David Heffernan. Debating Tudor Policy in Sixteenth-Century Ireland: “Reform” Treatises and Political Discourse. Studies in Early Modern Irish History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. 241. £80 (cloth).

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 408-409
Author(s):  
Steven G. Ellis
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr

It has long been known that the origins of the early modern dynasties of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Mongols, and Shibanids in the sixteenth century go back to “Turco-Mongol” or “Turcophone” war bands. However, too often has this connection been taken at face value, usually along the lines of ethnolinguistic continuity. The connection between a mythologized “Turkestani” or “Turco-Mongol” origin and these dynasties was not simply and objectively present as fact. Rather, much creative energy was unleashed by courtiers and leaders from Bosnia to Bihar (with Bukhara and Badakhshan along the way) in order to manipulate, invent, and in some cases disavow the ancestry of the founders of these dynasties. Essentially, one can even say that Turco-Mongol progenitors did not beget the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid states. Quite the contrary, one can say that historians writing in these empires were the ancestors of the “Turco-Mongol” lineage of their founders. Using one or more specimens of Persian historiography, in a series of five case studies, each focusing on one of these nascent polities, the book intends to show how “Turkestan,” “Central Asia,” and “Turco-Mongol” functioned as literary tropes in the political discourse of the time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-82
Author(s):  
Cassandra Auble

This paper explores how Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth i utilized jewelry in political settings to construct meaning, represent themselves, and negotiate personal and political relationships. Studying the complexities of jewelry’s exchange and circulation between the courts of England and Scotland provides a more nuanced picture of early modern diplomacy and material culture. Jewelry provided a valuable resource from which rulers and diplomats regularly drew when framing their political discourse. Jewels used in diplomacy were as politically meaningful as the gestures and rituals of formal diplomatic audiences and domestic ceremonies. As an object of exchange with a variety of functions, jewelry was absorbent of meaning and memories. Thus, jewelry could forge bonds between those who exchanged it, and also bring about hostilities and complications.


AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Jacobs

The Western perception of Islam as a belligerent religion owes many of its stereotypes not only to the Crusades, but also to the early modern rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe. Heated debates about the “Turkish menace” dominated European political discourse until the (second) Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, as documented by the innumerable Turcica that circulated both swiftly and widely thanks to revolutionary advances in printing. Sixteenth-century Christian authors provided their eager readers with constantly updated versions of Ottoman history, as did some of their Jewish contemporaries. Probably the first Jew to make the Ottomans the major subject matter of his work was Elijah Capsali of Candia in Venetian Crete, who in 1523 completed a Hebrew chronicle titled Seder ءEliyahu Zuta (“Minor Order of Elijah”).


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.


1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills

This paper examines an early modern contribution to the literature on stewardship accounting, the Tratado de Cuentas or Treatise on Accounts, by Diego del Castillo, a sixteenth-century Spanish jurist.


Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....


Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.


Author(s):  
Christoph Schubert

Abstract Presidential primary debates in the USA are commonly concluded by brief closing statements, in which the competitors outline the central messages of their election campaigns. These statements constitute a subgenre characterized by a set of recurring rhetorical moves, which are defined as functional units geared towards the respective communicative objective, in this case political persuasion. Located at the interface of rhetorical move analysis and political discourse studies, this paper demonstrates that moves and embedded steps in closing statements fulfill the persuasive function of legitimizing the respective candidate as the most preferable presidential successor. The study is based on the transcripts of 98 closing statements, which were extracted from eight Democratic and eleven Republican primary debates held between August 2015 and April 2016. Typical moves, such as projecting the speaker’s future political agenda or diagnosing the current situation in America, are presented with the help of illustrative examples, frequencies of occurrence, and a sample analysis of a complete closing statement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Penny Roberts

AbstractThis paper seeks to provide some historical perspective on contemporary preoccupations with competing versions of the truth. Truth has always been contested and subject to scrutiny, particularly during troubled times. It can take many forms – judicial truth, religious truth, personal truth – and is bound up with the context of time and place. This paper sets out the multidisciplinary approaches to truth and examines its role in a specific context, that of early modern Europe and, in particular, the French religious wars of the sixteenth century. Truth was a subject of intense debate among both Renaissance and Reformation scholars, it was upheld as an absolute by judges, theologians and rulers. Yet, it also needed to be concealed by those who maintained a different truth to that of the authorities. In the case of France, in order to advance their cause, the Huguenots used subterfuge of various kinds, including the illicit carrying of messages. In this instance, truth was dependent on the integrity of its carrier, whether the messenger could be trusted and, therefore, their truth accepted. Both sides also sought to defend the truth by countering what they presented as the deceit of their opponents. Then, as now, acceptance of what is true depends on which side we are on and who we are prepared to believe.


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