Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

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

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

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

Ontwerpen en bouwen in de Hollandse stad

Catholic Christianity and its imagery broke in on Mesoamerica suddenly in the 1520s and has been a pivot point of living and dying there ever since. But there is no simple story of an early formative stage and late decline in the history of Christian image shrines in New Spain. They began in the sixteenth century, haltingly; and with many shrines eventually scattered over a vast, broken terrain, local histories of Christian practice were bound to depart from models and prescriptions in Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, or less remote capitals and style centers. The weight of the European past and present in the development of Christianity and religious practices in New Spain was great, and diffusion from Catholic Europe lends some coherence to the history of image shrines, whether following European trends or working against them. But Europe, too, is a moving target, neither uniform nor fixed and finished in its religious culture. What, then, can be said with some confidence about the impact of European beliefs and practices on the development of those shrines? What changed where and when?

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.

During the last five thousand years, the original natural landscapes in the Netherlands have gradually been influenced and changed by agrarian ecosystems. At the present time we are at a stage in which the remains of these old ecosystems have become scarce. In the peripheral regions too, urbanisation has become so dominant that the last remnants of these premodern and site-specific ecosystems are about to disappear. Knowledge about how historical ecosystems work is important not only in an academic sense but also for integrated nature conservation with a sense of responsibility for the preservation of a diverse historical cultural landscape. Insight into the symbiotic relationship of local societies with the productive environments of their landscapes, as well as knowledge about small-scale adaptation to the potential of local ecosystems, are important for the sustainable quality of our lives.In the light of its genetic and spatial approach, historical geography is the appropriate discipline to provide insight into the development of site-specific, anthropogenic ecosystems. This historical geographical study aims to provide insight into the operation and development of agrarian ecosystems in different landscape environments. This process is described and charted for two regions in the Southwest of the present-day province of Drenthe for the period 1600-1850 on the basis of written sources and of the archive constituted by the landscape itself.In order to gain insight into the functional interaction between farming and the area of production, it is necessary to switch to the level of the village territory or marke , the smallest unit of administration and jurisdiction, which is also the administrative starting-point for research into the historical sources. A chorological and chronological approach has been adopted in order to gain insight at the local level into the interaction between a human group (culture) and its immediate surroundings (natural substratum).Besides the focus on the village territory, this study is also marked by an emphasis on the agrarian form of life. This gave form and content to the interaction between culture and nature. The 'style of farming' forms an integratory core concept in this field of tension. The concept is understood in this study as a derivation from the more general concept of 'form of farming'. Style of farming derives its specific significance from the ecological setting of a village territory and should be considered as a translation of a form of farming at the local level. The link between style of farming and local ecosystem is a thread running through the present study.This study comprises a collection of independent investigations of the cultivation of the edge of the peat moor in Koekange and the stream valley landscape of the Reest. Although there are hardly any differences in respect of the object and method of investigation, the two studies are not identical. In the case of Koekange, the choice of an object of study fell on a village territory that coincided with a parish. In this case the productive environment of the agrarian community thus coincided with an administrative unit. Thanks to the greater availability of serial sources, this coincidence enabled us to emphasise aspects concerning farm economics and demography. In this sense, Koekange can be characterised as a cultural ecological study in which the central question is how a local community has exploited its landscape area and how this environment has influenced the agrarian way of life.The emphasis in the Reest investigation is primarily on the consequences of the historical forms of exploitation on the soil in the context of a landscape consisting of a stream valley system. In the case of Zuidwolde, it was possible to link up with a field research into soil ecology.KoekangeTypologically, Koekange can be regarded as a case of peat moor border cultivation. This type of settlement is found in the Dutch-German lowland plain in the coastal areas and in the Pleistocene situated further inland. The latter category emerged in the Late Middle Ages and was cultivated in the original border territory between the stream valley and the peat moor. In Drenthe there are seventeen such roadside villages with plots on an incline that can be characterised as peat moor border cultivation.The present-day roadside village of Koekange is situated on the extreme south-western tip of the Drenthe Plateau. The cultivated area of Koekange coincided with the stream valley of the Koekanger Aa (Olde Aa) and the 'Echtener fene' at cut its course along the boulder clay ridge as far as the marken of Echten and Ruinen. The moorland has now virtually disappeared as the result of centuries of primarily agrarian exploitation. During the colonisation in 1275 the orientation of the first cultivators was on the valley of the Koekanger Aa and they used the upward slopes ( opgaanden ) from the stream to the peat moor as an axis of cultivation.In 1832 Koekange comprised forty-four plots on these upward slopes, varying in width from 60 to 120 metres and with a maximal length of 6 kilometres. When the church was founded in 1331, the village consisted of twenty Oldehoven from the first stage of colonisation and an unknown number of Nijehoven. The last phase of cultivation, in the early sixteenth century, ended with the establishment of the southernmost cluster of the village, the Lage Linthorst.The study of Koekange made it possible to demonstrate a clear connection between the specific content of the style of farming and the local ecosystem. Ever since the colonisation in the Late Middle Ages, this system was caught up in a constant process of change through human intervention. Vice versa, hydrographic changes and modifications in the soil ecology necessitated continual alterations in styles of farming.The decapitation of the Oude Aa by the construction of the medieval watercourse to Meppel had far-reaching consequences in the long run. The fact that the dynamic stream system with flooding and silt deposits no longer functioned eventually turned out to be disastrous for the greenland in the cultivated area. The middling bio-production in this rudimentary stream valley already obliged the people of Koekange to look for alternative meadows in the sixteenth century. To some extent these were found by buying up land alongside the Oude Aa to the south of Koekange. This made it possible to extend the area of production outside the actual area under cultivation.The quality of the marshlands deteriorated too. The regular cutting of peat and alternation with oats accelerated the depletion of the peat bog. In the plots outside the dyke this 'de-peating' eventually resulted in wet podzol soil with bare heath overgrowth that could only be used for extensive grazing by sheep and calves. In the plots inside the dyke the alternation with oats provided an alternative for the mediocre grass supply for a much longer period. All the same, this form of greenland improvement was still unable to prevent some lots from becoming bare heath pastures. Coppice wood cultivation offered an economic alternative for the low level of productivity of the enclosed fields. Nevertheless, this form of exploitation did not really contribute to an efficient utilisation of the nutritional cycle.The southern greenland outside the plots depreciated from the seventeenth century on as well. This was primarily due to inadequate drainage via the Hoogeveensche Vaart at times of increased flow. The limited availability of high quality catchment areas and common pastures forced the people of Koekange to keep cows. Within their limited conditions, this offered the best guarantee of rapid reproduction. Besides, the attempt to secure double production (dairy cattle and meat cattle) had the advantage of flexibility in unforeseen circumstances.Furthermore, sheep farming ensured a level of stability in the production of manure, in response to the availability of marsh heath and bare heath greenland.The ongoing deterioration of the greenland destabilised the fodder situation of the cattle. Winter feeding in particular came under pressure from unpredictable hay harvests. Although alternation with oats made it possible to spread the risk, in the long run this alternative did not provide a solid enough basis to keep up the cattle stock. Reduction of herd size, however, meant an attack on the fertility of the peat fields. Since there was no more room on the village territory for additional meadows, farmers had to seek compensatory greenland outside the village. In the course of the eighteenth century this led to a large-scale practice of renting hayfields in neighbouring villages and neighbourhoods. In addition, the people of Koekange used to pasture their herds in meadows in Overijssel during the summer months.Another negative development of the local ecosystem was a gradual drop in the surface level of the regular arable fields and increasing flooding from the fields behind them. Both phenomena were connected with the deterioration of the peat soil by drainage and soil cultivation or by peat cutting. A side-effect that also had considerable importance was the problem of the low level of porosity of the cultivated peat soil. This was due to the intrusion of amorphous humus, leading to the formation of black humus strata below the old peat layers on the sandy subsoil.The reaction to the flooding was in the first instance defensive. The oldest peat fields were abandoned as permanent land for cultivation and were only used as sheep pastures or as extensive arable land or hay fields, while other plots were reserved for forestry. The loss was made good by the construction of new peat fields in the land behind the cultivated plots. In the course of the eighteenth century the disused land was brought under cultivation again with a loamy sand substratum.Other measures were also called for to reduce the risk of a bad harvest on the wet peat fields. Buckwheat as a summer crop provided an alternative to avoid the risks of a wet winter. Moreover, this crop did not require such heavy manuring and its inclusion in the rotation of crops helped to combat weeds.At the end of the eighteenth century the stagnant marshy water in the area behind the peat fields became a problem. The constant reduction of the surface level had made the plots vulnerable to the peat water that ran off to the Koekanger Aa. The medieval structure of border drainage ditches was no longer sufficient to get rid of the acidic water without damage, so that a new system of ditches was required in the parts of the village that were most seriously threatened.Despite all these problems, grain cultivation in the interdependent system of the mixed farm was the only alternative for an efficient utilisation of the nutritional cycle. A significant proportion of the mineral surplus found its way to the peat fields. A large part of the farmlands were thus 'creamed off' to the benefit of a regular rye cultivation, which alternated with buckwheat in the eighteenth century. The deep litter house system played a crucial role in this creaming - off -economy. The peripheral situation of the southern peat bog meant that it could hardly play a part in the deep litter house system, while there was little or no room on the cultivated plots for more intensive grazing.The territory of the village of Koekange offered the farmers little room for intensification. With the switch to dairy farming at the end of the eighteenth century, they were forced to resort to the catchment hayfields alongside the Reest and the Meppelerdiep. Only after the construction of the Koekangerwijk in 1848, which meant an 'unlimited' supply of urban compost, was it possible for a more intensive cultivation to get underway within the boundaries of the village territory. This was concentrated on to bring the plots outside the dyke back under cultivation for the emergent dairy farming. This socio-ecological study of Koekange has demonstrated that the ecological setting of the village territory cannot be understood as a closed system that determined the content of the style of farming. The relatively favourable location close to the Hoogeveensche Vaart and the available catchment greenland offered a solution to the limited use that could be made of the actual village territory. The import of urban compost, long drives to remote summer pastures and the utilisation of hay fields outside the territory already constituted an alternative to the restrictions of the local ecosystem before 1800. This early and broad outward-looking orientation developed to become a typical characteristic of the style of farming in Koekange.Koekange is a good example of peat moor border cultivation where the ecological structure of the village territory was influenced by the historical system of farming. When colonisation started in the Late Middle Ages, the landscape was determined by two ecotopes. Most of it consisted of a continuous peat moor complex changing to peat bog at the stream. The differences in gradient between the valley of the Olde Aa (including the Koekanger Aa) and the Pleistocene border area were very gradual. As a result of the poor drainage of the border areas, an oligotrophic peat surface developed here that rose above the Pleistocene border zone to the village territory of Echten. In the stream valley a broad zone of marshy woods developed, interrupted near the actual bed of the stream by fluviatile sedge. When the land was issued in 1275, it was referred to as the 'Echtijger vene ofte bruyck' [Echten fen or brook]. This name, the oldest designation of the area, further emphasises the original preponderance of the ecotopes mentioned above. The first colonists settled on the border between peat moor and peat bog. This border zone provided the most favourable position for draining and for the establishment of a mixed farm. The peat moor was drained and prepared for moorland cultivation, while the woods in the valley of the peat bog were cleared and turned into meadowland and hayfields.Already by the seventeenth century the homogeneous peat landscape had been transformed into a varied cultivated landscape with a number of different forms of exploitation. This differentiated landscape continued down to the middle of the nineteenth century. The construction of the Koekangerwijk marked a turning-point in the landscape and ecology when the import of urban compost came within reach of every farm and a start could be made on bringing the impoverished enclosed fields back under cultivation.The 1:25,000 grid map of the topographical military map of around 1850 shows the exciting results of centuries of interaction between culture and nature. A highly varied landscape emerges with elongated lots with a great diversity of ecotopes and gradients in the plots of land extending for kilometres, apportioning the village territory into a cake with more than fifty slices. From East to West you passed through marshy heath and shifting sands, alternating with de-peated pools, that were sheltered from the marshy ryefields by coppice woods of alder and birch. Between the peat fields and the farmyards were extensive sheep pastures and hayfields. The farmyards with their vegetable gardens, milk wagons and orchards lay beneath a green umbrella of hundreds of tall oaks. In front of the farms were the enclosed fields in a mosaic of walled greenland, plots of coppice wood and oat fields, interspersed with grassland that had turned into bare heath. The area outside the dyke consisted of heath and bare greenland, with scattered de-peated pingo remains. So the original 'Egtinger broeck en vene' had become a highly variegated mosaic landscape with numerous transitions from small-scale use ecotopes separated by many hundreds of kilometres of border ditches and alder hedges.The Reest Valley landscapeThe second research area comprises the northern part of the valley landscape of the Reest in Drenthe. The Reest is the traditional border between the provinces of Drenthe and Overijssel. It is probably due to this function that its course has hardly changed over time. The Reest is one of the few small rivers in the Netherlands that is still more or less in its original state. The stream valley system has attracted renewed attention in recent years because of its designation as a nature reserve, part of the so-called Ecological Main Structure. The morene dam complex in Zuidwolde and Lutten and the Reest valley system on the southern side determines the main contours of the landscape in the Reest area. These structures were embedded in the extensive peat moor that was created in the Late Holocene in the sandy surface of the Oer Vecht that the winds had deposited.The morene dam complex consisted of a series of North/South ridges. Only the higher ridges in Zuidwolde and Lutten were suitable for settlement. The other ridges had become so flat during the second phase of the expansion of the land ice that they were covered with migrating peat moor during the last phase of the formation of the moorland. During its relatively brief history the Reest has developed to become a typical lowland stream with little drop and a very meandering course. Because of the pattern of emergent sandy mounds that follow its course, the valley is very narrow and in some in the middle of its course. the acidic marsh water gradually changed to a that was much in and valley of the Reest more or less the The of the stream was characterised by grass peat bog under oligotrophic from peat and small of the middle with of and of marsh and the was characterised by peat fields with and peat bog. the valley and the higher morene peat moorland was not the and The parts the development of a peat zone consisting of peat bog and peat The peat moor spread from these over the higher parts of the landscape. In the area between the of the Reest and the Aa of a peat bog developed on the loamy soil of the valley In this way the Reest and its sand deposits were gradually enclosed by an extensive of peat and a result of the of a little is about the of the research area in the time it is that the area became in the as the result of the formation of the peat and that colonisation did not the Middle administrative the part of the Reest valley in Drenthe consisted of the of Zuidwolde, and The part of the below Meppel has not been in the of in Zuidwolde in was low by the of Drenthe. The was concentrated in in the middle of their village on the low dam morene that rose metres above the flat peat moor an The on the of the Reest was to a few mounds of sand The position in the of Zuidwolde determined the of settlement and the of arable land down to the nineteenth century. In 1832 of the of land in the and the local consisted of heath and of soil. from a few scattered farms on the only the was suitable for and cultivation.In the of was from this in the also from Zuidwolde in of the ecological had peat moorland of with mounds of sand while the large of sand deposits on the of the Reest provided more for settlement and cultivation. These constituted the of for the core farms in the Late Middle Ages, where they developed to become or of The result was a series of five or running from East to the from the Reest to the into five areas of marke land on an upward Zuidwolde, the oldest farms in were situated along the valley their Moreover, they were situated in a more and position in the and the more marshy land offered for cultivation than the oligotrophic peat moorland in In the first of the seventeenth century consisted of running from East to differences in the agrarian styles of farming in the two were for these differences be primarily in the local ecosystems. In the last resort these the room for of the agrarian productive unit that can be regarded as an interdependent system of forms of agrarian exploitation. The for this research was the valley system of the Reest. A considerable part of Zuidwolde and all of were on the ecological of this valley under the historical of the mixed farm. were differences in the structure and of the landscape between the two the situation of Zuidwolde was that of a valley at the of the stream. only was the valley narrow but the of cultivation were also by the oligotrophic of the Reest and the valley These were much more favourable in so that the valley was to much more of a crucial function in the mixed second could be in the structure of the deposits of sand and the boulder clay The for settlement in Zuidwolde were in the of the stream by the of sand ridges that the of the were in the dam morene on the northern side that rose above the an of boulder This a peripheral position for the Reest valley in to its in the on the boulder clay situation in was the valley was by tall that on the northern side on the peat bog in the Pleistocene valley plain between the Oude Aa and the Reest. The orientation of the different ecotopes and the central position on the offered farms in favourable for integrated these in the environment had their on the pattern of and the spatial of the different marken or village Moreover, they were in the different styles of farming of the two In Zuidwolde there was a emphasis on a creaming - off - in which the extensive oligotrophic peat heath played a central The style of farming here had a while the of land by was as a typical form of In on the other the were much more favourable for the of an integrated style of farming with an efficient deep litter house this study we between the 'form of farming' and 'style of farming'. The two are used in the but our historical ecological approach to be made between them. A form of farming in this context can be as a number of of exploitation to the agrarian use of landscape ecotopes. This a of agrarian forms of use in to the different landscape ecotopes. In the seventeenth century such of exploitation were already on a and The of such forms of use in a style of farming was thus primarily determined by the of the local ecosystem. example of a of exploitation of this that was relatively integrated into local styles of farming in the early seventeenth century is the buckwheat As we in the case of Zuidwolde, the of this had important consequences for the quality and of the peat heath which in influenced the expansion of additional forms of exploitation such as grazing and peat of farming thus have a and that is to a specific cultural landscape complex such as the Drenthe with its border Style of farming is a question of how such of exploitation are in the limited of the local ecosystem in which a farm had to in the marke or village In there thus be considerable differences between the styles of farming of two neighbouring village the environments and from one in of and good example of a of this that had an on the style of farming is provided by the exploitation of the land outside the village of Zuidwolde and In the first this consisted of en vene' and peat while in the second it was In the exploitation of ecotopes was on and of the peat so that were for the crops in the oligotrophic peat soil of Zuidwolde this process was forced by cultivation so that peat buckwheat could be for a number of years in this the was so that it a few to before a new could be The peat moor was with sheep during the the peat bog of the and the process of in a much more the field grass system of the oat field culture offered an alternative to more intensive exploitation. The oat with a varying period of was here by a heavy use of urban This of cultivation, in which were to the of the was thus much In this sense the oat field cultivation can be regarded as a form between the peat culture and permanent crop cultivation on the basis of regular have already with the of on the style of farming and the way in which they were integrated into the other of the farm. It is important in this connection to that forms of exploitation eventually resulted in 'de-peating' and of the Pleistocene sand It be to the two with one in of a of and less Both forms of exploitation in and were a part of the exploitation complex of the Pleistocene sand landscape of the village territory of forms a between Zuidwolde and It is a area with a large number of different use ecotopes. the of all the landscape oligotrophic heath moor and peat a style of farming developed here virtually all of the of exploitation. the of was by creaming a buckwheat culture with sheep grazing and peat while the behind in the marshy was the oat Thanks to the favourable situation of a number of farms on the peat moor it was possible to peat moor cultivation on a limited to the system in the neighbouring peat moor border cultivation in Koekange. we is a of of exploitation that to the position of in the differences in ecological the research also that the geographical situation was important not only for the development of the style of farming but also for the and of the cultural landscape. the for farms in to in and out was of importance for the exploitation of and a rapid of the cultivation. The link by water with the economic of the gave the in an advantage over their in the peripheral village of in the the supply of urban compost offered the in an to out of their ecological This led before to the and cultivation of

When a King of Norway Became a King of Russia

BOOK REVIEWS 341 Though Wallace limits his discussion to the above-mentioned philological and historical matters (and in so doing he produces a first-rate work of scholarship), his book has more general significance. The evidence he provides is relevant to the problem of the connection between medieval thought and the rise of modern science; the problem of the process by which Galileo arrived at his later scientific discoveries and theories that made him famous; and the problem of the philosophical roots, content, and character of Galileo's work. Finally, I should note the rather curious fact that the logical structure of the content of these notebooks is very similar to the logical structure of the content of Galileo's mature work, the Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, as it has emerged from my own studies into the latter. MAURICEA. FINOCCHIARO University of Nevada, Las Vegas Maurice Crosland, ed. The Emergence of Science in Western Europe. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Pp. 201. $18.00. The chapters that make up this book were originally papers presented at the meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in the summer of 1974. Some of the chapters should be of interest to historians of philosophy for the information they provide concerning relations that existed between (anachronistically) science and philosophy. The chapters cover the period between the late sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century and deal with aspects of science, scientists, and institutions in specific countries. The first five pieces concern themselves with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the possible exception of Knight's chapter on German Romantics, "Naturphilosophie," these papers are likely to be of most interest to readers of this journal. Crosland begins the volume with a name-dropping introduction that attempts to discuss the question of doing history (of science, in particular) in geographical or nationalistic fashion. The papers following more often do a better job of providing a rationale for their method of approach. A. G. Keller's "Mathematicians, Mechanics and Experimental Machines in Northern ltaly in the Sixteenth Century" treats of the Renaissance artist-engineer tradition. He provides a readable account of some views of the relation betwen theory and practice that were then prevalent. Tanaglia, Guidabaldo dal Monte, and Savorgnan are discussed and interestingly quoted, but there is little analysis of the concepts these men employed. Still, the paper provides a survey of ideas with which historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuryphilosophy ought to be familiar. "Science in the Italian Universities in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," by C. B. Schmitt, is the start of an interesting and correcting picture of the role of universities during this seminal period. Schmitt deals, for the most part, with institutional and curricular matters, but these have implications for those who still write under the influence of Randall's work on methodology. It is a good survey of universitymovements and contains many suggestive hints that are not developed in this paper. The details concerning the lack of any significant role for theology in the universities, and concerning the debate over certainty in mathematics versus the syllogism are just two topics in Schmitt's paper that philosophers would find important. M. B. Hall's paper, "Science in the Early Royal Society," presents details and quotations from members dealing with method. The paper is marred by an extremely uncritical use of 342 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY rationalism and empiricism that leads to an unhelpful analysis of the methodological controversies in which the Society engaged. The quotations (e.g., from Wallis [p. 65] and Pardies [p. 66]) often show the confusion, complexity and sheer prejudice of these people rather than the simple-minded commitment to empiricism upon which Hall seems to insist. I found the analysis of the Hooke-Newton controversy in terms of rationalism versus empiricism quite unhelpful and failing to do justice to Newton's theological and Cartesian background (pp. 71-72). Nor has Hall progressed any in her understanding of Spinoza beyond the unsympathetic and misguided footnotes appearing in Volumes I and 2 of the edition of the Oldenburg Correspondence . Still, the piece contains information that philosophers dealing with seventeenth-century figures should be...

Gujarat was concentric to the early modern Indian Ocean world. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the fine tuning of long distance trading systems. In South East Asia, the Indo-Portuguese trade network flourished in the sixteenth century, followed by the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth. Equilibrium was established between European and Asian traders, both indispensable to the other. Profitable trade in pepper and spices in the eastern archipelago was based on cotton textiles from Gujarat. In the sixteenth century, Cambay stretched out two arms—towards Aden and Malacca. Commercial connections included ports like Acheh, Kedah, Tenasserim, Pegu, Pase, and Pidie. In the seventeenth century, Surat’s mercantile marine facilitated the consolidation of Gujarati trade. This chapter shows how Gujarati merchant diaspora was intrinsic to the intricate patterns of trade practices and traditions of the Indian Ocean.

In the age of the European witch hunts, Scandinavia consisted of two major political entities: the kingdom of Denmark, or Denmark – Norway as it is often known, with its dependencies Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands; and the kingdom of Sweden, or Sweden – Finland. Allegations of maleficium, however, were to dominate the sixteenth-century witch trials, often regarded as the precursor of the wave of Scandinavian persecution that peaked in the seventeenth century. The records of more than 400 Scandinavian witchcraft trials survive from the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth century, Scandinavian royalty continued to figure surprisingly large in the stories of witchcraft. The sources for the sixteenth century are so fragmentary, however, that they hardly permit a quantitative study of the nature and scope of the witch trials. Several of the necessary conditions for the persecution of witches were in place in the Middle Ages.

This chapter sheds some shafts of light onto the 'dark horses'. The horses of Africa are dark in the sense of being largely unknown, cast in the shade of global histories of the horse. In West and Central Africa, horses always had three sets of passengers: humans, tsetse fly and the trypanosomes they carried in turn. Whenever the date of their first arrival, horses came initially from across the Sahara, breaking through the tsetse barrier, penetrating as far as the disease-ridden marshes of the Sudan and throughout the safer savannahs of West Africa. Islam had penetrated Oyo society by the seventeenth century but ran up against a robust entrenched belief system, which had very different ideas about gender which interestingly for this chapter involved horses. Cavalry did play a significant role in state formation in the savannah during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although in idiosyncratic and heterogeneous ways. Keywords:Africa; cavalry kingdom; dark horses; Oyo society; Sahara; savannah; seventeenth century; sixteenth century

Previous articleNext article FreeDoctor Faustus and the Art of Dying BadlyMaggie VinterMaggie VinterCase Western Reserve University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFaustus:Lucifer and Mephastophilis! Ah, gentlemen, I gave them my soul for my cunning.All:God forbid!Faustus:God forbade it indeed, but Faustus hath done it.1What, exactly, has Faustus done? How has he come to act against the command of God? The moral and theological framework of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has proven notoriously hard to fix. Critics have plausibly interpreted the play through a variety of religious and philosophical lenses, from Calvinist predestinarianism to free-thinking iconoclasm.2 And turning to the text scarcely clarifies Faustus’s theological context and devotional milieu. Heaven is never represented on stage, and characters describing it tend to demonstrate the distorting effects of human perception more effectively than they invoke the divine. Faustus jostles against Catholics and Protestants, the godly and the godless, social superiors and inferiors, and angels and devils, all of whom offer different, and sometimes shifting, interpretations of the cosmos. These voices agree on almost nothing. Nothing, that is, except that Faustus’s bad actions will end in damnation.That Marlowe should emphasize the bald fact of Faustus’s badness over the religious context from which it emerges is all the more surprising because badness has traditionally been conceived in terms of privation or distortion. Augustine influentially defined evil as a departure from God.3 The Good is a unitary, positive attribute of divinity, which stands as both the source and the model for all goodness on earth. The Bad, as such, is nothing. Rather, different badnesses represent different, ever-multiplying perversions of the Good. This negative characterization of evil found new expression in the sixteenth century through the theology of Luther and Calvin, who offer broadly similar accounts of agency after the fall. The human will is at once entirely derivative and, when not illuminated by grace, irredeemably vicious.4 When Marlowe emphasizes Faustus’s depravity while obscuring the divinity it rejects, he perversely presents the consequence without the cause, the flawed reflection without the object that it mirrors.Perhaps, though, representational perversity is the point. In this article, I argue that theories of parody can help us understand such free-floating badness. From Julius Caesar Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridicula in 1560, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, parodic techniques have generally been understood as derogatory in intent.5 However, Giorgio Agamben suggests a fruitful alternative approach when he argues that parody might not simply deflate its target but could also function as a strategy for representing mysteries obliquely.6 To assess the value of Agamben’s ideas, I analyze Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus alongside another sixteenth-century dramatization of dying badly, William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1570). Both plays certainly use derogatory parody to ridicule characters who, at the last, are unable to relinquish worldly things. But they also suggest that parody can function as an investigative and representational tool, akin to a negative theology, that helps us to explicate obscured divinity through avowedly imperfect imitations. Marlowe and Wager share Calvin’s interest in depravity, but they reverse his emphasis.7 Instead of simply asserting that human will is irredeemably vicious, they ask what viciousness can reveal about the scope and limits of human agency or about the gap between fallen perception and divine truth. In particular, parody in their plays becomes a tool for analyzing and representing the approach to death, when the disjuncture between a person’s earthly and spiritual state can appear especially stark and especially in need of resolution.Furthermore, a focus on the affinities between parodic techniques and privative understandings of bad action can clarify the changing fortunes of religious theater in the sixteenth century. Between the publication of Enough Is as Good as a Feast around 1570, the writing of Doctor Faustus in the late 1580s or early 1590s, and the virtual prohibition on religious language onstage under the “Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players” in 1606, a growing group of religious thinkers came to understand dramatic representation as an inherently blasphemous practice.8 While there is no necessary link between antitheatricality and predestinarian accounts of the will, both discourses share a common concern with how imperfect human imitations approach an unseen, perfect original. Moreover, many of the same Protestant thinkers who elaborated Augustine’s account of evil to deny the possibility of good works independent of God’s grace also engaged in polemic against drama.9 Enough Is as Good as a Feast can help explain this slippage, since it indicates how hard it is to inoculate any representation of a religious subject from charges of profanation. By the end of the play, the derogatory potential of parody subsumes its use as an investigative strategy, and all forms of mimesis risk being revealed as blasphemous. Wager himself seems to have become disenchanted with religious theater, since he abandoned dramatic writing toward the end of the 1570s even as he remained “active in the Anglican ministry well into the 1580s.”10This context suggests that in writing Doctor Faustus, Marlowe was engaged not so much in secularizing religious forms as in reviving a dead genre abandoned by its original practitioners as unsatisfactory. His play, I argue, offers an implicit rejoinder to antitheatrical condemnations of drama. Marlowe appears to agree with the polemicists that dramatic mimesis necessarily offers a distorted, deficient version of what it imitates. But the theater’s representational badness reflects the ingrained badness of human performances generally, all of which are necessarily failed imitations of an inaccessible model. We are all doing what Faustus is doing. By foregrounding the validity of parody as a representational strategy for figuring otherwise unapproachable mysteries, and by attending to the forms of human agency that make such representation possible, Marlowe implies that drama is compatible with theological investigation precisely because of its blasphemous potential. The play encourages us to expand Scaliger, Bakhtin, and Agamben’s understandings of parody to theorize performances on the Elizabethan stage and beyond.Parody, Beside and BelowThe impulse to parody is ancient. The word itself derives from the Greek term parodos, which was probably initially used to describe any variant poem or song written beside an older work but took on particular connotations of comedy by the time Aristotle used it in the Poetics.11 Although the word (transliterated into Latin as parodia) and the concept disappeared from rhetorical manuals by the fifth century, a vigorous European tradition of adapting privileged genres or subjects for new ends persisted through the Middle Ages.12 The Coena Cypriani, celebrations of feasts of the fool, and drunkards’ and gamblers’ masses all manifest a particular appetite for burlesque revision, especially of sacred models. While modern critics have disagreed over the significance of these texts, Martha Bayless is persuasive when she emphasizes their diversity and cautions against any grand theory of medieval parody as prima facie orthodox or heterodox.13 The technique was everywhere, capable of advancing many ends.By the early modern period, though, parodies (especially of religious subjects) were attracting more controversy. Sixteenth-century discussions of parody focalized broader debates about the aesthetic and moral value of imitative art. Humanists revived parodia as a rhetorical term but altered its connotations to imply that imitation of a serious subject necessarily derogates that subject. In 1560, Scaliger influentially defined the word as “Rhapsodia inversa mutatis vocibus ad ridicula sensum retrahens” [rhapsody turned upside down, redirecting the sense toward amusing things with altered words].14 Where the Greek prefix para had suggested juxtaposition, Scaliger describes inversion and institutes a hierarchy between serious literature and comic travesty. Though ridicula may neutrally connote an amusing subject in Latin, Margaret Rose suggests Scaliger’s early modern English readers largely understood parody as derogatory.15 Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1616), for instance, describes parody as what would make something “absurder then it was.”16And this revaluation of parody was not confined to rhetorical theory. Over the same period that Scaliger’s construction of parody started to gain more widespread acceptance in literary contexts, religious reformers came increasingly to reject comic adaptations and inversions of religious motifs as blasphemous by definition. The Henrican state suppressed festivals of boy bishops in 1541, objecting that “boys do sing mass and preach in the pulpit … rather to the derision than any true glory of god, or honour of His saints.”17 In 1583, Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses condemned surviving festivals of the Lord of Misrule in similar terms as “horrible prophanation[s] of the Sabboth.”18 Significantly, Stubbes’s objection to misrule immediately follows his more famous condemnation of theater on the grounds that “the blessed word of God, is to be handled reverently, gravely, and sagely with veneration to the glorious Majesty of God, which shineth therein, and not scoffingly, floutingly, and jybingly as it is upon Stages in Playes and Enterludes” (236). Stubbes’s direct intellectual inspirations are the antitheatrical Church Fathers, including Augustine, whom he cites in his own support (237). However, when he denies the possibility of any genuinely sacred theater, he evokes an older Platonic logic that sees all imitation as inherently duplicitous. Plato’s Republic depicts Socrates condemning the tragic poet as “in his nature three removes from the king [i.e., God] and the truth, as are all other imitators.”19 For Stubbes, the problem is not that playwrights sometimes choose to mock God. Rather, he suggests that it is impossible to talk about God on stage without mockery. Any attempt to represent a religious truth dramatically, no matter what the motive, will necessarily fall into blasphemy. Imitation is parody.Modern critics trying to account for the character of parody in the early modern era, or to explain the hostility it increasingly inspired, have most often drawn on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.20 Bakhtin essentially accepts Scaliger’s definition of parody as ridiculing inversion but revalues ridicule as a folk challenge to elite monoculture and a spur to social and aesthetic change. Parody provides “the corrective of laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages, styles, voices; to force men to experience beneath these categories a different and contradictory reality that is otherwise not captured in them.”21 It defamiliarizes the object of representation and anticipates the development of novelistic heteroglossia by revealing the power of language as language (60–61). Applied to Elizabethan theater, Bakhtin’s account would align dramatic parody of religious models with subversive and secularizing impulses. Though elements of Bakhtin’s historiography have been questioned, the theoretical framework he proposes has remained powerfully influential and (superficially, at least) feels consonant with the iconoclastic, scoffing Marlovian persona evoked by documents like the Baines note.22Descriptions of parody as inversion, however, are by themselves inadequate to explain texts like Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Doctor Faustus. These plays sometimes exploit the deflationary capacity of imperfect imitation but at other points employ dramatic parody to explore theological problems or even to model orthodox behavior. As a corrective to Scaliger and Bakhtin, we might consider Agamben’s strikingly different claim that “parody does not call into question the reality of its object; indeed, this object is so intolerably real for parody that it becomes necessary to keep it at a distance … parody holds itself, so to speak, on the threshold of literature, stubbornly suspended between reality and fiction, between word and thing.”23 Departing from Scaliger—and effectively dismissing the dialogical play celebrated by Bakhtin as mere “fiction”—Agamben instead follows Plato in focusing on the relationship between the representation and the distanced reality it purports to stand for. However, he crucially revalues Platonic concepts. Where Plato asserts the hierarchical inferiority of representations, Agamben notes the prefix para implies a horizontal arrangement of original and copy. And where Plato rejects mimesis on the grounds of its imperfection, Agamben argues that avowed distortion has a sacralizing effect. When parody draws attention to its inability to display an object directly, it reverently casts that object as a mystery. Viewed in this light, the “liturgy of the mass, the representation par excellence of the modern mystery, [is] parodic,” and medieval scatological reworkings are respectful elaborations, rather than profanations, of liturgical form (42). Agamben rejects Bakhtin’s suggestion that parodies contest privileged forms and ideas from below and claims instead that they offer esoteric avenues to otherwise inaccessible truths.24 Reworking the terms that Stubbes uses to condemn the theater, we might say the scoffing, flouting, and jibing of players does not misappropriate or dampen the light of God’s majesty shining within his word, so much as it veils that light so that it can be looked on indirectly, without the risk of blindness.Although Bakhtin and Agamben’s accounts of parody are markedly different, I do not think we necessarily need to choose between them in all cases. Parody is capable of being deployed for many purposes and of appearing in many forms and many locations. It can emerge reverently beside or profanely below the object it mimics.25 Superimposing these two theoretical models, moreover, might be particularly helpful for understanding sixteenth-century texts. During this period, the reemergence of parodia as a topic of explicit consideration in rhetorical studies and the increased religious scrutiny of representation combined to render parody’s true position especially uncertain. Moreover, this uncertainty seems to have been recognized by at least some Elizabethan writers, who responded to it in markedly different ways. The ambiguous place of parody contributes to Stubbes’s distrust of scoffing mimesis. But to other writers struggling to depict ambiguous or dangerous subjects, the very instability of parodic forms might prove useful. To see just how useful, I now turn to representations of the bad death.Dying like a ProtestantIn many Christian traditions, death is something you do. Popular ars moriendi texts present death not just a misfortune to be suffered but also as a discipline to be studied or an action to be performed.26 From its inception in the fifteenth century, this homiletic literature of the good death troubled easy distinctions between activity and passivity and considered complex interactions between divine and human will.27 However, questions of how to die well became charged in new ways after the Reformation. The art of dying, like other devotional practices, became a site of sectarian controversy. Protestant reformers challenged many Catholic rituals such as the anointing of the sick and intercessory prayers.28 And polemicists from both confessions politicized the moment of death through highly publicized accounts of victorious martyrdoms29 and propagandistic accusations that dying leaders of rival sects had despaired or recanted.30 More fundamentally, popular predestinarian theologies threatened the conceptual basis of conduct books. The deathbed renders this theoretical challenge especially pressing, first, because the dying person’s diminished mental and physical capacity can make problems of human will more apparent and, second, because the moment of death was commonly understood to unmask the true distribution of agency between the human and the divine. Death reveals whether a person was always already saved or damned, and this revelation has two effects that are somewhat in tension with one another.31 On the one hand, it demonstrates the importance of grace to salvation and the insufficiency of human endeavor. On the other hand, it encourages a reconceptualization of individuals’ earthly actions as direct expressions of their ultimate spiritual status. Their earlier moral vacillations must be retroactively reclassified either as true expressions of their election (or depravity) or as temporary and misleading departures from their essential nature. Sectarian disputes and doctrinal innovations did not destroy the genre of ars moriendi; indeed more, and more were by both Catholics and over the sixteenth and than But altered the nature of the moriendi from a broadly for the good work of a Christian to a site of over what both a Christian and a work could disputes about also had for the form of religious drama. The link between deathbed conduct and drama is in the of which itself as a how of to … in of a the approach to death the in ars moriendi texts by who between good and bad impulses. Elizabethan Protestant to this tradition to account for the that spiritual is William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast how this The play is a of a by earlier medieval had and claims that in the 1570s and predestinarian some focus to Their “the for a tragic within the of moral of the earlier a comedy into its of spiritual and the that there are between homiletic and earlier plays is in focusing on he the to which these plays or even the forms they as they new doctrinal Is as Good as a Feast on the between the by the Man and he himself with a and with his help is a and a As the to the Man is by God’s to with and a but he to On his deathbed he to a will but he the the and is by a between the saved and the that is but obscured for much of the toward appear he offers God the of all will not the death of as hath to the true I the from the I for to Enough which to in and and all other I do Man is a as such by his in this he scarcely like claims to with And his that God has the true implies a in position and about through the is by the term which implies that Man godly through to the word by itself does not prove Man is in bad of worldly and spiritual language is especially in texts focusing on things. Sixteenth-century for religious and documents had devotional while sometimes in religious devotional The in offers an to Wager’s the godly at the of his religious by a will to his and and even for the of The need for the godly to with the in in to for the of the fallen to themselves with spiritual character such as Man in the of a impulse the same as And the questions about whether the two can be end of the play they Wager uses a parody of the of the good death to the apparent between saved and with a is because it reveals a more The dying Man his through of godly behavior. he is by and However, most of them are the even a concern for his spiritual like he is with his However, Man a will that would help his to as she rather than support of The its as Man is from a spiritual simply as a once he himself of God’s initially of Man had like one of the by the end of the play his of godly is itself a of his Enough Is as Good as a Feast rejects the apparent of godly and in will to a hierarchy between The worldly death is as a failed imitation of the godly This of worldly and in which the parodies the the where the in the earlier of the play that Man is then then are that and goodness to the same and become to the For the between dramatic models on a and a predestinarian becomes perfect and of to predestinarian His moral indicates how earthly uncertainty of election the between the saved and the damned, while his fall into explicit parody the of that the of the the implicit understanding of parody Wager increasingly variant imitations as not comic but and then encourages the to retroactively an of inferiority to earlier implicit understanding of parody Agamben’s is by one more like first, to through seems like a for it appears like a departure from true Christian the ridicule evoked by death is to his earlier what had beside becomes is there is any necessary to this or Enough Is as Good as a Feast to suggest that all imitations are parodic and even can be as it is hard to what imitation could accusations of and to have a turn by religious writers from the turn in as I Wager may have Faustus these like older forms to new doctrinal and parody to between and However, his play from Enough Is as Good as a Feast in it is that there are to Where Enough the with Doctor Faustus to in terms of privation that the distorting effects of human for how the Good is or by Faustus and to appear more like a of uncertainty than a link to the The often as the version of the play, to Faustus’s perception of Christian through that the To the then I the And In the context of Faustus’s can be almost as a of negative theology that the divine through what it is any attempt to Faustus’s simply as a blasphemous inversion is by the variety of ways that he divine truth. Man a bad Faustus of dying His imitations of religious never their on a divine original. alternative to rather than that could But in their diversity and their to explicate their to that they focus attention toward what fallen human Faustus may even a of not to but to choose between different to parodic to death in Doctor Faustus a investigation of the and of Wager’s of parody with depravity into a condemnation of all Marlowe’s of between parodic religious and what can be for imitation or even because its distortion of its or Faustus in the to Enough Is as Good as a from parody as inversion to parody as Marlowe the play by as the of dramatic and then whether mimesis can be either as a or as a tool for representing religious The Faustus as an intellectual and the privileged of the sixteenth-century As Marlowe’s by two of the word and the of the as their The fact that Faustus has to for instance, he has and can its because Faustus it to any positive While he that the scope of its is by “the of his own seems by the he already and His does not into new but other of and the religious he from the mass that to the as he his with Significantly, Faustus’s performances initially stand

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

Until recently, the dominant Mac Giolla Phádraig narrative had the surname associated only with the Barony of Upper Ossory, with ancient origins in medieval Osraí (Kingdom of Ossory). Yet, it has now been demonstrated, mainly via sixteenth-and seventeenth century Fiants and Patent Rolls of Ireland, that there was a Clann Mac Giolla Phádraig Dál gCais present in Clár (County Clare) in the sixteenth century, having been domiciled there since the thirteenth century. Also, by interrogation of sixteenth-and seventeenth century Fiants and Patent Rolls, it is shown here that Mac Giolla Phádraig resident in Laighean (Leinster) counties had no association with the family of Upper Ossory. Notable from the early sixteenth century are the Mac Giolla Phádraig of Cill Dara (County Kildare), who were once possessed of several discrete territories, including one that bore their name, and at least one castle, evidencing extended kinship, i.e., clanship. Yet, with the demise of the Kildare FitzGeralds ca. 1537, there came an upheaval for the clann. In the years after the rebellion of ‘Silken’ Thomas FitzGerald, Mac Giolla Phádraig are found in association with the infamous ‘Keating Kern’, due to their prior common service with the Earls of Kildare. But after the ninth Earl’s attainment, Mac Giolla Phádraig were expelled from their Cill Dara territories. Yet, those Mac Giolla Phádraig re-established themselves – and their network grew. By the 1550s, they had become well-connected with the Uí Tuathail (O’Toole), Uí Broinn (O’Byrne), Caomhánach (Kavanagh), and other notable clanns of the day, of Ceatharlach (County Carlow), Cill Mhantáin (County Wicklow), and Loch Garman (County Wexford). The relationships with Laighean clanns expanded throughout the rest of the sixteenth century while the association with Keatings faded. Significantly, Mac Giolla Phádraig came to hold lands at Cúirt an Phaoraigh (Powerscourt) until they were dispossessed in the early seventeenth century. This article follows the Mac Giolla Phádraig Laighean from the sixteenth century and identifies their descendants today. Now bearing the surname Fitzpatrick, they belong to an ancient kindred group identified by the surname-specific Y-DNA haplotype R1b-Z255 … BY2849. Today, these Fitzpatricks reside all over the globe. But true to their ‘Irish Sea’ Y-DNA modality, i.e., R-Z255, many also live all along Ireland’s east, from Aontroim (County Antrim) to Cill Mhantáin, and some families are still domiciled near their ancestor’s sixteenth and seventeenth century territories. This speaks to the diversity of Clann Mac Giolla Phádraig Laighean, their distinct kindred identities among their individual septs, and the long endurance of their surname.