriage patterns and stepfamily types? How did the greater propensity of widowed parents to remarry in some of the East Central European communities compared to Western ones shape the children’s lives? And how did the routine divorce before Orthodox courts by ordinary men and women shape relationships among children and adults belonging to blended families? By drawing on quantitative as well as qualitative approaches, the book offers an historical demographical narrative of the frequency of stepfamilies in a comparative framework, and also assesses the impact of stepparents on the mortality and career prospects of their stepchildren. The ethnic and religious diversity of East Central Europe also allows for distinctions and comparisons to be made within the region. Remarriage and Stepfamilies in East Central Europe, 1600-1900 will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of family, marriage, and society in East Central Europe.

Embark on a journey that transcends the boundaries of art and technology in the groundbreaking realm of Creative Convergence: The AI Renaissance in Art and Design. This isn't just another book on art and technology- it's a journey that sparks curiosity, fuels innovation, and challenges traditional artistic boundaries. Discover the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it melds with human expression, propelling artistry into uncharted territories and redefining traditional notions of both originality and creativity. The text is not just about art or AI; it is about the fusion of both, catalyzing a creative revolution that challenges previous assumptions about human-machine collaboration and how ideation, conceptualization, process and execution are radically rethought. Have you ever wondered how/will AI revolutionize training, education and execution in art and design? Delve into this captivating treatment that contextualizes the disruptions we are experiencing today in the technological innovations and artistic responses and integrations of the past five hundred years. Human creativity has always struggled against technological advance, but ultimately integrated and redefined what "art" is in each era. As such, you will see how AI can be incorporated in various artistic disciplines in this study. Explore real-world case studies that showcase AI's practical impact on 3D design, drawing, digital art, and even web design. The book also addresses the controversial question: Can AI be a co-creator in the creative and artistic process, even assisting in creating an original, signature style? Brace yourself for revelations that will challenge your perceptions of traditional artistry.

This book takes a long-term approach, spanning from the end of the 16th to the 19th century, to explore how men and women in Italy, France, and Spain collected, displayed, and passed down various types of papers. The contributors share a core interest in the relationship between social actors and their paper heritage. The collectors, who come from diverse cultural, social, and gender backgrounds, provide insights into the reasons and processes behind the accumulation, valorisation, and transmission of their paper heritage. Unlike most studies on collecting, this book shifts the focus away from collections and institutions to the owners of the collected objects and their desires for their accumulated papers. This volume covers three centuries and provides insights into the aspirations of collectors and the fate of their papers after transmission. It takes place against the backdrop of major social, political, and cultural changes affecting the Italian peninsula, the Spanish monarchy, and France. The cultural interests and the collector networks often extended beyond Europe, as noted by many of the essays in this volume. Paper Heritage in Italy, France, Spain and Beyond (16th to 19th Centuries) will interest scholars and students of Early Modern and Modern European History across various fields, including social and cultural history, intellectual history, gender history, history of collecting and patronage.

In the early modern era, two Nordic countries that are neighbours today, Sweden and Finland, formed one realm. Yet, modern history writing has largely ignored this unity, instead developing analysis and discussion in close connection to nationalistic ideas, national politics, and processes of state-building. Historians of both countries have therefore mostly approached their common past separately and academic history in both countries has taken its own course of development, leading to different emphases. This volume explores the common early modern history between Sweden and Finland from the Middle Ages to beginning of the 19th century, and how this history has been created in professional historiography (1860–2020), which methods have been used, and which themes studied. Based on extensive source material, including a database of history publications in different fields in both countries, this book offers a fresh scholarly approach to the study of historiography through a unique comparative perspective. This book is an excellent resource for students and professional researchers alike through providing an alternate view on the history of Sweden and Finland and providing key insight into the historiography of these two countries, and the similarities and differences they showcase.

This book aims to shed light on the roots of sustainability in the Iberian Peninsula that lie in the interrelations between shipbuilding and forestry from the 14th to the 19th centuries, combining various geographical scales (local, regional and national) and different timespans (short-term and long-term studies). Three main themes are discussed in depth here: firstly, the roots of current conservationism in the Iberian Peninsula; the evolution of the forest policies set in motion at the local, regional and national levels to meet the demand for wood and timber; and the long-standing impact of naval empirical forestry on the conservation and transformation of the forest landscape. Therefore, the book attempts, on the one hand, to unravel the forest policies and empirical forestry implemented in the Iberian Peninsula as the roots or origins of what we refer to nowadays as "sustainability", and to assess the contribution of imperial forestry to landscape planning and the conservation of forest resources, on the other, and, finally, to break away from the prevailing theological narrative that shipbuilding was the main agent of forest destruction in the Early Modern Iberian Peninsula, for which both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be conducted. This book could be of maximum interest to environmental and social historians and researchers, and anyone devoted to conducting research on the emergence and evolution of the concept of "sustainability" with respect to the governance and the historical transformation of woodlands around the world.