scholarly journals “The intolerable business": Religion and diplomacy under Elizabeth’s rule

Sederi ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Susana Oliveira

Within the scope of foreign affairs between Portugal and England during Elizabeth’s rule, numerous events indicate the challenges faced by the Portuguese ambassadors on their missions. Regrettably, little is known about these envoys and one rarely finds any reference to their names or their diplomatic accomplishments in Early Modern studies. This paper focuses on a diplomatic incident which involved Francisco Giraldes, a Portuguese resident ambassador in England, aiming to shed some light on “the intolerable business” that led to a confrontation with the Bishop of London, Edwin Sandys. Attending a Catholic Mass in the context of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement involved certain challenges that should be considered. Diplomats, however, enjoyed certain immunities, including the droit de chappelle, and were allowed to hold Catholic services in their ambassadorial residences. But in March 1573, while Mass was being held, Francisco Giraldes’s residence was raided by the Sheriff of London’s men, working under the Bishop of London’s instructions. The ongoing tension between the religious and the political areas of power was, thus, exposed. Two letters, written by the Bishop of London, included in the Lansdowne Manuscripts Collection of the British Library, registered the event. As Sandy’s correspondence appears to be the single piece of surviving evidence regarding this diplomatic incident, it stands to reason that its analysis will provide significant insight into the coexistence, as well as the clash, of oppositional forces, while further contributing to an interpretation of Anglo-Portuguese affairs in Early Modern times.

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 59-64
Author(s):  
Liviu Cîmpeanu

By definition, a monument has extraordinary features that mark landscape and human minds alike. Without any doubt, the Medieval and Early Modern World of Europe was marked by ecclesiastical monuments, from great cathedrals and abbeys to simple chapels and altars at crossroads. A very interesting case study offers Braşov/ Kronstadt/Brassó, in the south-eastern corner of Transylvania, where historical sources attest several ecclesiastic monuments, in and around the city. Late medieval and early modern documents and chronicles reveal not only interesting data on the monasteries, churches and chapels of Braşov/Kronstadt/Brassó, but also on the way in which citizens and outsiders imagined those monuments in their mental topography of the city. The inhabitants of Braşov/ Kronstadt/Brassó and foreign visitors saw the monasteries, churches and chapels of the city, kept them in mind and referred to them in their (written) accounts, when they wanted to locate certain facts or events. The present paper aims in offering an overview of the late medieval and early modern sources regarding the ecclesiastical monuments of Braşov/Kronstadt/Brassó, as well as an insight into the imagined topography of a Transylvanian city.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Wilt

AbstractThe return of the repressed “Catholic” has been lurking at the edge of English literary consciousness since early modern times, especially in the shorthand form of the plotting Jesuit. In its combined familiarity and mystery, grandeur and meanness, legitimacy and treason, “the Jesuit” even constitutes a figure for the Sublime. Novels by Thackeray, Kingsley, and Shorthouse locate the Jesuit in the political history of the nation, as the seducer of young noblemen. But this essay studies lesser-known novels by Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Trollope, and Mary Arnold Ward in which the plotting Jesuit, himself an object of allure in his un-Anglican “reserve” and his pre-Reformation Englishness, is suborned by his own humanity into the forbidden sublimities of love. As political threat and psychological object of desire, the Jesuit-in-love also represents Anglicanism's flirtation with Catholicism and with Queerness, his defeat/conversion sealing its commitment to its heterosexual priesthood and its post-Catholic modernity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Mikhail Pelevin

AbstractThis article offers a comparative examination of the literary responses of four leading early modern Pashtun authors to an armed clash in the Momand tribe in 1711. The responses include a chronicle record in prose (Afżal Khān Khaṫak) and three poems – an elegy (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Momand), a satire (ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Momand), and a war ode (ʿAbd al-Qādir Khaṫak). Discussed as both authentic historical documents and creative writings linked to a local social discourse, these Pashto texts enable us to reassess the intensity of everyday literary communications in Pashtun tribal areas in early modern times and append new factual material to the study of ethno-cultural processes within the Persophone oecumene. The salient stylistic and rhetoric diversity of the texts not only highlights the authors’ individual mindsets and literary techniques, but also provides an insight into a variety of social moods, political attitudes and ethics in the Pashtun traditional society.


Author(s):  
Ludmila Ivonina

The article analyzes a career and a number of poetic works written by a Polish poet Jan Kunowski. The books are associated with Smolensk and the wars between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Moscow State in the first half of the XVIIth century. The example of Kunowski’s poems and life demonstrates the place of Smolensk both in the political thinking of the Polish nobility of the Early Modern Times and, in particular, of an individual person. In addition, the article demonstrates some methods used by the propaganda of the Early Modern Times; they are dedicated to the event under the study. The author agrees that the writings by Jan Kunowski about Smolensk are an expression of the mentality of the Polish nobleman lived the XVIIth century, who was confident in Providence protecting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and convinced of the special mission of the Polish-Lithuanian State. In a certain way, the canticle to Smolensk was propaganda. In reality, Kunowski renewed the state and ethnic myth of Polish and partly Lithuanian political thought; he added a new element – Smolensk – to the thousand-year history of the state. Moreover, the article emphasizes that comprehension of Kunowski’s poems content from the only perspective of gentry’s mentality, propaganda and love for the city can be incomplete. The poet’s reflection of the reality was largely stimulated by material reasons, career aspirations, and religious confession.


Author(s):  
Elia Nathan Bravo

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. On the one hand, it offers a general analysis of stigmas (a person has one when, in virtue of its belonging to a certain group, such as that of women, homosexuals, etc., he or she is subjugated or persecuted). On the other hand, I argue that stigmas are “invented”. More precisely, I claim that they are not descriptive of real inequalities. Rather, they are socially created, or invented in a lax sense, in so far as the real differences to which they refer are socially valued or construed as negative, and used to justify social inequalities (that is, the placing of a person in the lower positions within an economic, cultural, etc., hierarchy), or persecutions. Finally, I argue that in some cases, such as that of the witch persecution of the early modern times, we find the extreme situation in which a stigma was invented in the strict sense of the word, that is, it does not have any empirical content.


Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.


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