In this year’s lunch talk series at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Malte Griesse was invited to present our research group and important aspects of our work.

His talk on the communication of revolts in early modern Europe gave a general introduction into our current projects and drew attention to both cross-border circulation of knowledge and medical paradigms used to explain the rise and spread of insurrections.

Even though early modern authorities hoped to quell both revolts and their commemoration, the political complexity of Europe allowed for a constant flow of information to and from neighbouring territories. This cross-border circulation of knowledge often counteracted policies of ‘damnatio memoriae’ and fuelled public debates on the causes and outcomes of rebellions.

As a consequence, early modern revolts were commemorated not only in oral popular culture, but also in chronicles, legal documentation or even printed reports.

Among the authors writing on revolts were jurists, theologians, military specialists, political scientists and even physicians. They all tried to make sense of past events and develop strategies to prevent uprisings in the future.

And all throughout early modern Europe, medical metaphors were especially popular in a long-term analysis of political change. Humoral pathology prevailed on the continent and localized the causes of rebellion within the body politic; Paracelsian theory, however, became predominant in Britain and attributed revolts to exogenous causes, such as Papist invaders.

On the basis of several textual and visual sources from Italy, Germany, France and England, Malte Griesse exemplified these interrelated strategies in order to show that the main trouble spot of early modern European ‘nation building’ was not the use of violence itself, but the uncontrollable horizontal extension of communicative space.

You are welcome to listen to an audio recording of Malte Griesse’s talk:

http://revolt.hypotheses.org/files/2014/05/malte_medical-policy_2014.mp3



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