Holy Roman Emperor Research Articles

SICILIAN-NORMAN TRAIL IN THE ORIGIN OF THE MOSCOW BOYARS OF THE VORONTSOV AND KHVOSTOV DYNASTIES

The article contains the results of a study of the family relationship of the famous Moscow boyars Vorontsovs and Khvostovs, who served in the Moscow principality as thousands and governors for a hundred years, starting from the second half of the 13th century, as well as the degree of their relationship with the Moscow princes. The work uses a comprehensive approach to the analysis of various archival sources in combination with the genetic data of the y-chromosome of modern descendants. The documentary base of the work was made up of European and Russian chronicle sources of the 12th-16th centuries, archival information from the regional archives of Russia, European genealogical tables on the history of European states and genealogies of Russian princes and nobles. The search showed that in the middle of the XII century the ancestors of the Vorontsovs and Bassovol-Khvostovs could be siblings from the family of the knight Count Loritello Robert I Bassavil, a South Italian Norman from the Rollonid family. Their distant relationship with the princes from the Rurikovich-Monomashich dynasty was established. At the same time, the legend of the appearance of the Resh princes Vorontsov from the marriage unions of the descendants of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Count Robert I Bassavil is substantiated. The genetic affiliation of the Vorontsov and Bassovol-Khvostov clans to the grand ducal family confirms the version of the murder of the Moscow thousandth boyar Alexei Khvost in 1357 as a possible contender for the throne and may be one of the main reasons for the cruel reprisal of Ivan the Terrible against members of this family close to the court long before the oprichnina and the expulsion of their relatives to Kazan immediately after its conquest.

The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss by David S. Luft

Reviewed by: The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss by David S. Luft Katherine Arens David S. Luft, The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. X + 234 pp. David Luft, Horning Endowed Chair in the Humanities (Emeritus) at Oregon State University, has again proven himself one of the premier contemporary interpreters of Austrian intellectual history. The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History is an altogether magisterial presentation of a new, expansive approach to the great final chapter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's intellectual life. [End Page 82] Luft begins by noting that the histories of Europe's nation-states simply do not accommodate a multilingual and multicultural region like Habsburg Central Europe. "National intellectuals," for example, are rarely seen as (at least) bilingual and bicultural—the precise status of many eminent names in a Habsburg monarchy never even seeking a single ethnic-national identity. Instead of contrasting "Austrians" and "Germans," Luft takes a broader view of Central Europe's German-language intellectual sphere. He begins with the late eighteenth century (before Prussia had claimed sovereignty over a united "German Reich") and situates an emerging Germanophone intellectual life in Cisleithania, the lands to the west of the Leitha River that became the Habsburg empire's heart after 1740: Bohemia and Austria (including Moravia). Luft rejects the idea of a single "Austrian" intellectual history for this region, set over and against "German" or European thought. He does, however, find a culture of "creativity and imagination" culminating in the 1905 generation: "The unifying themes of this tradition are a positive attitude toward the Enlightenment and modern science, combined with a resistance to reductionism and ideological polarization, the emphasis on ethics and inner experience, and respect for unconscious energies and what we cannot control" (139). Thus, Luft finds in Cisleithania a mainline of intellectual interests sustained in the two Habsburg capitals: Prague (until 1618) and then Vienna (for the final three hundred years of Habsburg rule). The book's first sections explain this map and how Austria and Bohemia became historically entangled, starting with the Holy Roman Empire. The Protestant Reformation brought the German language to the region. Bohemian resistance to the Habsburg Counter-Reformation led to the famous Defenestration at Prague (1618); the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 saw the defeat of the Czech-Bohemian armies (Hussite Protestants) by Catholic-Imperial forces. This forced Bohemia under Habsburg rule. After mapping the region's geography, Luft provides a timeline for Cisleithania's development, dividing it into four "modern" eras. The first was known as "Josephinism" (after Joseph II, son of Maria Theresa and the Holy Roman Emperor between 1765 and 1790, with his brother Leopold reigning for two years after that). A small group of state bureaucrats who were also intellectuals initiated a modern state. These ncluded Joseph von Sonnenfels (innovator in law and theater censorship), Joseph Dobrovský (contributor to establishing modern Czech and an advocate defining Bohemia as a joint [End Page 83] German-Czech cultural space), and the van Swietens (two educational reformers). Europe's disruptions—associated with the French Revolution, Napoleon, and their aftermaths—define the second era, between 1792 and 1866, marked by the conservatism of Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. This era's most significant Austrian figures are Stifter, Bolzano, and Grillparzer in letters, as well as historiographer František Palacký (part of the Czech revival) and Count Thun (of the University Reforms). The more familiar liberal era ran from 1867 to 1900, after the Austrian Empire became the dual monarchy in the Hungarian Ausgleich. The 1873 Börsenkrach braked its progress, feeding directly into growing antisemitism and nationalism among the Empire's ethnic-national populations. That liberal period nonetheless prepared the way for the final "Austrian" era beyond the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire proper: the era of modern intellectual life from 1900–1938/39, which was not an era of decline, as is sometimes thought, but rather one whose history has not been sufficiently appreciated. In the next three chapters, Luft tracks three major streams of intellectual life running throughout Cisleithania's existence. Chapter Three introduces philosophy and...

Oratio in adventu Francisci III Lotharingiae, Barri et Magni Etruriae Ducis ad Florentinos (Florencia, 1739), de Girolamo Lagomarsini (S. J.). Introducción, edición y traducción

The speech In adventu Francisci III Lotharingiae, Barri et Magni Etruriae Ducis ad florentinos (Florence, 1739), by the Jesuit Girolamo Lagomarsini (1698-1773), constitutes an excellent example of the epideictic oratory of his time. It is an address focused specifically on the figure of the man who later became Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. This article offers a critical edition of the speech, a translation into Spanish and a general contextualization in its historical and rhetorical framework, taking into account the oratorical production of the author.

Negotiating privileges at the imperial court : Emperor Sigismund's charters for Italian recipients and their financial dimension

This paper focuses on the financial dimension of the privileges issued to Italian recipients by the Holy Roman King and Emperor Sigismund. After outlining the general economic aspects of the imperial chancery production in the Late Middle Ages, the author draws on sources from the rich Italian archives to analyse the circumstances of Sigismund's important concessions for three prominent peninsular powers: the Margraviate of Mantua (1432), the Duchy of Milan (1426), and the Republic of Venice (1437). The main emphasis of the individual case studies is placed on the negotiations of fees and taxes for both the imperial chamber and chancery, the modalities of payment, and the strategies of creditors to recover their debts, or of debtors to avoid their obligations. This paper shows the granting of imperial privileges as a variable and flexible process, it highlights the importance of the chancellor’s personal agency, and, more generally, the lack of institutionalisation as an inherent feature of pre-modern bureaucracy.

Bee Yun, Wege zu Machiavelli: Die Rückkehr des Politischen im Spätmitteltalter. Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 91. Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau Verlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag, 2021, pp. 318.

Because Machiavelli theorized the cycle of governments, this book might seem to be about cyclical ideas in late medieval political thought. But the thrust of the tome is that Machiavelli can no longer be simply credited with bringing back classical political realism after centuries of Christian social theory. Bee Yun, a Korean scholar edging himself into medieval and early modern studies, has presented a gallery of fourteenth-century, late-medieval Latin writers who might well have been of necessity trying to do the same thing. The reality of the deep rift between the highly defensive papacy under Boniface VIII and the pretensions to ‘nationalistic-looking’ power of the French King Philip IV the Fair (ca. 1300) brought the old system of plenitudo potestatis to a breaking point, bolstered as it was by the mystical hierarchy of the spiritual authority of the pope and the often-incongruous favoring of the elected Holy Roman Emperor as the ideal secular champion of ordered polity under God.

Mission of Baron Joseph Maria von Neuhaus in Russia in 1742—1746 and the Organisational Problems of Diplomatic Service in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century

The article, based on unpublished materials from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, reconstructs the details of the stay in St. Petersburg and Moscow of Minister Plenipotentiary of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII Baron Joseph Maria von Neuhaus, who came to prevent Empress Elizabeth Petrovna from entering the War of the Austrian Succession on the side of Austria. Neuhaus’ mission was accompanied by a number of difficulties, the main one was to obtain permission from the Russian court to present his credentials. The absence of Elizabeth Petrovna’s imperial title in the letter of credence deprived Neuhaus of the opportunity to be accredited at the Russian court for a year and four months, and consequently of his public status, that made any negotiations impossible. The article also analyses the organizational and financial problems of diplomatic and courier service in wartime, and the peculiarities of etiquette formulas in official correspondence between Russia and the Holy Roman Empire.

“Great Atlant”: Emperor Ferdinand III (1637—1657) as a German National Hero

The article deals with the appearance of the image of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III as a national hero in German journalism. There are still not many works devoted to Ferdinand III in historiography. The discussion surrounding his reign continues to highlight the weakness of imperial power during the Congress of Westphalia. The traditions of glorification of rulers were acquired in German printed publications of the middle of the 17th century pronounced national connotation. The Peace of Westphalia gave a new impetus to the development of the German national idea. Despite the emperor’s loss of some important prerogatives during the Congress of Westphalia, Ferdinand III turned on the pages of printed matter into a “German hero” who ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618—1648), who recreated the unity of the Empire and became its full head. The emperor is presented in the writings of the era as the defender of the German nation, thanks to whom the Empire was not only able to withstand thirty years of military chaos, but proved its viability and even reached a new peak. Constructing the image of a national hero, the authors addressed both the real political possibilities of the imperial power after the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, and the moral arsenal of virtues, which the emperor had. The ideas of his inherent patriotism and his desire to care for the Fatherland constituted the main components of the image of the ideal ruler and national hero and firmly entered the national discourse. During his lifetime, publicists turned Ferdinand III into a symbol of the German nation and laid the foundation for similar writings in subsequent eras.

Ioannes III Batatzes’s Italian Venture: Byzantine Imperial Revival in Mediterranean Diplomacy

Three Greek letters by the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen to the Eastern Roman emperor Ioannes III Batatzes, dating from the year 1250, cast light on the Laskarid involvement in Italian politics outside of the Balkan Peninsula, the traditional sphere of Byzantine influence. In two of the letters, the Holy Roman Emperor informs his son-in-law and ally Ioannes III about the war he is waging against the papal forces in Italy; in the third, Frederick II openly appeals to his Byzantine counterpart not to engage in unionist negotiations with the Holy See. Examining the content of these three letters, I suggest, helps us to redefine the role that the Laskarid polity played in the wider Mediterranean world of the mid-13th century. In this paper, I focus on the Italian case in order to illustrate that the Laskarid Roman Empire was an active political agent that sought to influence the politics of polities well outside its assumed political sphere of interest. The Italian example allows us to understand that the Byzantine Empire of Ioannes III Batatzes and his successors had enough vigor and resilience from the 1240s to the 1280s to project an image of itself as a dominant power invested in determining international affairs throughout Christendom.

Seeing is Believing: The Ducal House of Lorraine and Visual Displays in the Projection of Royal Status

This article examines the visual strategies employed in the early modern period by a dynasty ruling a smaller state, the Duchy of Lorraine, to survive in the face of expansion by larger neighbours (notably France). The central argument posits that in order to be treated as fully royal (and therefore with inherent rights to exist independently, as full members of the society of princes), princes like the dukes of Lorraine had to appear as royal in their visual representation. The article therefore looks at different examples of selfrepresentation produced by the dynasty over time, including genealogical treatises, coins, portraits, and printed material, in order to see how this was achieved and what symbols were used. What emerges is a sense that this strategy was more closely tied to dynasticism, not necessarily state-building, and while it can be said to have failed for the Duchy of Lorraine as a state, it proved successful, even beyond what had been imagined, for the dynasty itself. This idea repositions our conceptions of “sovereignty” in this period, to see it, at least in some cases, as a quality pertaining to dynasties rather than more rigidly to the states they governed. Their hereditary estates in Lorraine were lost in 1737 but the dynasty survived, as grand dukes of Tuscany, and was deemed worthy of transformation into a fully royal—even imperial—dynasty through marriage to the Habsburg heiress Maria Theresa and the election of Francis Stephen of Lorraine as Holy Roman Emperor in 1745.

Kult populárního raně středověkého světce sv. Jiljí v českých zemích od jeho počátků až po konec středověku

The study deals with the medieval cult of the early medieval hermit and the Benedictine abbot St. Giles in the Bohemian lands from its earliest beginnings to the end of the Middle Ages. Saint Giles, living in the 7th and 8th centuries in the region of Septimania located in the south of modern‑day France, became one of the most popular Christian saints in the medieval Western and Central Europe due to his patronage. The study therefore seeks to create a comprehensive interpretation of the form of the St. Giles’s cult in the Bohemian lands in the Middle Ages. The historical research of the cult of St. Giles is carried out through a detailed analysis of the medieval narrative and material sources, iconography, legends and sources of Church‑administrative origin. The text presents, in detail and with the help of the analysis of relics, calendars and Church dedications, not only the spread of the St. Giles’s cult in the Bohemian lands in the 12th century, but also the close relationship of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV to the mentioned saint. The study also discusses the fine arts monuments and the cult of St. Giles as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers at the end of the Middle Ages

Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950)

Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950)

An Unpublished Autograph Letter from Sir Philip Sidney to Carolus Clusius, 21 April 1576

AbstractOnly a decade ago Roger Kuin's The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney (2012) offered scholars for the first time a complete edition of Sidney's correspondence. Kuin modestly allowed room for new discoveries, in the hope that additional letters might be identified. This article introduces a previously unpublished autograph letter by Sidney, written in French, addressed on 21 April 1576 to Carolus Clusius or Charles de l'Écluse, an associate of Hubert Languet and a noted botanist then active in Vienna at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. After briefly discussing the provenance of the manuscript I turn to its contents, situating the letter within the wider corpus of Sidney's extant correspondence, with reference to letters to and from Clusius and Languet in Kuin's edition, and analysing it within this context. The newly discovered letter, transcribed and translated in an appendix, is shown to offer important new evidence for Sidney's relationships with Clusius and Languet as well as his place in European intellectual culture more generally.

Honestas and the Angevin Queen: Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Letters and Their Classical Rhetorical Antecedents

Abstract In 1193, King Richard I of England was taken captive by the Holy Roman emperor Henry VI. In several letters, the captive Richard’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, exhorted Pope Celestine III to intercede on her son’s behalf. The specific topics on which she drew were ancient concepts within the topic of honestas, or virtue, and, more specifically, justice as one of the virtues. Justice occupied a preeminent place among the other virtues in medieval thought, and topics related to justice, as a species of honestas, were traditionally regarded as proper for deliberative argumentation. Eleanor’s letters set forth an argumentative schema regarding the nature of justice, asserting that it possesses an anatomy of subordinate parts that include friendship, pity, and the body politic of the kingdom. Her appeals illustrate the significance of ancient virtue theory in medieval political persuasion as an inheritance of Ciceronian thought, the place of virtue in geopolitical civic persuasion in her day, and how women implemented and conceived of social justice from classical rhetorical sources and employed them for civic ends.

Weitlaner retractor.

This hand-held, self-retaining retractor (Fig. 1) can be found in operating theatres around the world; however, its creator has been somewhat forgotten to history. This is particularly noticeable in English-speaking centres, as it is often referred to as the Wheatlander, Weetlaner, or even just ‘Wheatie’, and not by its proper name, the Weitlaner (pronounced VIGHT-lahn-er). Franz Weitlaner (Fig. 2) was born on 17 September 1872, in the town of Welsberg, a German-speaking municipality in the South Tyrol province of northern Italy, in the foothills of the Dolomite mountains, a range that is part of the Alps, and, as of 2009, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Initially studying theology at the Diocesan Seminary, Franz switched from theology to medicine, beginning his studies at the age of 20 years at Innsbruck Medical University. This historic university was inaugurated by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I on 15 October 1669. Weitlaner obtained his doctorate of medicine from the university in 1898, and, after completing his clinical training in 1902, served as a ship’s surgeon with the Austrian Lloyd Shipping Company, sailing to countries in Asia, and writing on various topics including sea-sickness, syphilis, and plague. Following his nautical adventures, Weitlaner returned to terra firma, marrying a classical pianist named Leopoldine Kraubmann in 1903, and settling in the remote village of Ottenthal, in the northeast of Austria. It was here, where he ran a general practice with no assistants available, where necessity led to the birth of his invention.

Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

Reviewed by: Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger Richard Butterwick Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time. Translated by Robert Savage. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2021. xviii + 1045 pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Genealogical tables. Index. $39.95: £35.00. An English-language edition of Barbara Stollberg Rilinger's monumental biography of Maria Theresa has been eagerly awaited by many dix-huitièmistes and Central Europeanists since the publication of the German original (Maria Theresia. Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit) by C. H. Beck of Munich in 2017. The addition of just one word to the title alerts us to the challenge faced by the book in Anglophone markets. Maria Theresa reigned over many realms, duchies, counties and lordships, from Tournai to Transylvania, and from Lombardy to Lodomeria. This 'agglutination' (in R. J. W. Evans's memorable phrase) is collectively referred to by scholars as 'the Habsburg Monarchy'. In contemporary diplomatic parlance, the shorthand 'Austria' denoted this assemblage of territories and titles centred on the Viennese court — a usage continued by historians. Maria Theresa and her entourage referred to 'the monarchy' as a whole, but the original family seat of Hab(icht)sburg in the Aargau had long since been lost to the Swiss Confederation. The family name Habsburg was thus a less than welcome reminder of the relatively modest origins of the 'House of Austria'. And that 'Highest Archducal House' was destined, according to its acronym AEIOU, to rule the entire world. In 1740, Maria Theresa inherited her titles of Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria, and so on and so forth, from her father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, although she had to make them good. She would add the title of Queen of Lodomeria and Galicia to her collection after participating in the first partition of Poland. Yet this mighty monarch only became an empress by virtue of her husband, Francis Stephen (who had exchanged his own ducal inheritance of Lorraine for Tuscany in 1738), being elected Holy Roman Emperor at the second attempt in 1745. After his death in 1765, Maria Theresa became dowager empress until her own demise in 1780. And yet for those thirty-five years, as well as the widower Joseph II's sole decade in power, Die Kaiserin had no need of a qualifying adjective (at least outside the Russian Empire). One of the author's principal tasks, therefore, is to enable her readers to distinguish between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and to correct the false assumption that Maria Theresa was empress of a 'Habsburg Empire'. At the same time, the historian has to explain the many overlaps between 'the Empire' and 'the monarchy'. It is a task for which Stollberg-Rilinger, the Rhenish author of several influential works on the Old Reich, is well prepared. Perhaps she assumes rather too much foreknowledge of the Holy Roman Empire in the prologue, which introduces its heroine through a mixture of [End Page 760] monuments, historiography and gendered analysis, but she provides further explanations on p. 34. These are much expanded in the fascinating fourth chapter, titled 'Empress, Emperor, Empire'. As the author shows, 'ruling the Empire and ruling the hereditary lands were two quite different things. They followed different logics and demanded political strategies' (p. 171). Maria Theresa emerges as an experienced and skilful player of the game of imperial politics. That said, she and her family spoke of travelling 'to the Empire', an understandable usage when the various exemptions of the Habsburgs' hereditary lands within the Reich from imperial jurisdiction and taxation are considered (pp. 169–70). Maria Theresa's priority was never in doubt: 'imperial policy was a Habsburg domestic policy pursued with imperial means, not a policy directed at the Empire as a political whole' (p. 186). The position of Francis Stephen, however, remained ambivalent. Although his elevation to the imperial throne belatedly resolved many questions of etiquette and diplomatic protocol which had hitherto undermined his status, he seems to have been averse to conflicts and usually accepted his wife's political dominance. This subordination...

Challenges of Early Modern Diplomacy

A Diet was an assembly of the Estates of the Holy Roman Empire, summoned by the Emperor to deliberate on political and judicial matters. As a multilateral forum of deliberation and communication within the Holy Roman Empire, Emperors, and Estates, Diets also attracted the attention of foreign princes, who thus sent their envoys to these Estate assemblies. Because of the variety and quantity of these foreign envoys, Diets developed into specific multilateral spaces of early modern diplomacy. The formal exclusion of the envoys from the Diets’ negotiations and meetings built up challenges and required strategies of “diplomatic” communication beyond the formal process. By comparing two envoys sent by Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), Christopher Mundt (1559/1566) and George Gilpin (1582), this paper shows what impact dispositive factors, such as expertise or confessional inclination, could have on an envoy’s status, his recognition by hostile and allied partners, and his assertiveness at a Diet. Furthermore, these factors mainly influenced and drove cooperation and conflict between England and the Habsburg Emperors and the Imperial Estates, and socontribute to further understanding ‘diplomatic relations’ in the 16th century.

The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture, by Alfred Thomas

This richly illustrated and beautifully produced volume explores the role of Bohemian culture in late fourteenth-century England. John Gower wrote of the ‘newe guise of Beawme’ in his Confessio Amantis, and Alfred Thomas convincingly explores the wider implications of these influences. Richard II married Anne of Bohemia in 1382, and she died in 1394. Anne was the daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, who had been brought up at the French royal court and who transformed the court at Prague into a centre of art and architecture; her siblings were Elisabeth of Bohemia and Wenceslas IV of Bohemia (also of Germany and Luxembourg). Her grandfather was the cosmopolitan John, count of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia and patron of the poet Guillaume Machaut, and her aunt was Bonne of Luxembourg, who married the man who would become King John II of France; her uncle was the duke of Brabant and, famously, the patron of the poet and chronicler Jean Froissart. One could continue listing these cosmopolitan cultural connections for many lines. As presented here, Anne embodied a truly European culture, stretching from Bohemia to Germany to Italy and France. Thomas is principally interested here in the influence of the flourishing and cosmopolitan Bohemian court, the model of French courtly life, and the imperial connections. He argues that Anne embodied a set of cultural influences which were intertwined with Richard III’s wider political goals: he was interested in imperial claims, worked on the presentation of a form of sacral kingship, and was more interested in culture than war. These observations about Richard’s reign are insightful, though perhaps a little too starkly drawn: the claim that a king might be interested in culture rather than war (repeated for Charles V of France on p. 24) is unnecessarily reductive; Richard’s interest in sacral kingship also has a longer, distinctively English history. Reminding the reader that these were not zero-sum games would not in any way weaken the argument.

Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague by Suzanna Ivanič

Reviewed by: Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague by Suzanna Ivanič Eleanor Janega Ivanič, Suzanna. Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021. xii + 244 pp. Illustrations. Notes on orthography and pronunciation. Chronology. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. £75.00. Religious studies of seventeenth-century Prague can, too often, treat the city’s rich and changing religious culture as homogenic, in which individuals took up the spiritual directives of their leaders as a matter of course. Ivanič’s meticulous and absorbing study of the personal possessions of a range of Prague’s Burghers across the century confronts, complicates and ultimately dismantles this narrative. The introduction of Cosmos sets out how Ivanič will approach the analysis of objects for her study, building on the work of, among others, David Morgan [End Page 566] and Dick Houtman and Bridgit Meyer. Her anthropologically-informed approach allows the book to ‘examine how objects and the material record can cast light on everyday religion’, with an understanding that ‘[r]eligion itself can no longer be seen merely as consisting of texts and ideas, but is instead a cultural force pervading and emanating from the material landscape’ (p. 11). In the first chapter Ivanič introduces seventeenth-century Prague. She deftly presents a picture of the city as it thrived as host to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1562–1612). Ivanič gives detailed information about the city’s population and topography (religious and otherwise), to describe what she terms Prague’s ‘cosmos of beliefs’ (p. 43), which allowed its residents to navigate their relationships with God via physical, tangible objects. The chapter would serve well as an introduction to seventeenth-century Prague generally for interested audiences, and also does well to set up some of Ivanič’s key arguments. The book then moves into its first section, titled ‘A Shared Cosmos’, the first chapter of which focuses on natural matter in the belongings of Prague Burghers. Here Ivanič shows that strict categories of ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ are misplaced when considering various objects. Instead, we must consider that animal teeth and paws, gemstones, or the special clay Terra sigillata need to be understood as possessing, as Rudolf II’s physician Anselmus Boetius de Boodt (1550–1632) put it, ‘a certain reflection of the gleam of divinity’ (p. 56), which could allow humans to navigate their cosmos. The second chapter of the first section then examines the way goods were exchanged among kinship groups in Prague to show how gifts, such as wedding rings, baptismal spoons and bibles, established and embellished relationships. The section ends in a third chapter which analyses how together these objects created a personal and ever-changing cosmos. Here, Ivanič builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s studies of the object-human relationship to show how both artisans and collectors created a vernacular of items which spanned confessions and shaped how people acted in their homes. It is a particularly incisive section and brings to mind the work of Deleuze and Guttari on productive desire, which I would be excited to see Ivanič incorporate into her work in the future. The second section on ‘Cosmos and Confessions’ applies these concepts in its first chapter to an analysis of the belongings of the clockmaker Kúndrat Šteffenaúr in 1635. We see that Šteffenaúr’s collection of objects seems to reflect a cross-confessional understanding of the world that is specific to Prague and presented its early seventeenth-century inhabitants with options above all else. This section is especially compelling, and I would be interested to see what Ivanič might make of conceptions of imaginary pilgrimage in regards to Šteffenaúr’s ownership of the Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (pp. 149–50) — a description of the sacred topography of the bible. The next chapter considers the ‘fracturing of universal Christianity’ (p. 153), and how shifts in belief are [End Page 567] reflected in possessions. Here we are given a particularly interesting analysis of the (relatively late) adoption of the rosary in Prague over the century. The final chapter in this section considers what scholars have termed the pietas Bohemica, or specifically, Czech baroque expressions of Catholic faith...

Just a Grand Duke who Loves Chemistry. Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine (1747–1792) and his Chemical Cabinet at the Imperial and Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History

This article dealt with the history of the chemical cabinet established by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine (1747–1792), at the Imperial and Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History in Firenze during his regency. To achieve this goal, it investigated untapped archival sources (e.g., administrative and commercial documents, minutes, correspondences, inventories) concerning the museum management from its foundation in 1775 to the departure of the Grand Duke for Vienna to be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II in 1790. The article analyzed the chemical cabinet’s manuscript catalog, whose entire transcription is presented in the Supplementary Information Files. The work then examined the connections between the activities performed at the chemical laboratory and Peter Leopold’s interests in experimental chemistry. Concerning this research question, the scientific relationship he held with the naturalist Giovanni Valentino Mattia Fabbroni (1752–1822) – Vice-director and then Director of the Imperial and Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History – who helped the Grand Duke navigate all aspects of his interests in chemistry and natural sciences, was also discussed.

Giovanni d’Aragona (1456‒1485) szerepe Mátyás király mecénásságában

Giovanni d’Aragona (1456‒1485) szerepe Mátyás király mecénásságában