The Officer and the People
Accountability and Authority in Pre-Modern Europe
Published on 5. August 2021
Book
Hardback
423 pages
978-0-19-284838-3 (ISBN)
Description
This volume focuses on the relationship between officers and local communities in premodern Europe. Its starting point is that communities played a central role in holding officers to account and thereby contributed fundamentally to shaping premodern rule and authority. The volume's main aims are to further our understanding of popular political participation in premodern practices of officers' accountability, and to shift the emphasis in the study of premodern bureaucracy to the agency of the people. The essays in the volume address different mechanisms of accountability in various geographical and chronological contexts, bridging the traditional gap between medieval and early modern studies. Yet none offers a traditional study of officers using institutional and prosopographical approaches. Instead they all shift the focus to the people in their various communities and their interactions with representatives of central authority. Taking a bottom-up perspective, the essays thus highlight the role of the people as key actors who exerted tangible and visible control over the officers' behaviour, their self-image, and individual scope for action. Ultimately, therefore, the volume contributes to the debate about state-formation from below.
Reviews / Votes
It can be said that the articles collected in this volume succeed in shedding light on a little noticed field of research on the conduct of offices, state formation and political participation in the pre modern era. * Jan Seiwerth, Julius Maximilians Universitaet Wuerzburg, H-Soz-Kult *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 219 mm
Width: 143 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
618 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-284838-3 (9780192848383)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Maria Angeles Martin Romera is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the Complutense University of Madrid. She works on the social history and political culture of the later Middle Ages and the early modern period in Mediterranean Europe. From 2018 to 2020 she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at University College London. She has published on late medieval oligarchies, patronage, kinship, women's agency, social networks, and corruption from the late medieval to the early modern period.
Hannes Ziegler is Principal Investigator in a research project on 'Common Informing' at LMU Munich. From 2016 to 2021 he was a Research Fellow in Early Modern History at the German Historical Institute London. He has worked on the history of the British Customs in the eighteenth century and has also published on the history of the Holy Roman Empire.
Hannes Ziegler is Principal Investigator in a research project on 'Common Informing' at LMU Munich. From 2016 to 2021 he was a Research Fellow in Early Modern History at the German Historical Institute London. He has worked on the history of the British Customs in the eighteenth century and has also published on the history of the Holy Roman Empire.
Content
- 1: María Ángeles Martín Romera and Hannes Ziegler: Local Communities and Central Officers: The Rise of Public Accountability
- 2: Philippa Byrne: 'Testify Against Me': The Use of Biblical Exegesis in Holding the Bishop to Account in Thirteenth-Century England
- 3: John Sabapathy: The Emperor between Person and Institution: Officer, Office, and Accountability in Dante's Imperial Thinking
- 4: Laure Verdon: The Prince, his Officer, and the Community: How Secular Inquisitorial Procedures brought against Officers Contributed to Community-Building in the Thirteenth-Century Comtat Venaissin
- 5: Alessandra Rizzi: Rules, Norms, and Instructions for the Venetian rettori in the Subject Dominions: Between Central Authority and Local Communities (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries)
- 6: Alexandra Beauchamp: Purga de taula and other Procedures of Royal Officers' Accountability in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Fourteenth Century)
- 7: Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer: The Will of the Town: Popular Politics and the Control of Local Governments in Late Medieval Castile
- 8: Adelaide Costa: Royal Judicial Officials Held to Account by Local Communities in Early Sixteenth-Century Portugal: Fact or Fiction?
- 9: Marco Bellabarba: Controlling Officials: Judicial and Administrative Practices in Early Modern Italian States
- 10: Diane Roussel: People and Sergeants: Accountability and the Co-Construction of Order in Early Modern Paris (Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)
- 11: Johannes Kraus: War Administration: Subjects, Local Officers, and the Contribution System in the Thirty Years War
- 12: María Ángeles Martín Romera: Empowered Citizens and Questioned Officers: A Social and Anthropological Perspective on the juicios de residencia in Spain (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)
- 13: Sébastien Malaprade: The Spanish Visita Procedure as a Social Phenomenon
- 14: Hannes Ziegler: Customs Officers and Local Communities: Informing in Late Seventeenth-Century England
- 15: Niels Grüne: Petition Campaigns and Public Order: Negotiating Administrative Accountability in Early Eighteenth-Century Germany
- Index