{"title":"Folk Songs and Material Culture in Medieval Central Europe: Old Stones and New Music. By Nancy van Deusen.","authors":"Antonio Chemotti","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121055470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Austerities and Aspirations. A Comparative History of Growth, Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe since 1945. By Béla Tomka.","authors":"Fanni Svégel","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.21","url":null,"abstract":"Austerities and Aspirations suggests a new methodological approach for a more nuanced understanding of convergence and divergence between East Central and Western European countries. Specialized in social policy and economic history, with a particular focus on international comparisons, Professor Béla Tomka, who is best known for his outstanding A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe,1 is an expert on twentieth-century Hungarian society.2 His results in comparative historical research are remarkable in Hungarian historiography. The current volume is a revisited version of his book published in 2011, which mainly concentrated on twentieth-century Hungary.3 The well-constructed book consists of five main chapters, with several subchapters leaving space for the elaboration of details. The introduction conceptualizes the triple approach to well-being: the concepts of economic growth, consumption, and quality of life. Tomka explains his approach by saying that it is meant to overcome the deficiencies of economic analysis focusing merely on GDP and economic output, while the available data on consumption practices and quality of life might facilitate a more complex understanding of economic and social history. Following the introduction of the aims and scope of his research and the possible methods, sources, and their deficiencies, the author argues in favor of long-term and comparative methods. Tomka is clearly aware of the methodological difficulties and shortcomings and reflects upon them throughout the book. In the introduction, we also get a brief description of the volume’s content and structure. While","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125133739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Exorcist of Sombor. The Mentality of an Eighteenth-Century Franciscan Friar. By Dániel Bárth.","authors":"Gábor Klaniczay","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.17","url":null,"abstract":"Dániel Bárth’s book, as indicated by the title, is written for scholars of the history of religion, of the history of mentalities, as well as for those who study popular belief. His choice of subject, the life story of the Southern Slavic Franciscan friar, Rochus Szmendrovich, who became famous and got in trouble for his exorcisms, invokes the quintessential monograph of a recently influential historical trend, ‘microhis-tory’, a classic written by Giovanni Levi and published in English under the title Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist . 1 Microhistory, the historian’s version of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description”, can only be explored where there is an exceptional source—which is how Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was able to write, based on records from the Inquisition, the story of the early-fourteenth-century Pyrenean village, Montaillou, where Cathar prefects were hiding; or how Carlo Ginzburg wrote about the strange and original worldviews of the Italian miller, Menocchio, convicted as a heretic at the end of the sixteenth century. Bárth discovered a gem of this type fifteen years ago in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Kalocsa when he found a set of documents containing the letters of the eighteenth-century Franciscan exor-cist and the decisions of the ecclesiastical investigation about him. In his introduction, he gives a vivid description of the ‘big catch’","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"190 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125847461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Two Travellers in Europe. An Early-Nineteenth-Century Panorama","authors":"Gábor Alföldy","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.18","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126252768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Weber’s ‘Ackerbürgerstadt’ in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Maximilian Martsch","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.06","url":null,"abstract":"In his treatise “The City”, Max Weber introduced the concept of the Ackerbürgerstadt (agrarian city), a type of city whose economic system is primarily rooted in agricultural production. Since then, Weber’s concept has been frequently applied to historical studies on urban economies, especially in the Middle Ages and early modern history. However, by taking a closer look at the socioeconomic fabric of small towns in the prelude to industrialization, many characteristics of Weber’s Ackerbürgerstadt still seem to be applicable. The paper investigates the development of the economic system of the rural small town of Zwettl, situated in the northwestern part of Lower Austria. Zwettl and its surrounding region were left mostly untouched by economic progress. The city had one of the lowest growth rates in Lower Austria and was excluded from the infrastructural expansions of the industrial period. However, Zwettl did not dwindle into a remnant of pre-industrial times. Changes in the social and economic fabric happened on a more subtle level. Structural changes, for example in the agricultural sector, impacted long-term business opportunities, household management, and market development in Zwettl—for better or worse. The paper offers a case study-based examination of Weber’s Ackerbürgerstadt. It questions the rigid separation between urban and household economy, as well as the functional distinction between the city and its hinterland. Thus, the paper provides a contribution to the historical exploration of the socioeconomic development of small towns in the rural periphery.","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122201534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Collision of Identities. Assimilation and Myth-making among Hungary’s Greek Catholics. By Bertalan Pusztai.","authors":"Eszter Győrfy","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.20","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125221458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Hungarian Atlas of Historic Towns","authors":"K. Szende","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.10","url":null,"abstract":"This article surveys the work carried out in the past two decades on the Hungarian Atlas of Historic Towns in a Central European context. With its more than 550 atlases published in nineteen European countries in the last fifty years, the European Atlas of Historic Towns is one of the most comprehensive collaborative projects in the field of humanities. The countries of East Central Europe could join the project only after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Hungary published its first atlas as late as 2010. In four subsequent project phases, the Hungarian atlas team has been working on nineteen atlases of eighteen towns, out of which eight have been published so far. The editors follow the standards set by the International Commission for the History of Towns and have adopted best practices represented by the Austrian, Polish and Irish atlas series. In addition to describing the source basis and the main methodological concerns, the article highlights examples of comparative urban research for which the atlases offer an unparalleled potential. The article also advocates a more extensive use of this exceptional resource.","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115900716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Le culte des héros en Europe Centrale, 1880–1945. Edited by Eszter Balázs and Clara Royer.","authors":"M. Erdélyi","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.19","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122560306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Finances of the Hungarian Aristocracy in Boom and Recession","authors":"G. Kurucz","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.02","url":null,"abstract":"Based on primary sources, the present study is intended to reconstruct and analyze the process and levels of indebtedness of some of the outstanding Hungarian aristocratic families possessing large landed properties in the western region of Hungary, mainly in the Transdanubian counties. The author provides exact numerical data on the changes of the registered amounts of credit transactions, the stocks of assets and liabilities of the princely line of the Esterházy, Batthyány and the Keszthely branch of the Festetics families at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He explores the various documents kept by the financial administrations of the families, including contemporary county mortgage records, which testify to an extremely lively lending and borrowing environment during the French Wars. The study concludes that devaluations and the financial crises of the Austrian Empire in the 1810s exerted an adverse effect on the finances of both the above families and contemporary ‘small investors’.","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116147935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sanctuaries in Roman Dacia: Materiality and Religious Experience. By Csaba Szabó.","authors":"P. Kató","doi":"10.47074/hsce.2021-2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47074/hsce.2021-2.11","url":null,"abstract":"In spite of important exceptions bridging the two fields, the archaeology of the Roman provinces and the study of Roman polytheistic religion often appear even today as separate disciplines. Archaeologists dedicate most of their efforts to the publication and interpretation of the material brought to light by their excavations. On the other hand, the most innovative scholars of religious history pay more attention to theoretical approaches taken from sociology, anthropology, and religious studies than to collecting and evaluating large bodies of archaeological and epigraphic evidence. More intense dialogue between these two fields has great potential for advancing our understanding of the religious history of the ancient world. The book under review, Csaba Szabó’s doctoral dissertation defended in Erfurt and Pécs, is an attempt to achieve just this.1 Szabó aims to analyse the rich epigraphic and archaeological evidence about sanctuaries in Roman Dacia using the questions and methods developed by the Lived Ancient Religion Project (LAR), one of the most innovative research programmes in this field, headed by Jörg Rüpke at Erfurt. As will become clear from the following, Szabó often succeeds in making the epigraphic and archaeological material “speak” about religious experiences in Dacia, even if his reconstructions are not always fully convincing. Szabó’s approach is made even more important by the fact that much—often very high quality—research on Roman Dacia was published in Romanian, and therefore remains inaccessible to most foreign scholars. The Introduction (pp. 1–10) presents the main categories and methodological assumptions according to which the material regarding religion in Roman Dacia is analysed. For Szabó’s work, the most important element and major methodological innovation of the LAR project is the category of “space sacralization”, which is used","PeriodicalId":267555,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies on Central Europe","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128047016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}