FemaleComplaintes: Laments of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France*

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 801-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate van Orden
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Love Lyric ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Musical Forms

This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of women. As a feminine counterpart to masculine love lyric, thecomplaintearose from an alternative poetics, treating subjects excluded fromfin amors, such as death, crime, and war. Essentially, lyric assigned erotic longing to men and mourning to women. The unusual subject matter accommodated by thecomplaintes, coupled with a set of material and musical forms locating them amid the cultures of cheap print, psalmody, and street song, ultimately embroiled them in the battles of the religious wars. Thus female voices came to trumpet confessional politics in songs that levied lyric, gender, and faith to serve in civil war.

scholarly journals THE ETHOS OF DEMOCRACY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 607-612
Author(s):  
ANNELIEN DE DIJN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
American History ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Depth Of Knowledge ◽  
Religious Wars

James Kloppenberg's Toward Democracy is a monumental achievement. To start with, Kloppenberg's breadth and depth of knowledge are awe-inspiring. He begins his story in the late sixteenth century, at the height of the religious wars in France, with the philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who rejected democracy because he did not believe ordinary people were capable of the self-restraint it required. Kloppenberg ends his narrative three hundred years later, with the poet Walt Whitman, lamenting the rise of unbridled individualism in the post-Civil War United States. Even though much attention is devoted to intellectual developments in northern America—Kloppenberg is, after all, specialized in American history—his book places these in a much broader context, highlighting how both in the colonial period and beyond Americans participated in transatlantic “communities of discourse” (2). In that sense, Toward Democracy contributes towards the recent transatlantic turn in American historiography.

scholarly journals ‘ACCEPTABLE TRUTHS’ DURING THE FRENCH RELIGIOUS WARS

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Penny Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Intense Debate

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.

Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Meere
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Cain And Abel ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
David And Goliath ◽  
Shed Light

The performance of violence on the stage has played an integral role in French tragedy since its inception. Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy is the first book to tell this story. It traces and examines the ethical and poetic stakes of violence, as playwrights were experimenting with the newly discovered genre during decades of religious and civil war (c.1550–1598). The study begins with an overview of the origins of French vernacular tragedy and the complex relationships between violence, performance, ethics, and poetics. The remainder of the book homes in on specific plays and analyzes biblical, mythological, historical, and politically topical tragedies—including the stories of Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, Medea, Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, the Roman general Regulus, and the assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1588—to show how the multifarious uses of violence on stage shed light on a range of pressing issues during that turbulent time such as religion, gender, politics, and militantism.

scholarly journals Post-Reformation Reformed sources and children

2008 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
A.C. Neele
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Significant Interest ◽  
The Subject

This article suggests that the topic “children” received considerable attention in the post-Reformation era – the period of CA 1565-1725. In particular, the author argues that the post-Reformation Reformed sources attest of a significant interest in the education and parenting of children. This interest not only continued, but intensified during the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation when much thought was given to the subject matter. This article attempts to appraise the aim of post-Reformation Reformed sources on the topic “children.”

The Myth of the Ottoman Caliphate

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-276
Author(s):  
Hüseyin Yılmaz
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Sectarian Conflict ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
Sufi Order

This chapter discusses the mystification of the Ottoman caliphate and the apocalyptic-messianic reconstruction of imperial ideology in the context of the long Ottoman–Safavid conflict of the sixteenth century. Current studies in the main treat the Ottoman–Safavid conflict as no more than a sectarian conflict between two expanding Muslim empires. The Ottomans, however, perceived it as an apocalyptic conflict between primordial forces of faith and disbelief, often expressed in manicheistic dichotomies. Being one of the most aggressively fought religious wars in Islamic history, it profoundly altered both Sunni and Shiite conceptions of history and rulership. The Safavids, being at once a Turkoman chieftainship, a Shiite dynasty, and a Sufi order, were better endowed with esoteric image-making skills than the Ottomans, whose juristic and theological arguments against heresy were, simply, by definition nullified. Despite the Ottoman military might that overwhelmed the Safavids in multiple battles, the Safavid–Shiite call resonated much more strongly among the vast Turkoman diaspora from Central Asia to the Balkans, particularly among popular mystical orders of the countryside.

Actions on the case for defamation

2019 ◽  
pp. 686-716
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts

The orthodoxy before 1500 was that the only remedy for defamatory words was a prosecution in the ecclesiastical courts. But it was a hard to deny a remedy if untrue words caused temporal damage, since damages could not be recovered in those courts. This chapter shows how actions on the case came to be available for causing temporal loss by words, and how indeed they became so common in the sixteenth century that the judges tried to discourage them by construing apparently defamatory words in a milder sense (‘in mitiori sensu’). Objections that such actions should not lie in respect of spiritual subject-matter, such as heresy or fornication, were overruled where temporal damage resulted. The final cases in the chapter show that the distinction between libel and slander was not the same, in its consequences, as that which became settled in later times.

Ut musica poesis: Music and Poetry in France in the Late Sixteenth Century

1994 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 1-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Mayer Brown
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
World Order ◽  
Pierre De Ronsard ◽  
Ideal Form ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Crucial Part

By praising rulers, whose magnificence formed a crucial part of the world order, Pierre de Ronsard and his French colleagues in the second half of the sixteenth century often depicted the world not as it was but as it ought to be. This idea informs Margaret McGowan's book on ideal forms in the age of Ronsard, in which she explores the ways poets and painters extolled the virtues and the theatrical magnificence of perfect princes following the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis: as is painting so is poetry. McGowan demonstrates the virtuosity of the painters and poets of the sixteenth century in shaping their hymns of praise from the subject matter and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome by following Horace's advice to regard paintings as mute poems and poems as speaking pictures. McGowan shows how artists and intellectuals pursued their goals by creating four kinds of ideal form: iconic forms, sacred images derived from classical literary sources offering princes some guarantee of immortality; triumphal forms that evoke the heroic imperial past; ideal forms of beauty to be found in contemplating the beloved; and dancing forms that mirror rituals of celebration. McGowan claims that such ideal forms were intended to enlighten the ruler himself as much as they celebrated his grandeur in the eyes of others.

The Reformation and Wars of Religion in France

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
The Right ◽  
King Henry Ii ◽  
Catherine De Medici ◽  
Religious Nature ◽  
The Impact

The 16th century began in France as a time of relative peace, prosperity, and optimism, but horizons soon darkened under the clouds of religious schism, heresy persecutions, and civil war. French theologians condemned Martin Luther’s ideas as early as 1521, but his views continued to spread underground. The movement remained small and clandestine until the 1550s, when the penetration of John Calvin’s ideas from nearby Geneva resulted in the formation of Reformed churches, whose growing membership demanded the right to worship openly. The accidental death of King Henry II in 1559 left France with a religiously divided court and a series of young, inexperienced kings. Henry’s widow, Catherine de Medici, attempted a policy of compromise that backfired. Militancy increased on both sides of the religious divide, and civil war broke out in 1562. Neither side could secure a decisive win on the battlefield, and neither was satisfied with the compromise peace that ended the war. Indeed, war broke out seven more times before a more lasting peace was secured by the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The edict set the terms for religious coexistence, allowing French Protestants limited rights to worship and certain protections under the law. It also fostered the spread of a movement already underway for the renewal of Catholic spirituality and reform of Catholic church institutions in France. Until the 1970s, the civil and religious wars that afflicted France through the second half of the 16th century were viewed largely as the consequence of political rivalries that spun out of control following the death of King Henry II. More recently, historians have shifted their attention to the social and cultural contexts in which the wars took place, particularly to the fundamentally religious nature of the quarrels. This has led to a profusion of new scholarship on the impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in France, the tensions—and ultimately the violence—generated by competing claims to religious truth, and the difficulty of resolving the quarrels or putting an end to the wars that resulted from them.

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