Privacy is often considered a modern phenomenon. Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches challenges this view. This collection examines instances, experiences, and spaces of early modern privacy, and opens new avenues to understanding the structures and dynamics that shape early modern societies. Scholars of architectural history, art history, church history, economic history, gender history, history of law, history of literature, history of medicine, history of science, and social history detail how privacy and the private manifest within a wide array of sources, discourses, practices, and spatial programmes. In doing so, they tackle the methodological challenges of early modern privacy, in all its rich, historical specificity.
Lars Cyril Nørgaard, PhD (2017, University of Copenhagen) is assistant professor at the Copenhagen Centre for Privacy Studies. His publications deal with the tension between religious seclusion and societal engagement and the ambiguous nature of pre-modern privacy.
Mette Birkedal Bruun, PhD (2000, Arhus University), dr.theol. (2017, University of Copenhagen) is professor of Church History and director of the Copenhagen Centre for Privacy Studies. She has published widely on medieval and early modern monastic culture and lay devotion.
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on the Editors Notes on the Contributors
5 How to Approach Privacy without Private Sources? Insights from the Franco-Dutch Network of the Eelkens Merchant Family around 1600
âWillem Frijhoff
6 Early Modern Swedish Law and Privacy: A Legal Right in Embryo
âMia Korpiola
Part 2: Crossing the Thresholds of Privacy and the Private
9 Entering the Bedroom through the Judicial Archives: Sexual Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse
âMathieu Laflamme
10 Public and Private in Jewish Egodocuments of Amsterdam (ca. 1680â1830)
âMichaël Green
Part 3: Secrecy, Knowledge, and Authority
11 The Paradox of Secrecy: Merchant Families, Family Firms, and the Porous Boundaries between Private and Public Business Life in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
âThomas Max Safley
12 Chops and Chamber Pots: Satire of the Experimental Report in Seventeenth-Century England
âIvana BiÄak
13 Dynamics of Healer-Patient Confidentiality in Early Modern Witch Trials
âNatacha Klein Käfer
14 Examination Essays, Paratext, and Confucian Orthodoxy: Negotiating the Public and Private in Knowledge Authority in Early Seventeenth-Century China
âHang Lin
Part 4: Spaces and Places of Privacy and the Private
15 Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as Artisans of the Heart and Home in Manuscript MPM RÂ 35 âVita S. Joseph beatissimae Virginis sponsiâ of ca. 1600
âWalter S. Melion
16 Privacy and Exemplarity in Gianlorenzo Berniniâs Cornaro Chapel
âMaarten Delbeke
17 Making Private Public: Representing Private Devotion in an Early Modern Funeral Sermon
âLars Cyril Nørgaard
18 Secret Routes and Blurring Borders: The New Apartment of Giuseppe Papè di Valdina (Palermo, 1714â1742)
âValeria Viola
19 What Lies between the Public and the Secret?
âMarian Rothstein
Index Nominum
Because of its comprehensive disciplinary scope, this volume is of interest to scholars and students of early modern culture in all its facets. Keywords: early modern, intimacy, legal history, religious history, history of art, history of architecture, secrecy, theology, ego-documents, history of science, literary studies, China, Europe, private life, privacy, Jewish history, theory.