Preliminary Programme

Promises, oaths and vows were fundamental to daily life in early modern Europe. Nowhere was this truer than the Saxon silver-mining city of Freiberg. Here, all sorts of legal resolutions were underpinned by a series of pledges, backed by guarantors (Bürgen). For personal loans and business transactions, guarantors were used to pledge for the trustworthiness of debtors (and in certain instances to make payments on their behalf). For insults, fights, and other ruptures of the urban peace, guarantors were responsible for ensuring the maintenance of social harmony between disputants. And for court summons, guarantors were used to assure attendance in court.
But being a guarantor was not without risk. Guarantors pledged their houses that the terms of the agreement would be upheld. If they were not, the guarantor stood to forfeit his or her house. Despite this significant risk, the use of guarantors was staggeringly high: in any given year, approximately half of Freiberg’s citizenry entered into a legal agreement that included guarantors.
Guarantors were hardly unique to Saxony. Their use was wide-spread in late medieval and early modern Europe. Where the Germans had guarantors, the Italians had mallevadori or fideiussores (the respective Italian and Latin terms). The work of Daniel Lord Smail, Thomas Kuehn, and Thomas Cohen shows that guarantors were a central part of legal life in early modern Europe.
But this paper will move beyond the legal dynamics of pledges and guarantors, and into the social networks that underpinned, mobilized, and channelled them. Finding or acting as a guarantor were social practices involving social capital, trust, and reciprocity. As illuminated by Jeremy Boissevain in Friends of Friends, these practices were also transactions and exchanges carried out by social actors within social networks.
Following Boissevain’s lead, three principle questions will guide this investigation. First, was there a cost to employing or utilizing guarantors? Not necessarily a financial cost, but some form of expected reciprocal or informal return? Second, given the risks, why act as a guarantor? What could be gained from it? Favours to be redeemed at a later date? Prestige? Honour? Trust? Leverage? Or nothing at all? Third, who acted as a guarantor for whom? Were these networks of transactions and exchanges based on kin, gender, trade/occupation, neighbourhood, patronage, social status, or on mere unstructured reciprocity? Did one guarantee for one's equals or for one's inferiors? Did dependent persons, such as women, children, or servants guarantee?
In Economia barocca, Renata Ago demonstrated that in business transactions early modern Italians routinely bound themselves to one another through a series of debts and credits to create webs of mutual obligations. Mutatis mutandis, did something similar occur with guarantors? And if not, why? Or was another dynamic at work?
Early modern Europe was a much more contingent world, subject to the vagaries of weather, disease and, in Freiberg, mining. By studying the use of guarantors and the social networks, transactions, and exchanges behind them, we can begin to understand how and through whom, people sought to bring security and surety to their social and legal lives. (Show less)

One of the master narratives of urban historiography is the notion that, after their rise during the Late Middle Ages, guilds underwent a steady social and political decline in most parts of Western and Middle Europe during the early modern period. Yet, – as the paper will argue – recent research on late-medieval and early modern urban communities and guilds in particular suggests a need to revise the traditional conception of the social and political development of urban guilds between the 15th and 17th centuries – at least – in two respects: (1) Even if guilds (along with the ‘ordinary’ artisan-citizen) underwent a process of social and political declassification at the end of the 15th and during most parts of the 16th century, in many urban communities guilds could consolidate or even strengthen their social and political position again since the middle of the 16th and in the course of the 17th century. (2) The changing position of guilds in urban communities can – at least to a certain degree – be explained with transformations in the communicative structures and the media system of urban communities and the differing possibilities and abilities of the urban social groups and sub-communities to adopt to these transformations.
Recent research has pointed out that the social formation and the political culture of urban communities were transformed in a fundamental way between the 15th and 17th centuries, a transformation which was mainly caused by changes of the urban media system. In particular the spread of written (and, to a lesser degree, print) media in political and jurisdictional communication, which accelerated during the 16th century, played a crucial role in this process: thereby, the rules of (political) communication which, during the Middle Ages, had been mainly determined by the logic of (oral) face-to-face-interaction were changing slowly but steadily along with the rules of accumulating – what one can call in reference to Bourdieu – ‘communicative capital’; this means the social and cultural resources which enable (urban) actors (as the guilds and other urban sub-communities) to influence social and in particular political communication processes. From such a perspective, the social and political development of guilds between the 15th and 17th centuries can be interpreted and explained in a new way: initially, guilds were one of the main losers of the media change, in particular in political respect, because they lacked the cultural capital which was necessary to accumulate communicative capital under the changing circumstances; rather, guilds adhered for most parts of the 16th century to the conditions of a political culture, which was determined by traditional forms of face-to-face-communication. Yet, since the end of the 16th century, guilds were able to adopt quickly to the new communicative conditions, mainly by using economic resources to accumulate communicative capital, for example by hiring advocates and (semi-)professional writers. Thus, they could compensate their cultural disadvantages and close the gap to other urban groups and sub-communities. As a consequence, the guilds reappeared as a potentially powerful political player during the 17th century. Moreover, these processes also had significant consequences on the formation and functioning of the guild system itself, in particular the conditions of inclusion and exclusion, the inner organization of the guilds and their self-perception.
The paper will discuss the processes mentioned above in more detail, concentrating on the situation in Middle European towns. (Show less)

According to Riga’s town privileges the Great Guild of the merchants had the function of the second political estate. Important political issues had to be negotiated by all three estates: the town council, the Great Guild and the Small Gild. This political duty was executed by the bench of elders. The elders were elected by all brothers of the Great Guild and held office a lifetime. Though the elders represented all members of the Great Guild towards the town public and spoke in their name to the town council, the bench of elders and the guild’s brothers frequently were in opposition to each other.
The proposed paper will focus on the question how this group of elders, which existence was an outcome of political processes, has been constructed as a social group. I would like to analyse inclusion and distinction both within the Great Guild and within the whole town. The shrovetide-feast for example included all members of the Great Guild but did also cement a clear distinction between elders and brothers by its ceremonial. New elected elders had to present a silver plate as a gift not to the whole guild, but to the bench of elders. Poems and university dissertations were dedicated to the bench of elders and not to the whole guild. Riga’s town finances have been controlled by the ‘Kassakollegium’, a group of citizens elected for three years. Elders and brothers of the Great Guild each had their own representatives in this committee.
Elders were headmen of charitable, social and ecclesiastical facilities. These leading positions in the midst of the town’s public affairs strengthened social reputation and social capital of the individual elders as well as that of the bench of elders: The bench of elders was responsible for the election of the candidates for these positions. And the elders elected elders.
The bench of elders had its own church pews. On the one hand everybody could see them at a prominent place at an important point of time in the town’s public life. The elders appeared as a special social group with a special place, where no one else was allowed to sit. On the other hand sitting together during church service may have tightened connections between elders.
The question if economic success and wealth did correlate with membership in the bench of elders is not simple to answer. In Riga’s town archive a list of a voluntary contribution is delivered, which gives some hints, that there was a correlation.
At the ESSHC I would like to speak about a group of townspeople, who had significant influence in Riga's public life, and about the mechanisms, by which this political group has been constructed as a social community. (Show less)

In recent years, network analysis has become increasingly popular with early modern historians. Due to the limitations imposed by the source material of this period, however, certain types of networks have not yet been studied in depth. While much attention has been paid to correspondence networks, more informal and less traceable oral networks have been neglected. Yet, these played a crucial role within early modern communities by spreading news and passing on rumours and gossip.
Focussing on the notebooks of the linen merchant Johannes Rütiner, this paper will provide a case study of such an oral network in sixteenth-century St. Gallen. From 1529 to 1539 Rütiner recorded the ‘talk of the town’ about past and contemporary political events, economic developments, wars, accidents, crimes and scandals, as well as gossip and rumours from all over the Swiss Confederacy and beyond. Since Rütiner usually named his informants and their sources, his notebooks are exceptionally suitable for a study of oral networks.
Sixteenth-century St. Gallen was a Protestant town of about 4000 inhabitants, most of whom were involved in the city’s flourishing linen trade. Since St. Gallen’s economy depended almost entirely on the export of linen, foreign news was highly sought after, especially in the aftermath of the Reformation and in the face of the violent clashes between the Catholic and Protestant cantons.
However, the same network which passed on vital information on wars and economic developments also spread gossip and shared personal and collective memories of events long past. Providing current news was therefore not its only aim, and arguably not even its most significant one. The exchange of information also served a social purpose and was strongly linked to practices of memory.
This paper aims to outline Rütiner’s network and to provide a statistical analysis of its members’ gender, social status and economic power. It will then address how oral networks of information overlapped and interacted with social and economic networks and establish its geographical dimensions. It will look at what people considered important information and therefore talked about when they met in the street, on the market, in taverns, or in private homes. Finally, and most importantly, it will discuss the various practical and social purposes of such a network in the context of an early modern urban community.
By answering these questions, this paper will contribute to the history of communication and social interaction in the early modern city. In particular, it will underline the continuing importance of oral forms of communication in the age of print. (Show less)

During the first half of the fourteenth century several urban riots took place in many Byzantine cities. Most of them were associated with the so called civil wars of 1321-1328 and 1341-1347 when rival fractions belonging to the ruling elite struggled for power. Among them the most famous was the revolt that took place in Thessaloniki in 1342 resulting in the seizure of power by the “revolutionary” party of the zealots and the creation of a semi-independent city-state that maintained its political autonomy until 1349/1350.
Despite the little, scarce and rather vague evidence provided by the sources contemporary scholars have often studied the zealot revolt proposing several interpretations of the movement. The relevant literature could be broadly divided into two groups: Socioeconomic Marxist approaches that emphasized the conflict between the landowning aristocracy and the bourgeois elements of the city and more traditional ones that tended to undermine the broader social and political context attributing the civil unrest to specific factors such as the motives of the main protagonists or the high prices of the bread.
The aim of our paper is to propose a reappraisal of the sources about the zealot revolt by focusing on the dynamic process of the formation of a political party with its own separatist goals. This process is analyzed in the context of the political interaction between the city and the imperial government after 1246 when Thessaloniki was reintegrated into the Byzantine state. Our point is that several local social groups such as emerging middle-class entrepreneurs, lower class craftsmen and even landowning aristocrats gradually alienated from the center of the empire for a variety of reasons and sought the autonomy of their own city. Their program aimed at creating a city-state with institutions analogous to those of the ancient Greek and Roman world. We argue that the systematic study of Aristotelian and Platonic political philosophy by intellectuals of 14th century Thessaloniki was closely linked with the politics of their time since the classical texts were perceived by them as an archetype for the organization of the state. Finally we attempt a comparison between the zealot revolt and similar contemporaneous urban upheavals in Western Europe thus placing the case study of Thessaloniki in a broader European context.
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