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New monograph by Dr. Matthias Winkler: Revolution und Exil: Französische Emigranten in der Habsburgermonarchie 1789–1815 (Revolution and Exile: French emigrants in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1789–1815)
The storming of the Bastille in July 1789 caused an exodus during which, in the course of just a few years, around 150,000 people left France. These emigrants expected that the revolution would collapse quickly and that they would soon return. Instead, the political radicalization in France and the unsuccessful military fight against the revolution from outside forced them to prepare for a longer-term exile. Many of these opponents of the revolution ended up in the countries of the Habsburg Monarchy, where some of them found refuge for years and even decades.
Dr. Matthias Winkler's actor-centred study examines the complex networks and entanglements between the revolutionary emigrants and the societies which received them. Based on a broad range of sources, he analyzes the emigrants' fields of action and charts how they asserted themselves under often precarious conditions. By consistently changing his perspective, he scrutinizes traditional clichés about revolutionary emigration and arrives at a chronologically, spatially, and socially differentiated assessment of one of the first major political migration movements of modern times. This monograph, which is based on the doctoral dissertation supervised by Prof. Dr. Xenia von Tippelskirch und Prof. Dr. Peter Burschel at the Department of History of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, has been published by Wallstein as volume 26 in the series Frühneuzeit-Forschungen (Early Modern Studies).
Dr. Matthias Winkler has been Scientific Officer in the Department Science – Policy – Society of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2021 and is an Associate Scholar at the Chair of Early Modern European History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
New edited volume by Matthias Pohlig and Barbara Schlieben: „Grenzen des Sozialen: Kommunikation mit nicht-menschlichen Akteuren in der Vormoderne“ (The boundaries of society: Communication with non-human actors in the pre-modern era)
Trials of animals and objects, conversations with ghosts and revenants, with witches, God and the devil: in pre-modern times, people communicated actively with the non-human world. They turned their various apparitions into addressees and thus into their social counterparts, into actors. For, at this time, the boundaries of society were not clearly defined between humans and the rest, but were much more complex and fragile.
This edited volume explores these diverse communicative relationships in an interdisciplinary dialogue, presenting theoretical considerations in search of ways to conceptualize society as it extended beyond human beings while empirical case studies focus on communication with non-human actors. The contents and especially the modes and historically specific conditions of communication with non-humans are at the centre of the volume which also asks how such communication changed over time.
The volume has been published as Grenzen des Sozialen: Kommunikation mit nicht-menschlichen Akteuren in der Vormoderne (The boundaries of society: Communication with non-human actors in the pre-modern era), ed. by Matthias Pohlig and Barbara Schlieben (Göttingen, 2022).
Special issue of the Journal of Intelligence History "Case Studies in Early Modern European Intelligence" published
The contributions to the special issue "Case Studies in Early Modern European Intelligence" of the Journal of Intelligence History (2022, vol. 21, no. 3) guest-edited by Tobias Graf (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) und Charlotte Backerra (University of Göttingen) call into question dominant assumptions about early modern intelligence by placing this sphere into the broader context of government practices. In addition, the articles discuss the specific challenges to the study of early modern intelligence to show how different types of sources can be used to improve our understanding of intelligence organizations and their activities. The three case studies by Ioanna Iordanou (on Venetian intelligence), Matthias Pohlig (on the use and utility of intelligence using the example of English intelligence during the War of the Spanish Succession) and Tobias Graf (on the intelligence gathering by Austrian-Habsburg diplomats in Istanbul in the late sixteenth century) are available as Open Access publications. The issue's introduction by Tobias Graf and Charlotte Backerra calls for the intensification of scholarly exchange across traditional periodization schemes and highlights the potential of early modern history for intelligence history more generally.
New article by Matthias Pohlig: "Das Jüngste Gericht als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet? Apokalyptische Perspektiven der Aufklärung" (The Last Judgement seen as a moral institution? Apocalyptic perspectives of the Enlightenment)
In the early modern period, the Last Judgement was given the greatest attention across all denominations and addressed in all available media – be it in literature, sacred music, the visual arts, or in theatre. This volume documents the results of an interdisciplinary conference organised in 2008 by the DFG Research Training Group "Interconfessionality in the Early Modern Period" at the University of Hamburg and the Wittenberg Research Library for the History of the Reformation which examined early modern reflections on the Last Judgement from the perspectives of historical theology, literary studies, art and music history, and history. Special attention is paid not only to the denomination-specific characteristics in dealing with the theme of judgement in its various media facets, but also to the question of how the interaction of different media determined the engagement with the iudicium extremum and its imminent coming.
Published in Das Jüngste Gericht in den Konfessionen und Medien der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Johann Anselm Steiger and Ricarda Höffler (Göttingen, 2023), pp. 399-422.