Late Seventeenth Century Research Articles

A New Polyphonic Source from Sixteenth-Century Scotland

ABSTRACT This article discusses a new source of sacred polyphonic music from sixteenth-century Scotland, one which had remained hidden for more than five centuries as marginalia within a printed book. Despite containing only a small amount of music, this source can tell us a great deal about cultures of written and improvised liturgical music in pre-Reformation Scotland, a time and place from which very little notated music survives. The music in this source has no text, title, or attribution. However, we reveal the identity of the music as the tenor part of a faburden on the Office hymn Cultor Dei memento and we determine that it was most likely written down in Aberdeenshire, in the north-east of Scotland. Finally, by analysing the book’s non-musical annotations, we explore a series of likely owners of the book—and what it might have meant to own such an object—during the turbulent period in Scotland from the early sixteenth century to the late seventeenth.

Simplified Chinese Lacquer Techniques and Style Decoration on Luso-Asian Objects from the Late Sixteenth or Early Seventeenth Centuries

Simplified Chinese Lacquer Techniques and Style Decoration on Luso-Asian Objects from the Late Sixteenth or Early Seventeenth Centuries

The Discovery of English Wants: Dearth and Plenty in Early Modern Anglo-Indian Exchanges

English experiences of late-Elizabethan economic crises coincided with national ambition to engage in global trade, marking a shift in the discourse of “needs” and “wants” in the English commonwealth. English travelers and traders documented in different modes of writing the topography, climate, food resources, markets, and roadways of Mughal India to better understand local abundance, needs, and wants. Travel through food insecure regions in India, interaction with local inhabitants, and encounters with famine created hybrid chorographic modes: forms of writing about travel and place within English environments were adapted and applied to Indian regions. By examining the writings of four lesser-known travelers to India in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this article argues that English understandings of nationhood, population, and commonwealth were informed by attempts to comprehend, inhabit, and write the complex, contingent spaces of other populations and their needs, wants, and crises, as well as those of Britain. The English commonwealth was thus reimagined in the context of the wider demographics of plural populations.

The Conjuring Girdles of King Solomon and Doctor Faustus in Early Modern Material Magic

Abstract The article concerns conjuring girdles in early modern material magic, particularly in Central Europe during the long eighteenth century (c. 1660–c. 1820). Magicians in ritual circles could wear such girdles on the body as belts or sashes to conjure and command angels, spirits, and demons. Emphasis in the article is on anonymous German manuscript books of learned magic dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, with pseudepigraphal attributions to King Solomon and Doctor Faustus. These manuscripts explain the design, text, imagery, materials, measurements, production, and applications of conjuring girdles. The article also discusses what is known about their compilers, end-users, and readers during a period marked by hybridizing, variability, and democratization in material magic. The article includes three illustrations in books of learned magic with designs for conjuring girdles (Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Ms. Hist. Nat. 80; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Mag. 6 [no. 51]; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Mag. 133 [no. 27]); and two conjuring scenes from the legends of Doctor Faustus and his apprentice Christoph Wagner.

Describing Otherness in Captives’ Autobiographies in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

The essay explores the description of Otherness in the autobiographies of three former Christian captives from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In these texts, authors described their experiences in the Islamic societies where they were enslaved, offering insights into Islamic geography and culture. However, these descriptions were also influenced by prevailing ideas and the authors’ need to align their narratives with the hegemonic discourse, thereby perpetuating and crafting biased depictions of the Other. Understanding the motivations that guided the construction of memory in these autobiographies is crucial for a comprehensive grasp of their objectives. These objectives are closely intertwined with the authors’ experiences in Islamic societies and their aspirations for reintegration into Christian ones, where they produced their writings after escaping captivity.

Reinventing Sacred Ground Amidst Natural Disaster: The Holy Islamic Tomb in Seventeenth-Century Quanzhou

The Holy Islamic Tomb at Lingshan Mountain in Quanzhou, China, is believed to be the final resting place of two of the Prophet Muhammad’s disciples who were dispatched as missionaries in the early seventh century. While prior scholarship has centred on verifying the tradition’s chronology, this article foregrounds the role of environmental actors in the tomb site’s ascent to prominence. I argue that the holy tomb (shengmu) tradition did not emerge until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, so its invention should be analysed alongside concurrent climate hazards that plagued late Ming China (1368–1644). Uncommon episodes of snowfall, flooding, drought, and associated famines drove Quanzhou’s local communities towards popular religious practices. Muslim visitation practices in Quanzhou, which experienced a restrained period following the decline of Mongol rule, re-emerged into universal consciousness and became integral to the city’s spiritual landscape by aligning with Chinese allegorical narratives. Through this reinvented tradition, the Holy Islamic Tomb was characterized as a site blessed by the heavens during times of cosmic disturbances. Instead of passive assimilation, through which religious identities may be diluted, the active participation of Quanzhou Muslims in local practices empowered them to elevate and honour Islamic traditions within a predominantly non-Muslim society.

Remembering Episcopalian Conformity in Restoration England

Abstract This article examines how the phenomenon of episcopalian conformity in the late 1640s and 1650s was remembered, debated and explained after the Restoration. Drawing on petitions, pamphlets, funeral sermons and clerical biographies, it shows that both personal ambition and polemical advantage encouraged episcopalians to suppress evidence of Interregnum conformity from the moment the king returned in May 1660. Crucially, however, this kind of whitewashing was by no means the only—or even the principal—way in which episcopalian conformists retrospectively presented their own careers. Many clergymen after 1660 were eager to defend their decision to continue ministering publicly under the English Republic, claiming that their proselytising activities in these years had ultimately helped to advance the interests of Church and king. It is argued that these contrasting approaches to remembering conformity reflect the unstable, contested meaning of loyalty, especially after 1649. As well as adding a new dimension to recent literature on the significance of memories of the English Revolution in the late seventeenth century, the article therefore enhances our understanding of episcopalian identities during the 1640s and 1650s, helping to explain why clergymen who considered themselves loyal to the pre-war order could embark on such divergent trajectories when confronted with defeat, disestablishment and regicide.

The Probability of Paradise Lost

Abstract: For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probability had been a quality of the propositions, sentences, and arguments extracted from a larger work for the purpose of example and instruction. But in the late seventeenth century, the concept grew into a criterion for the judgment of works in their entirety. The scenes of argument in Paradise Lost (1667) turned humanist convention against itself, and in so doing, helped usher probability into "the principal rule" of literary criticism: that fiction—irreducible to any of its parts, autonomous from the demands of teaching—should represent typical or generic patterns of human action.

In Pursuit of Equanimity: Managing Change and Adversity in Early Modern English Households, c.1570–c.1670

Abstract This article establishes equanimity as an important emotional ideal in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how equanimity served to strengthen positive emotions and temper disruptive states, it promotes a more positive view of the era’s emotional landscape. The article employs the pursuit of equanimity as an intimate analytical device for uncovering the agency of ordinary people, and thus offers historians a new perspective on momentous change and adversity in the early modern period. It charts personal experiences of adversity—from physical and spiritual threats to familial disputes, uncertain patriarchal power and economic precarity—alongside individual management of religious, social and political change following the English Reformations and during the Civil War. Where other scholars have examined how different social groups reactively negotiated new realities, this microhistorical study of one gentry family in the North West of England urges historians to refocus their attention on the proactive courses that people took. Through a detailed examination of 541 manuscript letters, domestic decorative schemes, and archaeological evidence of ritual practices of protection, the article uncovers how the Moretons of Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire managed change and mitigated disaster. It discusses instances where equanimity played a persistent role in motivating the family’s actions and behaviours in daily life, and argues that practices designed to promote emotional harmony were crucial for preserving kinship networks and managing personal well-being, as well as gender relations within households, in early modern England.

P. J. Thomas’s Scholarship on Mercantilism and the Political Economy of Trade: A Centennial Appreciation and Assessment

This article addresses the contribution of the Indian economist P. J. Thomas to the scholarship of mercantilism and the political economy of trade. It considers Thomas’s 1926 book, Mercantilism and the East India Trade, and interprets Thomas’s account of trade issues in the late seventeenth century in terms of the graphical analysis of the imperfect substitutes model. It contrasts Thomas’s work with that of Jacob Viner and sets his work in a larger context of culture and technology. The article concludes that Thomas’s scholarship deserves to be rediscovered within the fields of international economics and global political economy.

Western Classical Learning and the Protestant Missionaries: Revival in China and Korea in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

It has been observed that since the Early Qing Dynasty, the eastward spread of Western classics has been in decline; this article aims to looks at how Protestant missionaries helped to revive it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, this study examines the circumstances that Protestant missionaries faced upon arriving in China and describes the challenges, opportunities, and issues they encountered when attempting to spread Western classics as part of their missionary effort. Second, this article reveals the strategies Protestant missionaries employed to revive the Western classics, with a focus on the utilization of the translated literature, press, and academic institutions. Third, this article explores the ways the spread of Western classics by the missionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century outshone the achievements of their predecessors of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unlike the missions through secular knowledge in China, the spread of Protestantism in Korea took place in a more direct manner. This comparative study in the last section highlights the importance of each country’s endowment in terms of the method and effectiveness of missionary efforts.

Skin Colour and Priesthood. Debating Bodily Differences in Early Modern Catholicism*

Can people of different skin colours become Catholic priests? What may seem self‐evident from today's perspective, Catholic theologians and canon lawyers controversially debated in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While most authors agreed that colour per se was not a problematic factor, an increasing number argued that non‐white individuals should not serve as priests in white communities because of the negative reactions they would provoke there. This article argues that by taking this “perspectivist view” the Catholic Church could claim universality and flexibility in its admission policy whereas, in fact, it incorporated and reinforced anti‐Blackness. The article analyses the hitherto unexplored history of this debate, situates it within broader thinking about bodily differences in an increasingly global Catholic world and shows how it intersected with practical issues surrounding the establishment of an indigenous clergy throughout the Catholic empires and missionary zones.

Globalisation Occurred in Loch Craignish in 1720

The arrival of a pirate ship in Loch Craignish in 1720 was an episodic occurrence, which introduced a local community in Argyllshire to the process of globalisation, a process marked by the transoceanic movements of people, goods and ideas. For literate Scots, the wider horizons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were opened up by novels, travel literature and newsprint. While reading material stimulated the mind and promoted discussion about matters of global interest, actual commodities from overseas variously engaged all the senses. Globalisation became an active rather than a passive experience. Sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste affected all, from the social, commercial and intellectual elites to the woman in the field and the man in the street in early modern Scotland. Nevertheless, public knowledge of where colonial commodities came from became distanced by time. A global awareness of place was retained in families and communities overtly engaged in mercantile and military adventuring, especially when accompanied by death whether through natural causes, misadventure or mortal combat. Illicit activities had a no less profound impact. Indeed, covert people trafficking, enslavement, smuggling, shipwrecking and piracy had a more local immediacy.

Reading the rebus: the reception of seventeenth-century German rebus broadsheets

Rebuses—visual riddles that replace words or syllables by images—were highly popular in early modern Europe. Many broadsheets containing rebus poems were printed in France and Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although multiple theories on the intended audience and use of these rebuses have been formulated by historians, very little is known about their actual reception, since the extant broadsheets rarely contain any traces of their use by contemporary owners. However, several German rebus riddles have recently come to light that do contain evidence of how they were read and interpreted in early modern times. The broadsheets in question are political in nature: they pertain to the Thirty Years’ War, ridiculing the opponent by means of visual satire. The solutions to these rebus puzzles have been added in early modern hands. These rare traces of the contemporary reception of rebus broadsheets make it possible to follow the thought process of their readers step by step, demonstrating how they tackled the visual riddles and which type of image was most difficult to decipher. In one case, multiple individuals even worked on the solution at different stages, showing how these visual games could be played over and over again. These sources give us a unique insight into early modern visual literacy at work.

New material connections in a mother-of-pearl Enconchado from the Viceroyalty of New Spain

Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1695–1700), an enconchado painting attributed to Miguel González, active in Mexico in the late seventeenth century, exemplifies the refinement of the arts produced in Spanish America as a response to the taste for Asian goods during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The painting and its original mother-of-pearl inlaid frame were examined and analyzed using non-invasive and micro-sampling methods, an approach that permitted answering outstanding questions about the stratigraphy, pigments, and the use of shells throughout the painting and frame. The identification of the mother-of-pearl, determined to be from a Pinctada species, was a central focus of this study. In addition to the inlaid shells in the painting and frame, shell fragments were observed mixed with gypsum in the ground preparation of the painting by SEM–EDS. To our knowledge, this is a novel identification of marine shells in the ground of an easel painting. Traces of workmanship in the inlaid shells observed by SEM and optical microscopy are possibly connected to pre-Hispanic methodologies of mother-of-pearl refinement.Graphical

Skin on Trial: Experts and Expertise on ‘Skin Diseases’ in Early Modern Italy

Summary By using both static or normative documents (licenses, official regulations, barber-surgeon’s manuals) and more dynamic sources (trials of the Protomedicato), my presentation asks what was an expert on skin diseases in early modern Italy and how the loose category of “skin diseases” came into being under the influence of medical theory, surgical practice, patient demand, and civic regulation of medical practice. I argue that by the late seventeenth century “skin disease” became an independent category, the surface of the body an independent object, and the empiric surgeon an expert of such surface. As human skin as a surface acquired autonomy as an object of knowledge and practice, a class of experts emerged following a path which is in large measure independent from the transformations of Galenic theoretical medicine and the rise of mechanistic medicine which are typically described as central in this period. I argue that empirical surgeons and barber-surgeons became experts on skin through the licensing system and by inverting the classical path of medical knowledge – not from the inner body to its surface as manifestation of internal humoral imbalances, but rather from the surface to the knowledge and the treatment of the inner body.

The Letter‐Writing Manual and the Epistolary Novel

AbstractThe relationship between real and fictional letters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been the source of much critical debate. Disagreement surrounds the extent to which the increasingly popular genre of the epistolary novel drew on the practices and techniques of actual correspondence. On the one hand are those who see epistolary fiction as developing out of real‐life letters, with some literary‐stylistic additions. On the other hand are those who reject this teleological approach in favour of one that emphasizes the functional versatility of the letter in the period, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of drawing a distinction between its real and fictional incarnations. This relationship between real correspondence and epistolary fiction is brought into sharp focus by the genre of the letter‐writing manual, which rose sharply in popularity from the last two decades of the seventeenth century onwards. Concentrating on John Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide (1689), Thomas Goodman's The Experience's Secretary (1699), and G. F.'s The Secretary's Guide (1705), in particular, in this article, I suggest that the style of the letter‐writing manual from this period can, with caution, be compared with that of the epistolary novel. I pay particular attention to the ways in which letters in these manuals respond to and quote from each other and the often subtle ways in which they thus incorporate different voices. This polyvocality is taken further in Samuel Richardson's manual Familiar Letters (1741), which, as is well known, provided the raw material for his first novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1741). I demonstrate that some of the stylistic techniques which would prove crucial to the great epistolary novels of the later eighteenth century, including Richardson's, can be found, at least in embryonic form, in the letter‐writing manuals of the Restoration period.

Виртуальная реконструкция Рыночной улицы Старого города Кёнигсберга конца XVIII столетия: источники, технологии, история зданий, модели

Ahead of the 300th anniversary of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s birth, efforts are underway to digitally reconstruct the long-lost historical landscape of Königsberg, the birthplace of the ‘Prussian sage’. This article aims to recreate the architectural appearance of Altstädtischer Markt — the market street in the Old Town (Altstadt), one of the city’s districts. Three-dimensional models of the 18th-century public and residential buildings were constructed using surviving images of the market street-square alongside photographs, literature and research works, local history evidence, individual housing plans, design details and other data. Restoring the volumetric and spatial composition and external appearance of the facades is complicated by the absence of historical sources dating back to the study period when the aesthetic of buildings was dominated by the style features of late Baroque, Rococo and early Classicism. Although the houses retained their Medieval layout, the appearance of the street-square changed. The facades, predominantly retaining their medieval fachwerk structure, embraced contemporary architectural trends. Along this vibrant shopping street, houses adorned with sculptural embellishments and architectural elements characteristic of the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries lined the thoroughfare. It was during these periods that the street acquired its unique face. The presented three-dimensional models demonstrate the diversity and variability of Königsberg’s centuries-old street.

The Xicaque before Spanish Rule in Leán y Mulia, Honduras

Abstract In the late seventeenth century the Spanish colonial administration began to issue decrees that sought to implement the familiar colonial policies of entrada, reducción, and misión within an unconquered region of the Province of Honduras called by the Spanish Leán y Mulia. After a few short-lived settlements in the early part of the eighteenth century, a new wave of Franciscans began attempts to convert the Xicaque of Leán y Mulia in 1747–54. In 1751 the onset of a smallpox epidemic at the Franciscan misiones became the watershed event that defined subsequent interaction between the Spanish and the Xicaque and, because of this, defined Spanish policy within the region of Leán y Mulia. A fear of contracting the disease would subsequently linger in the memory of the Xicaque at the misiones and in Leán y Mulia. This dread of disease and sickness predetermined subsequent social relationships between the Xicaque and the Spanish settlers who sought their indoctrination and acculturation in subsequent decades of the eighteenth and nineteenth century with no success.

The Law of Reason and Beyond

Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham, an English philosopher and theologian, holds a distinctive place in the intellectual discourse of late seventeenth century England. As the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, a prominent Cambridge Platonist, and a close friend and student of John Locke, Damaris Masham participated in a number of discussions at once, related in one way or another to the basic tenets of Christian theology and moral philosophy. The first of these is a dispute with the English Malebranchians, primarily John Norris and his intellectual companion Mary Astell, regarding the concept of the love of God. The second important debate concerned the defence of John Locke's rational Christianity against attacks from deists and enthusiasts. In addition to the defence of moderate conformist theology against radical non-conformism, Masham's writings also offer a special vision of Christian moral life, in which there is room for pleasures, the precepts of natural law and the commandments of Christian Revelation. Natural law occupies an important, but underexplored place in Masham's moral philosophy and theology. This paper is intended to fill said gap and is devoted to the reconstruction of Masham's approach to natural law and its connection with other crucial concepts of her moral theology: pleasures, sociability, reason, Revelation. In order to accomplish this goal, we interpret Masham's writings in light of relevant contexts and consider them as polemical arguments in which natural law plays an important, but limited role.