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History Notes General History III: 1400–1650 (Renaissance, Recovery and Reform) Notes

Historiography Revision Notes

Updated Historiography Revision Notes

General History III: 1400–1650 (Renaissance, Recovery and Reform) Notes

General History III: 1400–1650 (Renaissance, Recovery and Reform)

Approximately 43 pages

These notes provide comprehensive cover of the General III Preliminary paper. They were the sole resource that I used for my preliminary examination revision, in which I achieved a mark of 69%. They include a wealth of specific and detailed examples spanning across the whole of Europe, as well as discussion of a broad range of historiography, making them a complete resource for studying for the prelim in General III. They are often structured around key questions, meaning that they also come in u...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our General History III: 1400–1650 (Renaissance, Recovery and Reform) Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

GHIII Historiography Revision:

Capitalism:

  • BRENNER DEBATE = key to development of capitalism.

  • Marxist: saw class struggle as cause of change, rather than changing prod methods.

  • Tensions came from small-scale agriculture’s inability to innovate.

  • Focuses on unique English environment.

  • Also talks of “a nearly unique symbiotic relationship between agriculture and industry”.

  • Were “wholly disparate overall patterns”.

  • Croot & Parker:

  • Agree to an extent: “the celebrated class of English yeomanry”.

  • However, Brenner over-emphs French peasantry’s strength.

  • “The first half of the sixteenth century is marked by a sudden upsurge of agrarian capitalism in western Europe”.

  • Malthus focuses on demographics.

  • B Geremek’s argument: low wages = “a driving force in the evolution of capitalism”.

  • R S DuPlessis:

  • Talks of a “Protestant ethic”.

  • “Europe’s economic center of gravity… shifted to the N Atlantic”.

  • Immanuel Wallerstein: Labels overseas expansion and subsequent wealth “the prime solvent of Europe’s feudal order”.

  • C R Friedrichs:

  • Development was “by no means unilinear”.

  • Overseas expansion = “an important stimulus”.

  • Le Roy Ladurie: Wars distracting.

  • Kamen: loans = “an instrument for the deterioration and expropriation of an independent peasantry”.

  • R Jutte: Capitalism “an absolute impoverishment of the rural masses”.

Education:

  • Grafton and Jardine: Humanism had “the cultural seal of superiority”.

  • Paul Grendler: “without universities, there would have been no Ref”.

Humanism:

  • C G Nauert:

  • Erasmus = “The apogee of reformist humanism”.

  • “Quite literally epoch-making… an important force in human history”.

  • P Dear:

  • Argues that the relat between humanism and scholasticism is characterised by “co-existence rather than conflict”.

  • “A centrally relevant cultural dimension”.

  • Following ancients = “the route to cultural respectability”.

  • “Strongly coloured the style and content of univ curricula”.

  • N Mann:

  • “Comes to pervade… almost all areas of post-medieval culture”.

  • By C15th, “the studia humanitatis were firmly enshrined in the uni curriculum”.

  • Hale:

  • John Colet’s lectures “broke radically with the trad methods”.

  • Printing “made the labours of classical scholars more and more conspic in booksellers’ shops”.

  • “Had a broader, independent life”.

  • M Davies:

  • Humanist writing style = “well on the way to sweeping the field”.

  • “There was no humanism without books”.

  • P Burke:

  • “A new age seemed to have dawned”.

Overseas expansion:

  • Nicholas Davies:

  • Talks of commercial and conquest as 2 types of expansion.

Popular Religion:

  • Clifford Flanigan spoke of ‘alienated liturgy’.

  • R N Swanson:

  • “It is all too easy to approach the pre-Ref laity with a patronising stance”.

  • “The faith itself is essentially atomistic, dependent on individs creating their own relationships with the divinity”.

  • “Pre-Ref Cath was… a ‘demand-led’ religion”.

  • “The ‘elite’ and the ‘clerical’… were often a veneer over the ‘lay’ and ‘popular’”.

  • “What is notable… is the general lack of complaints about the theological activities of the clergy”.

  • “Purely doctrinal theology was always elitist”.

  • “Discipline and devotion are to the fore, rather than theology”.

  • Pope = “virtually Christ-on-Earth”.

  • “Perhaps the most daunting is the need to try to penetrate minds”.

  • E Duffy:

  • Power to perform mass “implied an enormously high doctrine of priesthood”.

  • R C Finucane:

  • Talks of “much anti-papal feeling”.

  • “The increasing use of the vernacular… drew more and more laymen into the life of the Church”.

  • John Delumeau spoke of ‘the “folklorisation” of Christianity’.

  • M Rubin talks of “a symbolic system”.

Popular Revolt:

  • P Blickle:

  • Focuses on Norway.

  • Excessive gov’t oppression in Norway, 1490s, ^.

  • Tension over serfdom major cause in rural areas.

  • “Peasants were not called to arms by the nobility”.

  • L Stone blamed the Eng Rev on weaknesses of the Stuarts.

  • J A Goldstone:

  • “Brought on by purely polit conflicts and exacerbated by chance conjunctions of unfortunate circumstances”.

  • Explains how contemps viewed taxes as fair trade for gov’t maintaining stability.

  • People could have controlled demographics.

  • J H Elliott:

  • Wars of Relig in France brought French recruits into bands of bandits.

  • Blames demographics for Barcelona food riots.

  • Martin van Gelderen:

  • “Precarious balance of power” in the N’lands.

  • Created “a tradition of urban revolt”.

  • G Parker: ‘Military rev’ war cost x10.

  • Theda Skocpol: argued that rev’ns happened when state faced war with more advanced capitalist countries.

  • Rude (1964) – cross section of pop = mob.

Poverty:

  • P Elmer and O P Grell:

  • Emph desire to help poor in Florence.

  • Support Lindemann’s pro-hospital stance.

  • Hosps in Florence “certainly tools of social policy” but could also be “genuine expressions of Christian charity”.

  • M Lindemann:

  • Hospitals “always assumed great significance”.

  • Talks of “the Ref’s pruning” of hosps.

  • P Slack:

  • 1572: “A comprehensive PL… went the whole way”.

  • The dissolution of the monasteries etc. was helpful LT as it enabled more central gov’t programmes to take place.

  • “Their common inspiration was...

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