Privileging Gender in Early Modern England. Volume XXII, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies.

1994 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 513
Author(s):  
Robert L. Woods ◽  
Jean Brink
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

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.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

So Much at Stake: Martyrs and Martyrdom in Early Modern England The trail of martyrdom. Persecution and resistance in sixteenth-century England. By Sarah Covington. Pp. xii+289. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. $55 (cloth), $28 (paper). 0 268 04225 X; 0 268 04226 8 Making women martyrs in Tudor England. By Megan L. Hickerson. Pp. ix+239 incl. 2 figs. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. £50. 1 4039 3833 4 Martyrdom and literature in early modern England. By Susannah Brietz Monta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. viii+236. £55. 0 521 84498 3

2006 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-541
Author(s):  
THOMAS FREEMAN
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
The Third ◽  
Women Martyrs ◽  
University Of Notre Dame

In recent years, a number of works devoted solely or partly to martyrdom in early modern England – most notably Brad Gregory's seminal Salvation at stake and Anne Dillon's The construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community – have helped to bring the study of this topic from the margins of scholarship into the academic mainstream. Two of the three works discussed here further develop this recent research by analysing representations of martyrdom in English martyrologies; the third work, Sarah Covington's survey on religious persecution in early modern England, is gravely impaired by its almost complete disregard of the complexities present in the narrative sources on martyrs and their persecutors.

Making Murder Public

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.J. Kesselring
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Formal Distinction

Homicide can seem timeless, somehow, determined by unchanging human failings. But a moment’s reflection shows this is not true: homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death for the latter in most cases, and two, a significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other. This book explores connections between these two changes. It demonstrates the value in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter, or at least in seeing how that distinction came to matter in a period which also witnessed dramatic drops in the occurrence of homicidal violence. Focused on the ‘politics of murder’, the book examines how homicide became more effectively criminalized from c. 1480 to 1680, with chapters devoted to coroners’ inquests, appeals and private compensation, duels and private vengeance, and print and public punishment. The English had begun moving away from treating homicide as an offence subject to private settlements or vengeance long before other Europeans, at least from the twelfth century. What happened in the early modern period was, in some ways, a continuation of processes long underway, but intensified and refocused by developments from the late fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries. Exploring the links between law, crime, and politics, bringing together both the legal and social histories of the subject of homicide, the book argues that homicide became more fully ‘public’ in these years, with killings seen to violate a ‘king’s peace’ that people increasingly conflated with or subordinated to the ‘public peace’ or ‘public justice’.

The European Reception of Livy (1469–1600)

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-38
Author(s):  
John-Mark Philo
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Fame ◽  
Critical Order

Chapter 1 explores Livy’s early reception and translation in Renaissance Europe, examining the first, key decades in which the history reached a wider audience through its publication on the continent. The chapter first examines the literary fame enjoyed by Livy in Europe towards the end of the fifteenth century as well as the attempts of his earliest editors in print to impose some kind of critical order onto this monolithic work. The focus then moves to the first vernacular translations of Livy to have appeared in Europe, including the first renderings of the history into French and Italian. The final section considers the various translation styles at work in early-modern England and how these manifest themselves in each of the sixteenth-century translations of Livy.

Catholic Exorcism in Early Modern England: Polemic, Propaganda and Folklore

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Young
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Direct Contact ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Catholic Mission

Exorcism was an integral part of the post-Reformation Catholic mission in England and, from the late sixteenth century, an ideological battleground between Catholic and Protestant. As in the Gospels, the obedience of demons was seen as the ultimate sign and supernatural seal of religious authority. Exorcism, unlike other aspects of Catholic mission, often brought recusant priests into direct contact with non-catholics and provided an unparalleled opportunity for conversions.

Staging Vice and Acting Evil: Theatre and Anti-Theatre in Early Modern England

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 156-169
Author(s):  
George Oppitz-Trotman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Religious Writings ◽  
Moral Ambivalence ◽  
The Relationship

This article revisits the relationship between dramatic production and religious change in the sixteenth century, specifically by examining the allegorical Vice figure - a dramatic embodiment of evil forces - that came to particular prominence during this period. It suggests that the professional actor became increasingly associated with this figure of moral evil. I propose also that understanding the moral ambivalence of the actor’s presence can inform our understanding of many plays in which no obviously coherent Vice figure is present, but in which possibilities of such an allegory are important. It would be impractical to present this argument across the range of dramatic examples it deserves, particularly since substantial contextual argument will be necessary if the article’s conclusions are to have any weight. It is partly for this reason that an examination of Shakespeare’s Hamlet concludes the paper, a play needing no introduction. It will be suggested that the play’s issue of conscience was mediated in important ways by the actor’s potentially Vice-like presence, defined as such by Tudor legislation as well as by a variety of anti-theatrical religious writings.

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