Hasil untuk "History of Central Europe"

Gavin Moulton

Forthcoming.

Ondřej Czadera

This paper examines the economic background of the construction of the Church of St. Barbara in Kutná Hora based on preserved building accounts from the 16th century. It focuses on the funding sources, the financial management exercised by the town council, and, primarily, the organization of the building workshop. It also highlights the intricate structure of the project and its function.

Viktoria Čisťakova, Zdeněk Beneš, Zuzana Zlámalová Cílová et al.

The article focuses on a specific group of Roman Period finds from Bohemia with mosaic or millefiori enamel decorations. The study examines various artefacts, including disc fibulae, balteus fittings, glass beads, and a seal box, all identified as Roman-provincial imports. Disc fibulae adorned with millefiori enamel have been discovered throughout the Barbaricum, with notable concentrations in the Tisza and Elbe river regions. Although Roman-provincial circular balteus fittings are less common, recent discoveries in Bohemia have expanded their known distribution. Both fibulae and balteus fittings predominantly date to the period surrounding the Marcomannic Wars and the first half of the 3rd century AD. Glass beads are typical grave goods in women's burials from the Late Roman Period. Mosaic glass beads, though less common, are primarily found in rich female graves dating to the 3rd century AD. A central aim of this study is to investigate and compare the production technologies employed in creating millefiori enamels. To achieve this, analytical methods such as micro-XRF, SEM/EDS, and LA-ICP-MS were utilised to determine the composition of the glass and metal substrates. Additionally, the design of selected glass beads was examined using computed micro-tomography (micro-CT) scanning.

Arne Pommerening, Ulrika Widman, Janusz Szmyt

Background: Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF) is a type of forest management that is based on ecological, environmental, and biological principles. Specific definitions of CCF greatly vary and the concept usually includes a number of tenets or criteria. The most important tenet of CCF is the requirement to abandon the practice of large-scale clearfelling in favour of selective thinning/harvesting and natural regeneration methods. Methods: CCF is commonly believed to have its main origin in an academic debate that was conducted through publications in a number of European and North American countries towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Our findings are exclusively based on a literature review of the history of CCF and they revealed that the European origins of CCF go much further back to a form of farm forestry that started to be practised in Central Europe in the 17th century. Eventually, this type of farm forestry led to the formation of the single-tree selection system as we know it today. Another influential tradition line contributing to modern CCF is individual-based forest management, which breaks forest stands down into small neighbourhood-based units. The centres of these units are dominant frame trees which form the framework of a forest stand. Consequently, management is only carried out in the local neighbourhood of frame trees. Individual-based forest management also modified inflexible area-control approaches of plantation forest management in favour of the flexible size-control method. Results and conclusions: We found evidence that the three aforementioned tradition lines are equally important and much interacted in shaping modern CCF. Since CCF is an international accomplishment, it is helpful to thoroughly study the drivers and causes of such concepts. Understanding the gradual evolution can give valuable clues for the introduction and adaptation of CCF in countries where the concept is new.

Alla Kyrydon, Serhiy Troyan

The Russian-Ukrainian war of 2014–2024 and the destructive role of Russia negatively affects regional and global aspects of the life of peoples and states. It has created a threat of serious chaos in international relations. Russia’s aggressive policy has caused a crisis in world politics that even the great powers of today cannot overcome. The return to a new Cold War and the outbreak of a major war in Europe threatens the entire modern international system with dangerous turbulence. The purpose of the study is to analyze the concept of effectiveness and the role of influential international actors in the modern Russian-Ukrainian war in the field of actor-network theory. The research methodology is based on the principles of science, objectivity, historicism and the basic conceptual and theoretical provisions of the study of world politics and international relations. Actor-network theory was introduced by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour in the second half of the 1980s. In accordance with this theory, relations between participants are determined by the network itself and are marked by the intensity and orientation of the network of interactions. In the sense of international relations and world politics, this means that they are under the strong or even decisive influence of powerful international actors (big powers and flexible interstate coalitions). Russia is seen as one of the most influential international players or “core of localities” that interact. Accordingly, other influential international actors are very cautious about the complete break of relations with Russia; they do not consider the possibility of its complete defeat in the aggressive war against Ukraine. Such a position was reflected and substantiated in various theoretical approaches, examples of which are the ideas of neorealism representatives such as John Mearsheimer, Farid Zakaria and Henry Kissinger.

Marek Sroka

The paper examines the classification and subject representation of the concepts of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in the context of the knowledge organization, especially historical information, in American research and academic libraries during the Cold War and post-Cold War era. The author argues that classification and subject schemes such as Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) have reflected the concept of the region, generally referred to as Eastern Europe, as an intellectual and political invention, with its historical biases and ambiguous representation. As will be demonstrated, despite the emergence of new nation states and the expansion of the European Union, the concepts of Central and Eastern Europe as separate entities are still alive as if the Cold War’s East-West division had never ended. The paper concludes with the analysis of the latest changes to DDC and LCSH (or lack thereof) to reflect current conditions in the region.

Rubén Ruiz-Torrubiano, Sebastian Knopp, Lukas Matthias Wolf et al.

In modular educational systems, students are allowed to choose a part of their own curriculum themselves. This is typically done in the final class levels which lead to maturity for university access. The rationale behind letting students choose their courses themselves is to enhance self-responsibility, improve student motivation, and allow a focus on specific areas of interest. A central instrument for bringing these systems to fruition is the timetable. However, scheduling the timetable in such systems can be an extremely challenging and time-consuming task. In this study, we present a framework for classifying modular educational systems in Europe that reflects different degrees of freedom regarding student choices, and explore the consequences from the perspective of scheduling a timetable that satisfies all requirements from the organizational and the pedagogical perspective. For this purpose, we conducted interviews in Austria, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg and apply the framework to these educational systems, finding that among them the Finnish system shows the highest degree of modularity. After analyzing the consequences of modularity from the scheduling perspective, we assess the necessity for automated scheduling methods, which are central for realizing the potential and many benefits of modular education in practice.

Jerzy S Respondek

The author was encouraged to write this review by numerous enquiries from researchers all over the world, who needed a ready-to-use algorithm for the inversion of confluent Vandermonde matrices which works in quadratic time for any values of the parameters allowed by the definition, including the case of large root multiplicities of the characteristic polynomial. Article gives the history of the title special matrix since 1891 and surveys algorithms for solving linear systems with the title class matrix and inverting it. In particular, it presents, also by example, a numerical algorithm which does not use symbolic computations and is ready to be implemented in a general-purpose programming language or in a specific mathematical package.

Ágnes Kósáné Bilanics, Tímea Makszim Györgyné Nagy

Kutatásunk a demográfiai folyamatok és azok hatásainak néhány sajátos aspektusára szeretné felhívni a figyelmet Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg megyében. A demográfiai folyamatok közül kiemeltük a népesség korcsoportok szerinti vizsgálatát, a belföldi vándorlást és a termékenységi ráta változását. A demográfiai folyamatok hatás-mechanizmusai közül részletesen foglalkoztunk az iskolázottság helyzetének értékelésével. Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg megyében az elmúlt húsz évben bekövetkező minőségi változások elemzése mellett fontosnak tartottuk az iskolázottság foglalkoztatási, munkaerőpiaci kapcsolódásainak, valamint az iskolázottság és az urbanizáltság összefüggéseinek a vizsgálatát. Megállapítottuk, hogy a hagyományos demográfia tárgyát képező jelenségek közül Szabolcs-SzatmárBereg megyében a legnagyobb változás a belföldi vándorlásban következett be 2001 óta. Az elmúlt húsz évben csaknem négyszeresére emelkedett a vándorlási veszteség, ami a hazai megyék között a legmagasabb. Emellett jelentős változás következett be a népesség korcsoportok szerinti arányaiban. 2001 óta Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg megyében a 0-14 éves korosztály népességen belüli aránya másfélszer gyorsabban csökkent, mint ahogyan a legidősebb korosztály aránya növekedett. Ezek a kedvezőtlen folyamatok jelentős negatív hatást gyakorolnak a vizsgált térség – egyébként sem kedvező – iskolázottsági folyamataira.

L. Kvist, K. Viiri, P. Dias et al.

Lidia Pakhomova

The article provides a brief overview of Russian historical sources on the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period of the Austro–Hungarian occupation. The body of literature on the subject includes a wealth of work devoted to Austria–Hungary’s modernisation policies in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1878 and 1914. However, researchers have not yet considered how the Great Powers that made important decisions about the fate of the provinces appraised the governance model of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. Such decisions were made not only on the basis of foreign policy interests and international relations, but also on the basis of observations from the occupied territories. Russian analysts closely explored the development of the provinces in the multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy between 1878 and 1908. Russian officials realised that the situation in the multireligious region was very complicated. They analysed both how Austria–Hungary managed this situation as an empire, and their governance model from the point of view of another empire.

G. Soroka, Félix Krawatzek

ABSTRACT In this introduction to our special issue on the politics of memory in the post-Soviet space, we present a four-part analytical framework through which to evaluate recent developments in the region. Specifically, we focus on: 1) the circulation of memories across space and time; 2) the factors that condition the recall of the past; 3) the actors involved in these processes; and 4) the logics that guide how the past is represented and interpreted. This framework provides a means through which to conceptually order and discuss the individual contributions to this issue, as well as to evaluate the wider relevance of Russia’s 2020 Victory Day commemoration, which marked the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end. A central claim advanced in this article is that researchers need to distinguish not just between the nationalized remembering we increasingly see being manifest across the former communist states of East-Central Europe and the more universalistic appeals of the cosmopolitan memory regime that predominates in Western Europe, but also contemporary Russia’s attempts to promulgate an “empire memory” that represents a competing set of generalizable norms for how the past should be depicted. The latter is significant because it directly challenges the specificity and contextual embeddedness of national recall as well as key mnemonic precepts of the post-national–meaning largely spatially and temporally unbounded–attention that has been accorded to victimhood and suffering in recent decades.

Kateřina Smyčková

Songs of the Czech exiles and the Catholic hymnography of the 17th and 18th century. The study examines Czech spiritual songs since the beginning of the 17th century until the end of the 18th century and deals with the connections between the non-Catholic songs of the Post-White Mountain exile and the Czech Catholic hymnography. It has been thought that these connections were almost unpossible. This study deals with the songs of the exiles in the Czech Catholic hymnbooks, broadsides and manuscripts – the aim of this study is to show the function of media in the Czech hymnography. The contacts with non-Catholic exiled and Catholic hymnbooks were mediated by orality, manuscripts and broadsides. This example shows the Czech hymnography as a media space; the study examines the position of manuscripts and primarily broadsides in this media space, both are very close to orality.

Lukas Werther, Tanja Menn, Johannes Schmidt et al.

Rivers form major traffic arteries in pre-modern Central Europe and accurate regional to supra-regional network models of inland navigation are crucial for economic history. However, navigation distances have hitherto been based on modern flow distances, which could be a significant source of error due to modern changes in flow distance and channel pattern. Here, we use a systematic comparison of vectorized old maps, which enlighten the fluvial landscape before most of the large-scale river engineering took place, and modern opensource geodata to deduce change ratios of flow distance and channel patterns. The river courses have been vectorised, edited and divided into comparable grid units. Based on the thalweg, meandering and braided/anabranching river sections have been identified and various ratios have been calculated in order to detect changes in length and channel patterns. Our large-scale analytical approach and Geographic Information System (GIS) workflow are transferable to other rivers in order to deduce change ratios on a European scale. The 19th century flow distance is suitable to model pre-modern navigation distances. As a case study, we have used our approach to reconstruct changes of flow pattern, flow distance and subsequent changes in navigation distance and transportation time for the rivers Altmühl, Danube, Main, Regnitz, Rednitz, Franconian and Swabian Rezat (Southern Germany). The change ratio is rather heterogeneous with length and travel time changes of the main channel up to 24% and an extensive transformation of channel morphology in many river sections. Based on published travel time data, we have modelled the effect of our change ratios. Shipping between the commercial hubs Ulm and Regensburg, to give an example, was up to 5 days longer based on pre-modern distances. This is highly significant and underlines the necessity for river-specific correction values to model supra-regional networks of pre-modern inland waterways and navigation with higher precision. Highlights: • Systematic comparison of old maps and modern geodata to deduce river-specific length correction values to improve supra-regional network models of pre-modern inland navigation. • Large-scale analytical approach and transferable GIS workflow for flow distance reconstruction with case studies in Southern Germany. • Length changes of navigated fairways result in pre-modern period travel times up to 24% higher in corrected models.

György Kurucz

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’.

The re-periodisation of European history achieved in the last few decades is now complete in all but name. The idea of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries as a uniquely formative period for the creation of a European identity no longer surprises academic readers. The numerous titles proclaiming the 'origins', 'formation', 'making' or 'birth' of Europe illustrate that all we lack is a convenient term to express the shift from 'Middle' to 'Central' which characterises our age's re-appraisal of this period of its history, to replace the neat encapsulation 'medieval' with one, if no less anachronistic, perhaps more honest. Nor is it easy to say how long it will be before the rigid institutionalised encrustations of university course titles and publishers' catalogues' sub-sections catch up with the new view of a European history turning on the two great transformative eras following on from the Gregorian and the Industrial revolutions. In our new view reformations, rather than The Reformation, or the Italian Renaissance now recognised as one among other renaissances, are seen as deriving their impulses and characteristics from the first of these formative epochs, as part of a longer interrevolutionary period – the 'long medieval period' proposed here by Le Goff. But this new book by a scholar who has for years been an important contributor to our new view of European history is no mere rehearsal of the rehabilitation of the Middle Ages of the sort which has become popular. It is, as the author states in the introduction, neither a continuous nor a comprehensive history, but rather an essay illustrating the thesis 'that it was in the Middle Ages that Europe first appeared and took shape both as a reality and as a representation' (p. 1). This is a thesis which has been advanced in detail in recent academic literature, much of which Le Goff cites generously. But what he presents here is neither another synthesis of the monograph literature nor one of the increasingly frequent popularising texts (indeed this book assumes a greater familiarity with characters and events than most books aimed at more than academic readerships, demanding, and repaying, thoughtful reading). It is rather a reflection, by one of the creators of the historiographical revolution, on this view of European origins.

D. Fernandes, Dominik Strapagiel, P. Borówka et al.

Ancient DNA genome-wide analyses of Neolithic individuals from central and southern Europe indicate an overall population turnover pattern in which migrating farmers from Anatolia and the Near East largely replaced autochthonous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. However, the genetic history of the Neolithic transition in areas lying north of the European Neolithic core region involved different levels of admixture with hunter-gatherers. Here we analyse genome-wide data of 17 individuals spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (4300-1900 BCE) in order to assess the Neolithic transition in north-central Poland, and the local impacts of hunter-farmer contacts and Late Neolithic steppe migrations. We evaluate the influence of these on local populations and assess if and how they change through time, reporting evidence of recurrent hunter-farmer admixture over three millennia, and the co-existence of unadmixed hunter-gatherers as late as 4300 BCE. During the Late Neolithic we report the appearance of steppe ancestry, but on a lesser scale than previously described for other central European regions, with evidence of stronger affinities to hunter-gatherers than to steppe pastoralists. These results help understand the Neolithic palaeogenomics of another central European area, Kuyavia, and highlight the complexity of population interactions during those times.

P. Groenemeijer, T. Púčik, A. Holzer et al.

Petr Elbel

This study focuses on the memorial function of charters in the Late Middle Ages based on narrationes in Sigismund of Luxemburg's charters for Czech recipients from 1433 to 1437. This dramatic period saw the culmination of the Hussite Wars (the siege of Plzeň, the Battle of Lipany), while at the same time there were negotiations between the Hussites and the Council of Basel which resulted in the issuing of the Basle Compacts and the acceptance of Emperor Sigismund as King of Bohemia in July 1436. The author gradually describes narrationes in Sigismund's charters for Bohemian Catholics from 1433 to 1435 and 1436 to 1437, and finally also for the Utraquists from 1436 to 1437. He demonstrates that while from 1433 to 1435 the charters were a means of fixing the Catholic towns' and noble families' memory of their continued and gallant struggle against "Hussite heresy" in writing, from 1436 to 1437 Sigismund's chancery retrospectively modified the memory of the previous wars in an effort to harmonise the image created in these charters with the religious reconciliation of July 1436.

Arturo Sanchez-Lorenzo, Javier Vaquero-Martínez, Josep Calbó et al.

The current pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is having negative health, social and economic consequences worldwide. In Europe, the pandemic started to develop strongly at the end of February and beginning of March 2020. It has subsequently spread over the continent, with special virulence in northern Italy and inland Spain. In this study we show that an unusual persistent anticyclonic situation prevailing in southwestern Europe during February 2020 (i.e. anomalously strong positive phase of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillations) could have resulted in favorable conditions, in terms of air temperature and humidity, in Italy and Spain for a quicker spread of the virus compared with the rest of the European countries. It seems plausible that the strong atmospheric stability and associated dry conditions that dominated in these regions may have favored the virus's propagation, by short-range droplet transmission as well as likely by long-range aerosol (airborne) transmission.