Fest – Theater – Musik
Frühneuzeit-Info 27 (2016)

Erscheinungsdatum: Oktober 2016
Bestellungen werden gerne entgegengenommen: Bestellschein

Der vierte und letzte Teil der Vorschau präsentiert jene Beiträge, die unabhängig vom Themenschwerpunkt in der offenen Sektion der Zeitschrift erschienen sind.

Robert Rebitsch
Eine Frage der Ehre. Die militärische Ehrenbezeugung als Anlassfall und Gegenstand der Friedensschlüsse in den Englisch-Niederländischen Seekriegen
(in German language)

The Anglo-Dutch wars were conflicts between England and the Netherlands mainly due to economic reasons. Therefore these wars are often described as “trading wars”. Although other reasons for these wars existed, England wanted to abandon Dutch world supremacy in trade. Within this context as well the social phenomenon of “honor” played a crucial part of the intensification in the beginning and for the regulation in the end of these conflicts. In this sense “honor” is not just seen as an ethical system, as part of a rigid structure of values and conduct for individuals, in this sense “honor” must also be seen as a collective perception of feelings against other nations. The disrespect and insult of the flag, an important national symbol, stirred up bad emotions of princes, authorities and the whole nation – or at least could be exploit for propaganda reasons. At the end of the wars the handling how to proceed with the flags in sovereign territories had to be established. This article shows that an alleged infringement of the “honor of the flag” was not just in two of three cases a classical incident for warfare, the “honor of the flag” was also relevant in the peace treaties of Westminster (1654/1674) and Breda (1667). In all three treaties between England and the Netherlands the striking or bringing down of the flag by the Dutch in British seas is a subject matter of these contracts. So the archaic phenomenon of “honor” was defined in international peace treaties as a legal category in a per se rational context of conflict.

Julia Gebke
Milk and heritage. Wet nurses and doctors in the royal household of the Spanish Habsburgs
(in German language)

For a long time, wet nurses, their lives and working conditions, embodied not more than a mere footnote to history and to historians. During the last decades, this perspective has changed notably but there is still a lot of work to do. This article aims at contributing to this task. It examines how both medical theory as well as practice shaped the daily life of early modern wet nurses in the royal household of the Spanish Habsburgs and how this knowledge was spread even among non-medical circles. Despite the spare documentation, we can trace enough hints, which provide insight in the constantly growing complexity of procedures to choose the perfect wet nurse for the precious Spanish Infantes as well as the efforts to expose the selected ones to permanent medical control in order to secure the health and well-being of the royal nurslings. This control was exerted mainly by the royal physicians (médicos de cámara), who played a significant role in this setting of wet nurses’ practice in the royal household of the Spanish Habsburgs. Finally, the article aims at catching a glimpse of how those wet nurses faced their challenging working conditions and perceived their own status in the upbringing of the royal Infante.

Friedrich Polleross
„Conterfet Kupfferstich“. Neue Erkenntnisse zu den ‚Porträtbüchern‘ des 17. Jahrhunderts
(in German language)

The more than 200 portrait engravings in the „Annales Ferdinandei“ of the imperial diplomat Franz Christoph Khevenhüller Graf von Frankenburg (1588-1650) offer one of the most important iconographic sources from the first half of the 17th century. They are only known through the reprints of the 18th century and remain to be analyzed. They still exist in many old collections, but have been cut out of their original books and thus their origin is not known today. Therefore it is necessary to reconstruct the artistic and historical context of these portraits. This paper delivers the first information about the unknown portraits of the „Annales Ferdinandei“ from 1640/41 and connects this series with four other Middle European ‚portraitbooks‘ of the second third of the 17th century. In contrast to the portrait engravings by Elias Wideman(n) the other series have not yet been analyzed, neither by art historians nor by historians. But the contrasting juxtaposition of the „Conterfet Kupfferstich“ with the portraits in the books of Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato and Johann Joseph von Weingarten offers new insights about artistic relations among them and raises questions about their meaning and role in the political struggles between the Habsburg Court and the Estates in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary.