Early Modern Court Research Articles

Letters from Sodom: ‘Emotional’ Agency and Evidence of Sexual Crime in the Early Modern Courts of Italy and Spain

In the judicial system of the Ancien Régime, some crimes were notoriously difficult to prove. It was essential for the prosecution to properly argue the case and, to this end, it was necessary to develop a hierarchical system of evidential means that would allow any hint of suspicion to yield results. The goal of the essay is to carry out a detailed study of the written documents confiscated in judicial proceedings for sodomy in civil courts of the Mediterranean area during the early modern period. The objective is to understand the ‘expressiveness’ that this judicial evidence contributed to the process of signalling criminal practices within the judicial system of Spanish and Italian courts. In addition, by studying love letters between men, missives from their relatives and friends commenting on disagreements, the popular literature consumed by the defendants, certificates and other official documents, and their demands for employment, the essay will shed light on their everyday life and forms of dissidence, with the aim of understanding the particular ‘emotional’ agency of these individuals.

Gift and Glory

The gift of a velvet with repeating patterns of the Virgin Mary nursing Christ (Madonna del Latte) from Shah Abbas of Safavid Persia to the Republic of Venice is often interpreted as the embodiment of the Shah’s two-fold political and commercial motivations in pursuing his transcultural allegiance with Venice against the Porte. This paper explores the Shi’a Safavid iconography of the biblical imagery on this velvet and rereads it as a Safavid attempt in defining commonality across cultures through visual media. This vision differs significantly with the Venetians’ perception of the Shah’s luxurious gifts and letters, which is reflected in Gabriele Caliari’s painting of the Safavid reception by Doge Grimani in 1603, in Palazzo Ducale, Venice. The paper analyzes the two visions of the Safavids and the Venetians in a comparative study of the period’s textual and visual materials. It explores how the gifts such as the Madonna del Latte velvet facilitated diplomatic negotiations with Christian Europe, whereas painted representations such as Caliari’s reveal much about the perception of cultural difference in early modern courts.

Reconstructing the Labour of Care in Early Modern England

AbstractUncertainty about what constitutes work in the past has led to the labour of care occupying a shadowy place in the histories of both medicine and the economy. This article takes a microhistorical approach to shed new light on care in early modern England. Using depositions and other surviving records of a testamentary dispute heard in the Hereford diocesan church court in 1674–5, the article reconstructs the care received by a single, labouring man named Richard Howell. Focusing on forms of care that lay outside institutions, it unpicks the varieties of informal labour that society understood as care work in early modern England, including maintenance (provision of economic support for the sick, including lodging, food, and drink); physical or practical care (watching or attending the sick); and the emotional labour of care. The article challenges the idea that care work was simply undertaken by the family or carried out within a system of social obligation. It demonstrates that all forms of care in this pre-industrial society implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) held economic value, which could be leveraged as grounds for economic recompense in the early modern courts.

:Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700)

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Music as Political Practice: Evoking the Sounds of Power at the Early Modern Court

Music as Political Practice: Evoking the Sounds of Power at the Early Modern Court

The Fabric of Power: Political Histories of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Court

The Fabric of Power: Political Histories of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Court

K. J. Kesselring and Natalie Mears, eds. Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records. IHR Conference Series. London: University of London Press, 2021. Pp. 220. $55.00 (cloth).

K. J. Kesselring and Natalie Mears, eds. Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records. IHR Conference Series. London: University of London Press, 2021. Pp. 220. $55.00 (cloth).

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

The Representation of Royal Majesty in Ceremonies at the Early Modern Habsburg Courts

Understanding the court ceremonial of early modern times is one of the basic prerequisites for an understanding of the meaning of the existence of the institution of the imperial court, the hierarchical arrangement of the court as an organism and the ranking of its members, with the sovereign at their head. The present study therefore maps the development of research on the courts of the Habsburg emperors in the 16th-18th centuries from the perspective of Czech and Central European historiography. In the first part, the authors attempt to provide a general definition of ceremonial on the threshold of modern times. They devote special attention to the semantic significance of period terms associated with ceremonial, and note the contemporary typology of celebrations at the court of the sovereign. They go on to analyse the historiographic development of research into the imperial court and the ceremonies closely associated with it at the early modern courts of the Habsburgs, especially in the last two decades

Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England. Francisco Gómez Martos. Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge 14. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. vii + 120 pp. $160.

Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England. Francisco Gómez Martos. Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge 14. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. vii + 120 pp. $160.

Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe. By Andrew Hiscock

The week I began reading Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe, Russia invaded Ukraine. Those events made clear the timely, or, rather, depressingly timeless, nature of Andrew Hiscock’s analysis of how debates about war have shaped Europe’s international order. Hiscock possesses an insightful eye for the nuances of narratives about transnational violence and their complex relationships with literary texts—particularly Shakespeare’s history plays. His perspective is impressively broad, exploring how ideas about warfare have been repeated, re-formed, and interpreted in sources from England and the Continent from the seventeenth century to the present. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe proposes that the debates about “armed conflict as an instrument of state policy” were “articulated regularly in the playhouses and in early modern court culture”; in both, Hiscock argues, “the waging of hostilities was frequently linked with the overseeing of political continuity or change management, assertions of lordship and/or pressing crises responding to individual or collective insecurities” (3). While this is not a controversial claim, Hiscock builds upon it, showing how violence was deployed to reinforce claims of legitimate authority or conceal grounds of illegitimate authority, and arguing that the “enduring appetite for violence has come to fashion political discourse itself” (66).

Jones, Tanja L., ed. Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700)

Jones, Tanja L., ed. Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700)

This Bitch: Self-Fashioning and Social Media in an Adaptation of El perro del hortelano

This article examines how self-representational practices in the online sphere have been interpreted in an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s play El perro del hortelano (1618). This Bitch: Esta Sangre Quiero, written by playwright Adrienne Dawes and performed on Zoom as part of the University of Arkansas virtual ArkType Festival in January 2021, reimagines the role of honor and honra in the early modern court as analogous to the clout or status of influencers which dominant social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. The delicate balancing act that nobles in comedia must master to navigate between desire and reputation is reflected in Dawes’s adaptation in the juxtaposition of the private selves and the performative selves which influencers display for followers to consume. This article thus explores how this recent adaptation engages with performative identities/identity as performance as a natural through line between the social context of the original play and the self-fashioning practices of today’s rich and (internet) famous. In this version of Lope’s story, the countess Diana becomes a Pilates instructor and pansexual goddess, while the secretary Teodoro is reimagined as her talented, but unknown, social media manager. Although this adaptation was imagined for performance on a traditional theater stage, the social commentary became so much more pointed when examined through the meta-layer of online performance: as we examine the lives of people who mediate their identity via screens using the Zoom screen itself, the audience becomes complicit in the self-fashioning strategies of the characters.

Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ed. by Tanja L. Jones

Reviewed by: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ed. by Tanja L. Jones Catherine Powell-Warren Tanja L. Jones, ed., Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ( Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 213 pp., 33 ills. This is an exciting time to be a scholar of women artists and patrons of the early modern period. Long hindered by the lack of available archival material and surviving artworks (to say nothing of uneven institutional interest and ungenerous funding), art historians have determined that if women are to become part of an inclusive history of art, they must seize upon the "open pathways … to do art history differently," whether this means broadening the definition of art and/or employing updated or new methodologies (Elizabeth Sutton, Introduction to Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, ed. Elizabeth Sutton [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019], 23). With the collected essays in Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700), editor Tanja L. Jones has shown how rewarding doing so can be. In much of early modern Europe, the production of art was intimately linked to the courts. From Ferrara to London and Madrid to Dresden, rulers and assorted nobility commissioned and acquired art as a way to express their Aristotelian magnificence (a concept that imports philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions into spending, particularly relevant to the commission of art by the nobility and the ruling classes during the early modern period), their erudition and worldliness, and their wealth and power. To satisfy the needs of these courts, a large number of artists were called upon. The standard text in the study of court artists remains Martin Warnke's The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist (1985; translated into English in 1993). Warnke's book reflects the richness of artistic production at court, as well as the limits that have hindered the study of women as artistic and cultural producers. In the first place, (subject to a few exceptions) women were rarely formally named as painters or sculptors of the court and thus would not appear as such in the archives. In the second place, many of the works produced at the court (for example portraits, often executed in multiples) were unsigned. Importantly, Warnke focused his research on the production of the so-called fine arts, whereas women were often more active in other forms of artistic production. Thus, Warnke only refers to two women artists: Sofonisba Anguissola (1532?–1625) and Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807). Considering how Warnke frames the court structure, it is hardly surprising that so few women should have warranted inclusion in his discussion: "The court was a structure with many internal tensions, where princes, favourites, ministers, middle-class councillors, aristocratic courtiers, women, upstarts, dwarfs, fools and artisans all interacted" (Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], xvi; emphasis added). The result (not only of Warnke's work but of the scholarship that has followed in its tracks) has been a severe underestimation of the importance of early modern women in European courts with respect to the creation and production, but also the patronage, of art. The seven essays in this volume have turned these limitations into pathways for research, with interesting results. The book is intended as a companion to a large-scale digital humanities project entitled "Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts." The project, still in its [End Page 258] infancy, is hosted by the University of Alabama, where Tanja L. Jones, the editor of the volume, is coprincipal investigator together with Doris Sung. The stated objective of the project is to "encourage and support sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role Early Modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe and Asia (c. 1400–1750)" (https://adhc.lib.ua.edu/makers/s/makers/page/makers). In her introduction to the volume, Jones presents the project as a new direction in research and sets out the objectives of the project, the first phase of which is...

Anna of Denmark’s Pointed Elbow: Refiguring Rank and Gender in the Early Modern Court Portrait

This essay offers a new reading of the pose of Anna of Denmark in the hunting portrait, Anne of Denmark (1617) by Paul van Somer. Specifically, it attends to the significance of the queen’s pointed elbow as a marker revealing the precedence of her rank over her gender in the composition of her identity (Fig. 1).1 To evidence this precedence, I will retrace the figural patterns encoded in the imaging of women’s bodies, their elbows akimbo – types, allegories, and portraits – across media such as printed emblems, within paintings, and performances such as the courtly masque.2 These patterns established the norms and paradigms of this portrait’s visual cultural context, a body of images informed by discourses of state, theology, medicine, and natural philosophy, which in turn imprinted the practices of royal portraiture. As Maria H. Loh has observed, Renaissance ‘facial identity was a very nebulous...

Quantitative Approaches to Ottoman Fatwā Collections

In their joint essay, Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene make the case for “a pluralistic approach to the study of Islamic legal history,” through the lens of law and economics and other types of quantitative analysis. Regression analysis, they suggest, provides especially useful approaches suited to interdisciplinary studies of historical events. To illustrate, the authors describe the findings of their previous scholarship on Ottoman court records, for which they coded data on court petitions and were able to arrive at generalizable conclusions about access to early modern courts. Noting the uptick in digitized primary sources in the field, they predict an increase in Islamic legal scholarship that integrates quantitative analysis.

Introduction: Rank and Ritual in the Early Modern Court

In an essay entitled ‘Body, Brain, and Culture’, Victor Turner examined the question relating to the origin of human behaviour, asking whether it was genetically inherited, the result of social con...

Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos

Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos

Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos

Reviewed by: Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos Carl Austin Wise Francisco Gómez Martos. Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England. ROUTLEDGE, 2021. 128 PP. FRANCISCO GÓMEZ MARTOS takes a pan-European approach to analyzing the figure of the king’s favorite minister in the theatrical traditions of Spain, France, and England during the seventeenth century. This comparative method is a fitting lens for an installment in Routledge Press’s Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge Series, which aims to frame its scholarship from a globally connected perspective. Historians have long presented royal favoritism from a broader European position after the seminal studies of J.H. Elliott’s Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge UP, 1984) and Elliott and Laurence Brockliss’s subsequent The World of the Favourite (Yale UP, 1998), yet scholars of literature have largely remained siloed in their respective national literatures. Spain’s comedias de privanza, France’s drames des favoris, and England’s body of theater featuring Tudor and Stuart favorites all enjoy some degree of critical attention, yet, as Gómez Martos points out, there is a notable lack of literary scholarship that takes a comparative, pan-European perspective to favoritism plays as a single corpus. In adopting just such an approach, Staging Favorites examines how three select early modern plays from Spain, France, and England present royal favorites from the perspective of neo-Stoicism. Beyond its comparativism, perhaps the book’s most interesting contribution is the chapter on La paciencia en la fortuna (ca. 1615), an unattributed comedia that had never been published. Gómez Martos argues in another study that the two surviving manuscripts are copies of a play performed in Madrid in 1615, and he uses both the play’s production records and meter analysis to propose Lope de Vega as the author (“La paciencia en la fortuna: An Unprinted Play by Lope de Vega,” Arte nuevo: Revista de estudios áureos, vol. 6, 2019, pp. 57–89). After a brief introduction, chapter 1 gives a short overview of political favoritism in early modern Europe and discusses how court culture and literary patronage responded to the near absolute power over court life exerted by Philip III and Philip IV’s privados, the Duke of Lerma and the Count-Duke of Olivares; Louis XIII’s ministre Cardinal Richelieu; and James [End Page 107] II’s favorites, the Earl of Somerset and the Duke of Buckingham. Despite the enormous variety of plays about royal favorites and the lack of consensus among scholars on how to classify them, Gómez Martos proposes that this genre of plays is connected by a neo-Stoic understanding of kingship and royal favoritism. Developed in the writings of the Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), neo-Stoicism merged the classical philosophy of Seneca with Christian theology to propose the notion of how an ideal person, in this case the royal favorite, should behave. Chapter 2 looks at Spanish comedias de privanza, which emerged in the early seventeenth century when the newly crowned Philip III anointed the Duke of Lerma as his privado and gave him near king-like authority to rule in Philip’s absence. To seventeenth-century courtiers, Lerma’s rapid rise to power and unorthodox control over the monarchy strongly resembled Juan II’s medieval advisor Álvaro de Luna (ca. 1388–1453), who ruled Castile for decades before suffering a spectacular fall from power, imprisonment, and execution. Pulling from their own history of Juan II and Luna, Spanish writers saw royal favoritism as an unstable institution that could rise or fall without warning on the whims of the monarch. Damián Salucio del Poyo’s two-part La próspera fortuna and La adversa fortuna de Ruy López de Ávalos, and La privanza y caída de don Álvaro de Luna appeared in 1612 almost immediately after Lerma’s arrival in court and serve as the model for most of the privanza plays in the decades to follow. After discussing these well-known privanza plays, Gómez Martos...

‘Performing public piety:’ infanticide and reproductive agency in Reformation Spain

ABSTRACT This article focuses on infanticide prosecution in sixteenth-century Spain, and the judicial fate of women suspected of violating both criminal law and Christian precepts in the era of Tridentine reform. Through court records from the Kingdom of Navarre (annexed by the Castilian crown in 1515), the author explores how women on trial for the suspicious death of their infants co-opted language of Christian maternity and Catholic sacramental morality to craft their defense against prosecutorial allegations of murder and sacrilege. The article argues that accused infanticidal mothers used performative public piety and doctrinal ambiguity surrounding the post-mortem fate of the unbaptized to their legal advantage, not only to plead their innocence but also to assert their reproductive agency before the early modern Spanish court.