Early Seventeenth Century Research Articles

IX The Seventeenth Century: Part I

AbstractThis chapter combines what previously were Chapter IX, focusing on the early seventeenth century, and Chapter X, on Milton and poetry 1603–1660. Some of the content transcends historical dates and covers material from the latter half of the seventeenth century too; in other words, the long seventeenth century. It has seven sections:1. General; 2. Bacon; 3. Browne; 4. Burton; 5. Herbert; 6. Donne; 7. Milton. Sections 1 and 2 are by William Baker; section 3 is by Lucy Gwynn; section 4 is by William Baker; section 5 is by James Doelman; section 6 is by Anne James; section 7 is by David Urban.

The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform

Bauer uses the case of Onofrio Panvinio (1530–1568), an Augustinian friar, to shed light on the development of history writing in early modern Rome as well as on the historiography of the papacy. Panvinio, who left few published works but many manuscripts at his death, accomplished a remarkable amount of historical research during his short life and, as Bauer demonstrates, was an important innovator in historical method. The book’s title refers to Bauer’s thesis that Panvinio’s ambitious collection of primary source material, together with his source criticism and willingness to ask hard questions about the nature of change in the Church’s past, amounted to the invention of modern papal history.The focus on Panvinio’s life also allows insight into the pressures and opportunities faced by historians of the sixteenth century in attempting to work on church history in general and papal history in particular. Indeed, ecclesiastical interest in history was so great at the time that Panvinio’s order was willing to release him from its normal constraints to travel broadly in search of historical materials and to devote his life to historical scholarship. Panvinio’s constant need to find wealthy and politically powerful patrons—for the most part within the Church hierarchy—offers further evidence of what was required to have the luxury of research and writing.Panvinio’s earlier work on ancient Rome was pioneering in its use of multiple sources and methods, from literary works and epigraphy to numismatics and archaeology. His later work largely focused on the history of the papacy and papal elections. After his first two chapters, which provide an intellectual biography of Panvinio, Bauer examines in detail Panvinio’s history of papal elections and the nature of censorship in Rome in the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century.According to Bauer, Panvinio was the first scholar to write a comprehensive account of the many changes in papal elections from their beginnings to his own day. Among the key innovations that he examined were the attempts to eliminate lay influence, including the decree in 1059 limiting electors to cardinals, the introduction in 1179 of the requirement of a two-thirds majority to elect a pope, and the introduction of the conclave, with its exclusion of the outside world, in 1274. Such was Panvinio’s ambition that while completing the ten (unpublished) volumes of this study, he wrote a history of imperial elections—the first one to offer a detailed study of the election of emperors from ancient Rome to the sixteenth century.As Bauer recounts, papal history was a minefield at the time, partly because of the competing papal family dynasties. When a particular family was in power, sympathetic biographies of its popes were much appreciated, but a change in papal regime could render those same biographies unwelcome. With the onset of the Counter-Reformation (or, in Bauer’s terminology, the Catholic Reformation), anything that shed a negative light on the papacy could become victim to censorship; by late in the sixteenth century, Panvinio’s works themselves fell victim to these efforts.In an epilogue, Bauer offers some thoughts about the development of ecclesiastical historiography in the decades and centuries after Panvinio’s death. Most notable was the general lack of interest in church history. Not until the mid-eighteenth century did the Jesuit Collegio Romano introduce its first chair in ecclesiastical history. As for papal biography, the modern form of which Panvinio had introduced in the sixteenth century, it had been reduced to a mere panegyric exercise in church propaganda by the following century. The Church recruited historians into the battle against Protestantism, expecting them to play their part uncritically.The sources that Bauer used for this book are impressive, encompassing a large number of both manuscripts and published works from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century gathered in ecclesiastical and civil archives and libraries in Italy, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, and Vatican City. Although the subject may strike those outside the field as arcane, the book offers in compact form valuable insight into an important part of the evolution of European historiography. The book will be especially valuable to early modern European and Church historians, but is accessible to non-specialists as well.

„Ekstaza” czy „admiracja”? Ikonografia obrazu św. Franciszka z Muzeum Diecezjalnego w Siedlcach w kontekście wymowy wybranych płócien z serii franciszkańskiej El Greca

The widely adopted title of “Ecstasy of St Francis”, a painting at the Diocesan Museum in Siedlce, was introduced in literature in 1966 based on the typology developed by José Gudiol. The designa- tion continues to be used until today. However, the significance and the purport of the title has not been confronted with the representation, especially given the current knowledge about its details. No attention has been paid so far to the nature of the stigmata, nor have any conclusions been drawn from the arrangement of the fingers or the depiction of bone remains, their pattern and placement. An analysis of those motifs changes the previous interpretation of what the work seeks to convey. The paper also cites arguments in favour of amending the current dating, from 1578-80 to the early seventeenth century.

An AAS study of Chinese imperial yellow porcelain bodies and their place in the history of Jingdezhen's porcelain development

The bodies of 12 examples of imperial yellow Chinese porcelain dating from the early sixteenth century to the early twentieth century have been studied by atomic absorption spectroscopy. The yellow lead glaze was reserved for imperial use, and these fine monochrome porcelains played important roles in imperial rites at the summer solstice and as court wares within Beijing's Forbidden City. The project's aim has been to understand more fully the technologies used to make imperial yellow porcelains, which were significant ceramics in the history and culture of imperial China.This paper concerns the porcelain body material, particularly the nature and use of Jingdezhen's two prime body materials — porcelain stone (cishi) and kaolin (gaoling). The 12 samples studied span four centuries of imperial porcelain production and include a major change in kaolin usage at Jingdezhen in the early seventeenth century, when the proportions of kaolin used in fine porcelain bodies rose abruptly from some 20% to 50%. This study explores the natures of both prepared rocks and looks particularly at kaolin, about which some long-standing problems remain.

Mandamus and Borough Political Life, 1615 to 1780

ABSTRACT By the early seventeenth century, about 180 cities, towns and townships in England and Wales were administered as self-governing boroughs. In 1615, in Bagg's Case, Coke CJ announced that the King's Bench possessed a jurisdiction to judicially review misgovernment in the boroughs. Coke CJ's claim to remedy ‘any manner of misgovernment’ was denounced by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and the King's Bench was encouraged to disregard the idea. The King's Bench quietly ignored this advice and, through what would evolve into the writ of mandamus, implemented Coke's vision of a process of judicial review of misgovernment in the boroughs. This article reviews the uses to which Coke's remedy was put within the political life of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chartered corporation.

‘Very Pleased and Very Amazed with the Grandness and Royalness of this House of Aveiro’: The Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Torres Novas (Setúbal, 1618)

This article examines the marriage of Jorge de Lencastre and Ana Doria Colona, the first duke and duchess of Torres Novas, by focusing on its context, negotiations and celebration. It recalls the family strategy of the duke and duchess of Aveiro to contextualize the matrimony that their firstborn son celebrated in the early seventeenth century. It also examines the negotiations leading up to this union to enquire whether the Crown intervened in this border-crossing marriage and to identify the benefits it produced for the House of Aveiro. The article pays attention to the ceremonial dimension of the event through a close analysis of a manuscript description of the festivities. In approaching the marriage from those perspectives, the intention is to evaluate the several layers of meaning for this marriage celebrated at a time when Portugal was incorporated into the Hispanic monarchy. Aside from its dynastic and material significance, the article discusses the political and identity discourses performed in the wedding celebrations and reproduced in the written report. Despite being short-lived, the marriage (and its related festivities) did achieve multiple goals, from serving the interests of the Habsburgs and earning valuable benefits in return for the family, to evoking the ‘grandness and royalness’ of the House of Aveiro.

‘Remplis l’air d’alegresse pour ce seigneur chery des cieux’: Music in the Entries of Nobility and Other Dignitaries in Late Renaissance France (c.1585–c.1615)

AbstractAlthough royal entries have long been studied by scholars, those undertaken by nobles and other political figures have generally attracted less attention. This is particularly true in musicological literature, a fact undoubtedly attributable to the paucity of surviving documentation on this topic. Yet music often played an important part in these spectacles, both by underlining the dignitary’s status and by enhancing key components of the symbolism deployed. Rather than concentrating on one particular event, this article brings together information about as many entries as possible made by such figures into French cities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This enables us to make general observations about the types of music used in these events (such as fanfares, Te Deums and dance music) in order to draw possible connections with extant musical sources, and also to ponder why certain musical elements mattered more than others to the contemporaries describing these occasions.

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism

The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism

Rethinking Burlesque Forms in Louis XIII ballets: Dance, Music, and Politics in Burlesque ballets, 1625-1635

Influential analyses of the burlesque ballets performed at the court of Louis XIII argue that the ballets functioned as space for expression of noble resistance to the absolutist monarchy of Louis XIII and his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Closer attention to the actual historical contexts and the identities of the noble dancers involved with respect to some of the lavish burlesque ballets performed at court by the king and select group of nobles offers ways of rethinking the politics and meanings of burlesque performance to take into account the ways that the burlesque developed within court and noble cultural institutions and practices. The burlesque register and style in France can be situated within the context of libertine literary culture and its intersection with noblemen who moved between mondain and court circles in the early seventeenth century. The lavish burlesque ballets produced at court between 1625 and 1635 involved carefully chosen members of the nobility who danced alongside the king, each other, and professional dancers. Even a brief examination of three ballets from this period – Fées des forêts de Saint-Germain, Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, and Ballet des Triomphes – demonstrates that the court ballet organisers for these royal ballets were fully aware of tensions among different political factions; role assignments and ballet texts and para-texts suggest that these ballets provided a space for ongoing subtle, but consistent assertion of royal power and prerogatives, even when cast in the guise of play and recreation.

Tuhfah al-Mursalah ila Ruh al-Nabiy as the Source of the Doctrine Seven Grades of Being in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago

The doctrine of seven grades of Being (Martabat Tujuh) has been widely known to be a sufi interpretation of God’s Oneness (al-Tawhid). It originated in the subcontinent of India in the early seventeenth century. The doctrine was later introduced in Aceh and gained popularity among the Malay sufi authors and practitioners until the present day. Amid its wide acceptance, the teaching has long been considered by many scholars to be incompatible with the Islamic principle teachings of God’s Unity. The purpose of this article is to give an insight into the background of the writing of the Tuhfah al-Mursalah Ila Ruh al-Nabiyy and to establish its credibility as an authentic Islamic work by a recognized Muslim sufi scholar. To achieve its objectives, data of this writing was gathered through the usage of document analysis and then described using deducted and inducted analysis. This article found that the Tuhfah al-Mursalah was originally written to combatting misinterpretation of the teaching of wahdat al-wujud in the subcontinent India. It was later exported to the Aceh in the early sixteenth century. The work was written by a knowledgeable and important Indian Muslim sufi scholar. His credentials as a Muslim scholar were testified with few commentaries on the Tuhfah al-Mursalah by famous and well-known Muslim scholars in the Muslim world. Therefore, this work occupies an important place in providing a true comprehension of the doctrine of seven grades of Being.

Claiming Nobility in the Monarquía Hispánica: The Search for Status by Inca, Aztec, and Nasrid Descendants at the Habsburg Court

By the early seventeenth century, petitioners at the royal court in Madrid who claimed descent from the Inca rulers of Peru, the Aztec rulers of Mexico, and the Nasrid emirs of Granada found ways to acquire noble status and secure rights to their ancestral lands in the form of entailed estates. Their success in securing noble status and title to their mayorazgos (entailed estates) rested on strategies, used over the course of several generations, that included marriages with the peninsular nobility, ties of godparentage and patronage, and military service to the crown. This article will examine the networks formed in Madrid between roughly 1600 and 1630 when the descendants of the Inca and Aztec rulers interacted with peninsular noble families at court, obtaining noble status and entry into the military orders and establishing their mayorazgos. Their strategies for claiming nobility show striking parallels to those adopted by the Morisco nobility, and one aim of this article is to suggest how knowledge of such strategies circulated among families both at the royal court in Madrid and in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.

The king’s two bodies and the Crown a corporation sole: historical dualities in English legal thinking

ABSTRACT As Kantorowicz acknowledged in his seminal work on the theological groundings of medieval political theory, the legal doctrine of the king’s two bodies was not a medieval legal doctrine but an Elizabethan one. It was developed by Plowden, an English jurist, in the second half of the sixteenth century. With Plowden’s theory of the king’s two bodies – one natural and the other politic – the medieval notion of the Crown as a corporation aggregate of many was progressively abandoned. The king’s body politic was instead confused with the concept of office of kingship, which could only vest in the king. Building on Plowden’s doctrine, Coke wrote of the king’s body politic in the early seventeenth century that it was a corporation sole. With time, the Crown conceived as a corporation sole and as a corporation aggregate understood as the government became an important feature of English legal thought. The Crown as a corporation aggregate – comprising the whole realm – is more apt to reflect the constitutional arrangement reached after the Glorious Revolution, characterised by the sovereignty of Parliament and, later, responsible government.

A Significant Japanese Coffer: A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Examining Late Sixteenth- — Early Seventeen-Century Export Urushi Ware

ABSTRACT A significant coffer in the Royal Swedish collection, inventory number HGK 406, is examined. The aim is to confirm or add new data concerning its age, provenance, and components of manufacture. The scientific analyses include microscopy of cross and thin sections, wood species identification, scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, X−ray fluorescence microscopy, pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, strontium isotope ratio measurement, and radiocarbon dating. To a lesser degree, the investigation also includes excerpting and examining historical documents. The results show that the body wood is Thujopsis dolabrata BUN 1248, a strong indication for a Japanese origin of the coffer. The urushi coating is made with sap harvested in Japan from the species Toxicodendron vernicifluum. The decorations include gold powder, red iron oxide, and cinnabar pigments. Radiocarbon dating supports dating of the coffer, also based on its style, as late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. While all the results may not stand alone, the study shows that a methodology with a multidisciplinary approach can produce new knowledge, as well as support or reject hypotheses arrived at from other kinds of sources.

Decoding the Language of the Zohar: Lexicons to Kabbalah in Early Modernity

This article examines various attempts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that sought to repackage and reorganize kabbalistic knowledge through the compilation of lexicons to one of the most sacred texts in the Jewish mystical canon, the Zohar. By considering the Zoharic lexicon ʾImrei binah, written by Yissakhar Baer ben Petaḥyah Moshe, printed in Prague in 1610, in diachronic and synchronic contexts, the article exposes competing strategies adopted by Jewish mystics to transmit the linguistic and theosophical layers of the Zohar. I will place and discuss lexicons to the Zohar within broader questions of cultural transmission and textuality, revealing the modalities through which these works generated meaning for Jewish and non-Jewish readers. As Kabbalah came to occupy an important role in the intellectual exchange between Jews and Christians in this period, Zoharic lexicons and other study guides played a major role as cultural mediators.

Zwischen Realität und Mythos. Tod und Begräbnisse von Professoren der Prager Universität vom 15. bis zum frühen 17. Jahrhundert

The study focuses on questions relating to the deaths of professors of the Utraquist university in Prague from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century (cause of death, funerals, estates, forms and means of commemoration, etc.). It is based on sources of official provenance as well as on certain egodocuments and literary, iconographic, and material sources. Because from the Middle Ages they most commonly served as the final resting places of university masters, attention is also devoted to the Corpus Christi Chapel in New Town, Prague, and the Bethlehem Chapel in Old Town, Prague.

Introduction

In Britain, from the nineteenth century onwards, the default ‘setting’ for Shakespeare’s plays (by which I mean costume, mise-en-scène, and assumed historical and cultural context) has been medieval and early modern: the time of the plays’ composition (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) or the time of their historical location (medieval Britain or Europe, ancient Greece or Rome, etc.). In this visual and physical context, Twelfth Night would normally be performed or imagined in Elizabethan or Jacobean, Macbeth and Hamlet in medieval, Julius Caesar in ancient Roman dress and settings. In the historical context of their original production, the plays were performed in contemporary dress with minimal mise-en-scène; through the Restoration and eighteenth century in fashionable modern dress and increasingly naturalistic settings. Today in Britain, Shakespeare can be performed in any style of costume, setting and cultural context, from the time of the plays’ reference to the immediate contemporary present, and often in an eclectic blend of some or all. But strong forces of tradition and cultural memory tie the plays, in their visual and physical realisation as well as their language, to the medieval and early modern past. We see this attachment in film versions of the plays and of Shakespeare’s life. We dress Shakespeare in the costumes of all the ages, but we know that he truly belongs, as in the various portraits, in doublet and ruff.

City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. By Abram C. Van Engen

City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. By Abram C. Van Engen

Performing Early Modern Libel

This essay focuses on provincial libel cases between private individuals tried at the court of Star Chamber during the early seventeenth century. Libelling saw personal scandals creatively couched in verses, visual symbols, or mock-ceremonies, and read, sung, and posted in early modern communities. This essay identifies a range of ‘manners’ of libel, and compares a libellous ‘Stage plaie’ to a set of libellous mock-proclamations and a ‘book’ of playing card knaves. The essay argues that libels should be understood as functioning on a spectrum of performance. They should therefore prompt an expansion of the boundaries of early performance.

The Druze settlement on Mount Carmel: Daliyat al-Karmil as a case study – Archaeological, historical and geographical evidence

ABSTRACT The arrival date of the Druze at Mount Carmel is still unclear and several claims exist regarding it. None of the Druze villages have been extensively studied, and at present there are only two villages that survived the dismantling of the last two centuries; these are Daliyat al-Karmil and ʿIsifya. The current study will focus on Daliyat al-Karmil as a case study, using geographical, historical and archaeological evidence for dating the Druze arrival at Mount Carmel. The main claim suggests that the town began its journey during the early seventeenth century under the rule of Emir Fakhr al-Din al-Maʿani II; and another claim suggests that the town was built after the rule of Fakhr al-Din II, mostly because of immigration from Lebanon and Syria, as a result of the battle of ʿAyn Dara in 1711. Combining historical, archaeological and geographical evidence has led the present study to suggest that the settling of the town of Daliyat al-Karmil, as well as the other Druze settlements on Mount Carmel, did not begin before the seventeenth century. Moreover, it adds that the Druze inhabitation at Daliyat al-Karmil was among the earliest in the Carmel, and it probably began between 1622 and 1635.