Early Modern Context Research Articles

"Sit Down. Take Pen and Ink and Write. Are You Ready?" Sitting in the Early Modern Imagination

Abstract: Sitting might be associated in our minds with a break in action; less a gesture than a slump into inertia. However, by analyzing John Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671), John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1614), and texts on melancholy and Hercules's attack on the Pygmies, we argue that manifold ideas about madness and melancholy are encapsulated in the early modern sitting body. Hercules, Samson, and the Duchess are explicitly written—or can be read—as mad and melancholy. Like Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer's depictions of Melancholia, these characters are seen in a sitting posture. By sitting decisively, the Duchess and Samson alert us to their early modern context which is rife with visual and textual depictions of sitting. Thereby, they invite us to read their sitting bodies as sites where madness and rationality, power and dependency, and different genders, incline into and towards each other.

Enslaved as Outsiders, Enslaved as Property: Understanding Slavery in a Global and Early Modern Context

Enslaved as Outsiders, Enslaved as Property: Understanding Slavery in a Global and Early Modern Context

HISTORICISING THE MONSTROSITY OF JEALOUSY IN OTHELLO AND THE WINTER’S TALE

This article historicises the monstrosity of the passion of jealousy and situates it in its early modern cultural context with special reference to Othello and The Winter’s Tale; hence, the study is separate from the pure discussion of the nature or causes of jealousy. The cultural effects of the Reformation and the Renaissance and the abundant availability of literature, both original and in translations, inspired Shakespeare to portray the monstrosity of jealousy with all its early modern character. Most of such literature retained a strong influence from the classical antiquity. Moreover, the patriarchal standards of the period and residual elements of the shame culture rendered jealousy such a strong inflammability that it could, in early modern culture, “Burn like the mines of sulphur” (Othello: III.3.323).i The study contextualises and historicises the monstrosity of the passion of jealousy in the chosen plays and concludes that jealousy in Shakespeare’s society was regarded as a complex male-oriented malady, accompanied by monstrosity of violent passions capable of wreaking havoc in the family life of the victim. Shakespeare portrays Othello and Leontes as the epitome of this monstrous passion as was known to the people, the intelligentsia and the stage-goer which gave it an axiomatic status

Rickets and the industrial revolution in France: The example of Provence

AbstractThis article aims to estimate the prevalence of rickets and its development during the Industrial Revolution in southeastern France through the study of a large skeletal collection from two recently excavated sites in La Ciotat and Marseille. In total, 790 individuals were selected based on their state of preservation: 556 adults and 234 nonadults. All individuals were systematically examined for macroscopic paleopathological evidence of rickets, based on 13 features indicative of vitamin D deficiency. Rickets was rare in our population, with only 3% of the sample showing signs of the disease. Individuals who died during childhood were more likely to present lesions associated with rickets: 7.7% of the nonadult population show signs of rickets against 1.1% of the adult one (Fisher's exact test: p < 0.001). Moreover, these lesions generally indicated early stages with mechanical bowing of long bones being particularly rare, unlike metaphyseal deformities. Far from the expected increase described by medico‐historical literature, incidence was low and showed no change from the 16th to the 20th century. Furthermore, an increase in residual cases in adults results suggest better survival of vitamin D deficiency, which could reflect better handling of the disease. This is the first study dealing with rickets during the Industrial Revolution in France, and based on osteological material, forthcoming analyses should now focus on the incorporation of radiographic and microscopic criteria to further validate our cases and working hypotheses. Additionally, future research could benefit from the inclusion of a broader sample of individuals from early and late modern contexts, but also from the consideration of local medieval contexts providing a detailed overview that could highlight secular changes over a long period.

Roundtable on Michael J. Hollerich, Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021)

Few topics are more germane to this journal than the writing of ecclesiastical history, and no figure has had greater influence on the development of this genre than the bishop and scholar, Eusebius of Caesarea. In his masterful study of Eusebius and his readers from the late ancient to the modern era, Michael Hollerich has done a great service to all historians of Christianity. A work of reception history, the book begins with a chapter on Eusebius's life and work, focusing on his Ecclesiastical History and its relation to his Chronicle as well as other historical and non-historical genres with which he engaged. Subsequent chapters examine the reception of his work in the Christian Roman Empire of late antiquity, the non-Greek East, the medieval Latin West, and Byzantium, before turning to the rediscovery of Eusebius in diverse early modern contexts and his reception in modern scholarship including the implications of his historiographical work for future historians. The essays that comprise this roundtable, followed by the author's response, continue this important conversation about Eusebius and his legacy.

Between Written and Visual Communication: CIDOC CRM Ontology for Medieval and Early Modern European Graffiti

The development of graffiti studies during the last couple of decades highlighted the relevance and potential of graffiti as a complementary source for understanding different aspects of past societies. Moreover, the availability of digital documentation techniques crucially increased data production, showing the widespread presence of graffiti in Medieval and Early Modern contexts across Europe. However, the approach to historical graffiti has not been yet structured. Guidelines, specific analytical tools, and descriptors are still missing due to various reasons. First, graffiti are a multiform and multimodal graphic expression, so texts, signs, and images must be considered together despite their different communicative nature. Secondly, due to their variety in forms and contents, graffiti have been studied from many perspectives (e.g., epigraphy, palaeography, history, art history, maritime studies), following the specific interests of each scholar. Consequently, the numerous and extensive contributions concerning graffiti highlight the lack of shared standards and approaches, hindering data analysis and interoperability. The panorama emerging is fragmentary and unstructured. This article thus aims to offer a first step toward the development of a specific methodology for the analysis and study of Medieval and Early Modern European graffiti. Precisely, a specific ontology adopting CIDOC CRM for Medieval and Early Modern graffiti will be presented, as developed in a preliminary form within the DIGIGRAF project 1 with the support of the ARIADNEplus 2 network.

Afterword. The Cycles of Toledot Yeshu Research

Afterword to the "The Jewish ‘Life of Jesus’ (Toledot Yeshu) in Early Modern Contexts: Case Studies" thematic section edited by Daniel Barbu.

Managerial Shakespeare and TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

From the 1990s a new development has taken place within the framework of ‘Shakespeare in popular culture’, and more specifically of so-called ‘Self-help Shakespeare’, namely what Douglas Lanier has termed ‘the Shakespeare corporate-management manual’. What underlies them all is the notion that, if Shakespeare is famous for portraying universal human nature, he has a good deal to teach the world of business and management. To this effect, they provide quotations and discussions of a number of plays, particularly Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice. The value and usefulness of these manuals have been contested, but they could also be objected to as regards the scant attention paid to some other Shakespearean plays, such as Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida. It is our contention that, if we were to accept and follow the logic and aims of their authors, Troilus and Cressida could be at least as relevant to business and management as those other plays. This is so not only in its implications for managerial leadership and decision-making, but also on the grounds of more abstract but applicable notions of value and marketability, which are both defended —and opposed— in the play. This paper will seek to explain these notions both in an early-modern context and in their possible relevance to modern entrepreneurial activity.

A double-edged sword: the impact of military service on ‘zigenare’ and ‘tattare’ in Finland, c.1743–1809

ABSTRACT Drawing on various socio-historical sources, this article examines the impact of military service on people categorised as zigenare or tattare (historical terms referring to Roma in Finland) in the eastern borderland of the Swedish Kingdom circa 1743–1809. The article explores how military service influenced their social position and subsistence, and the ways in which they were viewed by others in society during an era when Sweden reinforced its eastern defences against the Russian Empire. I argue that military service acted to integrate people categorised as zigenare or tattare into society by providing them with legal status. Simultaneously, however, it strengthened their existing ethnic label, which was strongly connected with mobility, criminality and idleness. This was because soldiers categorised as zigenare or tattare often served in enlisted regiments that did not provide them with subsistence throughout the year. Hence, they often ended up practising itinerant occupations to make a living. This strengthened the general perception that zigenare and tattare had an innate tendency to roam, reinforcing their stigmatisation. The article adds an important dimension to the scholarship on the relationship between ethnicity and the military, hitherto inadequately examined in the early modern context.

Foreword


 
 
 The essays gathered here all concern the history, reception, and circulation of various versions of the Jewish ‘Life of Jesus’ (or Toledot Yeshu) in the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth century). Toledot Yeshu is perhaps the most infamous retelling of the gospel narrative of the premodern era. The story is best described as a parody of the Gospels, or perhaps an ‘anti- gospel,’ in which the foundational narrative and basic tenets of Christianity become an opportunity for ridicule and laughter. Jesus himself, whose purportedly shameful origins are narrated in detail, is thus railed as an antihero, a disgruntled student of the rabbis who sought to gain recognition by performing magic and duping the crowds, claiming to be the Messiah foretold by the prophets, but ultimately unable to save himself. The essays gathered in this thematic section of Cromohs are devoted to the early modern contexts of Toledot Yeshu, a period characterised by the dissemination of new versions of the narrative, increased circulation of manuscripts, translations into vernacular languages, and renewed interest—both on the Jewish and on the Christian side—in polemical and apologetic writings.
 
 

‘’Las sir! I’m no Ghost’: the misprision of spectral presence in Caroline drama

Scenes containing hoax hauntings or living characters mistaken for the spectral undead occur more often in Caroline drama than in any previous period of English theatre history. What drove the fashion for scenes of spectral misprision in this period, such that James Shirley’s 1633 revision of John Fletcher’s The Night-Walker (c. 1615) – a play replete with feigned phantoms – could haunt so happily in its new, Caroline performance context? This article answers that question not by situating such scenes against early modern theological contexts or patterns of popular belief, but by reading stage hauntings and paradramatic moments of spectral misprision across Caroline drama as constituent elements to a metatheatrical aesthetic that scrutinises inherited representational traditions. As we shall see, a palimpsest-like metatheatrical overlaying of dramaturgical conventions and intertheatrical references creates a network of interpretative cues and miscues exploited by Caroline dramatists and dissembling characters alike, from trapdoors and flour-faced millers, to borrowed lines and allusions to familiar, inherited hauntings from the emerging early modern dramatic canon. What arises, in turn, is a spirit of self-reflexivity in Caroline drama, whereby the figure of the ghost, hoaxed or otherwise, foregrounds and puts stress upon the insufficiencies – and value – of dramatic representation and spectatorship.

The Fasting of Others

As cultural historians have shown, various discourses about food and eating are correlated with processes of religious identity construction within European pre-modern societies. This article focuses on such a relationship between bodily and structural contexts during the transformative phase of the late sixteenth century in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. A selection of exemplary polemical sources of Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians illuminates the significance of fasting for the semantical constructions of religious collectives in times of societal upheaval. Regarding the increasingly uncertain circumstances due to the union of the Church, this paper argues that religious elites revolved around norms of fasting, which represented a semantic means of defining and defending their respective collective selves, their political claims, and legitimation in relation to a collective Other. Considering bodily practices such as fasting to be a methodological lens, the paper attempts to develop a novel perspective on the study and understanding of religious ordering in early modern European contexts.

Demonic Assault, Providence, and the Search for Salvation in Early Modern Reformed English Protestant Theology

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—the height of European demonological interest—England experienced a series of demonic possession cases that gained substantial attention from the clergy and laypeople alike. Reported across sensationalist pamphlets and learned demonological treatises, these cases were presented as extraordinary tokens of God's providence intended to be interpreted and responded to by those involved. English Calvinists during this period were largely interested in demonic possession for three primary reasons: what providential meaning this spiritual affliction offered, what action God was compelling them to carry out, and, more importantly, what profit they could gain in fulfilling their godly duties. The profit cited by these Calvinists was a glimpse into their predestined fate. This article argues that demonic affliction was fashioned as an emblematic phenomenon by English Calvinist communities with dispossession (exorcism) cast as a definitive form of spiritual warfare designed to provide comfort for the faithful and guide them toward a blessed conclusion. In this context, possession functioned as a providential catalyst: a call to carry out dispossession that, once fulfilled, brought the entire act to completion. Examining four possession textual accounts in detail, with a particular focus on the exploits of the controversial Puritan exorcist John Darrell, this article examines the intellectual construction of spirit possession and exorcism within an aligned Calvinist providential and eschatological framework. These cases exemplify many of the prevailing interpretations of spirit possession in the early modern English context and illustrate how this affliction offered individuals a potential salve to the vexed nature of Calvinist predestination.

VOLUME 52 (2022)

VOLUME 52 (2022)

Dimensiones del conflicto: Resistencia, violencia y policía en el mundo urbano

This hefty collection, 530 pages long, has 20 chapters by authors of multiple nationalities. Nineteen essays are in Spanish and one in Portuguese; the book also includes an introduction (in Spanish) as well as a preface and postface (both in Italian). The time frame spans the 1400s to around 1800. The collection espouses a global perspective that is preeminently Spanish, centered in Iberia, with two forays into Portugal, one into Sardinia under Spanish rule, and four into Spanish America. Chapters on Asia and Africa have a Spanish connection through missionaries in China and the Philippines as well as Catholic “renegades” who converted to Islam in northern Africa.The broad geographical and chronological scope is of a piece with the wide-ranging subject matter outlined in the title: resistance, violence, and police, primarily but not exclusively in early modern urban contexts. The introduction by Tomás Mantecón Movellán, Marina Torres Arce, and Susana Truchuelo García reviews four broad themes into which the essays are grouped: urban cultures and imaginaries of order and conflict, typologies and protagonists of conflict, tensions and reconstruction of order, and police and discipline. Yet the essays' widely different topics and approaches resist comparison or comprehensive conclusions. Several studies deal with minute subjects like resistance to standard weights and measures in the Spanish region of Galicia or ceremonial quarrels between the archbishops of Cagliari and Spanish viceroys of Sardinia. Other contributions offer broader perspectives on resistance “from below,” by slaves, Indigenous people, or ordinary Iberian women, and “from above,” by nobles thwarting Spanish Bourbon monarchs' efforts to professionalize the army. It is up to readers to draw their own lessons and comparisons.The preface and postface, respectively by the Italian historians Angela De Benedictis and Livio Antonielli, offer guidance. Even at the height of absolute monarchies, everyone understood that authorities should not wield their power or use force indiscriminately. Jurists acknowledged the right to resist as something natural. One did not need to be a lawyer to know this. A young man resisting unjust arrest on false grounds, a wife and mother loudly protesting high bread prices, and rebels everywhere clamoring distant rulers for justice all acted on the conviction that their actions were legitimate and sometimes even legal. The early modern concept of police was much broader, encompassing all areas of life: moral, political, economic, and spiritual. Policing was therefore decentralized, subject to seemingly inefficient, even irrational overlap of jurisdictions that in fact reflected practices and strategies constantly adapting to society's needs.Rather than engage with these ideas, the chapters offer their own, often very different takes on resistance, violence, and police, showing that there is no consensus about their meaning. Images on the book cover of massacres, public executions, and armed fighting reflect the assumption that violence and physical coercion were central elements of policing and resistance. Yet many of the chapters discuss nonviolent forms of resistance ranging from the symbolic gesture of an archbishop refusing to cede his place of honor in a church in deference to secular authority to individuals who simply ignored orders from authorities, often quietly to avoid drawing attention.Fortunately for readers of this journal, three of the most stimulating chapters deal with Latin America. Jorge Díaz Ceballos examines maroon communities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Panama. They secured privileges and a measure of self-government by rebelling and resorting to armed self-defense but also by ably deploying European notions of loyalty and vassalage to play off competing imperial powers. Susana Elsa Aguirre discusses everyday forms of resistance among Indigenous men and women to secular and religious authorities in Buenos Aires. Their actions are typical of James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak,” but they are nonetheless fascinating for their uniqueness. Baptiste Bonnefoy recasts revolts, plots, and rumors in Venezuela between 1794 and 1799, which nationalist historiography presented as precursors of independence movements, as instead rooted in traditional political language of loyalty and the quest for justice and protection from bad government, typical of ordinary people across the early modern world. However, fearful of news and rumors about the Haitian Revolution, colonial authorities reinterpreted Venezuelan events as revolutionary to validate repressive measures.Rather than point to grand theories, the overall impression left by this varied collection of essays is that the concepts of resistance, violence, and police are perhaps too broad for sustained global comparisons. One may speak of shared early modern “culture” and “imaginaries” only in the broadest sense. Analysis requires grounding actions and words in specific times and places. In each instance, men and women of very different backgrounds adapted for their own needs and purposes a common lexicon and repertoire of physical gestures at once strange and not entirely unfamiliar to us.

An Overview of Stylometry and Its Application to the Comedia

Abstract: Developments in computational analysis, corpus construction, and text editing have opened exciting new areas of inquiry in comedia studies. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a swell of stylometric studies dedicated to comedias of unknown or disputed authorship. This essay gives an account of stylometry, or the quantitative analysis of textual evidence, and appraises it in plain, nontechnical language. Taking the perspective most germane to comedia studies, the article reviews stylometry's place in authorship studies; considers the mechanics of performing it and some of the tests and methods employed; provides a brief history of stylometry in the early modern Spanish theater context; comments on the preparation of adequate texts and corpora; and offers conclusions about the overall implications of this mode of analysis.

Religious Transfusion in the Early Modern Kingdom of Kongo

In the present essay, I examine religious conversion as anthropophagic practice in the early modern Kingdom of Kongo. Through a close analysis of primary sources, I focus on King Nzinga a Nkuwu's conversion to Christianity in 1491 and the subsequent transformation of European religious beliefs and practice within the kingdom. Unlike converts in most other areas of Africa (and Brazil), Bakongo elites accepted Christianity largely on their own terms, and this allowed them to adapt their new faith to autochthonous tradition. In order to describe this process of adaptation, I link Bakongo conversion to Oswald de Andrade's call for 'blood transfusers' in his Manifesto Antropófago. In the end, my goal is to offer a more detailed account of Bakongo conversion while extending anthropophagic concepts to early modern contexts not primarily defined by coloniality.

ČUDOTVORNOST I IDENTITET: ODNOS SUBJEKTA I OBJEKTA U BOKI KOTORSKOJ XVII VIJEKA

In the year of 1672 several members of Pavlićević family in Prčanj witnessed miraculous transformation of the Madonna icon inside their household. Sacred image produced loud sounds, changed colors of the skin and grow a pair of legs which helped her moving away from the usual place that it inhabited. This behavioral animism of the artifact produced a very specific biological and ritual response in the observers. The clear line between humans with nonhuman features and nonhuman agency was blurred, allowing the analysis of tripartite relational structure of subject-object interactions. Convertibility of person and thing in the case of the miraculous event in Prčanj is rather eloquent example of an identity fashioning in the early modern religious context. The discourses of „life of things“, viewed from the point of new anthropology, studies in material culture and art historical approaches were used to inspect animistic psychological and cultural habits in 17th century Bay of Kotor. The experience of dissolving margins of a person and a thing was analyzed as crucial aspect in understanding the problems of identity, seen as a composite of relationships, instead of bounded and integrated entity.

Unmotherly Love: the Medea Model in Mary Sidney's Antonius

Mary Sidney’s Antonius, the English translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, offers the first example of a closet drama in early modern English that not only used classical resources but was also written by a woman. It is worth exploring the possibility that Euripides’s and Seneca’s versions have coloured Sidney’s reception and re-elaboration of Garnier’s play. Although neither has yet been connected with Garnier’s and Sidney’s plays, Sidney’s version effectively shows significant similarities in her construction of the female protagonist with particular reference to the dramatisation of unmotherly love. Through an in-depth investigation of these parallels, I will attempt to illustrate Mary Sidney’s approach to the Medea model and her own intervention, which include the influence of Studley’s translation of Seneca’s Medea; I will also explore how this intertextuality leads to the construction of Cleopatra as a stronger female ruler who abandons her children for her lover Antonius, and for her resolution to die after he has died. This article highlights how reading these aspects of Mary Sidney’s play in the early modern context may involve the identification of parallels with the situation in England linked to the Elizabethan succession. Keywords: Mary Sidney; Antonius; Robert Garnier; Euripides; Seneca; Studley; translation; Elizabethan succession

Harnessing Anger and Shame: Emotional Diplomacy in Early Modern Context

Abstract Emotions were, in early modern literature on diplomacy, described as a parasitic and even dangerous manifestation, and this view has endured until today. A series of recent books and articles published in the field of the history of emotions lays however the groundwork to question this traditional analysis. This article thus aims to examine the possibility of a broader and more strategic use of emotions in early modern diplomacy than is often acknowledged, and therefore the possibility of what can be called an early modern emotional diplomacy. I will first provide a summary of what the honnête homme culture of Europe’s ruling class meant for an ambassador in terms of emotion control. I will then show, through a few examples from diplomatic occurrences during Charles ii of England’s late reign, some of the possible uses of emotion in early modern diplomacy. Thirdly, I will study through one very memorable display of emotion from the English king the way such a display could be prepared and staged in order to achieve full effectiveness. Lastly, I will put these one-time emotional displays in the perspective of Charles ii’s international policy, arguing that they were not conceived as isolated occurrences but as parts of a real diplomatic strategy in which emotion played a crucial role, in other words an emotional diplomacy.