Early Modern Context Research Articles

The tragedy of honor in early modern political thought: Hobbes, Mandeville, Montesquieu, and Rousseau

ABSTRACT The academic defense of honor for its positive political and moral effects has surged recently among moral philosophers and political theorists. Challenging the narrative that the feudal legacy of honor has become outdated but acknowledging the reasonable points that opponents of honor have made, contemporary defenders aim to render honor compatible with society and politics today. This defense is reminiscent of that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially four modes of honor developed respectively by Hobbes, Mandeville, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Like contemporary scholars, these thinkers were conscious of the problems often associated with honor but appreciated its political usefulness. They aimed to preserve this feudal legacy in the early modern context. However, a comparative examination of these modes of honor reveals that, despite their internal coherence, they conflicted with one another owing to their authors’ conflicting understandings of the nature of honor. This conflict contributed to the tragic failure of the early modern defense of honor and testified to the conceptual elusiveness of honor. It is a cautionary tale for contemporary scholars who develop and defend essentialist and ahistorical understandings of honor.

Colonial/Global

Colonial/Global Stephanie Kirk Throughout the articles brought together in this dossier entitled "Colonial/Global," authors interrogate the complex ways in which the multiple projects of Spain's early modern globalized empire (and those of its rivals) played out in American colonial contexts and beyond. In addition, dossier authors reflect on how a range of imperial expediencies—literary, political, religious, cultural, and economic—transformed as they circulated through global circuits of power and encountered colonial realities and resistance. At the center of these discussions, we find the intersection of globalism and colonialism. While empire is, of course, a crucial concept for understanding the early modern global, here I want to flip the switch and focus on colonialism rather than imperialism, as well as on the creation of colonial/global spaces that speak to what Mary Louise Pratt designates as contact zones: "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths" (34).1 While scholars do not readily agree on what constitutes the global in an early modern context, they do concur that it is extremely difficult to define (De Vries 710; Strathern 318). One of the recurrent threads running through much scholarship, however, is the question of exchange or connectivity on a global level. As Alan Strathern explains, "perhaps the most important reason why the notion of a Global Early Modern period has gained traction has been its capacity to capture the connective flux of these centuries" (319).2 Strathern, further, celebrates a connectivity in which an imperial framework allowed for connections between peoples who, while living in close proximity, knew nothing of each other's existence: Consider that before the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1480s the kingdom of Kongo appears not to have been in contact with the kingdom of Benin to the north (in what is now southern Nigeria), one of the few other major sites of state construction south of the Sahel by this [End Page 5] point. Or that across the Atlantic, where many central Africans were now destined to travel, the Aztecs and Incas were apparently unaware of each other's existence before the Spanish subjected both of them to an improbable authority ultimately located in Madrid. (321)3 Gruzinski also celebrates an opening up of the globe in this way, explaining that imperial incursions led to a "proliferation of links of every type between parts of the world previously unaware of each other or in only the most distant contact" (4). While these relationships or links might appear thrilling, we must interrogate the stakes of this connectivity and its cost. As Ania Loomba explains, "work on 'connected histories' does not always pay attention to the fact that this single global modernity was forged, or at least drastically reshaped, alongside colonialism" (145). This dossier foregrounds the ways colonialism underscores all our understandings of the early modern global as well as to "foreground difficult questions about the historical processes and global relations through which this modernity came into being" (Loomba 145). An imperialist narrative is inextricably bound up in that of global early modernity if we think of it in terms of connectivity. For, as Alan Strathern explains, "it is only with the creation of sea-lanes that joined up the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans for the first time that truly global interconnections were established" (321). He further elucidates the contours of this connectivity and its materialization: "From this point on, empires could extend from the forests of the Amazon to the waters of the Melaka straits; new fiscal systems in Asian polities could be propelled or undermined by the quantities of silver mined in Bolivia and sent across the Pacific via Manila" (321). This view of empire as a series of exciting and cosmopolitan meeting points neglects its colonial dark side, without which it is unsustainable and which, in turn, cannot be divorced from questions of exploitation, subordination, and dispossession of peoples and territories in the name of religious and cultural hegemony and emergent capitalism.4 While we may celebrate cultural connections, we must do so with caution. As Jack Green has stated: "Historians...

Circle of Fear in Early China

Montesquieu wrote that “China is a despotic state whose principle is fear”. And indeed, in the early modern context in China, fear and despotism, on the one hand, were opposed to ziyou 自由 (“freedom”), on the other. These constructs created a discursive space in which theorists of the nation-state felt the need to articulate the complex relations binding despotism to fear. By contrast, during the early empires in China a different set of relations was imagined, wherein salutary fear was aligned against both despotism and freedom and, crucially, with according others a proper sense of dignity. For by the arguments of remote antiquity, “submission to instruction and fear of the gods” functioned both as a vital check on despotism and as the key barrier to the unchecked and unhampered self-assertion by subjects and rulers. Yet this notion of ritual operating within a circle of fear it helped to foster has so far escaped scholarly notice, perhaps because it does not square with the ritual theories that dominate our modern discourse and perhaps because such ritual fear has been dismissed easily as remnant, primitive superstition.

Seeking the historical listener

Abstract This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness, affective response and analogical understanding. The source material also interestingly raises the possibility of occasionally understanding the act of listening within a frame of erotic relationship modelled on Laura Mulvey’s well-known concept of the ‘male gaze’.

Power from indirect pain: a historical phenomenology of medical pain management

The article aims at reconstructing how pain is used in contemporary societies in the process of engraving power. Firstly, a social phenomenological analysis of pain is conducted: Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are used for clarifying the experience of pain itself; Elaine Scarry’s analyses are overviewed in order to reconstruct how pain contributes to the establishing of power. Secondly, this complex approach is applied in early modern context: the parallel processes of the decline of a transcendental and the emergence of a medical interpretation of pain is introduced, along with the marginalization of violence. Thirdly, the era characterized by the triumph of medical pain management is analysed: it is argued that the constitutive role of pain in establishing power does not cease to exist with the emergence of technologies of discursive governance (Foucault); it is an open question, what sort of power is engraved through pain understood in strictly medical frames.

The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth‐Century Rural Low Countries

ABSTRACTData from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex‐disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled database of adult burial information for 293 rural localities and small towns in the seventeenth‐century Low Countries, explicitly comparing mortality crises against ‘normal’ years. In contrast to expected results, we find no clear female mortality advantage during mortality spikes and, more to the point, women tended to die more frequently than men when only taking into account those years with very severe raised mortality. Gender‐related differences in levels of protection, but also exposure to vectors and points of contagion, meant that some of these female advantages were ‘lost’ during food crises or epidemic disease outbreaks. Responses to mortality crises such as epidemics may shine new light on gender‐based inequalities perhaps hidden from view in ‘normal times’ – with relevance for recent work asserting ‘female agency’ in the early modern Low Countries context.

Limited Liberties: Catholics and the Policies of the Pitt Ministry in an Early Modern Context

AbstractThis article contributes to current debates about the role of religion in governance in the late eighteenth century British Atlantic world by examining the Pitt ministry's policies regarding Catholic subjects in England, Quebec, and Ireland in an early modern context. Starting with an overview of early modern attempts to find a compromise between Catholic subjects and their Protestant rulers, this article shows how the Pitt ministry reused these earlier approaches in its efforts to respond to Catholic subjects during of the age of revolution. Focusing on the English Catholic Relief Act of 1791, the Canada Constitutional Act, and the ministry's unimplemented plans for Catholic emancipation, the article argues that these policies were all shaped in part around the idea that Catholic subjects could be allowed greater freedoms, and even access to political influence in some cases, if their faith was contained through Gallican-style restrictions. These restrictions varied from requiring new oaths to attempting to establish the government's right to select Catholic bishops. Each policy resulted in notably different outcomes based on the location and potential power of the Catholic subjects that they affected. The common goal, however, was to attenuate the Catholics’ connection to the papacy and increase government influence over the Catholic Church in British territory while also upholding the ultimate supremacy of the Anglican Church.

Threefold translation of the body of Christ: concepts of the Eucharist and the body translated in the early modern missionary context

This article tests the usefulness of concepts from translation studies to understand the dynamics and mechanisms of cultural translation. It asks what is happening when people translate. What do they do when they translate? From a historical perspective, we apply translation theories as analytical kit on the cultural translation process created by the Jesuit missionaries teaching the Eucharist in contact zones during early modern times. In a first part, we present the conceptual tool box borrowed from translation studies (Lefevere, Venuti, Nida). In the analytical part, we apply this instrument to Jesuit translation: How did the Jesuits translate the concept of body in the sacrament of Eucharist for a general audience in the multilingual and transcultural missionary contexts? It is generally difficult to transfer knowledge by translation. The translation of the Eucharist is not only difficult regarding the aim of a true translation, its fidelity to the source, but it can become a question of orthodoxy or heresy. The translation of Eucharist concerns the theology of transubstantiation, real presence or a symbolic understanding of the body; a crucial topic in the early modern European context. The semantics of the body are closely related to this theological issue as are the different cultural practices and understanding of them, particularly in non-European cultural settings. In this Jesuit case study, the dynamics of the cultural translation process are unearthed: Which methods and technics did missionaries apply to translate theological concepts? How did they accommodate and negotiate the knowledge transfer with the local cultural grids? How did they create dynamic equivalence in order to be understood? To what degree was the translation adopted by the intended audience? With the developed tool kit we unravel a complex, multi-layered translating process that was influenced by the translator, the audience, the cultural and linguistic context as well as the power asymmetries inherent to the process.

Exploration on the Construction of Chinese Economics System in Early Modern Times：Based on the Perspective of Research Content

The construction of Chinese Economics began in early modern times. Some scholars discussed its system construction then, however, the current academic circle has not paid enough attention to this field. For the first time, this article systematically investigates the exploration of the research content construction of Chinese Economics in early modern times. By focusing on the achievements which have theoretical consciousness and are in line with the understanding of Chinese Economics at that time, this article in-depth mines the first-hand literature, classifies them into four categories, that is, with several theoretical and practical issues as the main components, with “philosophy-theory-policy”as the main component, referring to the “Das Kapital” system as the main component, and referring to the classical economics “Quartering” as the main component, and analyzes the points put forward by scholars with different theoretical backgrounds from the late 1920s to the 1940s. This article mainly draws the following conclusions: First, the exploration has established a basic framework for the research content of Chinese Economics in the early modern context, covering a series of economic issues which include the historical evolution of China’s economy, the nature of China’s society, the operation of China’s economy, China’s production relations, industrialization and rural economy construction, fiscal and financial reforms and so on. Second, an important logic on system construction embodied in this process is that, based on absorbing the existing economic theories, the key point is to deeply explore the unique problems in the historical background of China’s economy and society that transformed from tradition to modern ones. Third, the early modern exploration failed to build a recognized mode of the research content which could be followed. The direct reason is that there was a lack of theoretical abstraction and refinement of the economic issues. The fundamental reason is that early modern China was short of a social background of basic stability and owned a backward economic research level. All these kept it away from the establishment of a mature and systematical economics.The academic value of this paper could be concluded in three aspects: First, it proposes a research framework based on system construction, especially on the research content, and forms a new perspective to integrate the works of early modern Chinese Economics.Second, it closely surrounds the category of Chinese Economics, and excavates a series of first-hand historical document, thus expanding the literature in this field.Third, it systematically shows the achievements and progress of early modern Chinese Economics on the research content, and provides enlightenments for accelerating the construction of the Socialist Political Economics with Chinese Characteristics.

Chronic denial: When making change means saying the whole truth

Through a personal exploration of disability as experience, this essay explores the navigation of confession and its ramifications and relevance for scholarly work. Attending to confession in an early modern Spanish context (with focus on Miguel de Cervantes and Teresa de Avila) as well as the contemporary moment, the essay creates a critical space for exploring how confession connects to narrative building.

LE MERAVIGLIE DEL SANGUE. I DIFFERENTI LIMITI DELLA NATURA NELLE «DUE EUROPE» DI ETÀ MODERNA

According to a middle and north European tradition, the cadaver of a murdered person would start bleeding in the presence of his or her assassin: “Therefore, when you create a contact between the breath of the murderer and the spirit that has remained in the blood of the murdered, the blood boils and rages [ ebullit effervescitque sanguis ]”. Reading such accounts, one may be struck by their similarities to the chronicles of the so-called “miracle of saint Januarius” in Naples, in which the verbs ebullire and effervescere were usually used to describe the behaviour of the blood of the martyr in the presence of his own head. In my paper, similarities and differences between the two ritual phenomena will be used as a litmus test to shed light on the relationships between the natural, the preternatural and the supernatural in the different early modern European cultural contexts. In other words, I will try to ascertain to what extent knowledge of what nature can or cannot do has been culturally (religiously, ethnographically, juridically etc.) determined or at least influenced.

Saints of North-East England, 600–1500 ed. by Margaret Coombe, Anne Mouron and Christiana Whitehead

Reviewed by: Saints of North-East England, 600–1500 ed. by Margaret Coombe, Anne Mouron and Christiana Whitehead Samantha Leggett Coombe, Margaret, Anne Mouron, and Christiana Whitehead, eds, Saints of North-East England, 600–1500 (Medieval Church Studies, 39), Turnhout, Brepols, 2017; hardback; pp. xviii, 363; 19 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503567150. This volume is the product of a conference held at Oxford in 2015, providing some much-needed foci for medieval north-east England. This region and period, as the introduction itself states, is often neglected not just in medieval studies but also more generally. When one thinks of the North it is usually of an industrial or post-industrial landscape. By contrast, what this volume's contributors aim to do, and I believe achieve, is to aid in the revival of an intellectually and culturally vibrant North-East, charting this through the ecclesiastical lens of the Middle Ages, feeding into the revival narratives we can see in the region today. The introduction is a well-considered piece that really sets the tone for the rest of the volume, and this work has much to recommend it to a broad and multidisciplinary medievalist audience. It must be noted that despite the large chronological span mentioned in the title, this is a volume predominantly dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Church, with the postscript providing the later medieval and early modern context. As an archaeologist with a background in medieval studies I find this volume at once very stimulating (due to the supposed multidisciplinarity) but also at points disappointing. The editors and authors repeatedly attempt to engage with material culture and other archaeological content, talking of landscape, churches, coffins, bodies, and saintly objects. However this is done with what I feel is a fundamental lack of critical engagement with the archaeological literature on these places, objects, and theoretical frameworks. For instance the project led by Chris Gosden at Oxford on English Landscape and Identities (EngLaID) would be useful here (<http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/englishlandscapes-introduction.html>), or any work by David Petts and Sarah Semple, who specialize in the archaeology of early medieval Northumbria. Alan Thacker's chapter, titled 'The Saint in his Setting: The Physical Environment of Shrine in Northern Britain before 850', is particularly lacking in archaeological content despite its premise, with the now rather outdated three-volume survey by H. M. Taylor and Joan Taylor on Anglo-Saxon Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 1965–78), the works of David Rollason, and Tomás Ó Carragáin's study on the early medieval churches in Ireland (Yale University Press, 2010) being the only archaeology mentioned. It is missing key texts such as John Blair's The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford University Press, 2005), Tom Williamson's Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England: Time and Topography (Boydell Press, 2012), or any other environmental and landscape archaeology, or even palaeoecology. Such scholarship would have benefited the chapter, making it more rounded, and not [End Page 194] just strictly architectural in terms of the physical environment. It should perhaps be rephrased as 'the built environment' to better reflect the mostly ecclesiastical architecture and church archaeology bent in the piece. Similarly, Allan Doig's contribution, 'Sacred Journeys/Sacred Spaces: The Cult of St Cuthbert', whilst interesting and well conceived, might have considered some archaeological and material culture theory in terms of sacrality and the use of space. Whenever saints and especially the relics or bodies of these saintly individuals are mentioned throughout the work, I found myself yearning for a discussion over the concepts of the corpse, embodiment, necroagency, archaeothanatology, and decomposition; and how medieval people might have interacted with these saintly bodies in life as well as in death (an approach developed by Howard Williams). In terms of the ever-present Cuthbert, it seems a shame to not bring these considerations to any discussion of his incorruptibility. However, this book is primarily historical and literary in focus and achieves some good breadth across these disciplines, also incorporating (as mentioned above) architecture and art history. The visual experiences conveyed by Richard Sharpe and Lynda Rollason are welcome additions and add great...

To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique

Reviewed by: To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique Patrick J. O'Banion To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario. By David Thomas Orique, O.P. [Latin American Originals, Volume 13]. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 127. $24.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-271-08098-7.) David Orique has done a great service by providing a very readable and useful translation of Bartolomé de Las Casas's 1546 Confesionario. The basis for his translation of this remarkable document, surprisingly the first ever into English, is the 1552 version published from Seville. Orique adds annotations in footnotes to help readers along and prefaces the document with three short chapters. The first places the Confesionario within the larger context of the Spanish Atlantic world and provides an account of Las Casas's early life and transformation into a defender of Native Americans in the New World. The second chapter explores the specific context within which Las Casas, as Bishop of Chiapas, wrote the confessionary and the dramatic responses that ensued from his opponents (including charges of high treason and inquisitorial scrutiny). The third chapter provides a helpful interpretive overview of the document and contextualizes it within the medieval canon law and summa confessorum tradition (although, unfortunately, not the broader early modern context of confessional manuals nor the substantial historiography that they have engendered). The Confesionario itself is an astonishing and brave document written to provide guidance for confessors in Las Casas's diocese. As Orique indicates, it follows the pattern established in Las Casas's earlier labors to tie together restitution, justice, and salvation (p.17). In particular, the Confesionario ordered confessors of conquistadors, encomenderos, slave owners, and, indeed, all Spaniards in the Indies (since he claims there were none who "acted in good faith" [p. 77]) to make restitution for the various ways in which they had robbed, oppressed, mistreated, or perpetrated violence of any kind upon the native inhabitants of the land. This might even entail handing over their entire estates. Failure to comply was to be met with exclusion from the Eucharist, a meaningful threat in a society that was organized around the annual Easter Duty and that saw sacramental grace as essential for salvation. By obeying these rules, the bishop asserted, "the conscience of the penitent will be assured, the aggrieved and the deprived will attain justice, and the confessor will fulfill his duty…" (p. 99). As that last phrase suggests, much of the burden for carrying out this program fell squarely on the confessors themselves, who were charged with implementing the [End Page 728] bishop's plan. He bound them to comply, lest by granting absolution they become "companion[s] and participant[s] in the crime and sin of the one who robs and destroys his neighbors" (p. 105). This gestures at the way in which Las Casas was attempting to establish a tightly regulated system of confessional oversight that would allow him to refashion social, economic, and ethical relations within his diocese. Frustratingly, the book does not effectively describe the consequences of that plan. Orique notes that Dominicans in New Spain supported it from 1546 and that, from 1560, mendicants in Peru also came on board (p. 69). But what does this mean? To what extent were conquistadors and encomenderos successfully pressured (if ever) to actually make restitution? One longs for a more explicit answer to this question. Professors will find this short text valuable for a variety of undergraduate courses. I expect that Las Casas's activist bent will intrigue many students. It might be effectively paired with Anthony Pagden's edition of Francisco de Vitoria Political Writings or, indeed, with a number of the "Latin American Originals" published by Pennsylvania State University Press, the series within which this book appeared. Patrick J. O'Banion Lindenwood University Copyright © 2018 The Catholic University of America Press

"Unaccomodated Man": Dismodernism and Disability Justice in King Lear

King Lear's exploration of what it means to be human has significant Disability Studies implications that have not yet been examined. Through the course of the play, Lear gains awareness of interdependence, bodily vulnerability, and human-animal kinship, and his new worldview unsettles the shared ground of ableism and anthropocentrism. Analyzing three of Lear's significant speeches, I argue that King Lear's exploration of what it means to be human anticipates Lennard Davis's recent theoretical concept, dismodernism. Both Lear and Gloucester express concern for Poor Tom in ways that link disability to community and social justice. Through considering King Lear in relation to early modern contexts and current Disability Studies theory and activism, I argue that the play is an important site for developing a socially conscious Shakespearean Disability Studies.

Widening the study of military organization in the early modern South Asian context: an examination of the Sinhala Hatana Kavya

ABSTRACTThis essay highlights the under-represented subject of military organization in the context of early modern Sri Lanka. Military organization is a topic well covered in North Indian studies of the Mughal State, and this essay borrows certain thematic concepts from that historiography to examine the Sri Lankan context. Specifically, it considers the existence of a ‘military labour market’ from which both European and Asian kings and generals recruited base soldiery between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such an economic market can be found through a reading of Sinhala sources known as the Hatana Kavya (‘war poems’), which document warfare and conflicts between the Portuguese and Sinhalese kings in this period. Information in these poems also notes the clear connection between territorial authority and efficient military organization, where authority was dependent on the loyalty of one’s military force. The essay attempts break from previous scholarship, which usually assumes military conflict in the period is the result of ideological conflicts (i.e. religion and ethnicity) between foreign, European, and native island elements. It does this by showing how military leaders of both groups were essentially required to gain the services of the same base soldiery through material incentives.

Handling the Theme of Hands in early Modern Cross-over Contexts

The human hand is a complex phenomenon within the contexts of early modern visual and textual culture. Its frequent presence in early modern texts and illustrations - as well as the many different types of described and depicted hands - raises a number of questions as to its functions and significances. In this article, we examine the role of the hand and two of its familiar functions –pointing and touching – against diverse and diverging understandings of human perception and cognition in the period focussing particularly on relations between bodies and minds. Through comparative analyses of cross-over examples from both medicine, manuals and drama – primarily John Bulwer’sChirologia and Chironomia, William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – we explore the questions implied by hands and their contributions to the knowledge probed and proposed by these texts and illustrations.

Colonial Cruelty: The Expression and Perpetuation of Violence in Theodor de Bry’s America

The images accompanying the Girolamo Benzoni account of Spanish colonization in the New World are characterized as some of the most violent of Theodor de Bry’s collection, America. Revisiting these depictions with an explicit focus on violence reveals the different ways in which violent acts are either justified or condemned in colonial discourse and power structures. The purpose of this discussion is twofold: first, to examine how violence is defined and represented in this early modern visual context; and second, to explore how the De Bry illustrations advance an equally violent colonial discourse. A juxtaposition of expressions of both indigenous and Spanish violence from parts four through six of De Bry’s America highlights the argumentative substratum of the images – mainly that European acts of aggression are justified actions of colonial control, while indigenous aggression is unbridled brutality, thus consequentially promoting colonial efforts that directly affect that very America in focus.

Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain: A Feeling for Magic ed. by Ronald Hutton

Reviewed by: Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain: A Feeling for Magic ed. by Ronald Hutton Debora Moretti KEY WORDS Debora Moretti, Ronald Hutton, Physical Evidence, Ritual Acts, Sorcery, Witchcraft, Christian Britain, Evidence of Sorcery, Evidence of Witchcraft, Late Medieval, Early Modern, Matthew Champion, Timothy Easton, June Swann, Brian Hoggard, Dinah Eastop, Deliberately Concealed Garments, DCGP, Tabitha Cadbury, Owen Davies, Chris Manning, Ian Evans, Archaeology ronald hutton, ed. Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain: A Feeling for Magic. Basingstoke UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xiv + 261. The study of magic and witchcraft, usually the domain of historians, ethnographers, and anthropologists, has had for at least the past fifty years a love-hate relationship with archaeology. Since the late 1980s, however, this troubled relationship has evolved together with the general interest in the materiality of magic and witchcraft which belongs to a wider recent material-cultural turn. The first and foremost complete contribution to the development of the archaeological study of magic and witchcraft came from Ralph Merrifield who, in 1987, published a survey of material objects indicating the existence of ritualistic and magical behavior in ancient pagan contexts and also in Christian medieval and early modern contexts in Britain. Ronald Hutton’s edited volume, Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain, published in 2016, not only wants to pay respect to Merrifield and his outstanding work, but also addresses and further analyzes the issue thoroughly, confirming two important points discussed by Merrifield: the general misinterpretation of deposits indicating magical or ritual activity in archaeological contexts; and the longevity of the reluctance of archaeologists and historians to approach material evidence of magic in Christian contexts. It also gives evidence of a general—if somewhat slow—and welcome change of attitude toward this topic, which has risen on the back of the widespread academic interest in the history of magic and witchcraft in medieval and early modern Europe. This edited volume presents the [End Page 141] reader not only with an updated bibliography of the major studies related to the material evidence of magic and witchcraft, but is itself a fundamental part of this new wave of research, focusing as it does on the study of a set of British material objects and of architectural markings “revealed by casual discovery or collected from owners” (6) related to magic ritual practices showing continuity in medieval and modern Christian Britain. The volume is divided into four main sections, preceded by an introductory chapter where Professor Ronald Hutton gives a brief but exhaustive overview of the historiography of this study of material culture which “is now becoming a recognized sub-discipline of history” (5) and where he brilliantly discusses the importance of this new approach to the understanding of the perception of magic and witchcraft. The first part of the volume focuses on the evidence of marks and symbols which indicate an apotropaic nature. Matthew Champion opens this section with a detailed study of the recent large scale surveys of graffiti inscriptions found in medieval churches in England. While a good part of these graffiti have a well-defined spiritual or devotional character and sit within the orthodox liturgy, many others “appear to have been created in non-traditional forms” (15). These inscriptions fall under the category of “apotropaic symbols, or ritual protection marks—sometimes misleadingly referred to as ‘Witch marks’ ” (17). They seem to be a constant element in medieval churches across Europe and perhaps are indicative of a direct connection between the individual and the divine. From apotropaic marks and symbols found in churches, the next chapter, written by Timothy Easton, summarizes apotropaic marks and symbols in domestic buildings, which seem to derive from the ones found in churches. Particular attention is placed in the discussion of “assembly marks” made by carpenters; Marian letters which survived the reformation; candle burn marks and the practice of applying biblical texts and homilies around the internal walls of houses which became popular during the second half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth-century. Easton concludes his survey of apotropaic markings and symbols with a reminder of...

Queering Poins: Masculinity and Friendship in Henry IV, The Hollow Crown, and the RSC's "King and Country"

Queering Poins:Masculinity and Friendship in Henry IV, The Hollow Crown, and the RSC's "King and Country" Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich Ned Poins, Prince Hal's rabble-rousing sidekick in the Henry IV plays, appears in only five scenes across two plays and vanishes in each play before the third act.1 Murray J. Levith suggests that his name alludes to his being "as tiny and insignificant as a point" (38), and indeed scholars and theater critics have overlooked him. In the usual understanding, these plays are about Hal's relationships with his father, Falstaff, and Hotspur—not with Poins. Two recent productions have challenged these assumptions by offering memorable, homoerotic Poinses. Series 1 of the TV program The Hollow Crown (2012) and the Royal Shakespeare Company's "King and Country: Shakespeare's Great Cycle of Kings" (2016) both represent Poins as a roguish but beleaguered queer hero whose erotically charged friendship with Hal must be swept aside to facilitate Hal's rise. Although several scholars have noted the second tetralogy's obsession with masculinity, few consider how Poins matters to this definition, and queer studies tend to focus on Falstaff or Hotspur.2 As this essay moves Poins into the spotlight, it analyzes sixteenth-century texts and twenty-first-century performances as equally rich instances of a Shakespearean "work," which Margaret Jane Kidnie defines as "a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users" (2). My method also draws on W. B. Worthen's definition of performance as "a collective means of knowledge making" (21) to argue that The Hollow Crown and "King and Country" do not simply present Shakespearean texts. Instead, each production enlarges them by offering what Pascale Aebischer has called "negotiated readings," or the fleshing out of "empty spaces" and marginalized characters, [End Page 635] that allow critics and spectators to tell alternative narratives (12). Each instance of the Henry IV plays, whether an early modern text or a modern production, is entangled with its culture's ideas about queerness, masculinity, and friendship. I begin by investigating how the earliest printed versions of these plays represent Poins as "queer" in its early modern connotations: peculiar, dubious, or disreputable. The playtexts suggest that he is not conventionally masculine, and they mark his friendship with Hal as inappropriate and suspect because of their disparity in rank. I then turn to the recent BBC and RSC productions, which offer versions of Poins that recall the past but are mediated by twenty-first-century notions of love and loss. To accommodate shifting definitions of masculinity and friendship, both use homoeroticism to underline how Poins's relationship with Hal can be "queer" in a modern sense: not corresponding to our established ideas about heterosexuality.3 In both the early texts and the recent productions, Hal's rise to the monarchy hinges on his fulfillment of culturally defined masculinity, yet by making Poins a likeable character and by embracing temporarily his friendship with Hal, The Hollow Crown and "King and Country" encourage discomfort with Poins's disappearance and the conventional behavior expected of Hal. This alternative, twenty-first-century narrative requires no radical transformation of the sixteenth-century texts, but relies on cultural changes to produce a new understanding of Hal's narrative and Shakespeare's Henriad. Emphasis on the Poins subplot in our current cultural moment can make the Henry IV plays into modern tragedies about conformity and injustice. "Be not too familiar with Poins": early modern texts and contexts The texts of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays provide little information about Poins's status and background. Poins calls himself "a second brother," suggesting that his family has something to inherit, but his precise social rank is difficult to pinpoint (1 Henry IV, 2.2.53). Descriptions of him as the Prince's "continual follower" and "shadow" suggest that he is a kind of courtier, but we never see him at court (1 Henry IV, 4.3.53; 2.2.127). We might describe him as a gallant—not the brave kind like Hotspur, but a man concerned with fashion and pleasure—but 1 Henry IV seems to mock that possibility when Falstaff...

L’aportació del Gazophylacium catalano-latinum, de Joan Lacavalleria, a la terminologia catalana

The publication in 1696 of the Catalan-Latin dictionary Gazophylacium Catalano-Latinum by Joan Lacavalleria led to the incorporation into Catalan of a large number of technical terms, in spite of the early modern sociocultural context being unfavourable to scientific and technical developments. The Gazophylacium is the Catalan version of a French-Latin dictionary, Le Dictionaire royal augmente by Francois-Antoine Pomey. Therefore, Lacavalleria may be considered as an initiator of the systematic transfer procedure of terminological units of French origin into Catalan, which were also adopted by many other languages of culture until well into the twentieth century, and that favoured the circulation of internationalisms. This article mainly describes the terminological units transferred from the French source into Catalan, examines the main proceedings of terminological formation and the adapting process of French terms into Catalan and, lastly, it accounts for the reception and subsequent implementation of these terms.