Early Modern Culture Research Articles

Introduction: Exile and Innovation☆

AbstractThe early modern period was an age marked by the forced migration and displacement of social groups and individuals around the world. Huguenots, conversos, Catholics, cavaliers, Jacobites, and French emigrés alike fled or were expelled from their homes and communities. Yet, exile is still usually considered only within the context of broader religious or political events by scholars working in sub‐fields rather than as a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right. Foregrounding displacement as a major facet of early modern society and culture, this special issue explores the experience, perception, and poetics of exile from 1500 to 1800 through the prism of innovation. It encompasses displaced individuals and communities, as well as writings that treat the theme of exile, to consider how forced migration shaped the social, cultural, political, and intellectual contours of the era – and thus led to innovative practices and ideas.

The Two Pierides: Magpies and Imitative Poetics in Early Modern England

Abstract: Since antiquity, magpies have been known for their chattering call and their uncanny ability to mimic other sounds, including human speech. On this basis, the bird has by turns been maligned as a gossip, an impostor, and a hypocrite—and celebrated as an imitator. These opposed perspectives mutually inform influential accounts of the magpie, such as Ovid’s tale of the Pierides, in which the eloquent and ambitious daughters of King Pieros, who are equal in number to and even share names with the Muses, are turned into magpies after challenging the Muses to a singing contest and losing. In the early modern period, this ambivalent legacy worked against polemicists who sought to establish a clear distinction between chatter and speech through the invocation of the magpie. The black-and-white bird testified with equal conviction on either side of debates over gender, politics, and religion. Poets and critics faced a similar challenge in distinguishing poets from “pie-poets,” for the magpie spoke profoundly both to the presumption and to the transcendent promise of poetry as described by its most idealistic advocates. Tracking the magpie through early modern culture broadens our sense of the scope of early modern poetics, allowing us to appreciate how a range of writers understood imitation and how poets themselves felt about their attempts to participate in beauty through the imitation of nature and art.

‘[S]he-Mercury’: Broadening Female Neighbourly Networks in The Merry Wives of Windsor

ABSTRACT Recent critical attention to The Merry Wives of Windsor has emphasised the feminist impulse of the play, stressing the way it celebrates female gossip networks. Important as they are, those studies, however, privilege the gossip network between the two prosperous, middling-sorts wives of the title, in the process marginalising the many working women the play depicts as members of a wider female neighbourly network and occluding the crucial roles they play in the success of the wives’ plots. When critics do attempt to attend to a wider female network, they often link the wives to the (off-stage) queen, thus further isolating them from their immediate neighbourly interactions. This article redresses this imbalance by showing that female neighbourly networks in the play, as they were in early modern culture, are much broader and socially diverse than has hitherto been acknowledged. Challenging dominant critical readings of Mistress Quickly as a garrulous, busybody, and drawing on the findings of social historians’ recent research into the lived experiences of early modern female servants, I argue that she is positioned in the play as a social actor, an active participant in her neighbourhood, an ingenious manipulator, and a significant member of the local female networks.

Artifice and animality in The Tempest: Imagining Caliban

The article discusses William Shakespeare's Caliban in the context of early modern knowledge culture and its representation of the ‘monstrous’ in wonder cabinets and works of natural history. According to Stephano, Caliban is ‘a present for any emperor’ (2.2.69). This connects him to the real-life case of Pedro Gonsalvus, who became just such a ‘present’ given to the French king in 1547. His face and body overgrown with hair, Gonsalvus and subsequently his equally hirsute children became marvels at several European courts. Their case shows the same intermingling of artifice and animality that went into the creation of Caliban and shaped his afterlife in the theatre.

‘The finny subject of the sea’: Thaisa's pregnant embodiment and (non)maternal identity in Pericles

Inspired by Stacy Alaimo's notion of transcorporality, this article reconsiders multivalent aquatic womb imagery, Thaisa's pregnant embodiment and her (non)maternal identity in Pericles. As argued, the play offers an inconsistent portrayal of pregnancy and maternity. Thaisa's pregnant body – a fluid aquatic economy – is prominently displayed onstage, while her labour described by Gower and Pericles remains the play's climax. Yet, the birth at sea and Thaisa's ‘terrible childbed’ communicate anxieties over maternal powers. Neither her maternal identity nor her maternal authority takes shape in the play, signalling early modern culture's unease with pregnant bodies that do not follow normative, patriarchal scripts.

The Ceremony of Receiving Ambassadresses at the Russian Court of the Eighteenth Century

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European system of international relations underwent significant changes, marked by the institutional development of diplomatic services and the establishment of more coherent diplomatic ceremonials. Resident embassies became common, introducing the presence of female relatives of diplomats who actively participated in the life of the diplomatic corps. The growing presence of ambassadresses played a transformative role in early modern diplomatic culture, contributing to the development of gendered diplomatic ceremonials. Drawing on relevant approaches to the study of the ‘new diplomatic history’ and using archival material from the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, this article examines the diplomatic ceremonial of ambassadorial spouses at the eighteenth-century Russian court. It examines the presentation of ambassadors’ wives at court, the implementation of protocol, and issues of etiquette that became sources of contention between ‘ambassadresses’ and the St Petersburg court, as well as methods of conflict resolution. The study of the reception ceremony for ‘foreign ladies’ reveals that, although it was governed by legal norms, it depended heavily on the Russian monarch’s personal attitude towards the ambassador and ambassadress, as well as the country they represented.

Transculturality of Virtue in the Early Modern Mediterranean

This article approaches the transculturality of virtue ethics in early modern Mediterranean intellectual culture by focusing on the case study of Florentine-Ottoman relations during the reign of Sultan Mehmed II. It examines how both entities, though drawing from different intellectual traditions and interpretations of virtue, engaged in a constructive dialogic process that facilitated diplomatic and cultural exchanges. To Florentine humanists, using virtue ethics with the Ottoman court allowed the framing of political actions as ethical conduct. To the Ottomans, it permitted an intellectual integration of the Florentines into the nizam-ı alem. This reveals how Mediterranean actors developed deep intellectual structures, which endowed their actions and encounters with culturally specific yet transculturally significant meanings. As an analytical concept, I argue, transculturality is not about portraying an overly rosy picture; it is a process that helps us better understand the multidimensionality of Mediterranean intellectual culture without imposing cultural boundaries where none exist.

Laughing at Hypocrisy: The Turncoats (1711), Visual Culture and Dissent in Early Eighteenth-Century England

This article considers The Turncoats (1711), an anti-Dissent graphic satire published after the Tory victory in the 1710 General Election. The print ridiculed the hypocrisy of those Dissenters who abandoned their principles and conformed to the Church of England after that election, and pointed to the pervasiveness of religious hypocrisy in early eighteenth-century England more generally. This article contextualizes the print within the tense religious and political rivalries that developed after the 1688 Revolution and the trial of Henry Sacheverell. The Turncoats’ ridicule resonated because it built on older traditions of stereotypes in anti-popery and anti-puritanism, which used mockery to attack those perceived to be hypocrites. Mockery is analyzed by considering how early modern culture understood laughter. It is argued that ridicule in The Turncoats expressed superiority over hypocrites by subjecting them to contempt and provided relief from anxieties about the prevalence of hypocrisy during the rage of parties.

The place of mirrors in the domestic culture of sixteenth-century Bruges

ABSTRACT The sixteenth century saw an exponential increase in the number and the diversity of objects people surrounded themselves with. Some objects have already been widely discussed, while others, like mirrors, remain hidden from scholarly view. The mirror was widely popular in the more wealthy households of cities like Bruges, but it was also frequently discussed and used in moralistic writings and paintings as a metaphor for a wide range of very different symbolic meanings. According to literature, however, a transition took place during this period from the mirror being a tool for contemplation and private devotion, to the mirror being used as a luxury item. Moreover, the literature argues, this transition also reflected a large-scale social and cultural change towards secularisation, humanism and emerging subjectivity. In this article, however, I argue that, especially in the Bruges context, reality - as is often the case – was much more layered than that. Indeed, their increasing popularity in the sixteenth century should be explained both by a changing consumer culture, and by the mirror's continued connection with spirituality and private devotion. The resulting new insights are of great importance for our understanding of early modern daily life and material culture.

Jesuit Astrology: Prognostication and Science in Early Modern Culture, written by Luís Campos Ribeiro

Jesuit Astrology: Prognostication and Science in Early Modern Culture, written by Luís Campos Ribeiro

Blasted, Bound, and Bald: the Abject Properties of Witch Hair

The witch’s blasted hair in Early Modern visual culture is moving and evolving. Her hair is untamable, animated by a wind and a force unknowable to the viewer. The artists who captured this “blasted” hair in the 16th century, including Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, and Albrecht Dürer, found themselves working in opposition to what appears, at first glance, a formidable “other:” women’s agency and sexuality, frozen in bodily form as strands of hair. Little research has been dedicated to an earnest analysis of the witch’s amorphous hair so this paper consists primarily of original research and the application of philosophical and anthropological theory. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is a key tenet of this paper’s central argument. The witch is not an “other” directly opposed to a mainstream, she is a third intermediary thing: Kristeva’s “abject.” She is a personification of the skin on the surface of sour milk, instilling disgust in the potential consumer. She is the abject precisely because she is embedded in the object; her hair is the most explicit vehicle for this argument. Friedrich Speevon Langenfield’s accounts of forced hair removal and contemporary literature from Raymond Firth, Barbara Baert, and E.R. Leach inform this reading of witch hair as the abject. This paper concludes that the visual translation of blasted hair is an attempt to remove it and its female sexual connotation from the imagination to a more accessible visual medium. The artist’s renderings are meant to turn the abject into an easily digestible object, a complete “other.”

Inventing Ancestors and Limited Empiricism in Chosŏn Korea: A Case of the Kigye Yu Lineage

AbstractThis paper investigates how the members of the Kigye Yu lineage imagined and invented their ancestral roots during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) and how such a pursuit of ancestral origins led to subsequent developments in genealogical records. As early as the fifteenth century, Chosŏn elites began to show interests in genealogy that included identifying remote ancestors from ancient times for various political, social, and cultural reasons. From the seventeenth century, the transformation of kinship organization in line with the Confucian ideal of patriliny and elites’ competition for power and prestige intensified genealogical consciousness. Elites became heavily invested in searching for ancestral origins in the form of their lineages’ founders and their tombs. While claiming to rely on documentary and physical evidence, elites often deviated from their professed empiricism and adopted evidence from dubious sources such as oral testimonies and geomancy to rationalize invented ancestral roots. Such pliable approaches, often observed in other early modern cultures such as late imperial China and Europe, opened a floodgate of lineages glorifying their ancestry by pushing their origins back even to mythical founders of ancient Korean and Chinese kingdoms, and adorning their lineages with invented heroes. At the same time, loopholes and blank spots in genealogies enabled quasi- and nonelites to become a member of prominent lineages by grafting their names onto their family trees.

“guhte Nacht du liebſter Ort”

Abstract The night plays an important role in Sibylla Schwarz’ self-presentation as a female poet. On the one hand, she expresses her poetic skills by using the night as a literary motif which she combines with metaphors of farewell and death. On the other hand, she presents the night as the time and place of the creation of her poetry, thereby marking it as a secondary activity accepted within the gender discourse of early modern culture. Schwarz’ use of the motif of the night vividly illustrates the interplay of convention, strategy and lifeworld reference that is characteristic of her poetry.

“Free Passage” for the “King's True Liegemen”: The Meaning of Free Trade in a Corporate Age, 1555–1624

Abstract Scholars of late have come to reevaluate and appreciate the achievements of merchant companies that fostered commercial networks and established new global trade routes. This research would seem to lend support to historians who have characterized early seventeenth-century calls for “free trade” as mere sloganeering driven by provincial merchants suspicious of the London-dominated corporations. This article challenges this view and argues that free trade ideas had deep roots in early modern political culture. It traces the origins of these ideas to protests in the sixteenth century and shows how a broad coalition of interests drew upon ideas of property rights and the ancient constitution to challenge the new companies. So compelling were free trade arguments that they became a commonplace in the economic debates of an emerging public sphere. A reconsideration of the free trade campaign that is attentive to interactions and negotiations between the Privy Council, Parliament, and the public highlights the ability of the early modern state before the 1630s to readjust the political economy of the commonwealth.

Property, Propriety, and Publicity: A Different Look at Pope v. Curll (1741)

The seminal copyright case of Pope v. Curll is typically cited by lawyers as the case which, for the first time in Anglo-American law, disassociated the physical copy of a literary work from its metaphysical content. A decades-long enmity between the author Alexander Pope and printer Edmund Curll culminated in Pope’s suit against Curll for having printed stolen personal letters. While not disputing traditional understandings of Pope v. Curll, this article offers an additional, alternative reading of the arguments made by Pope in the case. The litigation is situated within the context of early modern celebrity culture to argue that Pope was pursuing property rights on three levels, not simply the two typically recognized. Pope sought property rights to the physical material of the purloined letters and for property rights in the literary content of the letters, but also for the property right in his own image-making. This third argument is essentially the modern equivalent of publicity rights – a twentieth-century quasi-intellectual property right used to protect names, images, and likenesses. This article thus reads modern publicity rights jurisprudence as having deeper roots than previously discussed. Pope v. Curll represents a road not taken in the history of copyright law.

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

David A. Frick (1955–2022) i jego badania staropolskie

The paper is devoted to David Allan Frick, an American scholar, translator, and professor at the University of Berkeley. The author briefly presents the biography of Frick and analyses his books, focusing on Frick’s research on early modern Polish literature and culture.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture ed. by Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Caroline Egan (review)

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture ed. by Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Caroline Egan (review)

Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture. Elizabeth R. Williamson. Material Readings in Early Modern Culture Series. Routledge: New York-London, 2021, 289 p.

Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture. Elizabeth R. Williamson. Material Readings in Early Modern Culture Series. Routledge: New York-London, 2021, 289 p.

Gentry Rhetoric: Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community. Daniel Ellis. Early Modern Cultural Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 234 pp. $65.

Gentry Rhetoric: Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community. Daniel Ellis. Early Modern Cultural Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 234 pp. $65.