Louder Than Words: Broadsheets as Agents in a Multimedial Society

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva L E Janssens
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Abstract As significant instruments in the dissemination of Protestant ideas, oral, visual and written media affected early modern culture and its mentalities in an unprecedented way. Through word and image, religious oppositions were exacerbated in order to encourage the process of conversion. The role of prints in Protestant propaganda has already received scholarly attention. Yet, too often, a focus on medium-specific characteristics has ignored the interesting facet of interplay with other media. Through a detailed study of several illustrated broadsheets, this contribution analyses how prints of a Protestant stripe related, both in an explicit and in an implicit way, to other modes of communication. The perspective of multi- and intermediality is used as a scientific window on sixteenth-century prints and their reception.

scholarly journals Ancient Pneumatics Transformed during the Early Modern Period

Nuncius ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Valleriani
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
Exact Role ◽  
Ancient Technology ◽  
Ancient Science ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The paper aims to show how sixteenth century hydraulic and pneumatic engineers appropriated ancient science and technology – codified in the text of Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics – to enter into scientific discourse, for instance, with natural philosophers. They drew on the logical structure, content and narrative style passed down from antiquity to generate and codify their own theoretical approach and to document their new technological achievements. They did so by using the form of commented and enlarged editions, just as Aristotelian natural philosophers had been doing for centuries. The argument aims to detail the exact role of ancient science and the process of transformation it underwent during the early modern period. In particular, it aims to show how pneumatic engineers first tested the ancient technology codified by Hero while carrying out their own practical activities. Once these tests were successfully concluded, in the spirit of early modern humanism they finally presented these activities as being associated with the work of their discipline’s most authoritative author, Hero of Alexandria, whose technology was tested during the construction of the hydraulic and pneumatic system of the garden of Pratolino.

scholarly journals THE RISE OF THE AMBASSADRESS: ENGLISH AMBASSADORIAL WIVES AND EARLY MODERN DIPLOMATIC CULTURE

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEMMA ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Decision Making ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractThis article reveals how the ambassadress became an important part of early modern diplomatic culture, from the invention of the role in the early sixteenth century. As resident embassies became common across the early modern period, wives increasingly accompanied these diplomatic postings. Such a development has, however, received almost no scholarly attention to date, despite recent intense engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of early modern diplomacy. By considering the activities of English ambassadresses from the 1530s to 1700, accompanying embassies both inside and outside of Europe, it is possible not only to integrate them into narratives of diplomacy, but also to place their activities within broader global and political histories of the period. The presence of the ambassadress changed early modern diplomatic culture, through the creation of gendered diplomatic courtesies, gendered gift-giving practices, and gendered intelligence-gathering networks. Through female sociability networks at their host court, ambassadresses were able to access diplomatic intelligence otherwise restricted from their husbands. This was never more true than for those ambassadresses who held bonds of friendship with politically influential women at their host or home court, allowing them to influence political decision-making central to the success of the diplomatic mission.

‘Kindred Without End’: Wet-Nursing, Fosterage and Emotion in Ireland, c. 1550–1720

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-35
Author(s):  
Clodagh Tait
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Old English ◽  
Fictive Kinship ◽  
Infants And Young Children

Wet-nursing and fosterage were widely used in early modern Ireland. Despite the difficulties of reconstructing practices surrounding the nourishment and care of infants and young children, the limited surviving sources provide some evidence for the practical arrangements involved, the role of these practices in extending families and creating long-lasting ties of ‘fictive kinship’, the emotional and economic connections they forged and deeply held concerns that they might inspire and extend political disloyalty and disaffection. While fosterage is mostly associated with Gaelic communities, by the sixteenth century, a distinct brand of fosterage was significant to Old English families as well. New English and Protestant families also increasingly participated in networks referred to as fosterage, and references in the 1641 depositions testify to the degree to which these practices linked settlers and natives and the horror inspired by their abandonment.

Problems with Rhubarb: Accommodating Experience in Aristotelian Theories of Science

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Medical Plants ◽  
Theories Of Science

The paper examines controversies over the role of experience in the constitution of scientific knowledge in early modern Aristotelianism. While for Jacopo Zabarella, experience helps to confirm the results of demonstrative science, the Bologna Dominican Chrysostomo Javelli assumes that it also contributes to the discovery of new truths in what he calls ‘beginning science’. Both thinkers use medical plants as a philosophical example. Javelli analyses the proposition ‘rhubarb purges bile’ as the conclusion of a yet unknown scientific proof. Zabarella uses instead hellebore, a plant that is found all over Europe, and defends the view that propositions about purgative powers of plants are based on their ‘identity of substance’, an identity that had become questionable with regard to rhubarb due to new empirical findings in the sixteenth century.


“Communis Hostis Omnium”: The Smerwick Massacre (1580) and the Law of Nations

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Alan Orr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present State ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Common Enemy ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologetic, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1596). On this view, the papal troops at Smerwick were considered brigands, pirates, or, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's words, “communis hostis omnium”—a common enemy to all—and enjoyed no standing as lawful enemies under the law of nations. In the sixteenth century, the established law of nations was hardly a seamless web but manifested significant cleavages and fissures allowing for the construction of localized spheres of legal exception in which the ordinary rules of warfare did not apply, thus providing a convenient juridical rationale for atrocity.

`The bodie and the letters both': `blending' the rules of early modern religion

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 187-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Canning
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Conceptual Integration ◽  
Early Modern Catholicism ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
Formal Integration ◽  
Emergent Structure ◽  
Poetic Texts

The role of conceptual integration or blending has featured significantly in analyses of contemporary texts. To date, no-one to my knowledge has applied this theory in an early modern context. In the sixteenth century, a historical juncture rich in innovative forms of textual expression, the Reformation generated cognitive and ideological discordances between conceptions of the spiritual and the material, or more specifically, between word and image. These tensions were made manifest in physical acts of iconoclasm by Reformers in response to the `idolatry' of early modern Catholicism. Many poetic texts of the period attempted to validate and perpetuate the Reformed position, denouncing carnal representations of divinity, focusing instead on the spiritual incarnation of Christ as the `Word'. Taking one such text, Herbert's poem `JESU', as the focus of my analysis, I trace the path of a blend through to its emergent structure. I will argue that while the blend coheres conceptually in that it appears to make `plausible' the Reformed worldview, the reality is that it generates an ideological implausibility. As such, this article aims to demonstrate the greater efficacy and scope of blending than would otherwise be available through strictly metaphorical analyses. I will focus specifically on the correspondence between conceptual and formal integration of expression and meaning. My analysis leads to insights that more impressionistic, literary analyses of the period have not addressed, and that stylistic analyses have only briefly outlined, in that I will consider the material effects of this cognitive linguistic phenomenon in the significantly literary theological context of early modern England.

Centering Bukhara

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-72
Author(s):  
James Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Construction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
The Prestige

This chapter traces the history of the ascent of Bukhara by focusing both on investments in physical religious infrastructure and on textual mythologization, whereby Bukhara was discursively centered within the larger Perso-Islamic cosmopolis. These mutually reinforcing efforts had roots in the deep past, reemerged in the sixteenth century, and reached a crescendo in the nineteenth century. The early modern chapter of this story, particularly urban construction of religious infrastructure under the Shibanid and Ashtarkhanid dynasties, has received scholarly attention. The nineteenth century, however, is better known for colonial defeat and stagnation. The chapter argues that the Manghit era marked the city's cultural apex, inheriting all of the prestige and infrastructure from previous eras, and building on them substantially. By tying the universal and abstract to the immediate and concrete, Bukhara's mythologization project exemplifies an understudied process with parallels throughout the preindustrial world.

John Calvin’s Vision of Reform, Historical Thinking, and the Modern World

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
Complex Relationships

Distinctly modern forms of historical consciousness emerged first after the Enlightenment but were anticipated by early modern developments in attitudes towards and strategies for recovering the past. Scholarship has only recently focused on how religious perspectives of the sixteenth century and the demand for alternative visions of religious history contributed to broader developments in early modern historiography. This chapter investigates the role of the past in Calvin’s vision of reform through the lens of his 1543 treatise, Supplex Exhortatio, to show how an early modern version of historical thinking is reflected in and shapes his reforming agenda. Though much of his programme is in continuity with Western reforming traditions, Calvin’s vision involves more conscious and critical engagement with and re-evaluation of the past. Attention to the contours of Calvin’s historical thinking illuminates the highly complex relationships among religious orientations, religious conflicts, and engagements with history in the sixteenth century.

The Relacyja of Sefer Muratowicz: 1601–1602 Private Royal Envoy of Sigismund III Vasa to Shah ‘Abbas I

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-93
Author(s):  
Michael Połczyński
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Social Milieu ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Armenian Population

Armenian merchant and Ottoman subject Sefer Muratowicz emigrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth century. Soon after, he appeared before Safavid Shah ‘Abbas I as the personal envoy of King Sigismund III Vasa on a royal diplomatic mission unsanctioned by the Commonwealth's parliament. Though the trajectory of Sefer Muratowicz's life is not without precedence in the heterogeneous social milieu of Poland-Lithuania, his documented involvement in the private royal embassy of 1601–1602 to Safavid Persia presents an exceptional view into the critical role of the diasporic Armenian population in the diplomatic and economic relations between Europe's largest republic and the Islamic world in the early modern period.

Prophets, Saints, and Matriarchs: Portraits of Old Women in Early Modern Italy*

2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 807-849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin J. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
The Family ◽  
Women's Lives

AbstractThis essay examines portraits of old women that were produced for the households of the professional and elite classes in Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and the Veneto during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious and social reform, women's lives came under increasing scrutiny. By interpreting the portraits within the context of prescriptive texts on the stages of women's lives, this study argues that the portraits provide evidence for the pivotal role of old women within the moral and symbolic order of the family, as well as in the wider community beyond the home.

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