Magnetism, Navigation, and Cartography in the Early Modern Period: An Elusive Relationship

Since the beginnings of nautical cartography in the Mediterranean region during the Late Middle Ages, the importance of nautical charts has grown beyond mere navigational purposes, especially during the early modern period. They became an essential medium for conveying an extensive array of socioeconomic information and messages, particularly as less expensive and easier-to-distribute printed charts began to replace their manuscript counterparts. Due to its immense geostrategic significance in integrating the Mediterranean framework with continental Europe, the Adriatic Sea and its surrounding areas have been the sole focus of numerous early modern charts. Featuring two primary ensembles, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the development of nautical cartography for the Adriatic Sea region from the late medieval era until the advent of systematic field surveys. With its most significant scientific and stylistic turning points explained in greater detail and supported by the most important cartographic examples, the first one focuses on the chronological development of nautical cartography as seen through a phenomenological lens. The second one focuses on the history of the discipline itself and provides readers a variety of insightful academic results that are further distinguished based on key methodological principles applied to the study of old nautical charts, both of the Adriatic Sea and beyond.

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

This chapter examines early modern nautical charts of the Adriatic Sea from the perspective of their function as medium of communication. The aim of the research was to provide new insights into early modern nautical charts of the Adriatic Sea produced in various European cartographic centres. The study focuses on 84 charts from the early modern period, supplemented by medieval and early nineteenth-century charts for comparative analysis. The charts were analysed to explore how they transmitted messages beyond nautical and geographical discourse, including territorial claims, cultural influences, and social interactions. The research integrates the study of imagological elements, symbols, toponyms, cartographic signs, scales, and communication noise to uncover communication techniques and strategies on old charts. Deconstruction of allegorical depictions, flags, and emblematic symbols revealed cartographers’ use of religious, cultural, and territorial motifs to reflect geopolitical realities and aspirations. Toponym analysis highlighted links between navigational needs and the cultural-political context, with toponyms serving as tools for affirming political goals and cultural dominance. The use of cartographic signs enhanced maritime safety. Drawing multiple scale bars, each calibrated in a different unit of distance, increased charts’ communicative potential, though errors due to uncritical content reproduction reduced reliability and posed navigation challenges. Early modern nautical charts transcended their navigational role to function as dynamic communication media, conveying geographical, social, political, and cultural information. These charts conceptually shaped the Adriatic as a space of interaction and conflict, proving their significance as both reflections and agents of historical processes in nautical cartography.

Following Columbus' voyages to the Americas, Castilian (Spanish) and Portuguese rulers engaged in heated geopolitical competition, which was eventually reconciled through a number of treaties that divided the world into two unequal hemispheres. However, the early-sixteenth-century papal demarcation line was poorly defined. Expressed in degrees with respect to a vague reference location, determination of longitude at sea became crucial in the nations' quest for expanding spheres of influence. In Spain, King Philip II and his son, Philip III, announced generous rewards for those whose solutions to the longitude problem performed well in sea trials and which were suitable for practical implementation. The potential reward generated significant interest from scientist-scholars and opportunists alike. The solutions proposed and the subset taken to sea provided important physical insights that still resonate today. None of the numerous approaches based on compass readings ('magnetic declination') passed the exacting sea trials, but the brightest sixteenth-century minds already anticipated that lunar distances and the use of marine timepieces would eventually enable more precise navigation. With most emphasis in the English-language literature focused on longitude solutions developed in Britain, France and the Low Countries, the earlier yet ground-breaking Spanish efforts have, undeservedly, largely been forgotten. Yet, they provided a firm basis for the development of an enormous 'cottage industry' that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century.

Erica Fudge. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 224 pp. $45.00.Kathryn Shevelow. For the Love of Animals: Rise of the Animal Protection Movement. New York: Henry Holt, 2008 1st edition; 2009 paper. 352 pp. $17.00.Donna Landry. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 240 pp. $50.00.Work on animals is necessarily interdisciplinary. Discussion of, for example, subjectivity, symbolism, husbandry, vivisection, pet keeping, wildlife, welfare, and rights overlaps many areas: philosophy, history, literature, art, ecology and environmental studies, medicine, childhood, feminism, empire, and postcolonial studies. list goes on. Respected, established scholars who hail from literature and language departments wrote all three of the books under consideration here. Erica Fudge is Reader in Literary and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University; Katherine Shevelow is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, San Diego; and Donna Landry is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent. All three authors are concerned, broadly speaking, with agency in the, broadly conceived, early modern period (from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries) in Britain. And all three contribute to and cultural studies by also deploying feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist theories. But perhaps what is most significant here is not what these three books have in common, but that, despite all of the authors' grounding in literary studies, they offer three very different contributions to the burgeoning field of studies. Indeed, the diversity of these books suggests that scholarship focusing on nonhuman animals has matured to the point that our offerings are expanding beyond the usual suspects and perhaps gaining stature and recognition beyond the usual haunts. Fudge's book continues her pioneering work in studies in the early modern period with a contribution here to the history of ideas; Shevelow's first contribution to the field of studies is a book aimed at a popular rather than scholarly audience; and Landry offers a very pointed analysis of one kind of horse to add to her multiple contributions to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical cultural studies.Following Derrida's denunciation of the term in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), it has become de rigueur in studies to avoid using the term animal as one that denotes and demarcates the nonhuman in an imprecise and monolithic way. Early modern Britons used it to precisely this effect. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which the concept of reason was defined and figured into the categorization of the in the early modern period (defined here more traditionally as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries). Fudge cites concern for the impact of Descartes on early modern attitudes about and actions toward nonhuman animals as inspiration for her book. She suggests that modern scholars too often impose our own post-Cartesian perspectives on the period and thus inadequately consider other animals or elide them from history altogether. She begins by exploring the construction of the category and its instability and proceeds to explicate complicated attitudes toward nonhuman animals in turn. She suggests the two are inextricable and that too many historians have torn asunder unthinkingly what cannot be taken as distinct: the history of humanity and the history of nonhuman animals. To explain the it seems, is to explain the animal; or perhaps that should be reversed: to explain the is to explain the human, she argues (6). All too often modern scholars read metaphor and symbol where there is an actual to be seen. Fudge is concerned to uncover the real animals in early modern considerations of reason, not simply the metaphorical animals that reflect human concerns. …

Reviews 143 laxly confusions, of sex and gender in the early modern period. What may seem at first glance to be anomalous probably is not. The Bedtrick's ambition, comparativist orientation, and its play fulness prevent it from argumentatively engaging questions "cul tural studies* might pose: what is at work to approve this copu lating pair and condemn another? what allows the fictional indi vidual to evade social demands? what might the conjugal/forni cating pair displace? what might the "tricked" partner represent? In Splitting theDifference, Doniger concludes "gender trumps cul ture." By mounting evidence that individuals are ignorant of the identity (frequently overtly split or fragmented) of those with whom they are most physically intimate, Doniger implies in The Bedtrick that indeed "culture is the shadow of gender." However, the surrogates, so crucial to the bedtrick, are as likely to repre sent a beleaguered figure of nostalgia, the status quo, or a restored order, as an object or subject of sexual desire. The Bedtrick engenders a good many more questions than it answers, and therein may lie its greatest value. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. 390 pp. $69.95. Reviewed by Donna C. Woodford Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, edited by Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, is the firstbook in the new Women and Gender in the Early Modern World series fromAshgate. The book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on mothers and other caregiving figures in the early modern peri od. Spanning the disciplines of literature, music, art history, and social history, and covering territories throughout Europe and the Americas, the essays explore the roles of caregivers in the early modern world and the ways inwhich those roles were interpreted and used both by the caregivers themselves and by the cultures inwhich they lived. In her introductory essay, Miller establishes the book's aim of exploring the "spectrum, and spectacle, ofmaternity in particular and of female caregivers at large in the early modern period" (1). The concepts of spectrum and spectacle prove central to the vol ume since the essays not only examine a variety of caregivers, including "mothers and stepmothers, midwives and wet nurses, wise women and witches, saints and Amazons, murderers and 144 The Journal for Early Modern Cultured Studies nurturers," but also explore the many ways inwhich those care giving roles were turned into spectacles that sometimes empow ered or glorified the caregiver and sometimes limited or condemned her (1). Early modern women, Miller observes, were often identi fied by their caregiving responsibilities both inside and outside the family, and while roles such as mother, midwife, wet nurse, and educator could potentially empower women by giving them author ity in the home and in the community, these same roles could be used to define and limit the condition of female caregivers or to condemn women who did not live up to a given ideal. The essays in this volume are divided into five categories: conception and lactation; nurture and instruction; domestic pro duction; social authority; and mortality. Part One includes four essays on the subjects of conception and lactation, and while these essays explore different disciplines in different countries, they together show how the breast and the womb could alternately be constructed as sources of life and feminine creativity and as dan gerous threats to men and a patriarchal society. In her essay, Judith Rose suggests that both the poet, Gaspara Stampa, and the painter, Sofinisba Anguissola, ally themselves with images of the Virgin Mary and thus with a positive, acceptable form of creativity for female artists. Likewise, Yavneh examines Anguissola's realis tically depicted nursing Madonna and suggests that the artist was drawing parallels between the influence ofmaternal milk and the influence of a female artist. In contrast, Caroline Bicks's essay is a fascinating examination of early modern fears about the power of midwives both to spread stories about the paternity of a child and to emasculate male children by tying the umbilical cord too short, which was thought to affect both the length of the child's genitals and his ability to speak freely...

Amsterdam played a central role in at least two of the processes that took place in Jewish cultural history in the early modern period: in the development of a new stage in Jewish library awareness; and in the inception of a Jewish, traditional of letters. This chapter demonstrates this centrality through the analysis of two noteworthy Ashkenazi rabbinic figures of Amsterdam, R. Shimon Frankfurt (1634-1712) and his son R. Moshe Frankfurt. It draws attention to another work of R. Shimon's, Sefer Yitnu, which he wrote in his late years, and which remains in manuscript form, having never been printed. The compendium of traditional exegetical works served the spiritual needs of former conversos familiar with Christian culture. The term republic of letters, in the sense of an autonomous sociocultural space, first appeared in the late fifteenth century, in the context of Renaissance Humanism. Keywords: Amsterdam; Christian culture; early modern period; Jewish of letters

In comparison to other European states in the early modern era, Muscovy is considered to have been one of the most secluded and isolated. Nonetheless, from the late fifteenth century, the destination of migrants from many parts of Europe was Muscovy. Much of this migration was actively supported by the Muscovite government. While the tsars and some members of the Muscovite nobility were eager to recruit foreign experts, their presence in Muscovy was accompanied by controversies and conflicts, between both immigrants and the native population, and among the immigrants themselves. The word inozemtsy is the term most commonly found in Muscovite sources and historical research. However, the term inozemtsy is also problematic, since it refers in general to any non-Orthodox person subject to Muscovite law, including Europeans and their descendants living in Muscovy, as well as other non-Orthodox inhabitants of Muscovite territories annexed over the centuries.

Reviewed by: Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain by Nicholas R. Jones Harrison Meadows (bio) Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain nicholas r. jones Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019 222 pp. Nicholas R. Jones's book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain examines the politics of theatrical embodiments of Blackness on the Iberian stage from the late 1400s through the end of the seventeenth century. As is accurately acknowledged in the introduction, little attention has been given to account for the populations of sub-Saharan African descent on the Iberian Peninsula during this period, and much less toward understanding their impact on cultural production, including Jones's focus on early modern [End Page 945] Spanish theatrical practice. In this study the author launches a compelling challenge to prevailing approaches that privilege readings arguing that the performance of embodied theatrical Blackness in early modern Spain was limited to racial impersonation for the purpose of buffoonery. While Jones recognizes the widespread, even dominant performance practices that fit such a description, his analysis uncovers a wider range of possibilities for Black representation on the Iberian stage, about which he articulates two of the book's principal objectives: (1) to identify the "agentive subject positions of habla de negros speakers" on the Iberian stage from the late fifteenth through the end of the seventeenth centuries, and (2) to prove that "black populations of early modern Spain actively participated in the formation of a so-called Black Experience that thrived outside of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the U.S." (14). Jones's approach is marked by the careful application of a wide range of critical theory, while he also displays a gift for identifying meaningful links between the content of his study and eighteenth- to twenty-first-century cultural phenomena in other geographical contexts (specifically the US), including work songs of US Black American slave culture, blackface minstrelsy, and Blaxsploitation films. These comparisons serve to assist Jones as he reads against scholarship that has led to the theoretical oversimplification of the nature of early modern Black theatrical embodiment and rendered silent the Black voices that Jones recovers, voices that "challenge abjection and diffuse the supposed 'power' invested in Western racist antiblack anxieties, stereotypes and subjective insecurities" (20). In chapter 1, "Black Skin Acts: Feasting on Blackness, Staging Linguistic Blackface," Jones identifies and theorizes two categories of embodied performance of habla de negros on the early modern Iberian stage. First, the author makes the important note that Iberian staging practices did not exclude Black characters from being played by Black actors, for which Jones cites a number of examples, dedicating the most attention to La Gloria de Niquea (1622), a play written by the Conde de Villamediana. In its original staging for the court of Felipe IV, a Black actress played the allegorical character Night, alongside members of the royal family and court that made up the rest of the cast. In this section of the analysis, the author mistakenly indicates that Princess Margarita Teresa of Austria (the subject of Velazquez's famous painting Las Meninas) played the role of Beauty, when it was actually her mother, Queen Isabella of Bourbon, who played [End Page 946] the role. But this historical detail is of minor importance to the argument itself, in which Jones reads against traditional interpretations that would prioritize the implications of a reading that viewed the unnamed actress playing Night exclusively as the embodiment of the Other. Instead, he shifts the emphasis to the agency enacted by the Portuguese actress, whose entrance overshadowed the presence of the royal actors onstage thanks to her incredible singing voice ("excelentísima cantora") as chronicled by a member of the audience. The next section of the chapter is dedicated to instances of habla de negros speech acts performed through racial impersonation, which the author asserts should be considered a form of blackface, arguing that examples like the ones analyzed in the book provide evidence that blackface performance can be traced back to early modern European staging practices. Jones identifies the inseparable link between speaking...

This chapter provides an overview of the historical and (socio)linguistic context surrounding the translation of biblical texts in late fifteenth and sixteenth century Croatia. The Croatian language community during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period was essentially multilingual. In addition to Latin, which served as lingua franca, different Slavic literary languages were used depending on the text type. “Diglossia” and “triglossia” are nowadays commonly used terms to describe the Croatian language situation from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Croatian Church Slavonic remained the most prestigious type of literary language until the sixteenth century when its high status finally collapsed, and it lost the competition with Croatian vernaculars. It is during that century that we witness the coexistence of several different concepts of literary language in liturgical texts (as the most conservative genre). The chapter traces the demise of diglossia during the sixteenth century when three different trends can be seen in Croatian translations of biblical texts: the adoption of a high variety, a low variety and finally a mixed variety.

This chapter outlines a two-fold argument in order to offer a contribution to the general discussion of 'early modern medievalisms' using early modern Jewish intellectual history as a case study. First, it sketches the broad outlines of an argument that a particular conceptualization of medieval Jewish philosophy prevailed as the mainstream in the early modern period from the late fifteenth century through the eighteenth-century period of the Jewish Enlightenment ( Haskalah ), and even into the nineteenth century. The chapter shows that this conception of medieval Jewish philosophy is well understood as a particular form of an 'early modern medievalism' that can be distinguished from medievalism as it operated in the (late) modern period. However, when one views the problem from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history rather than through the narrower lens of the history of philosophy, the relationship of medieval and modern becomes more complex. Keywords: early modern medievalisms; Haskalah ; medieval Jewish philosophy

The essence of hunting as a historical phenomenon cannot be defined in the economic aspect alone. In the Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Period, it was a multi-faceted symbiotic relationship combining both the daily life of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, the economic life of the state, and even foreign policy. It also partially shaped the image of the sovereign and legitimated his power. Hunted animals provided meat, bone material, furs, skins, and other products necessary for the needs of the ruler’s court. This article represents the latest research on the prices and value of the hunted animals and the products made from them in late fifteenth century and the second half of the sixteenth century in the environment of the ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The second part of the analysis reveals the variety and prices of different products made from the hunted animals and their use.

In this chapter the authors first of all give a sketch of the whole process of the Great Divergence and its transformation into the Great Convergence. This is followed by a detailed analysis of those factors that allowed the West to overtake the East in the Modern Period, as well as those factors that put in motion the process of the Great Divergence. This necessitates the consideration of certain aspects of the development of the East and the West from the mid-fifteenth century (and even earlier in some respects) till the late twentieth century. Among the most important provisions that the authors develop in this chapter is the idea that, starting with the early second millennium BC, one can distinguish the potential that later enabled Europe to overtake the East. However, for a long time Europe lagged far behind the East, and it managed to develop its potential advantages only in the Early Modern Period. The chapter analyzes in detail the reasons that enabled Europe to achieve this. Another important idea in this chapter is that the authors believe it is much more reasonable to consider the Industrial Revolution as a rather long-term process that started in the late fifteenth century and continued till the mid-nineteenth century. This process went through several phases, and, in our understanding, the period between the last third of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth century (this period is traditionally denoted as the period of the “Industrial Revolution”) was only the final phase of the Industrial Revolution, at which an irreversible transition to machine technology and at the same time to a new kind of energy occurred. But it was the most prominent and visible phase of the industrial revolution. The authors do not consider the European nineteenth-century breakthrough as a really unexpected development, they rather view it as a fairly long process that continued from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, during which in some respects (e.g. military-technical and scientific) Europe was already ahead of the advanced countries of Asia, whereas in others (such as the level of craftsmanship) it still lagged behind. But in general, we denote this period as “catching up divergence”. All of the above said has allowed the authors to express their own opinion on the reasons for the Britain leadership in that period. Although Britain was clearly the leader at that point, but in that period one also observes a number of important processes that can be identified as pan-European (including the development of military technology, trade, science, pan-European commercial and industrial crises of the second half of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the demographic transition). From this perspective, the authors clearly trace in the Industrial Revolution the result of the collective achievements of different European societies.

Reviewed by: Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany Michelle Smith Spinks, Jennifer, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World, 5), London, Pickering and Chatto, 2009; hardback; pp. 224; 66 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. $US99.00, £60.00; ISBN 9781851966301. Tales of monstrous births were well known across Europe in the late medieval and early modern period. They were used symbolically by authors in a variety of media to 'represent and debate issues of morality, religion and politics' (p. 3). Curiously, there were more printed references in Germany than anywhere else, which suggests something other than a passing interest. Jennifer Spinks examines a number of illustrated printed publications, such as broadsheets, pamphlets and books, which appeared in sixteenth-century Germany. Beginning with instances of monstrous births in the late fifteenth century, she maps the development of such material across the Reformation, finally ending her discussion in the late sixteenth century. Central to her argument are the religious conflicts of the Reformation and early Counter-Reformation, and the role the resultant polemical propaganda played in promoting a visual culture grounded in natural and unnatural occurrences. In a world shaken to the core by religious disorder, monstrous births and other such phenomena were used didactically and apocalyptically: they were understood as messages from a God who was unhappy with the moral state of that world. Spinks begins by briefly outlining classical and early Christian ideas of monstrous births, before leading the reader to the sixteenth century where there is a 'rich array of visual and textual materials for understanding natural wonders and prodigies … [and which are] best encountered through illustrated print catalogues' (p. 8). This cultural history is laid out chronologically within a structure that analyses specific types of printed material – from crude woodcuts to sophisticated texts – together. The central focus is the positive and negative meanings which sixteenth-century people gave to monstrous births and how we, as modern historians, can access those meanings through a close analysis of this printed material. Spinks argues that her discussion 'places considerably more weight than any previous study on the positive interpretations given to monstrous births in the period immediately preceding the Reformation' (p. 10). Furthermore, she claims the evidence points to a marked increase in negative and apocalyptic interpretations which peaked mid-century. Different meanings were now being attached to monstrous [End Page 255] births in order to interpret emerging topics of concern. Travel narratives brought tales of monstrous races home to local audiences prior to the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 briefly discusses such travel literature, the visual effect it had on audiences, and the mentalities that developed with regard to those living on the outer edges of the world. Medieval imagery saw the idea of monstrous races and monstrous births as one body, as exemplified in John Mandeville's Travels. However, by the sixteenth century, monstrous births came to be seen as unique and unrelated to those marginalized races. Spinks analyses what she calls the 'culture of prodigies' (p. 23) that emerged during the reign of Maximilian I, and how the emperor used wondrous signs and monstrous births for political ends. The remainder of the chapter examines Sebastian Brant's broadsheets that brought the representation of monstrous births to a wider audience through an appealing combination of words and images, and paved the way for the outpouring of works seen during the sixteenth century. Chapter 2 places images of monstrous births firmly within the expanding visual culture of the early sixteenth century. Using the work of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Spinks outlines the varying methods and approaches used to construct images of monstrous births that resulted in more naturalistic dimensions to artists' illustrations. Chapter 3 examines the images of the Monk Calf and the Papal Ass in the polemic pamphlets of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon where they used the images as allegories of the Catholic Church. As Spinks argues, monstrous bodies 'became texts to be read and argumentatively decoded using highly visual language' (p. 11). Chapter 4 demonstrates that, by mid-century, there was an increase in the number of books that focused on...

So far, scholars have claimed that a territorial border line between East and West emerged in Northern Europe when the treaty of Nöteborg was concluded between Sweden and Novgorod in 1323. In fact, it was a medieval agreement which roughly defined economic rights between two not yet territorialized powers. The territorialization of the border and the existence of an East-West confrontation, however, belongs to a later epoch with the emergence of the modern Swedish and Russian empires in the Early Modern period. A real borderline was only drawn in the late fifteenth century, when the Grand Duchy of Moscow replaced the Novgorodian commercial republic as the eastern power in Northern Europe. A stark ideological component was added to the border discourse, when in the sixteenth century Moscow began to legitimize her power as an Orthodox empire, and Sweden as defender of western civilization.