Search results for "peasant"
showing 10 items of 29 documents
Rents instead of Land. Credit and Peasant Indebtedness in Late Medieval Mediterranean Iberia: the Kingdom of Valencia
2021
AbstractThe literature on the rural economy of the high and late Middle Ages has long established a close correlation between three significant features of the period: the spread of rural credit, the dynamism of the peasant land market and the expropriation of peasant land by the creditors, usually yeomen or urban landowners. There has even been talk for some countries (northern Italy) of a deliberate strategy of territorial conquest, insofar as the credit provided by urban lenders would aim at the expropriation of land from insolvent debtors. This article studies for the Mediterranean Spain of the late Middle Ages, and in particular for the old kingdom of Valencia, other objectives of rura…
The Warm Water in my Heart - The Meanings of Love among the Finnish Country Population in the Second Half of the 17th Century
2011
This article examines the meanings and contents given to the emotion called love in early modern Finnish culture. The study takes as its starting point three distinct love affairs found in the district court records. These cases violated the boundaries between the estates, for the women were of noble birth and the men came from peasant backgrounds. Historical love is here approached using the theories of Catherine A. Lutz, Carol & Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein. Following these scholars, love is seen as a cultural and social phenomenon, bound up with the culture and mentalities of the era. In early modern times marriage was the basis of society and promoted by both the state and the ch…
Otherness and self in latvian theatre: Changes at the turn of the nineteenth century
2015
In the article, political and historical interpretations of the first play in Latvian, an adapted translation of Ludvig Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill (1723, Latvian version 1790) are explored. Although the play has been often interpreted as a work of anti-alcohol propaganda, the article argues that the political motives of the play are no less important. Translated into Latvian during the time of the French revolution, the play mirrors the tense atmosphere of the revolutionary years and reflects changes in Latvian peasant identity. While translating, Baltic German pastor Alexander Johann Stender changed the play’s setting to the late eighteenth century Courland and added new details, emphasiz…
Aflame Face. The Sicilian Days of Carlo Levi.
2019
The seventy-three years of Carlo Levi’s (Turin 1902-Rome 1975) arch of life reveal his extraordinary coherency as an intellectual, his political flame, and his aesthetic versatility. His life was an expressive symbiosis with painting and writing: two forms of 'saying' amalgamated as one. If his love for Lucania is distilled from his journey to the South of Italy, his 'Sicilian days', framed in the Fifties, and preserved in his novel Words are Stones, radiate a subterranean and solar Sicily inhabited by violence and by Guttuso’s palette. The absorbing dynamism of the oxymoron governs the whole: that is, a spiritual, geological, social soul of a world, the peasant one, on the threshold of dis…
Leaseholders in Capitalist Arcadia: Bourgeois Hegemony and Peasant Opportunities in the Valencian Countryside during the Nineteenth Century
2006
Scholars tend to interpret the European peasantry's incorporation into mass politics at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of two equally extreme situations, citing either the peasantry's support for traditional oligarchies, or its anti-capitalist radicalism. By contrast, this article explores how the confluence between a broad network of peasant families and leased agricultural properties in the Valencian region of Spain helped generate mass support for an anti-liberal (and eventually Francoist) legal system. The authors highlight the uniqueness of the social and productive context of Valencian agriculture during the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as the tensions that exi…
Violence and the Peasant Elite in Lower Satakunta (1550–1680)
2016
“The lengthy quarrels over inheritance hint that these people had fiery tempers”, wrote Mauno Jokipii in his pioneering article on the history of the Lavila family—one of the prominent families of freeholders in Lower Satakunta.1 In our study on the women from that same family, Virpi Nissila and I have encountered about 100 court cases from the 1620 to the 1650s, in which six women from two generations have been present. The most prominent of them is Anna Martensdotter who appeared in court 28 times in the four years for which we have the court minutes still intact. These records tell of her offensive behaviour: neighbours complaining about her physical violence, insults, appropriations, an…
The Story of Aggressive and Violent Peasant Elites in the North
2016
All over early modern Fennoscandia—in the areas of modern-day Norway, Sweden, and Finland—there were peasants who occupied wealthy farmsteads, held positions of trust, and had kinship networks with members of higher status groups such as local priests and state officials, burghers, and other gentry. Even though they served as a link between the rest of the peasantry and the state authorities, it is evident that early modern peasant resistance was also often led by the wealthy. There is abundant evidence in court records that these respected and leading members of the local community could practically terrorise their neighbourhood with violence and aggression. Why was there this seeming cont…
Arrendaments i parceries. La gestió indirecta de la terra al País Valencià (segles XIV-XV)
2002
In this article, it is studied the market of land lease in the Valentian rural society in the end of the Middle Age. Using notarial sources and court rolls, it is possible to know the economic function that exercised this forms of land management in the agrarian system. The penetration of urban capital through this kind of contracts was always limited. Far from eroding the hegemony of the small peasant farming, leases consolidated this pattern as productive basis of the feudal system.<br><br>En aquest article s'estudia el mercat de cessió de la terra a curt termini en la societat rural valenciana a les darreries de l’Edat Mitjana. A partir de fonts notarials i judicials, es pot …
Sustainability Assessment of Agricultural Systems in Paraguay: A Comparative Study Using FAO’s SAFA Framework
2019
Sustainability is a topic that is at the center of current discussions in the political, economic, social, and environmental fields. For its analysis, an integral and multidisciplinary vision is needed. This work aims to assess the sustainability of agricultural systems in Paraguay through a comparison applying SAFA (Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems) indicators. The research focuses on 15 case studies on the territory of the Eastern Region of Paraguay divided into five classes of agricultural systems: agribusiness, conventional peasant family farming, agroecological peasant family farming, neo-rural farming, and indigenous agriculture. Data were collected through in…
Oligarchies and Client Systems in Rural communities in the South of the Crown of Aragón (13th to 15th Centuries)
2010
Studies of late medieval Hispanic client systems generally focus on networks of noble power, to the exclusion of the peasantry. This is doubtless in part because the peasantry has traditionally been considered to represent a largely homogenous social group defined in opposition to the feudal nobility, whose members defended common interests. However, the last few years have witnessed a profusion of studies into the rural, or peasant, elites of Western Europe during the late medieval and modern periods, and these highlight not only significant disparities between the economic status of those and that of the remainder of the peasantry, but also their employment of specific power-mechanisms in…