Fifteenth-Century Diplomatic Documents in Western European Archives and Libraries (1450-1494)

1962 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 64-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Ilardi

The enormous mass of fifteenth-century diplomatic documents deposited in European archives and libraries, mostly in Italy, has never been explored and utilized systematically. Relatively small selections have been published in various collections and appendices of specialized monographs, but the over-all significance of these papers has never been assessed. By contrast sixteenth-century diplomatic documents have given rise to many printed collections and publications ever since the third decade of the last century when Leopold von Ranke first made extensive and effective use of the Venetian dispacci and relazioni in his History of the Popes.

Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 257-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza

There are many still unstudied aspects of the cultural history of early Quattrocento Rome, especially if we consider the years before 1443, the date of the more or less permanent re-entry into the civitas aeterna of Pope Eugenius IV. The nexus between the still ephemeral papacy and the emerging intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism is one of these aspects. It is hoped that this study will shed some light on this problem by presenting a document that has hitherto not been completely edited: the original will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini. As we shall see, this important witness to the fifteenth century provides valuable information on many fronts, even on the structure of the old basilica of Saint Peter. The short introduction is in three parts. The first has a discussion of the cardinal's cultural milieu with a focus on the only contemporary treatise specifically about curial culture, Lapo da Castiglionchio's De curiae commodis. The second part addresses the textual history of the will as well as some misconceptions which have surrounded it. The third part contains a discussion of the will itself, along with some preliminary observations about what can be learned from the critical edition of the text here presented for the first time.


1956 ◽  
Vol 3 (02) ◽  
pp. 68-114
Author(s):  
Hugh Aveling

In the middle ages the Fairfaxes ranked amongst the minor landed gentry of Yorkshire. They seem to have risen to this status in the thirteenth century, partly by buying land out of the profits of trade in York, partly by successful marriages. But they remained of little importance until the later fifteenth century. They had, by then, produced no more than a series of bailiffs of York, a treasurer of York Minster and one knight of the shire. The head of the family was not normally a knight. The family property consisted of the two manors of Walton and Acaster Malbis and house property in York. But in the later fifteenth century and onwards the fortunes of the family were in the ascendant and they began a process of quite conscious social climbing. At the same time they began to increase considerably in numbers. The three main branches, with al1 their cadet lines, were fixed by the middle of the sixteenth century – the senior branch, Fairfax of Walton and Gilling, the second branch, Fairfax of Denton, Nunappleton, Bilhorough and Newton Kyme, the third branch, Fairfax of Steeton. It is very important for any attempt to assess the strength and nature of Catholicism in Yorkshire to try to understand the strong family – almost clan – unity of these pushing, rising families. While adherence to Catholicism could be primarily a personal choice in the face of family ties and property interests, the history of the Faith in Yorkshire was conditioned greatly at every point by the strength of those ties and interests. The minute genealogy and economic history of the gentry has therefore a very direct bearing on recusant history.


1991 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 235-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob C. Wegman

In 1449, the records of the church of Our Lady at Antwerp mention a new singer, Petrus de Domaro (see Figure 1). He does not reappear in the accounts of 1450, and those of the subsequent years are all lost. Musical sources and treatises from the 1460s to 80s call him, with remarkable consistency, P[etrus] de Domarto, and reveal that he was an internationally famous composer in the third quarter of the fifteenth century.


Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sister Mary Denise

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.


2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
ISAAC NAKHIMOVSKY

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic filmThe Third Man(1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.


1965 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 251-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. F. Thomson

Of all the early but non-contemporary works which throw light on the history of Lollardy, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe is undoubtedly the most important. Although it contains many tendentious comments, the products of an age when religious passions burned fiercely, comments which are of greater value to the historian of sixteenth-century propaganda than to the student of fifteenth-century heresy, it would be unwise to reject its source-value on these grounds. Besides Foxe’s comments, it also contains material, sometimes no longer extant in other records, which Foxe claimed to draw from the original accounts of the heresy trials, and, for the early sixteenth century, memories of observers, and it is some of this material which I wish to consider today. Because Foxe is noted as a propagandist, his reliability has sometimes been questioned, so the first task of the historian is to subject his excerpts from documents and his other source-material to a more than usually careful scrutiny. In cases where the original sources are still extant, these can be used to reach some estimate of his accuracy in general; in cases where they are not, other records can sometimes serve as a cross-check.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duchowny Aléxia ◽  
Pereira Luíza

El objetivo de este trabajo es identificar la fecha aproximada de la producción del texto del manuscrito Lybro de magyka, la tercera parte de una obra sobre astrología, en espanõl, comprada por Hernando Colón en 1527, que se conserva hoy en la Biblioteca Colombina, Sevilla, bajo la inscripción Ms. 5-2-32. Nuestra hipótesis es que el texto fue escrito entre los siglos XIII y XVI. Por lo tanto, la base teórica está constituida por gramáticas históricas de la lengua española que traen las siguientes características representativas del español medieval que nos permitieran elaborar criterios para el análisis que comprobarían o no la hipótesis inicial: 1) la formación de adverbios con el sufijo -mientre; 2) los masculinos hechos en -a que adoptan concordancia femenina; 3) la aspiración de la f- inicial; 4) el cambio de la copulativa et para y; 4) el adverbio suso. Los resultados permiten observar que la lengua del manuscrito fecha probablemente de finales del siglo XIV o del siglo XV, lo que se encuentra de acuerdo con las hipótesis de autoría propuestas por los trabajos acerca del Lybro de magyka hasta el momento. Así, el presente estudio contribuye para la reconstrucción de la historia del códice y para los estudios acerca de la lengua española. The objective of this work is to identify the approximate date of the production of the text of the manuscript Lybro de magyka, the third part of a work on astrology, in Spanish, purchased by Hernando Colón in 1527, which is preserved today in the Biblioteca Colombina, Seville, Spain, under the registration Ms. 5-2-32. Our hypothesis is that the text was written between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and is a copy of a Catalan translation. Therefore, the theoretical basis is constituted by works of internal and external history of the Spanish language that bring representative characteristics of the medieval Spanish. The characteristics below allow to elaborate criteria for the analysis that would verify or not the initial hypothesis: 1) the formation of adverbs with the suffix -mientre ; 2) the masculine ones made in -a that adopt feminine concordance; 3) the change of the copulative et to y; The results show that the language of the manuscript probably dates from the fifteenth century, which is in accordance with the hypotheses of authorship proposed by the works on the Lybro de Magyka so far. Thus, the present study contributes to the reconstruction of the history of the codex and to the studies about the Spanish language.


2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (573) ◽  
pp. 303-336
Author(s):  
Querciolo Mazzonis

Abstract This essay sheds new light on the spirituality and historical significance of the influential and controversial Dominican friar Battista Carioni da Crema (c.1460–1534). A popular spiritual writer, charismatic founder of devout associations such as the Barnabites, and a spiritual director of several well-known Catholic figures, including Gaetano Thiene, Battista’s significance has not yet been fully acknowledged. The essay considers his spirituality in the framework of reforming movements emerging in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. In dialogue with previous interpretations of Battista, the essay provides a novel and systematic analysis of his notion of perfection and concept of the Church. Synthesising ascetic and mystic spiritual influences rooted in the monastic and humanist culture of the fifteenth century, Battista presented a distinctive view of Christian life, which included an ecclesiological perspective and a new geography of the sacred. Defined as the ‘third life’ and conceived in a period of religious fluidity, it neither fitted emerging Lutheran ideas nor the orthodox Catholicism of the Roman Church. In addition, the essay argues that Battista’s proselytism can be seen as an attempt to reform society which preceded proposals for religious reform made by groups such as the Spirituali.


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