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This volume advances our knowledge of continuing trends over the longue durée of European history. It also exposes many differences separating contemporaries from their medieval and early-modern ancestors. In putting the concept of social capital to the test, the authors also expose the strengths, weaknesses, and limits of the 'Putnam thesis'.
The essays address fourteenth-century English fears of old-age neglect; childhood, friendship, scandal, and rivalry in Renaissance Florence; rebellion in an Italian village; social capital and seigneurial power in southern and north-central Italy; guild violence in Calvinist Ghent; civil society in early-modern Bologna, Naples and the Papal State; gender in High Renaissance Rome; and critical analyses of the transition from religious to secular sensibilities that scholars (following Juergen Habermas) have identified in eighteenth-century Europe. In each case, the topic is considered in relation to recent theories of 'social capital': the informal, intangible bonds of trust upon which, social scientist Robert Putnam argues, every human community depends. The result is a series of highly original case-studies which reveal the workings of late-medieval and early-modern European society from new and often unexpected angles.
The essays address fourteenth-century English fears of old-age neglect; childhood, friendship, scandal, and rivalry in Renaissance Florence; rebellion in an Italian village; social capital and seigneurial power in southern and north-central Italy; guild violence in Calvinist Ghent; civil society in early-modern Bologna, Naples and the Papal State; gender in High Renaissance Rome; and critical analyses of the transition from religious to secular sensibilities that scholars (following Juergen Habermas) have identified in eighteenth-century Europe. In each case, the topic is considered in relation to recent theories of 'social capital': the informal, intangible bonds of trust upon which, social scientist Robert Putnam argues, every human community depends. The result is a series of highly original case-studies which reveal the workings of late-medieval and early-modern European society from new and often unexpected angles.