Dagmar Freist – författare

Current scholarship continues to emphasise both the importance and the sheer diversity of religious beliefs within early modern societies. Furthermore, it continues to show that, despite the wishes of secular and religious leaders, confessional uniformity was in many cases impossible to enforce. As the essays in this collection make clear, many people in Reformation Europe were forced to confront the reality of divided religious loyalties, and this raised issues such as the means of accommodating religious minorities who refused to conform and the methods of living in communion with those of different faiths. Drawing together a number of case studies from diverse parts of Europe, Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe explores the processes involved when groups of differing confessions had to live in close proximity - sometimes grudgingly, but often with a benign pragmatism that stood in opposition to the will of their rulers. By focussing on these themes, the volume bridges the gap between our understanding of the confessional developments as they were conceived as normative visions and religious culture at the level of implementation. The contributions thus measure the religious policies articulated by secular and ecclesiastical elites against the 'lived experience' of people going about their daily business. In doing this, the collection shows how people perceived and experienced the religious upheavals of the confessional age and how they were able to assimilate these changes within the framework of their lives.

In recent decades historians have emphasized just how dynamic and varied early modern Europe was. Previously held notions of monolithic and static societies have now been replaced with a model in which new ideas, different cultures and communities jostle for attention and influence. Building upon the concept of interaction, the essays in this volume develop and explore the idea with specific reference to the ways in which diasporas could act as translocal societies, connecting worlds and peoples that may not otherwise have been linked. The volume looks at the ways in which diasporas or diasporic groups, such as the Herrnhuters, the Huguenots, the Quakers, Jews, the Mennonites, the Moriscos and others, could function as intermediaries to connect otherwise separated communities and societies. All contributors analyse the respective groups’ internal and external networks, social relations and the settings of social interactions, looking at the entangled networks of diaspora communities and their effects upon the societies and regions they linked through those networks. The collection takes a fresh look at early modern diasporas, combining religious, cultural, social and economic history to better understand how early modern communication patterns and markets evolved, how consumption patterns changed and what this meant for social, economic and cultural change, how this impacted on what we understand as early developments towards globalization, and how early developments towards globalization, in turn, were constitutive of these.

Based on archival research, using court records, literary sources and the reports of everyday talk, Governed by Opinion explores how political opinion was created and developed in Stuart Britain. Dagmar Freist explores the politics of censorship and the role of the London book trade in spreading and forming opinion, and argues that the events of the 1640s paved the way for political awareness among ordinary people.

In recent decades historians have emphasized just how dynamic and varied early modern Europe was. Previously held notions of monolithic and static societies have now been replaced with a model in which new ideas, different cultures and communities jostle for attention and influence. Building upon the concept of interaction, the essays in this volume develop and explore the idea with specific reference to the ways in which diasporas could act as translocal societies, connecting worlds and peoples that may not otherwise have been linked. The volume looks at the ways in which diasporas or diasporic groups, such as the Herrnhuters, the Huguenots, the Quakers, Jews, the Mennonites, the Moriscos and others, could function as intermediaries to connect otherwise separated communities and societies. All contributors analyse the respective groups’ internal and external networks, social relations and the settings of social interactions, looking at the entangled networks of diaspora communities and their effects upon the societies and regions they linked through those networks. The collection takes a fresh look at early modern diasporas, combining religious, cultural, social and economic history to better understand how early modern communication patterns and markets evolved, how consumption patterns changed and what this meant for social, economic and cultural change, how this impacted on what we understand as early developments towards globalization, and how early developments towards globalization, in turn, were constitutive of these.