Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (review)

Introduction: Wonders and Monsters in Early Modern Europe 1 From Monstrous Races to Monstrous Births: Sebastian Brant and the Intersection of Humanism, Print Culture and Monstrous Births around 1500 2 Visual Culture and Monstrous Births before the Reformation: Albrecht Durer, Hans Burgkmair and Conjoined Twins 3 Reformation Visual Culture and Monstrous Births: Luther's Monk Calf and Melanchthon's Papal Ass 4 Wonder Books and Protestants: Jakob Rueff, Konrad Lycosthenes and Job Fincel 5 Catholic Print Culture and Monstrous Births: Johann Nas and Anti-Lutheran Polemic 6 'Many Heads, Mouths and Tongues': Monstrous Births in the Later Sixteenth Century

“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel

Previous articleNext article FreeIn an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800Nir ShafirNir ShafirUniversity of California, San Diego Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is the story of a holy land in the Middle East—but not the one you might expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Damascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj—that is, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina—has been a well-established part of Muslim religiosity for centuries.1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the hajj's importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally undertook the journey.2 Yet the hajj's aura of timeless sanctity also hinders scholars from understanding its historicity. How did the hajj complement and compete with other forms of Muslim religiosity, such as saint worship/Sufism? Can we speak of an "Ottoman" hajj, and what significance did this pilgrimage carry for the many non-Muslim subjects of the empire? Approaching the hajj from the shrines of Damascus, no longer so holy today, rather than Mecca and Jerusalem's hallowed sites, allows us to scratch away a bit of the gilding of enduring holiness and find a history of choices and contingencies, controversies and contestations.3I argue in this article that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries an Ottoman holy land emerged that comprised the traditional sanctuaries of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, as well as the lands of greater Syria. Following the conquest of the Arab lands in the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty turned Damascus into both the center of an Ottoman imperial cult around the grave of the medieval theosophist Ibn ʿArabī and the empire's primary logistical hub for the hajj in response to the challenges of its religious and political competitors. As tens of thousands of Rūmī—that is, Turkish-speaking—pilgrims used the new infrastructure to stream into and through Damascus, the hajj also became an extended pilgrimage to visit the numerous tombs of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Non-Muslims too began to use the same infrastructure to partake in their own pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its environs, which they also referred to as the hajj. These overlapping claims to the hajj brought Rūmīs, Arabs, Christians, and others into competition and collaboration over the significance of the Ottoman holy land.As the logistical hub for the hajj, Damascus offers a view onto how religion was shaped by the forms of mobility available at the time, especially due to the development of material infrastructure. I take inspiration from recent scholarship, specifically that on the hajj, that has emphasized how new technologies of travel, such as steam and jet power, transformed Muslim religiosity by expanding its geographical horizons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 These works, with their focus on modern technologies, refrain from commenting on the premodern period, yet their insights can be applied to early modern forms of mobility. An unexpected complement to these studies is the recent book by James Grehan on everyday religion in greater Syria during the early modern period. He argues that an "agrarian religion" centered on saint worship flourished in rural parts of the Middle East among both Muslim and Christian communities. Although not explicitly framed as such, Grehan's argument is about mobility and materiality. According to Grehan, a shared religious practice of saint worship emerged from the timeless patterns of rural life and the inability of the "high" Islam of scholars and jurists to move into the countryside. Only the technological and infrastructural transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered the shocks needed to dismantle the material conditions underpinning saint worship, bring the high tradition of legalistic Islam to all areas, and make Muslim and Christian peasants realize that they belonged to distinct religious traditions.5 Grehan deserves credit for pushing scholars to pay attention to the difference between urban and rural religious life in the early modern Middle East. However, we should not assume, as Grehan does, that increased circulation inevitably homogenizes devotional practice and obliterates saint worship.6 As Nile Green has demonstrated, modern technologies like steamships and steam-powered printing presses actually fed a florescence of religious practices centered on saintly miracles.7 Moreover, I disagree with Grehan's presumption that premodern Ottoman society, even in rural areas, was static and immobile. People (and objects) traveled on camels, horses, and on foot rather than on steamships and trains, but the empire was always on the move, and these movements redefined its religious landscape. While the mode in which people traveled remained largely the same, there were particular circuits and forms of mobility unique to the Ottoman Empire; the road from Damascus was one of these.The second part of this article's argument is that the regime of circulation built on the road from Damascus gave rise to a specifically "Ottoman" lived religion in general and a shared culture of pilgrimage in particular. The hajj became a central component of the lived religion of many of the Ottoman Empire's inhabitants, Muslim and non-Muslim. Christian subjects of the empire, for example, came to refer to their pilgrimage to Jerusalem as the hajj, even integrating the honorific hajji—that is, someone who completed the hajj—into their names and titles. Asking how the hajj became "Ottoman," in turn, opens a number of related questions for the study of religion. How did the Ottoman hajj differ from earlier iterations, given that the ritual itself did not change? What is the role of the state in the creation of common religious practices? And how does the religious practice of one community—in this case, the Muslim practice of pilgrimage—come to be a shared aspect of the lived religion of a diverse and multiconfessional early modern empire?To speak of an "Ottoman" hajj also requires probing the analytical valence of the word "Ottoman." In its most restricted sense, the word applies only to the actions of the ruling dynasty, the eponymous house of Osman. In the early modern period, the word was used largely in this limited sense, both by the dynasty itself and its observers. Modern historians, however, employ a more expansive definition of "Ottoman," in which the word is a blanket term that applies to anything and everything that occurred within the empire's boundaries. Moreover, many implicitly extend this idea conceptually and assume that every subject within the empire's boundaries also possessed a shared "Ottoman" mentality or culture, which in turn drove their political and intellectual choices.8 The mechanisms for the dissemination of a common Ottoman culture or mentality are rarely articulated, however. Most often, historians point to the actions of the state as creating an Ottoman culture. For example, the sociologist Karen Barkey argues that the Ottoman state intentionally promoted a policy of religious tolerance, one that broke from earlier and supposedly narrower iterations of Islam.9 Even if we accept Barkey's assertions of a state policy of ecumenicalism, they do not necessarily help explain how cultural practices like the hajj came to be shared by all the empire's subjects at the community or individual level. Like many premodern empires, the Ottoman government did not attempt to homogenize its diverse population under a single imagined culture. While the state actively intervened in the daily religious practices of Muslims and the institutional structure of Islamic law, it never contemplated the creation of shared "Ottoman" religious practices among its subjects.10 How then did the hajj become "Ottoman"?To understand how the hajj became a practice that left its mark on nearly all Ottoman subjects, we have to rethink our understandings of empire. Historians today, especially those focusing on the Ottomans, have often understood empire to be a set of institutions that govern by replicating or projecting the rules and culture of the imperial center onto its provinces.11 In other words, empire is regarded as a synonym for the state. Other scholars highlight the inherent social diversity of empires, using empire largely as a foil to the linguistic, ethnic, or religious homogeneity of the nation-state.12 I treat empire differently in this article. I see empire as a specific assemblage or network of heterogenous human and nonhuman actors connected in myriad relationships.13 The specific elements of the network, and their arrangement, varied in time and place. Thus, the "Ottoman" hajj was different from the "Mamluk" hajj, for example, not because the ritual radically differed but because it brought together an alternate set of material and social elements: the movement of Rūmī Muslims to the Arab provinces, the kilns of Iznik and Kütahya that produced the empire's ceramics, and especially the lines of pilgrim infrastructure centered in Damascus, among others. The shared "Ottoman" culture of the hajj was not the intentional construction by the state but an unintentional by-product of the interaction of these elements, a network that could only have existed with the empire's expansion and sustained presence.14This article traces the network that brought about the creation of an Ottoman hajj and holy land. Damascus functions not as the site of a fine-grained local study but as a gateway that illuminates the various connections streaming through it. My argument brings together a constellation of actors, both human and nonhuman, that connect to form a larger picture. Moreover, since I focus on the transformation of what Nancy Ammerman has termed "lived religion," I draw the reader's attention to the creation of an Ottoman pilgrimage culture from everyday practices rather than in theological works.15 The article jumps from Egypt to Hungary and the many places in-between, but it begins with the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Damascus in 1516, which first provided the Ottoman dynasty the possibility of administering the hajj. The centrality of the hajj in Ottoman religious life was far from assured, however, in these initial years. I situate the dynasty's first operations in Damascus in a wide array of other forms of state-sponsored Muslim religiosity available to the dynasty, such as the creation of a set of imperially sponsored saintly tombs. I then turn to the Ottoman state's eventual commitment to the hajj and its massive investment in the physical and textual infrastructure of pilgrimage. The hajj became progressively important in the daily lives of Rūmī Muslims from the empire's heartland, and it even expanded to incorporate visitation to tombs and shrines. Christians too used the same infrastructure to turn their pilgrimage to Jerusalem into what they themselves referred to as the hajj. The last section examines how this network led to a shared Ottoman culture of the hajj and also to competing claims by Arabs, Rūmīs, and Christians as to who could define the Ottoman holy land.Holy Lands, Old and NewUpon his return to Damascus, fresh from the victories against the Mamluks in 1517, Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) set out immediately to thank a saint.16 The sultan seems to have attributed his victory to the omens and intercession of Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240)—an Andalusia-born Sufi theorist whom the Ottomans believed had prophesized the rise of the dynasty in a pseudepigraphic work, Al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya—and thus decided to build an imperial tomb at the site. Sultan Selim ordered that the residences, bathhouses, and an already standing mosque in the Ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood be bought from their owners and quickly demolished. Within three months, a congregational mosque had been erected around the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī.Even today, Ibn ʿArabī is a notorious figure. Thanks to his pantheistic theories of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd), he is regarded as either the greatest Sufi master or the master of the infidels.17 The residents of Damascus, however, knew little of Ibn ʿArabī before the Ottomans' entry. Despite the fact that it had been well known that he had died in the city, travelers who sought out his grave state that it was being used as a rubbish dump in the fourteenth century. In 1499, one apparently had to scale the wall of a bathhouse in order to access the neglected graveyard housing Ibn ʿArabī's unvisited tomb.18 Other observers, such as Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546), the future imam of the mosque built at Ibn ʿArabī's tomb, tell us that the site was already the tomb of a certain Ibn al-Zakī.19While they knew little of Ibn ʿArabī, the residents were at the center of their own holy land, populated by the graves of local saints and holy men, many of them being ṣaḥāba, the companions of the Prophet. This Syrian holy land had been built up over centuries; the oldest surviving collection of the faḍā'il (virtues) of the area comes from the mid-eleventh century and reflects the traditions and stories that had been collected up to that moment about Syria's sacrality.20 The arrival of the Crusaders—who built at least four hundred chapels and churches in the Levant over the course of their two-hundred-year presence—prompted the resacralization of greater Syria.21 As the Ayyubids (under Salāh al-Dīn, r. 1174–93) and the Mamluks (under Baybars, r. 1260–77) reclaimed this land, they quickly began a campaign of creating a new Muslim holy land in southern Syria. Rulers, military men, and common townsfolk took part in rediscovering, often in an inspired dream, the locations of the tombs of early Islamic figures and heroes from the wars against the Crusaders and then contributing to their construction and upkeep. Older, smaller pilgrimage sites, such as the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, were greatly expanded, and non-Muslims were banned from entering them. Churches and monasteries were converted into Sufi lodges; revenues from villages that previously supported monasteries and churches were seized and reendowed to support the new shrines.22 Whereas earlier holy sites had predominantly stressed biblical events and urban locales, this new wave of shrine building saw the establishment of the graves of a wide variety of early Islamic figures, learned scholars, and military heroes throughout both the urban and rural landscape. Geographies and pilgrimage guides (pilgrimage to shrines, that is) of the period, like those of al-Idrīsī (d. 1165) and al-Harawī (d. 1215), included these shrines and sites. While the Crusader incursion might have spurred the renewed sacralization of the lands of Syria, the spread and establishment of shrines by themselves was part of the growing shift in the middle to late medieval period toward an Islam centered on saints and holy men—that is, Sufism.23The Ottoman government's warmhearted embrace of Ibn ʿArabī and its intervention in the sacred landscape of Damascus were not acts intended for the locals but rather for its competitors in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Iran. In the post-Mongol Turco-Iranian world, especially on the frontiers of Anatolia and the Balkans, there was a constant potential for holy men and saints' descendants to raise the flag of rebellion in their fortress-like lodges and become contenders for political power.24 Only a few years before his conquest of the Mamluk lands, Sultan Selim had quelled a serious rebellion in central and eastern Anatolia by the Kızılbaş followers of the Safavid Shah Ismail, a man who had used his holy ancestry to found a state in the late fifteenth century. Even cities like Cairo were not exempt from this particularly Turco-Iranian idiom of political sainthood. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ottoman conquest, a new holy man from Anatolia, Ibrāhīm al-Gulshanī (d. 1534), started gathering a following and consolidating power in Cairo.25 In these uncertain times, the Ottoman government took a distrustful stance against many Sufi orders and instead decided to turn Ibn ʿArabī into a "nondenominational grand master of spirituality from whose esoterism all Sufi orders could get inspired, and ideologized, in defense of the Sunni faith and its political patrons."26This type of experimentation was found in other early modern Islamicate empires throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) developed a sort of Sufi order in which he was the holy shaykh and his courtiers and subjects were disciples.27 Later, when the Mughals conquered the Deccan, they the shrines of the Muslim The built massive tomb in around their in creating a cult of the around the other Sufi The Ottomans too with this throughout the sixteenth century, for example, a tomb shrine for Sultan on the Arab observers, however, saw the Ottoman government's of Ibn ʿArabī's tomb as an attempt by Muslims from the to and even the hajj and the holy sanctuaries of Mecca and The residents of Damascus referred to the many Ottoman as In its most sense, Rūmī a and someone who and came from the lands of the central lands of the Ottoman between the in the and the in the have of the medieval from however, is actually a of his or from the lands of This early modern at with its in both the medieval and modern In the medieval period, the both the and in the and fourteenth centuries, it began to refer to Muslims in the This and was by the development of Ottoman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into an and of competing with a that the Rūmī from that of the more or In the nineteenth century, however, the it applied to subjects of the empire, which is its In local Arab residents of Damascus saw the as with only a of Islam and its to build a tomb over the grave of Ibn ʿArabī being the of their of the of the events by the Ibn a number of omens for the future of Ibn ʿArabī's new the the bought the and to the general and that the had The as they the a and the the the man who the sultan to build the mosque and tomb in the first Only a had also were at the foot of Ibn ʿArabī's grave as the their to it into a holy site. they erected a a traditional of over the tomb and more but only under the of being of what the people might and that no one find out about While the sultan to the and a for a Ibn ʿArabī, the people of Damascus of high due to the and the of in their an of the Safavid one when an of the and the was into the by his to its As the shrine they from a building that a had that these had been from the tomb of saint the of the an to the of Ibn Selim and the Rūmī the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī on the of The of is the central of the hajj, when the stream onto the of and for the this a hajj Ibn Ṭūlūn that the Ottomans were to the hajj with pilgrimage to the new tomb of Ibn ʿArabī, as they had the pilgrimage to the and to against the significance or the might have with their of was however, because the of the Rūmīs, was so that he could not the and the of even with a In other words, he the a were to the and were throughout the sites of the the of the and were given out in the by the As he the it for a moment that he had built the shrine of a of holy on the eastern of the it was an it was at the employ of the of it spread among the the and the men of state. it was that it was the of one of the bathhouses, which became with and when the they believed it to be holy only did the to the locals but also few of the and of the to the were that as residents decided to because of the high brought on by the Ottoman Ṭūlūn a the when he was the and of the mosque at Ibn ʿArabī's While he with the that what is for few of his came to visit in his new The of the land to visit the tomb when he came to the more traditional tombs at the He was left with the Rūmīs, who had it their to visit the tomb during their and like a certain who came with his to the tomb to to be by one should us that it was not a that the Ottoman government both and into the hajj and the the Islamic world, there were a wide variety of that and saintly power, and the same the construction of Ibn ʿArabī's a cult centered on Ibn ʿArabī was not so Ibn take on Ibn ʿArabī's tomb the that the religious of the Ottomans immediately following the Other Arab scholars of the period a of the religious and the cult of Ibn the tomb and the cult among Rūmī scholars in as Rūmī scholars a of Ibn ʿArabī, for the saint needed to be among all the scholars in the imperial Although the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained a for Rūmī Damascus and the Arab lands become the center of a different holy Ottoman Ottoman government for a different of a state that did not on the creation of imperially tombs of holy men and The tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained but the dynasty instead to become a of and a of Islam centered on following Islamic the course of the sixteenth century, it and in congregational in every and and that Muslims them as it to a particular of religiosity on practices such as and the The dynasty undertook these actions to itself from its imperial competitors like the and as had their own of shrines and but also with an toward the it had at greatest in a Sunni for the empire in its of the the of Mecca and that it had from the Even with these sites at their Ottoman in the hajj were a of for of the sixteenth For example, only toward the of the sixteenth century did the dynasty support for the tomb of Sultan in Hungary and order its shaykh to move to Mecca and focus his and on the grave of the to the the of Arab the government's shift toward the hajj was a In of over a hundred years the conquest of the Arab lands, the (d. a book in of The of the of the Ottomans were to other dynasty, or to set a number of and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known by their of of the or the of the house of The had their of Rūmī which them the site of an about the of imperial and in the Arab the Ottoman dynasty as a of both religious and a view to the the Ottoman and a century Whereas they had been as they were of especially to their massive investment in the religious sites of the hajj and the people who lived how they of thousands of on the of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Hebron, so so that they were never This was in to the on the military to the of the from The was by no an the from the seventeenth century that the and became and These imperial were by from the of the the which lands, and from both Muslims around the empire and of the dynasty The government also the around and Jerusalem, renewed of the area around the built and and all the in and hajj was a every which if not of thousands of through and massive infrastructure needed to be developed to bring to Mecca and Moreover, the pilgrimage had to be so that at the time in Mecca to the of the the left Damascus or there was not a to traveled on or horses, and a few were in However, the which included the many and that came traveled by The most was the between Damascus and Medina, the pilgrim were to the Syrian had been used during the Mamluk period, it no or infrastructure to to other than the few Thus, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty began a of in the Syrian hajj The first was a

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: Demons and Histories 1. Reuchlin's De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century 2. Reuchlin and Erasmus: Humanism and Occult Philosophy 3. Agrippa of Nettesheim and his Appeal to the Cologne Council in 1533: The Politics of Knowledge in Early Sixteenth-Century Germany 4. Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany 5. The Reformation Jubilee of 1617: Appropriating the Past in European Centenary Celebrations 6. Fears of Flying: Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality in Sixteenth-Century Germany 7. She-man: Visual Representations of Witchcraft and Sexuality 8. Durer's Witch, Riding Women and Moral Order 9. The Wild Cavalcade in Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Paintings: Witchcraft and Sexual Disorder in Sixteenth-Century Germany 10. Body Parts, Saturn and Cannibalism: Visual Representations of Witches' Assemblies in the Sixteenth Century 11. Fashioning New Worlds from Old Fathers: Reflections on Saturn, Amerindians and Witches in a Sixteenth-Century Print 12. Cannibalism and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Reading the Visual Images 13. Appropriating Folklore in Sixteenth-Century Witchcraft Literature: The Nebelkappe of Paulus Frisius 14. Writing the Visual into History: Changing Cultural Perceptions of Late Medieval and Reformation Germany 15. Nuremberg: The City and its Culture in the Early Sixteenth Century Index of Names Index of Places Index of Subjects

“Monstrous births,” anomalous newborn bodies, or stillbirths, have produced public and scientific reactions of fear and excited voyeuristic interest from the early modern period to the present in Europe and North America. During this time, the category of “monstrous births” expanded even if the term itself was replaced over time with “defectives,” “congenital malformations,” “birth defects,” and “disabilities.” Particular attention is given here to medicine, mothers of “monstrous births,” twentieth-century moments that brought birth defects to international attention (German measles and thalidomide), and gender. In addition, attention is given to the perspective of contemporary people whose sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors (conjoined twins) were considered “monstrous births” and whose bodies are still preserved in museums.

“Monstrous births,” anomalous newborn bodies, or stillbirths, have produced public and scientific reactions of fear and excited voyeuristic interest from the early modern period to the present in Europe and North America. During this time, the category of “monstrous births” expanded even if the term itself was replaced over time with “defectives,” “congenital malformations,” “birth defects,” and “disabilities.” Particular attention is given here to medicine, mothers of “monstrous births,” twentieth-century moments that brought birth defects to international attention (German measles and thalidomide), and gender. In addition, attention is given to the perspective of contemporary people whose sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors (conjoined twins) were considered “monstrous births” and whose bodies are still preserved in museums.

g d e g e n h a r d t , University of Massachusetts Amherst Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails.-The Tempest, Epilogue, 11-12 1 a fter wielding the power to command storm and shipwreck throughoutThe Tempest, Prospero speaks an Epilogue in which he acknowledges how his manipulation of the sea has always been subject to the indulgence of the audience.In comparing the audience's compliance to favorable sea winds, Prospero's speech plays upon a familiar association between theatrical performance and seafaring in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.The Prologue to Thomas Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's (1611) wonders "How is't possible to please / Opinion tos'd in such wilde Seas?" given the sheer numbers of people who attend the theater and the diversity of their tastes. 2As Douglas Bruster has argued, The Tempest's opening shipwreck can itself be read as an allegory for playhouse labor, since theatrical productions, like seafaring, required hard work and cooperation. 3Unwilling audiences interfered with this labor by disrupting the performance or its representational fictions, rather than helping to keep the ship afloat.Theater and seafaring also shared a precarious status as risky enterprises undergoing new forms of commercialization in early modern England.For early modern playwrights, the risks, dangers, and

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine sixteenth century Netherlands business organisation and accounting practices, then the most advanced in Western Europe, to test Sombart's theory that scientific double entry bookkeeping was an essential prerequisite for the development of modern capitalism and the emergence of the public corporation during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than being a development of Paciolian bookkeeping, double‐entry bookkeeping in sixteenth century Netherlands was grounded in northern German (Hanseatic) business practices.Design/methodology/approachSixteenth century Dutch business records and Dutch and German bookkeeping texts are used to establish that north German Hanseatic commercial practices exercised the greatest influence on The Netherlands' bookkeeping practices immediately prior to the development of the capitalistic commercial enterprise in the first years of the seventeenth century.FindingsContrary to Sombart's thesis, scientific double‐entry bookkeeping was rarely used in sixteenth century Netherlands, which became Europe's most sophisticated commercial region during the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. Instead, extant commercial archives and the numerous sixteenth century accounting texts suggest that Hanseatic business practices and agents' (factors') bookkeeping were the dominant influence on northern Netherlands' business practices at this time. The organisation and administrative practices of Netherlands' businesses prior to the seventeenth century, especially their decentralised structure and lack of a common capital, were founded on Hanseatic practices that were considerably different to the best Italian practice of the time.Research limitations/implicationsNorth German influences on Dutch accounting and business practices have significant implications for social theories of the development of capitalism, notably that of Bryer, that assume the use of a scientific (capitalistic) form of double‐entry bookkeeping was essential to the development of capitalism from the seventeenth century. This is tested in a subsequent paper which examines the accounting practices of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie or VOC) which was founded in 1602 at the very cusp of modern capitalism. The research presented here was partially constrained by the scarcity of transcriptions of original sixteenth century bookkeeping records.Originality/valueThe vigorous debate in the accounting history literature about the dependence of modern capitalism upon a scientific (capitalistic) form of double entry bookkeeping prompted by Sombart has been mainly concerned with England. This paper introduces into the debate material which documents the accounting and business practices of the most commercially advanced region of Europe in the late sixteenth century and the influence of Dutch bookkeeping texts.

It probably was a delightful summer day when the celebrated humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, best known as a friend of Albrecht Durer and Erasmus of Rotterdam, strolled, with an unknown friend, through the streets of Nuremberg. When they saw a girl standing at the streetside, it occurred to the friend to predict the girl's future by reading her palm. So he did, foretelling a forthcoming marriage and a blissful life. After the girl had passed on, Pirckheimer's unknown friend admitted that, unfortunately, he had not seen the girl's blithe life but her impending death. In order not to scare her, however, he had not revealed this message to the girl; only his learned friend Pirckheimer could know the truth. Some years later, the Nuremberg philologist Joachim Camerarius, who narrated this rather trivial event with great excitement in 1576, does not display any sign of bewilderment that in this instance a chiromantic had told untruths to somebody.1 On the contrary, he praises this art and admires Italy's scholars, who practiced, besides chiromancy, other wonderful divinatory arts based on astrology. Camerarius was perceptibly impressed by Italian astrology and her divinatory stepsisters. Presumably he was thinking about De subtilitate (1554) by Girolamo Cardano who, at least in this work, counted astrology and chiromancy among the arts of natural divination.2 And so, as if inspired by Cardano's acute judgment years afterward, Camerarius read in Cardano, in the same breath, the idea that there had been only twelve significant scholars in the history of civilization, who were capable of divination: such were, among others, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Alchindi, and Vitruvius. However, no contemporary of Cardano was among them.This anecdote provides but a glimpse of the sixteenth-century enthusiasm for the divinatory art of chiromancy and, relatedly, astrology. My contribution will show that academic Protestant Germany was actually in the grips of an astrology fever. Throughout the sixteenth century, many German scholars were under the spell of astrology. In this, Germany did not essentially differ from Italy and France, but in one specific place astrology presented itself in a peculiar shape.In the sixteenth century astrology flourished particularly in one German site of erudition: in Wittenberg, 51°52' latitude, 12°38 longitude. Particularly here at the University of Wittenberg, attracted by Philipp Melanchthon's pedagogic enterprise, a series of scholars came together who shaped the image of astrology in sixteenth-century Germany. They were humanists, physicians, astronomers, mathematicians, municipal surgeons, and scholars of Greek. There were at least forty-six of them. In one way or another, each of them was interested in astrology. Many of them composed astrological analyses for wealthy clients. Pene innumberabiles mathematicians came from the University of Wittenberg, as the Tubingen professor of rhetorics Nikodemus Frischlin grudgingly asserted. By this he meant astrologers, and he did not try to conceal his aversion to them.3 He was unequivocal: astrologers are swindlers.With this opinion, Frischlin joined the ranks of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,4 Martin Luther,5 Erasmus of Rotterdam,6 and others. This is not a novelty, and yet Frischlin's caustic remark can still teach us something today: regarding the history of German astrology, one should resist the temptation to see Melanchthon as the one and only spiritus rector of German sixteenth-century astrology. Instead, it is reasonable to concede much more weight to the sway of Wittenberg and its numerous astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians, who did not only gravitate toward the personality of Melanchthon. The large number of scholars and the variety of ideas preempts any attempt to reduce the number of astrologers to a so-called Melanchthon circle.7 This circle did not exist, not least because his pupils did not monistically adhere to Melanchthon's thoughts on astrology. …

The discussion on the legal power of documents generated by the researchers exploring the written culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invites for a more detailed analysis of the usage of a written document in the legal process, the chronology of its legal regulation, the document’s place in the system of evidence as well as its meaning in the legal consciousness of the nobles. The legal proceedings and rulings recorded in the judicial affairs books incorporated into the Lithuanian Metrica reveal the process when, with the development of the written culture and the increase of the demand for documents in the state’s internal affairs, the written document evolved into an independent and sound legal evidence in the judicial process. In the civil cases, primarily concerning the land ownership, the legal power of a written document was recognized already in the middle of the fifteenth century (although there was no peremptory requirement to present written documents in the judicial process), and approved by the extended edition of the First Statute of Lithuania. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the long-lived “colorful robes of justice” (the oath, the gesture, the placing of one’s cap) were replaced in the system of legal evidence by written documents which, from then on, were considered as more reliable evidence than a personal oath, and, in some cases, even a testimony. Eventually, this view found its place in the consciousness of the nobles who documented their transactions and used documents to solve legal conflicts. Moreover, in Lithuania, unlike in the Kingdom of Poland, the judges considered not only the public, but also the legitimate private documents as legal evidence of equal importance. Although, the hierarchy of legal evidence, that prioritized the documents was embedded only in the Second Statute of Lithuania (chapter IV article 52, entitled “On evidence and defense” (O dovodech i otvodech), the analysis of sources allows to decisively affirm that the main source of the aforementioned article was the practice of the courts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

<i>Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany</i>, by Jennifer Spinks.

Jennifer S. Spinks. Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World. London: Pickering &amp; Chatto Publishers, 2009. xii + 207 pp. index. illus. bibl. $99. ISBN: 978–1–85196–630–1. - Volume 63 Issue 1

The shifting historical category of “monstrous birth” usually referred to the birth of infants with conditions described in later time periods as birth defects, defects of development, congenital anomalies, and/or congenital disabilities. While today it is widely acknowledged that classifying a person as a “monstrosity” is stigmatizing and degrading, the term was routinely used in this way for centuries. In Antiquity, Aristotle defined a monster as an offspring strayed so far from the parental type as to no longer be recognizable as a human being. Monstrous births garnered both elite and popular attention across the medieval and early modern periods. The advent of scientific teratology, defined in the early nineteenth century as the modern scientific study of monstrosity, characterized monstrous births as the product of irregularities in embryological development. The tenets of scientific teratology circulated transnationally, including among medical practitioners in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and China. While traditional accounts of this history assert that new scientific understandings of birth anomaly resulted in the disappearance of the term monstrous births, the words monster/monstrosity did not fully recede from formal medical usage until the mid-twentieth century. The scholarship on the history of monstrous birth can be divided into several major (and sometimes overlapping) approaches. A growing subset of the scholarship situates the topic of monstrous birth within a broader literature on the history of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbearing. This work examines the stories and experiences of women who birthed “monstrous” infants, and analyzes the meanings attached to their childbearing within larger social, political, and gendered contexts. A closely related literature considers the history of medical and obstetric practice surrounding monstrous birth in a variety of national settings. Another major subset of the scholarship examines theories and representations of monstrous birth in scientific, popular, religious, and political culture. While much of the existing literature in this area centers on early modern Europe, some scholars focus on cultural representations of monsters in regions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. A prominent segment of this literature examines how Europeans mobilized theories and representations of monstrosity to justify slavery, colonialism, and imaginaries of racial hierarchy in the Atlantic World. A final major subset of the scholarship, closely associated with disability studies and disability history, focuses on the lives of individuals historically labelled as “freaks” and “monstrosities.” While many conditions that fell under the historical rubric of “monstrous birth” were not compatible with life past early infancy, some individuals identified as “monstrosities” at birth did live into childhood and adulthood. Much of this literature foregrounds the experiences of performers in Victorian-era “freak show” exhibitions and other popular commercial practices of spectacle and display, as well as these individuals’ often exploitative or degrading treatment by an expanding medical profession.

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the