Early Modern Culture Research Articles

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice. Katherine Ibbett and Kristine Steenbergh, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xii + 306 pp. $99.99.

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice. Katherine Ibbett and Kristine Steenbergh, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xii + 306 pp. $99.99.

Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750 by Nicole Howard

Reviewed by: Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750 by Nicole Howard Rienk Vermij (bio) Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750 By Nicole Howard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 218. The invention of the printing press has generally been described as an unambiguous boon for the development of early science and scholarship. Scholars themselves, however, were often less sure about the benefits of the new invention. A scholarly work typically was not written for all and sundry, but printing meant that it went public. This introduced the possibility of corrupt editions and misunderstanding, thereby damaging the author's reputation. In Loath to Print, Nicole Howard investigates how scientists developed various mechanisms to keep control of their work in the age of print. Some of these were purely literary. Prefaces and dedications could bring a work to the attention of appropriate readers and keep away inappropriate ones. In some cases, editors formed a necessary intermediary between a reluctant author and the public. Probably the most interesting chapter, certainly for readers of this journal, is the fourth one. Here, Howard describes how some scientists attempted to take the whole printing process into their own hands, either by running a complete printshop, as in the well-known cases of Tycho and Hevelius, or by inventing their own alternative printing or reproduction techniques, fit only for limited print runs of short texts and images. In an interesting move, Howard discusses the cases of John Evelyn, William Petty, and Christiaan Huygens, placing these scientists' interest in etching and related techniques in the context of the concerns about authorial control. It does not appear, however, that these scholars made more than incidental use of such techniques, and their work certainly did not overturn the regime of commercial publication, as Howard herself admits. Howard illustrates her book with many examples from different countries and contexts. Somewhat disappointingly, however, she hardly refers to non-English-language historiography. Recent work by Karl Enenkel, for [End Page 258] instance, could have further strengthened her case. People familiar with the period will not really be surprised by her findings, but it is a clear and nuanced overview of an aspect of early modern print culture that is not always given sufficient consideration. Rienk Vermij Rienk Vermij is a professor in the Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. His most recent book is Thinking on Earthquakes in Early Modern Europe: Firm Beliefs on Shaky Ground (Routledge, 2021). Copyright © 2023 Society for the History of Technology

Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of St. Peter

This paper explores conflations of martyrdom, spectatorship, and image theory in Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601). It argues that Caravaggio employs an “iconic” visual formula as a response to the pressures of a post-Tridentine poetics. Through these strategies, an iconography of immediacy and presence is paired with a sacrificial subject-matter. This merging united witness and visual experience in the shape of the sacred image. Martyrdom, as both a historical and representational phenomenon of early modern sociality and culture, invoked the act of spectatorship. In connecting the Crucifixion of St. Peter with the cultural and aesthetic paradigms of post-Tridentine Italy, the article argues that Caravaggio’s image re-imagines the codes of iconic repre­sentation. While not a novel academic context for Caravaggio scholarship, I will read this image less as the expression of stylistic tensions in the Roman artworld than as the result of overlapping frameworks—martyrdom, Petrine iconography, and a Counter-Reformation aesthetic. Reenergized as part of the visual rhetoric of Tridentine politics, the icon reflected a new propensity for paleochristian cultural revival. Discussing both the contextual pressures of this new aesthetic regime as well as intertwining it with the increasing presence of Catholic image treatises, the article suggests an “iconic” space for reading Caravaggio’s Crucifixion. This “iconic” framework is built into the charged discourse surrounding the image itself.

Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World. Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards, eds. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xiv + 398 pp. $75.

Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World. Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards, eds. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xiv + 398 pp. $75. - Volume 76 Issue 1

The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making. Katie Barclay and Bronwyn Reddan, eds. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 67. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. x + 250 pp. €29.95.

The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making. Katie Barclay and Bronwyn Reddan, eds. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 67. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. x + 250 pp. €29.95.

My Encounter with Early Modern Ukraine

DOI: 10.47632/2786-717X-2022-1-77-88 УДК 94(=161.2)(71)“19/20”(092) Як цитувати: Zenon Kohut, My Encounter with Early Modern Ukraine, Ukrainian Historical Review / Український історичний огляд, I | 2022, 77-88. Zenon Kohut My Encounter with Early Modern Ukraine In this article Canadian historian reflects on his intellectual biography and on the changes in the field of early modern Ukrainian history during the last fifty years. He emphasizes the role of academic communities of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University in his formation as a historian of early modern Ukraine. His affiliation with the Ukrainian chairs at Harvard and intellectual guidance of Oleksander Ohloblyn and Omeljan Pritsak played an especially important role in this regard. Having completed a thesis on the abolition of the Hetmanate’s autonomy in the late eighteenth-century Russia Empire, in the early 1990s he became a director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies where in cooperation with Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy he founded an informal laboratory of early modern Ukrainian history. Zenon Kohut’s research in the 1990s and 2000s has been focused on the Russo-Ukrainian unity myth on the one hand and on the preconditions of the Ukrainian distinctiveness in the early modern period – on the other. It led him to the examination of the early modern Ukrainian history writing and identity-building. He was one of the first who demonstrated Ukrainian contribution to the emergence of the “traditional scheme of Russian history” – an imperial narrative in which Ukrainians and Russians are treated as offshoots of the same people sharing a common historical legacy, a common Orthodox faith, and, therefore, a common national destiny. Kohut’s studies of the early modern Ukrainian historiography and political thought focused on the evolution of such concepts as fatherland and nation. His pioneering works on the emergence and evolution of the Little-Russian identity in the Hetmanate conceptualized these developments as an important stage in the early modern Ukrainian nation-building. The article concludes with the presentation of Kohut’s ongoing project – a monograph on the political culture of Cossack Ukraine from 1569 to 1714 – which aims to synthesize his semicentennial research into the early modern Ukrainian history. References Chynczewska-Hennel Teresa. Świadomość narodowa szlachty ukraińskiej i kozaczyzny od schyłku XVI do połowy XVII w. Warsaw 1985. [In Polish.] Gat Azar. Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. Cambridge 2012. Hen-Konarski Tomasz. No Longer Just Peasants and Priests: The Most Recent Studies on Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Ukraine // European History Quarterly 45/4 (2015) 727–728. Kappeler Andreas. The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. Abingdon 2013. Kas’ianov Heorhiy. Teorii natsii ta natsionalizmu. Kyiv 1999. [In Ukrainian.] Kohut E. Zenon. Korinnia identychnosti: studii z rann'omodernoi ta modernoi istorii Ukrainy. Kyiv 2004. [In Ukrainian.] Kohut E. Zenon. Making Ukraine: Studies on Political Culture, Historical Narrative, and Identity. Toronto 2010. [In Ukrainian.] Kohut E. Zenon. Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s – 1830s. Cambridge 1988. [In Ukrainian.] Кohut E. Zenon. The Question of Russo-Ukrainian Unity and Ukrainian Distinctiveness in Early Modern Ukrainian Thought and Culture // Culture, Nation, and Identity. The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600–1945) / ed. A. Kappeler et al. Edmonton – Toronto 2003, p. 57–86. Portnov Andrii et al. Whose Language Do We Speak? Some Reflections on the Master Narrative of Ukrainian History Writing // Ab Imperio 4 (2020) 88–129. Yakovenko Natalia. Dzerkala identychnosti: doslidzhennia z istorii uiavlen’ ta idei v Ukraini XVI – pochatku XVIII stolittia. Kyiv 2012. [In Ukrainian.] Yakovenko Natalia. Paralel’nyi svit: doslidzhennia z istorii uiavlen’ ta idei v Ukraini XVI–XVII st. Kyiv 2002. [In Ukrainian.] Yakovenko Natalia. Ukrains’ka shliakhta z kintsia XIV do seredyny XVII st. Volyn’ i Tsentral’na Ukraina. Kyiv 2008. [In Ukrainian.]

Popular Song Topics in the Dutch Republic

This article investigates popular topics and topical fluctuations in a diachronic corpus of 43,772 Dutch songs, all written between 1550 and 1750, contained within the Dutch Song Database. Computational methods such as topic modelling are used to analyse the relationship between topical changes and cultural-historical developments. Two cultural trends are used as case studies: the role of Petrarchism, and the articulation of a patriotic identity in early modern Dutch song culture. Furthermore, this data-driven approach reveals how subcategories can be defined within the existing but incomplete genre classification in the song collection. The results obtained contribute to a better understanding of the richness of the Dutch Song Database, and will facilitate the use of the song collection by future users.

Anglo-Latin macaronic verse in early modern England: A new survey of manuscript evidence

Latin-vernacular macaronic verse is a distinctive feature of early modern literary culture across Europe. Scholarship has, however, focused upon Italian examples; the production of such verse in England has been particularly little studied, with existing analyses of Anglo-Latin macaronic based on a very small corpus of printed poems from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries only. This survey of previously unconsidered manuscript evidence demonstrates the production of Anglo-Latin macaronic verse of many kinds in early modern England, at least from the 1550s onwards, including new examples of both ‘morphological’ macaronic verse (in which a Latin poem contains some English words inflected as if they were Latin) and ‘simple’ macaronic (comprising various other kinds of language mixture). The article includes new evidence for the knowledge of Italian macaronic poetry in sixteenth-century England; for evolving trends in the typical uses of Anglo-Latin macaronic—from ad hominem satire in the earliest periods to more generally humourous or topical verse in the seventeenth century; on the use of rhyme and borrowings from other languages (including Greek, French and Italian) in Anglo-Latin macaronic; and for the importance of manuscript sources especially for assessing the prevalence of relatively ‘popular’ and informal types of bilingual literature, such as macaronic verse.

Review of Maja Bondestam, ed., Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture: Concepts of Monstrosity before the Advent of the Normal.

Review of Maja Bondestam, ed., Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture: Concepts of Monstrosity before the Advent of the Normal.

Shakespeare and Happiness. By Kathleen French

This book contributes significantly to the field of Shakespeare and the emotions, a growing area of scholarly interest over the last two decades. It began with studies of the body and the influence of Galenic physiology, such as Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999), Gail Kern Paster’s Humoring the Body (2004), and Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson’s Reading the Early Modern Passions (2004). French, like many engaged with the subject, notes the limitations of using humoral theory exclusively as means of inquiry. Her remedy is to incorporate Aristotelianism, early modern theology, feminism, and twenty-first century positive psychology into her approach. The result is a wide-ranging and multidisciplinary inquiry into the nature of an emotion—happiness—that is both “found” and “lost” in Shakespeare’s plays. Through this focus, French illuminates the important role that women have played in shaping the ethical and social conditions by which happiness can be understood, not only in early modern culture, but in our own.

Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. By Patricia Parker

Addressing a BBC radio audience in 1937, Virginia Woolf imagined words as “the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.” They live “variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together.”1 What Woolf celebrates about language—their strange lives and unpredictable movements, their unexpected and promiscuous relations—Patricia Parker has devoted her distinguished career to interrogating. By honing a feminist philological practice attuned to the intersections of language, class, gender, sexuality, and race, Parker illuminates how single words and their discursive networks firm up or challenge hierarchies of self and other in early modern English culture. This book requires and rewards slow reading. Throughout six chapters, it advances an “experiment in interconnection” (28) that offers literary and cultural critics a “strategy of reading” (29) the relations between words and their discursive networks. Working across historical periods, geographies, discourses, and languages, Parker traces how single words range far afield to mate, drawing other terms into the orbit of the self-same in subtle, queer, and preposterous ways. As one has come to expect from Parker, delight is in the details. Highly filigreed arguments organized around distinct Shakespeare plays—Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Othello, and Cymbeline—demonstrate how single words in multiple forms (verbs, nouns, prepositions, proper and place names), as well as the discursive networks in which they circulate, illuminate contexts, subtexts, and complexities that have been critically “marginalized or have gone unnoticed by [the plays’] editors and critics” (1). Parker’s word-hoard comprises an expansive range of unexpected terms: preposterous, awkward, (in)continence, supposition, construing, occupation, cambio, cashier(ing), Ganymede, Low Countries, Brabant, quince, breeches, part, and latter ends, among others. Tracing how such words—as well as phonemes, sounds, and orthographic variants—participate in the broader scope of an early modern English cultural semantics requires Parker to attend to plays as well as to dictionaries, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Protestant polemics, new theories of military science, eye-witness accounts of military campaigns, works on grammar and orthography, conduct books, marriage manuals, accounting and bookkeeping manuals, the visual and textual aspects of emblem books, non-Shakespearean drama, Histories, and more.

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).

Wilde, Cornelia, and Wolfram R. Keller, eds. Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains: Transformations of Music in Early Modern Culture between Sensibility and Abstraction

Wilde, Cornelia, and Wolfram R. Keller, eds. Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains: Transformations of Music in Early Modern Culture between Sensibility and Abstraction

Spatial and Scalar Multitudes: Thinking with World, Globe, and Planet

Abstract: "Spatial and Scalar Multitudes: Thinking with World, Globe, and Planet" offers a theoretical framework and overview of the themed issue "World, Globe, Planet." This themed issue considers the recourse to macroscopic categories in early modern cultures and argues for their value as a resource for understanding present-day invocations of large-scale categories in conversations about the global, globalization, and geopolitics, on the one hand, and in conversations about the planetary, the environmental, and the Anthropocene, on the other. The tensions between such approaches encourage also a reconsideration of scale, interconnection, universality, modernity, cosmopolitanism, and other foundational concepts. Pieces in the collection, both scholarly and pedagogical, take up other keywords and points of fracture around totality, horizon, collectivity, and sphere.

Re-reading the acclamation of John IV of Portugal in Cochin 1641 as urban spectacle and literary text

The primary focus of this study is Agostinho de Almeida Gato’s extensive account of the celebrations held for the acclamation of John IV of Portugal in 1641 in Cochin. Drawing on studies of the Iberian monarchies as polycentric spaces, intellectual culture in the Estado da Índia and the historiography of early modern Iberian festival culture Gato’s text is analysed as both a testimony to the spectacle that was staged in Cochin and a text addressed to John IV in Portugal. Concerning the history of Cochin, and Portuguese India more broadly, it is argued that the spectacle of kingship staged by the festivities sought to underscore the significance of the oath of loyalty sworn by the population of Portuguese Cochin and address the interweaving of the concerns of the imperial, colonial and indigenous elites. Furthermore, consideration is given to how Gato’s account served as a form of a petition to the king.

Transgender Reassessments of the Cross-Dressed Page in Shakespeare, Philaster, and The Honest Man’s Fortune

A boy page is in love with his master. One version of this story should be familiar: shipwrecked in a strange land, Viola cross-dresses as the eunuch page boy “Cesario” so that she might serve Lord Orsino, who enlists her to woo Lady Olivia. Matters are complicated when Cesario falls in love with Orsino and Olivia with Cesario, but all plan to be married to appropriate heterosexual partners in the end.1 The story is retold less than a decade later in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Philaster; or, Love Lies A-Bleeding (1608–1610).2 Inspired by Viola’s escapades, this play features the boy page Bellario, whose master, Philaster, employs him to convey romantic messages to his fiancée, Arethusa. Bellario is besotted with his master and at the end of the play is revealed (to both characters and audience) as the girl Euphrasia.3 A few years later, in The Honest Man’s Fortune, the boy page Veramour delivers messages from his master, Lord Montague, to the Lady Lamira.4 Veramour adores his master and is suspected to be a girl in disguise who has been inspired by “two or three Plays” to dress as a boy (5.1, sig. Xxx2r). Eventually Veramour’s clothing is searched and he is declared to have been a boy all along. Each page presents a challenge to conventional scholarly understandings of the relationship between gender and embodiment in early modern culture. This article presents a critical reassessment of the cross-dressed page through the lens of transgender theory, focusing on its evolution through Viola, Bellario, and Veramour. It challenges the supposed “real” material body of the boy actor; it analyzes the importance of class, age, and imitation to transmasculinity; and it investigates the violences to which gender-divergent characters are subject, arguing for reading modern and early modern gender divergence comparatively. Drawing on trans theory, this article discusses the “real” and its relationship to deception, how imitation constitutes gender, the prosthetic materiality of gender, and the role of narrativization in constructing gender. Finally, in identifying gender divergence in characters who are never outed, it seeks to define early trans identities beyond violence and exposure.

:Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater

:<i>Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater</i>

Book Review: Rachida Chih, Sufism in Ottoman Egypt: Circulation, Renewal and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge 2020.

The study of Ottoman Sufism has grown exponentially in recent years, but has tended to focus more on the Balkan or Anatolian contexts than those of the Arab provinces, leaving broad gaps in our understanding of the religious history of the Arab provinces after the sixteenth century. Rachida Chih’s study of the history of Sufism in Ottoman Egypt is, for this reason alone, a welcome intervention in the historiography of early modern Ottoman society and culture. However, it is also a critical intervention into a historiography that has often portrayed the Ottoman era as a period of religious sclerosis and decline for Egypt and the Maghreb. To replace this outdated trope, she uncovers a transformational shift in Egyptian Sufism that should be recognized as one of the most consequential since the foundation of its earliest Sufi movements in the medieval period of the twelfth and thirteenth century.

Maja Bondestam, ed. Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture: Concepts of Monstrosity before the Advent of the Normal. Monsters and Marvels: Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds 1. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. Pp. 201. $105.00 (cloth).

Maja Bondestam, ed. Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture: Concepts of Monstrosity before the Advent of the Normal. Monsters and Marvels: Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds 1. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. Pp. 201. $105.00 (cloth). - Volume 61 Issue 4

Customs From the Other Shore

Studies on early modern legal culture increasingly focus attention on the (limited) agency of “users” or “consumers” of justice, and the strategies devised by litigants and witnesses in relationship to the institutional codes of the legal system. Besides drawing the Dutch colonial empire into the debates, this article explicitly wants to shift attention away from criminal procedures, and highlight the neglected potential of interrogations and cross-examinations in civil suits to study the concept of Justitznutzung. Eighteenth-century colonial Sri Lanka will serve as a cross-cultural legal laboratory where litigants negotiated uncodified Sinhalese, Tamil and “Moorish” laws with Roman-Dutch law. Drawing on information from over 300 civil cases in VOC courts, four influential manuals of Roman-Dutch procedural law and seven transcripts of civil interrogations and cross-examinations, this article explores how the translation of Roman-Dutch codified law into the plural legal context of littoral Sri Lanka created a legal grey area that offered considerable opportunities for litigants and their legal representatives, with interrogations and cross-examinations as the perfect playground to devise a winning legal strategy.