Cornel Zwierlein

John G.A. Pocock´s six-volume work Barbarism and Religion is a complex monument of close readings on European Enlightenment historiography grouped around Edward Gibbon´s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 –1788), but is by no means absorbed in an analysis of just this work. The article shows that in many respects Pocock´s B&R even moves quite consciously and wilfully away from the Gibbon: as early as 1776, Gibbon probably intended the overall concept of the history of the fall of the We-stern and Eastern Rome (476 to 1453) as an (also consciously chosen and eventually idio-syncratic) unit. Pocock, on the other hand, concentrates decidedly only on the „first fall“ only of the Latin Western Rome and therefore ends essentially with the 38th of 71 chapters of Gibbon´s work. Gibbon´s remaining work also includes the ur-republicanism of the Arabs and the rise of Islam and the Ottoman Empire as anew complex of motifs:This no longer falls into the binomial of the destructive causal engines ,barbarism´ and ,(Christian) religion´. The barbarian attacks, manifest again and again in eastern-western flows (Huns, Tartars, Mongols), are fed in geo-historical rhythms by nomadic warriors who ,push´ down from the global north (ranging from Scandinavia to China). They thus destroy the European empire in this physical domino effect, while christian religion ,destroys it from within´. Pocock analyzes Gibbon´s structural plot very illuminatingly, but the Islam/Ottoman Empire motif is ignored, so that the main protagonists of Pocock´s title, ,Christianity and Barbarians´, only grasp the half of Gibbon. The article attempts to point out the discrepancy in Pocock´s analytical concentration of interest if compared to Gibbon´s own emphasis; it tries to uncover Pocock´s semi-explicit methodological starting points, and tries –in an incomplete manner –to remind the large dimension of Gibbon´s eastern orientation and his sources.Gibbon´s eastern orientations was in itself strongly congruent with the axial shift of the British Empire in 1757/1776, taking into ac-count not only its Atlantic-American, but also the Euro-Asian dimension. Gibbon would perhaps be understood more as the most important early romantic historian than as the last British Enlightenment historian, as Pocock tried to contain or perhaps to domesticate him in this contextualizing manner.

Using competing European perceptions of China, for example by the Curia, the Parisian République des lettres and the Jesuits, the contribution shows how elements of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the quarrel of rites and the Renaissance and enlightened comparison of peoples (civilization) got merged around 1700. The comparatism between antiquity and ´moderni´ became complexified by the additional comparison with non-European civilizations with their own history, difficult to synchronize. The discussion after Martino Martini about the age, form and production of Chinese 'history' is one issue, the question of the priority of technological inventions in Europe and Asia - such as paper, compass and gunpowder – is another. In the period that we call the 'early modern period', different 'early modern times' emerged, as comparatism always led to statements according to which one people or one's own region was 'earlier', 'later', 'not yet' there or formed in this way or had reached a certain point of civilization - a gesture that is isomorphic with the heuristic substrate of 'early modern' as a new epochal subdiscipline of academic historiography which only emerged during the Cold War after World War II.

Bremen claims to be the oldest Republican city state in Europe that has still today the quality of a (partially) independent state, different from Venice, Genova in Italy or the old Imperial cities in Germany like Cologne and Frankfurt/M. It is one of the 16 regions (Bundesländer) that constitute the Federal Republic of Germany. This article argues that the fundaments of Bremen's concept and self-definition as a state have been laid around 1600 by the Calvinist syndic Heinrich Krefting who used extensively Bodin's Les six livres de la République to proof Bremen's sovereignty. His treatise, the Discursus de Republica Bremensi (1602), remained in manuscript but circulated widely during early modern times in Germany and was a standard item in the libraries of Bremen's civic aristocratic families. Hermann Conring was refuting it extensively in 1652 in a printed treatise and Leibniz made use of it. The contribution analyses the text and its precursor by Johann Esich for the first time and shows how political theory was anticipating willfully and thereby constructing purposefully the reality of the independence and sovereignty of the Calvinist city state.

This is the transcription of an Original French leter by the Jesuit Dentrecolles from Peking to his superior in Paris engaging polemically with Eusèbe Renaudot´s vision of China. I share it here in a rough version not thought to be of Theodor Mommsen standard, but readable enough, so that I can refer to it in an article to be published this year in a collective volume (2023); there was no technical possibility to include it in the volume itself.

The Navigation Act was published first as a Law of Cromwell´s Commonwealth. The article does not discuss the old question of the ´authorship´ of the Act but how it can assessed within a context of imperial thought or a thought of growth and expansion of ´Britain´. Here, within a political and mercantilist discussion about British foreign politics ranging from Levellers (William Walwyn), to Thomas Violet, Thomas Worsley to royalist and republican uses of John Selden´s Mare clausum, the Navigation Act stands in a continuity of British empire-building between Republic and Restoration; despite some differences (e.g. Civil Law courts instead of Common Law courts for the jurisdiction concerning the Act after Cromwell) there is not too much rupture in terms of imperial discourse.

Palmyra 1691 – 1754.

From the Oriental Interest of the Anglicans via the Temple Fascination of the Freemasons to Early Modern Archaeology

In 1691, William Hallifax, Anglican chaplain to the English Levant Company, visited the ruins of Tadmor (Palmyra) with a small group of travelers. His description of his trip and the ruins appeared in the “Philosophical Transactions” of the Royal Society and sparked a discussion about the history of the ruins and their enigmatic inscriptions in the Western Republic of Letters. This article examines three successive interpretations of the ruins. In the conservative wings of the Anglican Church, the city of Palmyra was thought to have been founded by Solomon. In the historical development of the city, parallels were seen with the episcopal sees of the early Christian church, which had supposedly consisted of quasi independent dioceses, governed by bishops of equal rank at the top, downplaying any supremacy of the pope or of a secular ruler. With this emphasis on the decentralized organization of the early Christian church, the so-called “non-juring” bishops and other members of the Anglican Church bolstered their own position in times of crisis. After the Glorious Revolution, Clergymen such as Abednego Seller and Thomas Smith no longer obeyed King William (and Queen Mary) in ecclesiastical matters and therefore needed an episcopal ecclesiology that, if thought through the end, should work without the idea of a supreme head, be it a pope or a Protestant monarch.

A direct line can be drawn from this perception, anchored in Christian Orientalism and older traditions of exegetical speculation and reconstruction of the buildings mentioned in the Bible (Noah’s Ark, the Tabernacle, the Temple of Solomon), to the reception of Palmyra among Newton’s disciples and the early Freemasons. In unison with geognostic research and debate about the shape, age, and structure of the earth, they speculated about the earliest history of architecture by noting correspondences between astronomical constellations and building forms and symbols on earth: Freemasons regarded the Temple of Solomon as the first great work of art of ‘Masonry’. Thus, Palmyra could be integrated into a whole series of ancient buildings and symbols, which referred back to the divine creation of the earth at the very beginning of time.

A third approach to Palmyra emerged with the sober description by the English scholar Robert Wood, who dropped all links to mythical prehistoric times and analysed the ruins of Palmyra primarily as a document of the period around 250 AD. An example of the early forms of modern archaeological historicism, Wood’s way of thinking was close to that of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. All three forms of reception of Palmyra in the Western Republic of Letters became an integral part of European cultural memory that survives the physical destruction of the ruins in 2015.

Can dispersed things have power?-Certainly not in a direct way. A chair on its own cannot perform an action, though we can speak as if it does or imagine a world where this is the case in which it might. But since Actor-Network Theory has long taught us not only to think of human beings and animals as actors in history, but also about the malleable relationships between things and humans that allow objects to have a form of agency of their own. The question remains an open and valid one. Actor-network theory first concentrated on the artificial environment of the laboratory: Latour and his followers tried to demonstrate that historians need not make their protagonist the human researcher and genius who initiated and carried out a process of scientific research, but that alternative points of view are possible. For example, one can take the perspective of cholera virus cultures, which had been separated from their natural habitat between four walls and can concentrate on their relationship with a team of researchers in the laboratory. Latour's approach acknowledges that biologists also exist outside of the laboratory-telling stories about the experiments, being influenced by social networks, guided by non-scientic preferences-and because and despite of all that they and their microbial subjects form a unique unit with characteristic rules, timescapes and patterns of socio-material behavior.1

Early Modern travelers often did not form part of classic ‘diaspora’ communities: they frequently never really settled, perhaps remaining abroad for some time in one place, then traveling further: not ‘blown by the wind’, but by changing and complex conditions that often turned out to make them unwelcome anywhere. The dispersed developed strategies of survival by keeping their distance from old and new temporary ‘homes’, and by manipulating, shaping, using information and foreign representations of their former country and situation.

The volume assembles case studies from the Mediterranean context, the Americas and Japan. They ask for what kind of ‘power(s)’ and agency dispersed people had, counterintuitively, through the connections they maintained with their former homes, and through those they established abroad.

Contributors include: Eduardo Angione, Iordan Avramov, Marloes Cornelissen, David Do Paço, José Luis Egío, Maria-Tsampika Lampitsi, Paula Manstetten, Simon Mills, David Nelson, Adolfo Polo y La Borda, Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Cesare Santus, Stefano Saracino, and Cornel Zwierlein.

In early modern times, European international relationships with the Ottoman Empire and in the Mediterranean were characterized by a complex system of consular networks privileged by the sultan or the North-African deys and beys by way of capitulations. Security was mostly addressed in terms of safety for the free practice of trade and commerce. The transformation of this situation between the late eighteenth century until around 1840 is characterized by complex entanglements of continuity and rupture between early modern and modern realities: the infrastructure of the consular system persisted for a long time, while the invasion of Egypt (1797), the continental Napoleonic Wars, the Greek War of Independence (starting 1822) and the invasion of Algeria (1830) were profoundly changing the region. «Security», as conceived by liberal men of politics like Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant and Jeremy Bentham, became a central term to order the emerging new realities in terms of state and international politics. At the same time, while one conceives of the European allies' invasion of Greece as perhaps the first modern humanitarian

Early Modern Mediterranean History has produced far less studies in the larger field of History of Knowledge and Science than one would expect. The Braudelian legacy implied, for a long time, a priority of marco-scale economic history; the microhistorical turn has challenged the Braudelian view, but it remained still very much concentrated on socio-economic subjects. A panel organized on the 2017 meeting of the German Association of Early Modern History (featuring also Guillaume Calafat, Fernando Clara and Erik de Lange) was addressing that gap with several contributions. Here the one on Geography and Geology

Nach der ersten „ptolemäischen“ Kartographierevolution ab 1450 setzte um 1700 eine zweite Wandlung auch der Wahrnehmung des Mittelmeers in der Folge der Kontroverse zwischen Newtonianern und französischen Akademiegeographen ein. Die Debatte, wie die Längengradwerte „endgültig“ genau bestimmt werden könnten, die bis in die 1760er-Jahre noch nicht präzise instrumentell messbar waren, führte im Mittelmeerraum auch zur Rezeption der mittelalterlichen arabischen Geographen. In Paris ergaben sich hieraus erstaunliche Resultate („Schrumpfung“ der Meeresbreite um 1 000 Kilometer). In der Geologie griffen etwa Kaplane der Levant Company wie Thomas Shaw und der Konsul, dann Levante-Inspektor, Benoît de Maillet, auf bis dahin nicht erschlossene arabische Handschriften zurück; etwa, um die Nilometer-Messungen in Kairo seit dem Frühmittelalter zu ermitteln: Es deutet sich hier um 1730 die frühe Idee an, solche Messungen als „Proxy-Daten“ für Thesenbildungen zur geologischen Formationsbildung durch Langzeit-Berechnung von Sedimentablagerungen zu verwenden.

Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676). They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities.

In general overviews of the development of the early modern History of International Law, neither the Rota Romana nor the Congregazione di Propaganda fide play a role. This article shows that they may claim to have a place in it at least for the period of c. 1650 and c. 1750 and with regard to maritime law: treating cases of Maltese corsairing and privateering of ships and goods against orthodox Greeks, the papal jurists protected the Greeks although they were recognized to be schismatic against the catholic order. The arguments were based not only on canon law, but on the early modern Grotian theory of international law, receiving in the core of the Roman institutions ´Protestant´ theory against a different vision developed by the Maltesians, foremost by the jurist and later cardinal Gaimbattista de Luca. The latter combined concepts of just war from the crusader period with a quasi ´Erastian´ concept of state and of an International system composed of such states where the border of the political power would be coextensive with that of each church. According to da Luca and the Maltesians, Greeks who remained under Ottoman rule for centuries were to be treated just as part of that state and could be object of a ´just war´. In contrast, the Roman curia supported a neo-Thomist vision of the International system consisting of two separate spheres of the political and the ecclesiastical power where the borders of influence, rights and legal claims of Christians were not coextensive with the borders of the states. In the end, the Roman courts were effective in enforcing their point of view and in establishing a formal hierarchy of instances of appeal. By that, this development reveals to be a process of juridification and securitization of a maritime zone by way of international law. The Roman point of view can even be understood to anticipate, in a reversed form, elements of the later nineteenth century concepts of ´humanitarian intervention´ which were first established and tried with regard to the oppression of the Greeks by the Ottomans after 1822/7.

One of the most important Orientalists, EusèbeRenaudot (1648-1720), was central in at least three major debates of his time: the late confessionalist anti-Protestant debate about the conceptions of the Eucharist; the hundred-year-long clash between the Jesuits and their enemies during the controversy of rites; and the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Analyzing Renaudotʼs large collection of unpublished manuscript treatises, it is argued that the early modern concept of ‟world history," with its actors, civilizations, and even historical or cultural regions like the "Middle East," emerged as something of a by-product of competing visions within those debates.

European merchants in their factories ('nations') in the Eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman rule were not really colonizers; in early modern times, they were somehow privileged guests. However, they deserve an important part in a long-term history of types of 'close distance' and forms of segregational coexistence. Different from recent studies that stress a strong overall interaction, understanding, sharing, and exchange between Europeans and Ottoman subjects, it is proposed to distinguish three levels: (1) The daily commercial interaction of Western Europeans with their Ottoman counterparts; (2) the stronger involvement in some politico-religious struggles (the 1724 schism in the patriarchate of Antioch serves as example): also here, one has still to distinguish between real interest in the religious cause and other activities as credit lending; (3) the care for and maintenance by the Europeans of their own Western national culture abroad: these cultural activities served more to (eventually unconsciously) perform 'boundary work' and to close up the 'nation'. These early modern forms of close distance and segregation were only isomorphic but not homologous with later highly conscious colonial and modern imperial forms of contact between 'West' and 'East' as in the nineteenth-century European settlements in Istanbul. Keywords Aleppo, Boddington family, book history, boundary work, Greek orthodox schism of 1724, khans, Levant Company, levels of knowledge, Mediterranean, merchant culture, Ottoman Empire, patriarchate of Antioch, segregation Before 1830, Western merchant 'colonies' in the Mediterranean were never really colonial settlements, as they remained at all times under Ottoman overlordship. However, taking into account their embeddedness in the local foreign environment of the Mediterranean cities, and the antiquity and quantity of their roots, the Western merchant settlements in the Mediterranean were one of the most important fields, if not the pioneering one, for which the Europeans acquired institutional and administrative know-how for the establishment of a proto-imperial network of representatives and formally regulated living conditions abroad. From the entry of Northern

The history of segregation is usually concentrating on modern racial forms of it, in colonial settings or in large urban conglomerates. Mathematical definitions of segregation refer to the ratio between the type of segregated element (e.g. Blacks) in a given larger area and its sub-area. We are suggesting that pre-modern as well as postcolonial forms of segregation are far less determined by this space/race-alignment. For a long-term history of segregation concerned with many other dominating themes and objects of segregation (such as religion, non-racist ethnicity), we propose to concentrate on the fluid cognitive dimension of what segregation is, close distance: 'distance' can refer to physical space, but it is also far more open to cognitive forms of distance. 'Closeness' aims to draw attention to the fact that both the processing and enacting of separation and difference, from the early to the late period of colonialization, may have nothing to do with how far away or how close together people actually live. Ignorance and ignoring are one of the most important elements of this epistemic core of segregational behaviour and of what creates close distance in societies.

Grimmelshausen is known as the most important German author of the seventeenth century, witness of the Thirty Years War with his ´Simplicissimus´ and the cycle of novels that followed that first important one. This article shows how his work after the Simplicissimus can be conceived of as a search for understanding the post-war world: Aggressive mercantilism of the trading empires was replacing the war with the sword, a form of sublimation of violence. His Continuatio, the the perception of the Mediterranean and of world-wide travel in it right toward India and Australia reveals to be something like "Writing after the catastrophe" (not really ´Poetry after Auschwitz´, but 300 years earlier, a similar attempt to find words for a changing reality).

The History of Early Modern International Relations usually concentrates on States as main actors. Here it is shown, that also churches and schismatic parts of churches were developing theories and practices of international relations around 1700: The non-jurors, those Anglicans who did not accept to deliver a new oath of allegiance as clerics to William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, were relying on Patristic sources (Cyprian) to develop a political language to negotiate on equal terms with the Greek Orthodox Church in the Mediterranean under Ottoman rule - both churches being therefore somehow under a partially unfriendly Lord. Contrary to a view on International relations and states that would be in consonance with Hobbes (coextension of the borders of church and state), this ecclesiology enabled a partial political autonomy of non-state actors in early modern times across confessional and territorial borders.

The history of late medieval and early modern premium life insurance in Europe is marked by a significant gap: Until around 1600, insurances as wagers on famous public persons were practiced, as there was also a constant though – compared to maritime transport insurance – usually small practice of individual premium life insurance contracts for private persons since the fourteenth century. Lawyers and theologians were usually condemning that practice though acknowledging its  existence, but in any case, canon and early merchant law experts usually distin-guished between all kinds of wager and gambling (sponsio) and insurance, reserv-ing for the maritime transport insurance the term assecuratio; sometimes they used sponsio as the general term for both. During the sixteenth century a series of territorial prohibitions of life insurance were enacted which led to a quite com-plete disparition around 1600 of the practice and its treatment in learned discourse at least as far as sources hitherto uncovered by research can tell. The only excep-tion since the early eighteenth century of a revitalization of individual premium life insurance as usual every-day business seems to have happened in England, in most other countries, research only accounts for the emergence of life insurance business during the nineteenth century. An exceptional case from Hamburg, luck-ily transmitted due to an appeal process brought for the Imperial Chamber Court in Wetzlar (1753–1767) shows that there must have been also some life insurance practice in Hamburg, probably imitating the English practice since the early eighteenth century until 1759. This case is analysed in the present contribution with the purpose to show the developments of the concept of “insurance” in gen-eral: the case bears proof that there was for centuries something like an invisible epistemic barrier to let emerge a universal concept of insurance covering all differ-ent realms and objects as it is known today. It seems that only at the end of the eighteenth century within the macroeconomic thought and perspective of Ger-man cameralism a vision on “insurance” became possible that narrowed it more and more to such a universalized concept – though, still, during the nineteenth century discussions remained strong whether to classify “insurance” as part of the gambling contracts or as a genuine form and part of new positivist codification law. Behind those developments in legal classification systems, larger trends of social history become visible: future oriented self-care instead of public post-fac-tum charity, individualization instead of collective conceptualization of the collec-tive, economization even of human life and the recognition of universal principles and concepts as common to practices and ideas that were hitherto treated as dis-tinct and separated.

The "Italian Model" or "Modèle italien" is perhaps the oldest and most common in our received tradition of writing history because
Fernand Braudel published his history of the Italian Renaissance in French under the title Le modèle italien. Therefore, instead of
summarizing what already exists (Braudel's book), this article will take a historiographical detour. It tries to reveal the historical roots of
the 'Model-Model': how was the question of the di􀆡usion of Italian Renaissance and Baroque culture across Europe rooted in pre- and
post-World War II historiography? What were the implicit and explicit assumptions underlying such a project between the 1930s and the
1980s? This leads to a discussion of how such a historical narrative can still be adopted today. De􀆤ning then a narrow concept of the
"Italian Renaissance as Model", I will give a very short and rough sketch of what could be a History of the Italian Renaissance as model
for and in Europe.

The concept of the conversiones rerumpublicarum – of how states and empires evolve in cycles of growth, stability and decline and how that move-ment can be anticipated – was derived by Bodin and others from the classic theory of History’s rules and regularities (Aristotle, Polybios). But it was never been employed neither by him nor by later academic discipline of the Politica to extra-european realities. This rather happened as a pattern that informed the structure of historical and travel writing, of state descriptions and the political lan-guage of consuls and ambassadors abroad. The topos that the people of Northern Africa are specially inclined to ‘revolutions’ is derived from those roots. However, during the eighteenth century, the regencies and provinces of Northern Africa and Egypt became ‘virtuous’ examples of political stability, in contrast to the dep-ravation of European Ancien Régime conditions. At the same time, the notion of ‘civil wars’ superseded that of the revolutions: the ‘civil war’ as a part of the modern theory of international law – similar to the Lipsian notion and close to the concept elaborated by Emer de Vattel – entered in the political language of European actors of the trading empires with regard to the realities in the Levant.

The emergence of an extensive transnational discourse of´security´was intrinsic to the self-understanding of the emerging British Empire as such, which was mostly concerned with military and naval defensive power. Though the awareness and consciousness of the environment´s vulnerability in the sense of a pre-romantic conservation of nature as such, has been identified by environmental history also as a part of early British imperial communication, it was seldom associated with´security´. Early elements of´environmental security´can only be found where the infrastructure of that expanding empire was concerned within four fields: (1) natural disasters—foremost dearth, droughts and their impact on the shortage of the grain supply; (2) shortages of wood, to which the shipbuilding industry and thereby the security infrastructure itself were highly sensitive; (3) concepts of climate and acclimatization applied to agricultural theories as far as one may discern a link tósecurity´; (4) humans as part of nature as they were addressed mostly within populationist discourse. We might, therefore, detect here the imperial roots of environmental security—not in the sense of a necessary teleological unfolding, but in the meaning of a perhaps unexpected, side-stepping form of relationship between the periods.

Scipio Gentili was a Protestant from Italy who had to emigrate to Germany (Nuremberg/Altdorf) for religious reasons in the 16th century. He was a lawyer and brother of the better known Alberico Gentili. The latter is a famous precursor of Grotius within the evolution of International Law. However, the oeuvre of Scipio Gentili is likewise impressive and  somehow forgotten. His theory of high treason / the crime de lèse majesté (crimen laesae maiestatis) was an important contribution to the modern understanding of criminal law and has to be contextualized within the explosive and threatening situations in England and France (conjuration of Essex, some years before the Gunpowder plot, conjuration de Biron in France)

Sebastian Castellio is known as one of the founding fathers of a modern concept of religious tolerance. His main contributions to this debate date back to the 1550s. How was he remembered (or forgotten) 30 years later, when the French and Dutch wars of religion had been fought already for nearly one generation? - as his status as an author of reference for early modern eirenicism and theories of tolerance/toleration/indifference was only settled in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, this is an investigation into the ´dark moments´ of the risk of getting forgotten and lost: only a tiny strand of tradition remained.

The ways of the early reception of Machiavelli in Central-Europe have to be reconsidered: Instead of conceiving of it as a simple crossing of the Alps from Italy to the Northern territories of Austria and Germany and beyond, distinguishing the vernacular and the Latin forms of distribution, it was rather in triangular and quadrangular paths that Machiavelli entered from the West and the South-West into the political and academic culture of Central Europe, from the French speaking Lower Netherlands (Belgium), certainly from Basel and in the context of the pamphleteering concerning both Western wars of religion in France and the Netherlands.

Paul Fagius, the renowned Hebraist Paul Fagius, professor of Old Testament at Strasbourg and preacher at the church of Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune, taught at the faculty of theology until 1549, he together with Martin Bucer was forced into exile in England. This article offers us, for the first time, an analysis of manuscript notebooks kept by students attending his lectures – one of which was thought to have been lost in the aftermath of World War II. The extant lecture notes allow us to understand how the exegesis of Genesis, Leviticus, and  Numbers functioned as a prism for Strasbourg´s Protestants to help them come to terms with the tense situation they faced when their city was under pressure from Emperor Charles V to accept the Augsburg Interim of 1548, notwithstanding the fierce resistance offered by Fagius and Bucer. Thus, the formation of small "core churches", that is, communities of the "truly elect" within the larger church, and the enforcement of discipline by its pastors preachers, found echoes in the story of Noah who built his ark under the threat of the flood, and in the story of God´s servants Moses and Aaron who preached and enforced discipline among the elect people of Israel. Here, one might argue, we find the origins of the Reformed Protestant exile discourse and identity from the second half of the sixteenth century.
Paul Fagius, hébraïsant et professeur d´Ancien Testament à Strasbourg en même temps que prédicateur à Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune, a continué à enseigner à la faculté jusqu´au dernier moment avant son exile forcé de la ville et de son départ avec Martin Bucer pour l´Angleterre en 1549. Des cahiers manuscrits des étudiants – dont un qu´on pensait perdu depuis la Seconde guerre mondiale – permettent d´analyser ici pour la première fois comment l´exégèse de la Genèse, du Lévitique et du livre des Nombres a aidé à interpréter la situation tendue dans la ville, menacée par l´empereur Charles Quint et contrainte d´accepter l´Intérim de 1548 auquel Fagius et Bucer s´opposaient énergiquement. La formation des nouveaux communautés au sein de l´Église et le renforcement de la discipline se comprennent à la fois au prisme de l´histoire de Noé qui, menacé du déluge, prépare l´arche, et à celui des "ministres de Dieu" Moïse et Aaron, qui exercent et prêchent la discipline comme guides du peuple élu. On est ici aux origines de l´identité d´un protestantisme d´exil réformé et de ses formes d´expression qui marqueront la deuxième moitié du XVIe siécle.
Paul Fagius, der bekannte Hebraist und Theologieprofessor (Altes Testament) an der Hohen Schule in Straßburg, zugleich Prediger an der Kirche Jung St. Peter, lehrte kontinuierlich an der Fakultät bis zum letzten Moment als er gezwungenermaßen 1549 zum Exil nach England zusammen mit Martin Bucer aufbrechen musste. Handschriftliche Vorlesungsmitschriften von Studenten, die seine Vorlesungen hörten – von denen ein Heft seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg als verschollen galt – werden in diesem Beitrag zum ersten Mal analysiert. Sie ermöglichen ein tieferes Verständnis, wie die Exegese der Bücher Genesis, Leviticus und Numeri dazu diente, die gespannte Situation in der Stadt in Überblendung mit den alttestamentarischen Geschichten zu verstehen: Karl V. übte starken Druck auf den Magistrat aus, das Augsburger Interim von 1548 anzunehmen, wogegen sich Bucer und Fagius entschieden wehrten. Die Einrichtung (seit 1546) der sogenannten ´Christlichen Gemeinschaften´ und die Ausübung der Disziplin in diesen radikalen Kirchen unabhängig vom Rat war eine Reaktion auf diesen äußeren Druck. In den Vorlesungen wird deutlich, wie dies im Spiegel der Geschichte Noahs, der die Arche angesichts der drohenden Sintflut vorbereitet, im Spiegel auch der Geschichte von Moses und Aaron, die das erwählte Volk führen und die nötige Disziplin in ihm zu erhalten versuchen, von Fagius mit einer Tiefendimension biblisch-exegetischen Interpretationshorizontes versehen wurde. Man kann dies als den Beginn einer vom Luthertum distinkten Form von Selbstverständnis und Identitätsformung des reformierten Protestantismus ab der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts verstehen, insoweit er stets stark von Exilsituationen geprägt war.

Agostino Nifo´s Political Method was not a plagiarism of Machiavelli: it was in elective affinity with the Florentine´s thought and that is why he used some paragraphs from the ´Principe´, translating them into Latin. But Nifo´s real aim was to integrate ´Politics´ as a science of decision-making processes (of ´consiliabilia´) into the universal Padovan renewal of Aristotelan method. His key for this was not Aristotle´s Politics, but Aristotle´s Rhetorics. He was founding thereby something like an ´experimental method´ of Politics close to the experimental method in Physics and other parts of natural philosophy. This method could be applied to virtual every political content: here it is shown, how is teachig on tyranny, tyrannicide and on his idea hold in greater esteam a "plurality" of princes instead of a monarchical rule was gained methodically by the application of that rhetorical Aristotelian method - close to how the school of Padova (which was a precursor to Galileo Galilei) was reforming also the method in Medicine and other practical sciences: A universal concept of Renaissance Empiricism prior to a clear-cut distinction between ´Humanities´ and ´Natural Sciences´ is at stake here.

One of the consequences of the reformations was, around 1560/70, the transformation of older medieval as well as humanist practices and theories of regicide, tyrannicide and conspiracy. What had been still rooted in the medieval coniuratio as congiure (Machiavelli, Discorsi III, 6) or inspired by ancient authors (the young Morus on Lukian´s De Tyrannicida) was to become an interpretative politico-theological scheme, highly polarized, that was ordering perceptions and actions of and within the early modern international state system. Shakespeare´s own period was marked by the diffusion of the Calvinist and catholic monarchomach theories as well as by the spiritualization of the Crimen laesae majestatis (Cod. Just. IX, 8, 5) with tacitist lawyers so important for England as Alberico Gentili: The political contexts since at least the excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570) right up to the Gunpowder plot was marked by the intersection of such theories with the well-known practice of ´plotting´ and European wide networking; the Catholics (exiled, recusant or not) between Rom, Madrid, Reims, Douai, Rouen; the protestants between England, the Netherlands, the Palatinate. The question of this contribution is not to search once again for direct influences on Shakespeare´s plays and to understand them simply as replicas of reality – to see Hamlet as a comment on the succession crisis; to ask for literal influence of the Basilikon doron on Measure for measure. It is rather the argument that the political practice and communication had witnessed itself, indeed, a profound change after the middle of the century, a liquefying of what were before more stable dynastic systems of rule, that a continuous change of perspectives and of reflexivity – the good king would switch to tyrant, who was once protector of one owns religion became its cruel persecutor – was trained not only and first on stage but was a crucial problem in real politics in a new way. This epistemic change which started to exercise its pressure on the relevant actors´ perception was due mostly to changes in the forms of communication, political analysis and planning. For the historian, it thus seems that the prismatic interrogations about tyranny, usurpers, sovereignty, regicide in Shakespeare´s plays such as Julius Caesar and Richard III are to be conceived as projections of that already existing liquefied political perception into a more personalized investigation of and on characters.

A paper that traces back the history of the ´German´ concept of confessionalization as having emerged during the 1980s, remembering its forgotten roots in the 1930s and asking how one might use it in European and global contexts (Intra-Christian Confessionalization, Confessionalization in contexts between Christians and between Christians and Non-Christians, in European and Extra-European relationships).

Rule and Reciprocity. The Dependencies between Sovereign and Subjects becoming visible in War and Conflict (Paris – Rome 1589). Political crises in Early Modern Times made the reciprocity visible of both, the relationship between rulers and ruled, as well as that between the ecclesiastical and secular powers. This is demonstrated regarding the culmination of the con-frontation between King, Catholic League and Huguenots in France in 1589 after the murder of the duke and cardinal Guise by king Henri III (reg. 1574–1589) in 1588 and how the French negotiated that case at the Roman curia before Sixtus V and the special congregation of French affairs, chaired by the great inquisitor Giulio Antonio Santori cardinal of Santa Severina. The major catholic monarchomach treatise De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione, attributed to Jean Boucher, is shown not to be a plagiarism of the Calvinist monarchomachs and not to post-date the murder of Henri III – as research assumes since the nineteenth century. It rather continued the teaching of the school of Salamanca, and it served as expression of the League’s constitu-tional thought in that Roman context. New archival findings help to understand how this case can be understood as a part of a possibly larger approach to historicize ‘reciprocity’.

Environmental security is a bountiful but seldom narrowly defined notion within current security studies. The link between awareness of environmental problems and security is usually historically situated as a part of the emergence of post-World War II global environmental politics, a major step being the 1972 Stockholm conference. Environmental security covers security politics that investigates either the security of states or that of humans from direct or indirect environmental threats. But a history of ‘environmental security’ in the longue durée as it is laid out here in a sketch can be traced back in time by following the paths of early colonialism and the establishment of the early European trading and settler empires. However, certainly, that genealogical link of ‘environmental security’ to imperial economies remains rooted first of all in the fears and efforts of the growing national state, being the core of those empires: the policies adopted by early modern governments, the political arithmetical thought concerned with the nexus between economic speculation, agrarian sustainability, and the security against unforeseen environmental threats were conceived first mostly with regard to the closed territories such as France. The contributions for the late modern and contemporary period show, by contrast, that environmental security has now become an issue treated differently, on a multi-level scale from the local to the global, with all levels being entangled and intercon-nected. Differently from early modern concerns for food and supply crises in purely economic and populationist terms, every political and even private actor on the local level is aware of possible or probable links between their ‘small world’ and global developments.

his contribution uses the sources of the major nineteenth-century global fire insurer, the Sun Fire Office, to compare the individual perceptions of its insurance agents and of its London headquarters when entering the German market in the early industrial age (1830 to 1850) and when entering the Chinese Treaty Ports after 1852. For the German part, a strong sense of difference is present among the Sun’s agents and in the headquarters between progressive British industrial know-how and a somewhat backward Germany. This is not exactly a “colonial” perception, but the term is appropriate for the second case, the Chinese market: here, the question for the agents was not whether a house or an early industrial facility was “modern” enough, but whether it was European. The blending of “modernity” and colonial “Europeanness” as the deciding factor for insurability was the simple starting point of the British agents and carriers of economic globalisation. This factor is revealed as economically false, but the agents could not escape from it: the fire regimes of the Asian cities were so different, one from the other, that in one city, insuring the non-European buildings would have been as profitable as insuring only the European ones (as they did). In other regions, insuring was not profitable for either of them. So the purported expert knowledge is revealed as a rule of thumb. At the same time, these perceptions, the subjective insurability decisions, and the empirical data concerning fires gathered by the agents emerge as excellent sources for a comparative urban disaster history.

This contribution will analyse the presence of Western travel literature - which forms also the corpus
of the Zephyros project - in the libraries of Western merchants in the Levant. The study is based on
archival material from London/Kew, Paris, Nantes, mostly the chancery records of the Levantine consulates
where library catalogues of deceased or bankrupt merchants were noted. An astonishing high number of
those same travel accounts that are used for content analysis in the Zephyros project were in possession
by the British and French merchants in the Levant: Surprisingly, they read in the Levant itself about the Levant
by help of those publications in Western languages. The contribution will ask for how to understand this, and how
the Western perception of the Levant was travelling with Westerners themselves into the Levant.

The main purpose and object of the British and French Mediterranean Empires was trade in its proto-national mercantilist competition. But they needed, searched for and produced also a certain general historical knowledge. There has been done several research on individual actors or on the printed works (Barbary and Enlightenment and beyond). Here more attention will be paid to the steady administrative production of general historical (non)knowledge about the Levant in mémoires historiques, descriptions of ‘the present state and the history of…’ given regions within the French and British imperial communication. The administrators and decision-makers in London and Paris/Versailles, from the kings down to the simple clerk, constantly tried to be oriented in the best possible way about the specifities and particularities of the Mediterranean realities (as of the other outposts and markets of the world). But the ‘best possible’ information of the French and British was full of lacunae from our ex-post point of view. A look on the contents of the libraries owned by Europeans in the Levant suggests  likewise that they cultivated very much their own home culture in the échelles. The microhistory on the everyday work of cultural brokers, drogmen, enfants de langues, on the know-how of economic exchange between ‘Europeans’ and ‘Levantines’ (Ottomans, Armenians, Greeks, Jews…) up to a degree that the old dichotomy of European/non-European has vanished with good reasons. This contribution tries nevertheless to show that a distinction of levels of interaction and epistemic exchange might be useful, and that on that level of general knowledge about the historia (in the early modern wider sense), we might call that what is visible parallel societies, despite their highly effective exchange and coexistence.

Sources come from the usual archives (PRO, BL, AN, AE, Bodleian, CUL). The contribution draws on the third of four chapters of book manuscript which will be circulated.

Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676). They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities.

Dans cet ouvrage, Cornel Zwierlein montre comment la maîtrise à la fois des causes et des conséquences des risques d’incendie urbain a joué un rôle important dans l’émergence des sociétés de prévention modernes.
Cet ouvrage est divisé en sept parties. Après une introduction qui s’appesantit sur les sources et l’état actuel de la recherche, la deuxième partie du livre est consacrée aux risques dans le monde pré-moderne. À propos de l’essor des assurances maritimes et de leur légitimation au travers de la théologie chrétienne et de la loi romaine, Cornel Zwierlein décrit ces premières assurances comme des « artifices comptables » mercantiles conçus pour rapprocher des distances spatiales et non temporelles. Malgré la nouvelle terminologie applicable au risque et aux nouveaux instruments tels que les polices et primes d’assurance, les assurances de l’époque pré-moderne manquaient de perspectives d’avenir (Zukunftsausrichtung). A contrario, la croissance rapide des assurances incendie vers 1700 a été un élément déterminant pour le développement d’un mode de pensée prospective dans les sociétés du début de l’ère moderne.
Dans la troisième partie de son ouvrage, Cornel Zwierlein décrit la réalité des incendies ainsi que leur perception. Il compare les embrasements des villes d’Europe au début de l’ère moderne aux catastrophes nucléaires impossibles à assurer. Après avoir analysé 8 200 incendies urbains en Allemagne et en Autriche, l’auteur traite du fossé (le fire gap) qui sépare les villes pré-modernes facilement inflammables des villes modernes. Selon lui, le nombre d’incendies dans les villes allemandes a commencé à baisser avec l’apparition des premières assurances incendie au cours du XVIIIe siècle. Le déclin des risques d’incendie était le reflet de nouvelles stratégies militaires ainsi que de l’évolution des infrastructures urbaines et de la police des incendies. En ce qui concerne ce dernier point, les jeunes États territoriaux comme la Prusse ont progressivement pris le pas sur les anciennes villes libres comme Cologne. Vers le milieu du XVIIIe siècle, les penseurs du Siècle des Lumières ont commencé à appliquer des « méthodes scientifiques » pour combattre les risques d’incendie. Cependant, il était relativement fréquent que ces penseurs se contentent de recycler des pratiques vernaculaires bien établies.

Dans la partie suivante, l’auteur analyse Londres et Hambourg en tant que laboratoires de nouveaux systèmes de sécurité. Vers la fin du XVIIe siècle, les deux villes ont mis au point deux formes très différentes d’assurance incendie. À Londres, le grand incendie de 1666 et la révolution financière qui a suivi ont vu éclore dans le pays des compagnies d’assurance incendie fondées sur le profit comme la Sun Insurance. À l’opposé, la General-Feuer-Cassa de Hambourg (créée en 1676) était une instance municipale centralisée (obrigkeitliche) qui versait des dommages incendie aux membres cotisants tout en évaluant régulièrement la valeur des maisons de ces derniers. Le modèle de cette caisse publique, ultérieurement repris par Leibniz, fut intégré dans les théories du caméralisme d’État en tant que moyen pour préserver, voire augmenter, la richesse globale d’un État via des investissements tournés vers l’avenir. Désormais, le risque d’incendie n’allait plus être supporté par des individus. En interprétant l’incendie comme un risque naturel exceptionnel – un casus fortuitus –, les caméralistes ont affecté le rôle d’assureur général à l’État, qui avait la responsabilité de protéger ses sujets générateurs de valeur. C’est ainsi que les modèles inspirés de Hambourg ont été adoptés par les États territoriaux comme la Prusse au XVIIIe siècle.

Après une micro-analyse de Hambourg et de Londres, la cinquième partie du livre de Cornel Zwierlein propose une macro-analyse de la « société de sécurité normale » (Sichere Normalgesellschaft) qui a vu le jour aux alentours de 1700.
Ayant fixé les origines des « sociétés normales » modernes aux environs de 1700, Cornel Zwierlein continue à analyser le devenir des assurances incendie au XIXe siècle dans la dernière partie de l’ouvrage. Face au constat de déclin des assurances incendie publiques en Allemagne au début du XIXe siècle, il étudie l’expansion générale des assurances incendie de type britannique à Hambourg, Bombay, New-York et Istanbul, et arrive ainsi à la conclusion qu’une certaine dimension spatiale a réintégré la pensée assurantielle : alors que la titrisation des assurances contre les risques futurs allait devenir la marque des société européennes modernes, leur diffusion dans le monde ne s’est pas effectuée de manière uniforme. Au lieu de cela, les assureurs européens ont défini les villes extérieures en zones modernes assurables et zones non modernes non assurables. Les notions européennes de sécurité normale se sont de plus en plus définies par opposition aux espaces et structures extra-européens ou autochtones. Réparties en zones européennes « modernes » et extra-européennes non modernes, des villes comme Bombay intégraient plusieurs éléments de modernité en termes de production de sécurité, même si ce zonage n’avait pas grand-chose à voir avec la réalité de l’éclatement d’incendies. Selon Cornel Zwierlein, la propagation des régimes européens d’assurance dans le monde a transformé la dichotomie moderne / non moderne du Siècle des lumières en dichotomie européen / extra-européen. Conçus en tant que méthodes universelle de colonisation du futur, les facteurs spatiaux ont de ce fait réintégré l’histoire des assurances.

L’›arrangement expérimental‹ de ce travail est un triangle européen formé par la France, Savoie-Piémont  et le sud-ouest de l'Allemagne. Il entreprend d’étudier, dans une perspective qui les compare d’une part et tient compte de l’histoire de leurs relations d’autre part, Savoie-Piémont et le sud-ouest allemand en vue des théories de la délibération. L’objet commun auquel se réfèrent les délibérations étudiées dans chacun des cas est donné par la France, c’est-à-dire par les guerres de religion françaises. Comme cela, le ›triangle‹ est complet. Les ›théories‹ de délibération deviennent ce que nous appelons des ›cadres de pensée‹ , quand elles sont mises en pratique. Ces cadres de pensée émergent, se transmettent, et éventuellement, entrent en conflit les uns avec les autres, dans ces deux régions.
En ce qui concerne Savoie-Piémont, nous partons de l’hypothèse que ce territoire est une sorte de ›nuovo stato‹ dans le sens de Machiavel : quand le territoire était restitué à Emanuele Filiberto après 23 ans d’occupation française, l’état devait au fond être constitué de nouveau. Nous interprétons cette ›reconstitution de l’état‹ spécialement comme implémentation et mise en vigueur d'une cadre de pensée, c'est-à-dire de la méthode du ›discorso‹ pour la délibération politique, une méthode qui s’était développée depuis Machiavel (nous allons revenir de suite à ce terme de ›discorso‹). Car, quand la forme de la délibération étatique change, ›l’état‹ change finalement lui-même. Pour ce qui est du sud-ouest allemand, nous supposons que dans la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle, trois ›cadres de pensée‹ y concouraient : deux nouveaux, celui du ›discorso‹, et celui de la ›lex Dei‹ (surtout celle réformée et calviniste), ainsi que l’ancien de la normativité de l’Empire (pour les définitions, cf. infra). La perception étatique est ainsi analysée, dans une comparaison germano-italienne, à partir des ›cadres de pensée‹ (ou des herméneutiques) respectifs concernant la délibération. La première raison pourquoi nous prenons les guerres de religion françaises comme l'objet principale de l'observation est que ce phénomène concernait simplement de la façon la plus directe les affaires étrangères des deux régions frontalières. La deuxième raison consiste en une hypothèse de départ, selon laquelle la perception continue de ces guerres, leur assimilation et la réaction à elles peuvent à leur tour expliquer, à l’aide des ›cadres de pensée‹ précisés préalablement et expliqués dans leur historicité, des évolutions historiques en Italie et en Allemagne, comme ›effet‹ des guerres de religion françaises.

Après cette introduction brève dans notre interrogation, nous résumerons le cours de la présentation et les résultats, d’abord en gros :
Le travail se divise en quatre étapes. Dans le premier chapitre (B), il s’agit d’expliciter ce que veut dire le terme machiavélien de ›discorso‹, et comment ce concept devient, à partir de 1500 environ, le nom d’une méthode empirique, en particulier une méthode de délibération politique. L’évolution ultérieure de ce ›cadre de pensée‹ lié au ›discorso‹ est tracée à partir de 1500 jusqu’environ 1560, c’est-à-dire jusqu’au moment où Savoie-Piémont était refondé et, d’après notre hypothèse, caractérisé désormais par la mise en vigueur de ce cadre.
Dans le deuxième chapitre (C) nous nous plaçons sur un niveau tout à fait différent : nous adoptons une perspective extérieure, en expliquant l’émergence et l’évidence du ›cadre de pensée‹ du ›discorso‹ après 1500 dans une perspective d’histoire de la communication, c’est-à-dire à partir des conditions médiatiques dans l’Italie de cette époque, et de leur effet sur la perception de la politique actuelle.
Dans le troisième chapitre (D), nous poursuivons le nouveau ›cadre de pensée‹ du ›discorso‹ dans la pratique, c’est-à-dire à propos des processus de délibération en Savoie-Piémont de la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle. L’accent est mis ici sur la perception des guerres de religion françaises et sur les décisions qui s’y réfèrent ; néanmoins, ›l’intérieur‹ de l’auto-construction étatique, étant en interdépendance permanente avec ›l’extérieur‹, est traité dans des paragraphes intercalés systématiquement.
Le quatrième chapitre (E) est divisé en deux : premièrement, nous renouons avec le chapitre C, en analysant la situation dans l’Empire autour de 1550 / 1560 dans une perspective d’histoire de la communication et de la perception. Ceci sert encore une fois le but d’expliquer pourquoi et en quelle configuration les ›cadres de pensée‹ ont une évidence pour les délibérations dans l’Empire. Dans la deuxième partie, nous retraçons trois ›cadres de pensée‹ concurrents dans l’Empire de la deuxième moitié du siècle. Premièrement, celui du ›discorso‹, qui, en tant qu’objet d’un transfert culturel, fait son entrée venant de l’ouest. Deuxièmement, celui de la ›lex Dei‹, qui désigne l’herméneutique calviniste réformée, laquelle représente une herméneutique normative, quoique très flexible et large, même pour les actions de ce monde-ci. Et troisièmement, celui de la normativité de l’Empire, qui représente le cadre traditionnel de délibération dans les institutions, et conforme aux normes de l’Ancien empire.