Early Modern Culture Research Articles

Globalizing early modern central and eastern European art : a discussion forum

The following roundtable is the result of a conversation between six scholars who met in the summer of 2021 to share their views on the challenges and opportunities associated with tracing and popularizing central and eastern Europe’s global and transcultural histories with a focus on early modern art and material culture. The topics addressed include the long tradition of studying art from a global perspective in the region, groups of objects ripe for reinterpretation, preferred methodologies, and the unique contributions scholars of the region are poised to make to the global turn.

Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity by Wei Yu Wayne Tan

Reviewed by: Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity by Wei Yu Wayne Tan Gerald Groemer Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity. By Wei Yu Wayne Tan. University of Michigan Press, 2022. 266 pages. ISBN: 9780472075485 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). It will surprise few readers of this journal to hear that men and women with visual disabilities played a major role in the development of early modern Japanese culture. Visually impaired men recited Tale of the Heike and other narratives (as they had since medieval times); composed the bulk of the koto repertory; created countless songs with shamisen accompaniment; served as acupuncturists, masseurs, moneylenders, and scholars; and engaged in innumerable other professions. Especially in western and southern provinces, visually disabled biwa-playing priests or monks (mōsō) cultivated and performed their own genres of narrative and song. Visually disabled women worked as musicians (goze), folk-religious healers, and shamans and created and performed a variety of sung and narrative genres that they diffused to every region of the land. Excellent Japanese-language studies of the blind men's guild (tōdō), of goze and mōsō organizations, and of the arts and activities of visually disabled individuals have been available for decades. In Western languages, scholars including Susan Matisoff, Ingrid Fritsch, Hugh de Ferranti, Alison Tokita, Maren Ehlers, and myself have published many papers, book chapters, and monographs on the subject. In the study under review, based on a 2015 dissertation submitted to Harvard University, Wei Yu Wayne Tan sets out to present a more complete picture of visual disability in early modern Japan. This is a laudable effort, and several chapters of the book shed welcome light on regions that have not yet been adequately illuminated in Western-language research. [End Page 334] But first, who is to count as the subject of a book titled Blind in Early Modern Japan? Who in Edo-period Japan was considered blind? This cannot be determined outside of its specific historical and cultural context and requires examining the society within which the language and criteria for identification and categorization are situated. Tan is of course aware of this and assures the reader that his use of the term "blind people" foregrounds "the experience and identity of blind people and also reflects the references in historical sources" (p. xiv). Yet since Edo-period Japanese did not use English, the notion that certain persons considered themselves "blind people" thanks to their experience and self-identification as "blind people" is either false or tautological. Early modern Japanese with visual disabilities did not, in truth, identify or experience themselves as "blind people" at all. Rather, they described themselves as zatō, kengyō, goze, oyakata, zamoto, or the like when they spoke of their attributed social status or their position in an occupational collective; as mekura (dark-eyed—today a discriminatory term), me ga warui (eyes are bad), me ga mienai (eyes cannot see), or the like when explaining their impairment or disability; as "masseur" or "biwa player" when referring to their occupation; as "father" or "son" when relating their family situation; or as "poor" or "wealthy" when considering their economic position in society. This clutter of categories and self-identifications obviously presents a problem for a writer wishing to represent what being blind in early modern Japan was all about, and Tan wisely recognizes that "blind people," however defined, constitutes a crowd far too large and heterogeneous to be adequately covered in one monograph. Instead of seeking to include anyone and everyone who could be counted as somehow visually impaired, Tan focuses on the largely subjective claim of "disabled identity" (p. 5) and on the notion of "status identity," which seeks to combine the objectivity of social status—something Tan too simplistically maintains was "defined by occupation" (p. 7)—with a notion of identity that hovers between a social attribution and an individual choice. The two concepts are interrelated because Tan defines blind status identity as a "disabled identity tied to membership in the Kyoto guild" (p. 9). "Blind people" in early modern Japan cannot, however, be defined on the basis of guild membership, because such membership was...

Древнерусская каллиграфия в контексте проблемы когнитивных трансформаций (некоторые замечания о монокондильных композициях раннего Нового Времени)

The object of our research is the process of shaping of the Early Modern person in the culture of Old Rus. The research is focused on technological turning points which are viewed basing on Old Russian writing and book culture. Any substantial change in technology is not only important as such, but also as an element of cognitive transformation. The latter consists in a systematic change of people’s skills and habits which eventually entails the society’s transition to new models, styles and strategies of thought, and world outlook. The cognitive transformation is the result of changes in skills and habits. Together they form psychological and psychophysiological contents of such transitions, shaping a ‘new’ person for a new epoch. The changes in writing and reading skills are of special interest in studying the processes of cognitive transformations. It is from this point of view that we discuss the monokondylia compositions in Russian Early Modern ABC-books on calligraphy. We analyze the function of monokondylia in shaping the skills that paved the way for development of cursive writing in Muscovy. The role of calligraphic art in the formation of the system of Russian Early Modern culture is discussed.

Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400–1700. Francesco Venturi, ed. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 62. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xiv + 432 pp. €149.

Self-Commentary in Early Modern European Literature, 1400–1700. Francesco Venturi, ed. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 62. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xiv + 432 pp. €149.

Domesticating the Turks, Staging Otherness. The Tradition of Embodying the Turks, the Parata dei Turchi of Potenza and Its Narration in 20th-Century Folkloric Descriptions

Abstract The aim of the essay is to analyse the presence of Oriental characters in the patron saint’s Feast of San Gerardo, taking place in the city of Potenza on 29 May. After offering an insight into the integration of Oriental characters into Italian early modern culture, the paper will first focus on the ‘historicity’ of the Parata dei Turchi and its carnivalesque function. It will then move to the way in which the Turks were represented between the 19th and 20th centuries — that is, the period from which sources present it as an already long-established tradition — seeking to offer a contribution to the interpretation of the tradition of the parading of Turkish masks on the annual procession of San Gerardo.

Africanos y afrodescendientes en la América hispánica septentrional: Espacios de convivencia, sociabilidad y conflicto

Africanos y afrodescendientes en la América hispánica septentrional: Espacios de convivencia, sociabilidad y conflicto

Mermaid Iconography and Early Modern Anglo-American Maritime Culture

This article builds upon recent research on early modern Anglo-American maritime culture to demonstrate how mariners used shared mermaid iconography (such as spaces, symbolism, objects, superstitions, and songs) to cultivate an ‘imagined community’ that linked their lives at sea to that on land, and vice versa. Ships and taverns were key to such efforts, as these public spheres – themselves branded by mermaid iconography – served as well-recognised nodes of maritime identity-ways. Ultimately, early modern Anglo-American sailors claimed mermaid iconography as critical symbols of maritime culture that transcended space and time, thereby helping diverse constituents of global empires to create connections wherever they travelled.

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes, eds. The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and Its Empire. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 235. $115.00 (cloth).

Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes, eds. The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and Its Empire. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 235. $115.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 4

Bookbinders in the Early Modern Venetian Book Trade

AbstractBookbinders are still among the least known of the professions of the early modern Italian book trade, partly because they rarely signed their work. However, they had an undeniably fundamental role in the production and circulation of books (both manuscript and printed) across Italy, and especially in Venice, where the book trade was a particularly lively industry. In recent years, there has been a strong interest in early modern material culture but little attention has been paid to bookbinders, who quite literally shaped the materiality of books. This article looks at the scarcity of documentary sources on Venetian bookbinders between 1450 and 1630 both as a methodological challenge and as evidence of their role in local production and consumption of books. It explores both the lack of sources documenting the professional lives of binders, and sources traditionally underused in book history, to highlight the social lives of binders. Evidence of binders’ family finances, marriages, and social and geographical mobilities is used to identify their lower social standing in the early modern Venetian book world in comparison to booksellers, the overlapping of their professional roles, and the locations of binders’ workshops in the topography of the city.

Beeley, Philip, Yelda Nasifoglu, and Benjamin Wardhaugh, eds. Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe: Studies in the Production, Collection, and Use of Mathematical Books. Material Readings in Early Modern Culture. Series eds., James Daybell and Admin Smyth. New York: Routledge, 2021. Hardback $160; eBook $43.15 (ISBN: 978-0-3676-0925-2).

Beeley, Philip, Yelda Nasifoglu, and Benjamin Wardhaugh, eds. <i>Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe: Studies in the Production, Collection, and Use of Mathematical Books</i>. Material Readings in Early Modern Culture. Series eds., James Daybell and Admin Smyth. New York: Routledge, 2021. Hardback $160; eBook $43.15 (ISBN: 978-0-3676-0925-2).

Volume 51 (2021)

Volume 51 (2021)

Rich Ornaments and Delightful Engines: The Poetics of Failed Festivity and Figural Automation in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

The present study focuses on the poetics of failed festivity in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, tracing analogies between early modern festival culture, in particular the Joyous Entry of the Renaissance prince into the city, and the machinery of the play, which is set in motion by Titus. The principal element of this machinery is the figure of Lavinia, who can be seen as the inverted version of such wonders of occa- sional architecture and civic pageantry as the automaton, the breathing sculpture and the automatic waterwork. One of the major problems explored is the confrontation of reality and fiction, or human flesh and art, in the manifestly echoic universe of the play, where the objectified automaton-like figure responds to the actions of its animators with its own stirring.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Intercultural communication and cultural transfers in the colonial context. The encounter between Pizarro and Atahualpa in 1532 ans its discursive representations in early-modern cultures

This contribution treats the historical representations of the encounter between the Inca King Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro on november 16th, 1532, in the Peruvian town of Cajamarca which was one of the decisive turning points of the Spanish conquest of South America. After theoretical and methodological reflections on the relations between intercultural communication processes and cultural transfers in the context of the conquista, it focuses first on the various contemporary Spanish discourses on the event of November 16th, 1532, which represented predominantly an official ideological version of it. In a further step are analyzed the new 18th-century discourses, influenced by different historical sources, like the work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, which reveal very different ‘constructions’, based on a transcultural network of cultural transfers and intercultural mediators, of this event.

John Taylor Retailored

Abstract The works of John Taylor the Water Poet (1578–1653) have in recent years been reappraised by scholars of early modern material culture for their expression of a working-class voice, for their inventive manipulation of the print market, and above all for their embodiment, in contrast to dominant Renaissance paradigms of literary worth, of a poetics of physical labour. In this article I revisit the figure of the tailor in Taylor’s defences of his own literary practice, showing that he cleaved to a simplistic distinction between originality and theft, identifying tailoring with the latter. I then examine three examples of his reworkings of previous poems—a micro-drama about the Thirty Years War, an anti-Papist dialogue, and an extended piece of nonsense verse—in an attempt to demonstrate that, despite Taylor’s critical assertions, they can after all best be thought of retailorings, neither properly original nor stolen. This category, however, is a modern one, and I conclude that we have no choice but to appreciate Taylor’s poems, or those of any other early modern writer, on our own terms.

Baudrillard, Hyperreality, and the Evil in Othello and The Hateful Eight

Shakespeare’s tragedies and Quentin Tarantino’s aesthetically violent films bear striking similarities in the problematization of both villainy and reality. Such concerns reverberate the most in Othello (1604) and The Hateful Eight (2015). Although critical scholarship about both works abounds, this essay offers an alternative approach by consulting the thoughts of Jean Baudrillard on the issues of hyperreality, criminality, and terrorism. The dialogue between the three can be important in two ways. First, it establishes a link between Early Modern and contemporary culture by engaging three canonical figures. Second, it provides a novel commentary about each artistic piece by drawing on the profound ways (hyper)reality and villainy can function. The essay also discusses the (non-voluntaristic) crises of reality that follow, when opposing parties battle for the ultimate power.

The First Greek Tragedy Printed in England: Some Textual and Typographical Notes

This article focuses on the first Greek edition of a work of classical antiquity printed in England, namely Euripides’ Troades, published by John Day in 1575. This is not a new edition of Euripides’ text, but it reproduces the text established in the editions derived from the Aldine one, without any of Willem Canter’s 1571 changes. Basing their discussion on a textual and contextual analysis, these notes focus on the book’s typographical peculiarities, suggesting that Day’s Greek types may have been used later by Dawson. The article also attempts to identify Day’s printing purposes and the possible readership of this entirely unusual printing venture. Keywords: Greek theatrical literature; reception of Greek literature; early modern English culture; reception of Euripides

Barbara Crosbie. Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 289. $130.00 (cloth).

Barbara Crosbie. Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 289. $130.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 3

Politics, religion and ideas in seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain. Essays in honour of Mark Goldie. Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall. (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History.) Pp. xviii + 345 incl. 1 ill. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2019. £65. 978 1 78327 450 5

Politics, religion and ideas in seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain. Essays in honour of Mark Goldie. Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall. (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History.) Pp. xviii + 345 incl. 1 ill. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2019. £65. 978 1 78327 450 5 - Volume 72 Issue 3

Luxuswaren und Wissensobjekte

Abstract The Venetian incunabula and post-incunabula traced in the library of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer express the significant influence of the two cities’ relationship on shaping early modern culture in North-alpine Europe: The books, traded by Franconian merchants as luxury goods and, due to the miniatures added by Albrecht Dürer, examples of the influence of Italian Renaissance art north of the Alpes, also shaped the development of Greek humanism in the north and played an important role in constituting learned networks. The ambivalent and always shifting relation of their status as luxury goods or as objects of intellectual knowledge continued after Pirckheimer’s death as they became part of important English book collections and in the 1920 s precious pieces of the stocks of the famous Munich antiquarians Jacques and Erwin Rosenthal, the latter studying as an art historian the artistic importance of Dürer’s miniatures in Pirckheimer’s Venetian books.