Manuscript Treatise Research Articles

Distilling the Art of Distillation in an Unstudied Manuscript of “Chymicall Notions”

This article focuses on a curious manuscript treatise in the British Library, Harley MS 6940, which the learned physician Samuel Bispham composed for the English patron and horseman William Cavendish (1593–1676), most likely in the mid-1640s. Sitting somewhere between a practical medical recipe book and theoretical chymical treatise, while being peppered with traditional causal explanations and Galenic precautions, Harley MS 6940 testifies to the erosion of the entrenched dichotomy between chymical and Galenic medicine in the mid-seventeenth century. Harley MS 6940 also lays bare how a learned physician used (and taught the use of) practice to confirm and sometimes challenge his learning, offering a counterpoint to recent scholarship that underscores the learning that apothecaries used to shore up their practice. Produced at the behest of a leading Royalist who sought both to acquire techniques for distilling and fermenting herbs and to advance his knowledge of chymical conceptions of spirits, seeds, and salts, the manuscript allows us to appreciate that the chymical art animated a broader set of individuals than the historiography often implies.

War, peace and commerce and the Treaty of London (1604)

Abstract The Treaty of London (1604) brought an end to the long Anglo-Spanish War. Scholars have assumed that peace was broadly welcomed, especially among the English mercantile community. Yet many merchants had made vast fortunes from the war, through privateering or opening trade routes with Spain’s imperial territories. This article demonstrates that the lobbying of merchants significantly shaped the negotiations for the Treaty of London. Simultaneously, multiple manuscript treatises arguing pro or contra peace were widely circulated: these foregrounded commercial concerns in their analysis of foreign policy.

Beheading the Hydra: Antonio Castelvetro, The Congregation of the Index, and an Imagined Future for Print Censorship

In 1587, Antonio Castelvetro, a little-known physician from a well-known Modenese family, circulated a manuscript treatise that proposed a radical new vision for a Catholic press and a reformed system of press censorship: The Brief Treatise on the Reform of the Press (Trattato breve sopra la riforma della stampa). Historians have typically treated this text with a combination of amusement and outright ridicule, but this essay explains the ways that Castelvetro’s text captured a particular ethos of expertise and reform at the end of the sixteenth century in Italy. Although never implemented, Castelvetro’s treatise represents a moment of creative tactics in confrontation with the hydra of print. Censorship lay firmly within the project of the Counter-Reformation—a response directed at undermining and controlling the immediate and long-term effects of religious upheaval across Europe. However, systemic solutions to managing the press were part of the creative process of Catholic Reform. As Castelvetro’s treatise shows, some of these suggestions were more far-fetched and self-aggrandizing than others, but each contributed to a flourishing landscape of ideas aimed at combatting heresy and restructuring Catholic life.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Hobbes, Empire, and the Politics of the Cabal: Political Thought and Policy Making in the Restoration

AbstractThis article explores a sizable and largely unknown manuscript treatise from the 1670s, “Pax et Obedientia,” which discusses the Civil Wars, trade, the origins of government, toleration, plantations (especially Jamaica), and the royal supremacy, embedding within it a distinctive engagement with Hobbes and a particular vision of imperial composite monarchy. This first analysis of what “Pax” said, who wrote it, and why he did so in the way that he did nuances the present understanding of Restoration debates over a centralizing empire; it reveals the different forms that policy makers thought that empire might take, while also capturing a moment of transition between different meanings of imperium. The anonymous author's engagement with Hobbes further suggests how questions that later fell into the realm of political economy were discussed at the time, using the language of natural jurisprudence. In demonstrating the methodological necessity of utilizing both linguistic and institutional contexts, the authors argue that the apparent incoherence of “Pax” reflects an essential although ineptly executed strategy on the part of its author. Inchoate though the manuscript is, it offers a significant opportunity to understand the intellectual world of junior members of the government and to reconsider the intersection of political thinking and political action.

Learning the ‘New Law of the Star Chamber’: Legal Education and Legal Literature in Early-Stuart England

ABSTRACT How did early-modern lawyers learn about the law and practice of courts which were under-served in printed legal literature? This article investigates this question through an examination of the dissemination of professional knowledge about the court of Star Chamber. It considers the role of the readings in the Inns of Court, as well as the extensive circulation of manuscript treatises about the court and law reports of cases heard in the court.

Jakob Adlung’s ‘Anweisung zum Fantasiren’ (c.1725–7): edition, translation and introduction

Abstract Jakob Adlung’s recently rediscovered manuscript treatise, ‘Anweisung zum Fantasiren’ (‘Instruction in improvisation’, c.1725–7), proves definitively that some 18th-century musicians understood improvisation modularly in terms of stock voice-leading patterns, or schemas. The manuscript is a compendium containing 28 typical voice-leading patterns that are to be memorized, varied and combined in myriad ways. Adlung’s treatise is thus of particular value, not only because of its numerous musical examples and extensive textual commentary, but because it reveals some of the musical and social expectations of the average central German church organist in the early 18th century. This article offers an introduction to the treatise in the context of Adlung’s biography, with an online appendix containing a critical edition of the treatise and an English translation.

The Lost Liquid Cosmogony of Johannes Daniel Schlichting (1705–1765)

The focus of this paper is a fascinating but hitherto unstudied 1742 manuscript treatise by Johannes Daniel Schlichting (1705–1765) titled “Sapientiæ Problema” that contains something extremely rare in the mid-eighteenth century: a full-blown speculative cosmogony. As this article reveals, Schlichting developed a distinctive vital liquid matter in an effort to account for the generation of all natural bodies and combat the stamina-based theories that were dominant in his day. He hoped that his treatise would be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, but an accompanying abridgment by the FRS Henry Baker (1698–1774) strongly implies that Schlichting’s speculative bent and desire to divulge causal explanations were unacceptable to the Englishman and generally ill-suited to the intellectual climate of mid-century England.

Partus Sequitur Ventrem in Theory and Practice: Slavery and Reproduction in Early Modern Portuguese Asia

ABSTRACTWhereas partus sequitur ventrem (“the birth follows the womb”) laws and their effects on the lives of enslaved women and their children are well understood in the Atlantic context, they remain entirely unstudied in the case of the slave trade in Asia, in particular Portuguese Asia, the string of entrepôts between India and Japan. Focusing on Portuguese Asia between c. 1550 and 1750, this article relies on a little‐known corpus of manuscript treatises on slavery alongside baptismal records, manumission letters and other archival documents to argue that Jesuit missionaries built on the longstanding and varied legal tradition that they had inherited to create a mixed descriptive‐prescriptive framework for understanding and regulating the hereditability of slavery in Asia, which simultaneously admitted departures from partus sequitur ventrem, including Chinese, Japanese and Mughal slavery. This theoretical framework reflected (and to some degree created) the reality on the ground, although the lives of enslaved women were inevitably also shaped by factors that the Jesuits did not fully comprehend, such as Chinese conventions surrounding female bondservants and the seemingly divergent manumission rates of different ethnic groups.

Harmonizing Chorales Systematically: A Translation of G. H. Stölzel’s Kurzer und gründlicher Unterricht (Brief and Thorough Instruction), ms. c.1719–1749

This article provides the first English translation of a little-known manuscript treatise by the central-German composer and Capellmeister, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1749), titled Kürzer und gründliche Unterricht (Brief and Thorough Instruction, ca. 1719–49). Stölzel’s method frames speculative theory (trias harmonica and the tabula tradition) practically in terms of thoroughbass in order to provide simple instruction on how to invent the bass and middle voices to an original chorale melody. In the second half of the treatise, Stölzel uses thoroughbass to describe not only harmony, but also counterpoint. He does so by explaining various dissonant intervallic constellations in terms of the traditional terms “agent” and “patient,” which describe the two voices involved in a dissonant syncopatio. Stölzel’s treatise thus has both historical and practical value, since his method of chorale harmonization can provide welcome guidance for today's students and pedagogues.

El manuscrito de elaboración de pólvora de la Casa del Infantado. Un manual técnico de fines del XV e inicios del XVI

El estudio de la pólvora en la Castilla medieval ha contado hasta el momento con un exiguo conocimiento sobre su proceso de fabricación. Con el presente trabajo se pretende dar a conocer y analizar un manuscrito datado en época de los Reyes Católicos y conservado en el Archivo Histórico de la Nobleza, Casa del Infantado, dedicado a la escopeta. Así como aportar luz sobre los procesos técnicos relacionados, refinado del salitre y el azufre y composición del carbón.

Some (Dis)Assembly Required

In 2010, researchers at theBach-Archiv Leipzigrediscovered a manuscript treatise by the central German organist and theorist Jacob Adlung titled “Anweisung zum Fantasieren” (Instruction in Improvisation), dating from c. 1726–27. The treatise, which is investigated here for the first time in print, contains twenty-eight typical baroque voice-leading patterns. Although Adlung demonstrates the variation of these patterns in detail, he remains largely silent regarding their concatenation into larger structures. Two publications by Adlung’s south-German contemporary Johann Vallade represent the ideal complement to Adlung’s treatise, since both authors rely on the principle of modularity, but in a reciprocal manner: Adlung demonstrates and varies individual patterns (a bottom-up approach), while Vallade begins with complete pieces and breaks them into smaller parts (a top-down approach). Thus I suggest that Vallade’s pieces can be productively understood as models for the concatenation of Adlung’s patterns—a sort of missing appendix to Adlung’s instruction. By viewing these authors’ methods as complementary, we gain a more complete picture of how keyboard improvisation and composition were taught in the eighteenth century, which has important implications for historically informed analysis.

Orient contra China: Eusèbe Renaudot's Vision of World History (ca. 1700).

One of the most important Orientalists, EusèbeRenaudot (1648-1720), was central in at least three major debates of his time: the late confessionalist anti-Protestant debate about the conceptions of the Eucharist; the hundred-year-long clash between the Jesuits and their enemies during the controversy of rites; and the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Analyzing Renaudot's large collection of unpublished manuscript treatises, it is argued that the early modern concept of ‟world history," with its actors, civilizations, and even historical or cultural regions like the "Middle East," emerged as something of a by-product of competing visions within those debates.

The Fundamenta compositionis Jean Kuhnaus 1703. Edition, Translation, and Commentary

Until now, scholars have generally doubted whether Johann Kuhnau, J. S. Bach’s predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, was indeed the author of the manuscript treatise, Fundamenta Compositionis Jean Kuhnaus 1703. Nevertheless the Fundamenta appears to originate from the Thomasschule around 1700, suggesting that it may stem from Kuhnau’s broader circle. Moreover, recent research has revealed concordances between the Fundamenta and an anonymous manuscript titled Kurtze Verfasung (“Brief Instruction”), in addition to a number of other sources. Thus, regardless of who compiled the Fundamenta, this manuscript is significant because it reveals the pedagogical priorities, or “fundamentals” (according to the title), that often lie buried in more discursive, theoretical treatises. Therefore the ultimate value of the Fundamenta is not its originality, but rather its explication of topics such as consonance and dissonance, modes, clausulae, cadences, invertible counterpoint, and fugue in a highly condensed, practical manner with numerous musical examples. The Fundamenta is thus an excellent resource for historically informed analysis and composition at the turn of the eighteenth century, before thoroughbass accompaniment displaced vocal polyphony as the dominant pedagogical paradigm in compositional instruction. Part one of this article explores the Fundamenta’s provenance in detail; part two provides a transcription and English translation.

Robert Boyle's anonymous 'Crosey-Crucian' identified: The German alchemist and religious dissenter Peter Moritz.

Using previously neglected manuscript sources, this paper sheds light on a puzzling episode in the later life of Robert Boyle and the early career of his laboratory assistant Ambrose Godfrey. Currently, the only account of their disappointing encounter with an unnamed German adept derives from Godfrey's lost manuscript treatise 'An Apology and Letter touching a Crosey-Crucian', excerpts of which were published in 1858. Based on a comparison between that source and the papers of the virtually forgotten chymical practitioner and convicted heretic Peter Moritz (1638-ca. 1700), the authors argue that Godfrey's anonymous 'Crosey-Crucian' was none other than Moritz himself. The first part establishes that various significant and seemingly insignificant details agree precisely and thus corroborate this identification. The second part focuses on those passages among Moritz's papers that contain explicit evidence of his dealings with both Boyle and Godfrey, a sheet of notes and a lengthy epistolary 'Memorial' to an unnamed addressee. The authors contend that Moritz's 'Memorial' is a version of the same document that the adept sought to deliver to Boyle who refused to accept it, according to Godfrey's 'Apology'. For this reason, and on the basis of strong internal evidence, Boyle is identified as the intended recipient of Moritz's 'Memorial'. Taken together, these two identifications solve a long-standing riddle in Boyle scholarship and introduce a significant addition to his extant correspondence.

The hydrostatical works of George Sinclair ( c .1630–1696): their neglect and criticism

The Scottish natural philosopher George Sinclair (or Sinclar) ( c .1630–1696) was one of the earliest British writers on hydrostatics. He visited London in 1662, when he met Sir Robert Moray and Robert Boyle and left a manuscript treatise at the Royal Society. Receipt of this work was never recorded by the Society, and Sinclair felt that he had been dealt with unfairly. A Latin version, Ars nova et magna gravitatis et levitatis , was published in 1669, followed by his Hydrostaticks in 1672. All Sinclair's works were vituperatively and pseudonymously criticized by James Gregory and William Sanders in The Great and New Art of Weighing Vanity of 1672. Here, Sinclair's life is summarized, and his disputes with the Royal Society and with Gregory and Sanders are examined. It is argued that, despite his other limitations, Sinclair's knowledge of hydrostatics was considerable, and that the criticisms made against him were exaggerated. Yet his work was subsequently neglected. Sinclair's treatment sheds light both on academic rivalries and on the procedures of the early Royal Society.

Figuración y teatralidad en las estructuras de comunicación vertical propuestas por los Vandelvira. Estudio formal y analítico del caracol de emperadores como caso teórico singular

<p>En la obra de Vandelvira, y por supuesto en el manuscrito de su hijo, se van declarando una serie de temas entre los que no quedan de lado distintas aplicaciones sobre el empleo de superficies alabeadas. Ampliando el grado de complejidad en este campo, Vandelvira considera además el uso de superficies cíclicas que, bien con un papel protagonista o bien como solución complementaria, terminan generando hélices y helicoides.</p><p>La explicación del despliegue de estas figuras geométricas queda a medio camino entre las soluciones a problemáticas de carácter utilitario y la búsqueda de una expresividad plástica capaz de suscitar en el usuario respuestas psicológicas más complejas. Podemos decir que estos fragmentos constructivos, en ocasiones identificados como detalles menores o accesorios con respecto al total de la obra, están dotados de un espíritu místico singular con la suficiente capacidad para significar al conjunto.</p>

Richard Haydocke’s Oneirologia: A Manuscript Treatise on Sleep and Dreams, including the ‘Arguments’ of King James i

Richard Haydocke’s manuscript treatise Oneirologia (1605) is a learned account in English of the medical nature of sleep and dreams. This article presents a commented edition of the manuscript, an account of the circumstances that led to its composition, and a commentary on its contents. Apparently composed on the orders of King James i (whose ‘arguments’ against rational discourse in sleep it includes), Oneirologia is a significant document in the history of early modern erudition. The treatise reflects the orthodox physiognomic and psychological explanations of sleep and dreaming expounded in the universities, as well as its author’s experience as a writer on and practitioner of the visual arts. A product of the febrile political climate in England around the time of the Gunpowder Plot, Oneirologia touches upon major themes in society and religion, including the nature of royal authority, mens rea, and divine revelation.

Remarks on architecture: the Vitruvian tradition in Enlightenment Poland

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Architectural theory in Eastern Europe during the EnlightenmentReview of:Ignacy Potocki, Remarks on Architecture. The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland, Carolyn C. Guile ed. and transl., University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 155 p.Basile BaudezEarly modern Polish architectural thought is largely absent from standard surveys of Western art and architecture. If Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski has recently studied the history of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth1 and if Andrezj Rottermund's work on neo-classicism has been partly translated2, no general study of eighteenth-century East European or Polish architecture exists in English apart from Stefan Muthesius' brief account in Art, architecture and Design in Poland, 966-1990 (Konigstein im Taunus: K. R. Langewiesche Nachfolger H. Koster Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1994). Due to a language barrier, limited or restricted access to primary and secondary sources, the situation of East-European studies began to change only in the 1990s and with time, historiography has shifted its concern from the strict research of a East-West borderland as it was defined by Oscar Halecki in 1980 in Borderlands of western civilization: a history of East Central Europe, to the study of multidirectional cultural transfers3. The historic notion of connected centres played an important role in understanding these phenomena, a more useful tool to think the age of Enlightenment than considering the cultural geography of Central Europe only in terms of centres and peripheries4. To understand Enlightenment art and architecture, analysing circulations and transfers proved to be more efficient than focusing on distinct regional boundaries. The conference organised in Warsaw in November 2013 by Letizia Tedeschi, Andrzej Rottermund and Sergej Androsov, 'Recepcja i odmiany antyku w Polsce i Rosji w okresie neoklasycyzmu' (Transmission of the Antique in Russia and Poland during the neoclassical era) was a sign of the renewal of East-European studies of architecture in particular. Carolyn C. Guile's edition and translation of Ignacy Potocki's manuscript Remarks on Architecture provides an exceptional case study of what rigorous and inventive scholarship can bring to our knowledge not only of the strategies at work in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but also of the Enlightenment European architectural theory more generally. Guile, associate professor of art and art history at Colgate University, is a specialist of the early-modern architecture of Central Europe and her field of expertise focuses on the art and architecture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Among other papers, she has contributed an essay on 'Winckelmann in Poland: An Eighteenth-Century Response to the History of the Art of Antiquity' in the December 2013 issue of the Journal of Art Historiography. The book here under review that she published with the Pennsylvania State University Press in 2015 provides the reader not only with the edition of an unpublished eighteenth-century manuscript treatise held in the Central Archive of Early Records in Warsaw (Archiwum Glowne Akt Dawnych), but also with a very clear translation and an illuminating introduction (1-56) which represents the first study available for English readers of the early modern architectural treatise in the East European borderlands and early modern Polish-language architectural theory5. A bibliography, which strangely mixes secondary and archival sources, and a very useful index of places, locations and topics complete this scholarly work, which takes an important place in the history of architectural theory of the Enlightenment.Architectural treatises studies, a historiographical genreSince the end of the 1980s literature on the history of architectural treatise focused mainly on the Renaissance and Baroque, with major contributions including Jean Guillaume's edited multilingual volume, Les traites d'architecture de la Renaissance published by Picart in 1988, Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks edited volume, Paper palaces: the rise of the Renaissance architectural treatise at Yale University Press in 1998 and Alina Payne's The Architectural treatise of the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture published in 2011 at Cambridge University Press. …

Chanter sur le livre à la Renaissance: Les traités de contrepoint de Vicente Lusitano ed. by Philippe Canguilhem (review)

PORTUGAL Chanter sur le livre a la Renaissance: Les traites de contrepoint de Vicente Lusitano. Edited by Philippe Canguilhem. (Collection Epitome musical.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. [410 p. ISBN 9782503550404. i 80.] Music examples, illustrations, facs , companion Web site, appendices, bibliography, index.The practice of improvised polyphony during the Renaissance has long seemed out of reach to musicologists and performers. Vicente Lusitano, a Portuguese musician born around 1520, is most often recognized as a participant in a celebrated debate with Nicola Vicentino in 1551. Less widely known is that Lusitano is also the author of not one, but two of the most detailed music theory treatises on the practice of improvised polyphony. This volume aims to promote awareness of Lusitano's treatises by making them more widely available and by presenting extensive research on his life and works.The book opens with an essay by Philippe Canguilhem that situates Lusitano's writings within the context of major developments in Renaissance contrapuntal theory. Particular attention is paid to Lusitano's indebtedness to earlier Iberian writings, most notably Matheo de Aranda's Tractado de canto mensurable y contrapunto (Lisbon, 1535). Canguilhem's thorough introduction to Lusitano's writings explains the important concepts of contrapunto suelto, contrapunto concertado, and abilidades. A fascinating discussion of the relationship between counterpoint and composition (pp. 21-23) introduces notions of orality and literacy to the scholarship on the historical meaning of these terms. For Canguilhem, the significance of Lusitano's writings is that they show how central improvised counterpoint was to everyday musical life during the Renaissance. The chapter includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary sources concerning the practice of chanter sur le livre up to the year 1800.An essay by Giordano Mastrocola marks a new height in biographical research on Lusitano. The wide-ranging chapter examines key elements of Lusitano's personal identity: Portuguese nationality, racial and ethnic difference (his father was probably an African slave), cosmopolitanism in Rome, and, toward the end of his life, heterodoxy across Europe. Mastrocola rightly laments the knee-jerk scholarly association of Lusitano with Vicentino. In addition to an extended discussion of their debate (pp. 58-78)-the clearest yet in the secondary literature-the chapter presents intriguing findings that will enable future scholarship to transcend the limiting view of Lusitano merely as Vicentino's nemesis. Among these promising areas of research are his social and geographical mobility, conversion to Protestantism, and later transalpine career (possibly under a different name). Mastrocola's contextualization of Lusitano within overlapping aristocratic networks in Portugal, Italy, and Germany is very useful in this regard.The remainder of the volume consists of critical editions and French translations of excerpts from two treatises by Lusitano. The first, Del arte de contrapunto (ca. 1550), is from a larger manuscript treatise preserved in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, shelf mark Espagnol 219. Although the Spanish-language manuscript is anonymous, the editors follow Robert M. Stevenson in attributing its authorship to Lusitano, and take a further step in asserting its status as an autograph (pp. 119-20). A short linguistic analysis by Marie-Francoise Deodat-Kessedjian establishes the influence of Portuguese and Latin on the Spanish orthography in the manuscript; this contributes additional security to the manuscript's attribution to Lusitano. Clearly, the manuscript was a work in progress. The editors preserve the flavor of its development by indicating additions, cancellations, and marginalia where they occur.Lusitano's Del arte de contrapunto is a systematic discussion of ways to improvise counterpoint against a given voice. The first chapter proceeds logically in the manner of species counterpoint, considering in turn one, two, four, and three notes against one note of a cantus firmus. …