Seventeenth Century Research Articles

Transubstantiation and Trinity in the Anglican controversy with Roman Catholicism during James II’s reign

ABSTRACT In 1686, during the Anglican controversy with Roman Catholicism, two anonymously published recusant tracts employed Socinian arguments to contend that Protestants’ reliance on Scripture as sufficient for salvation led to the denial of not only transubstantiation but also Trinity as unscriptural and irrational. They emphasized the necessity to refer to sacred tradition, as preserved by the Roman Catholic Church, in order to define Christian doctrine and salvage the Trinity. Anglican clergymen Thomas Tenison, Richard Kidder, William Sherlock, and Edward Stillingfleet replied that the Trinity was a thing “above reason” revealed in Scripture. However, this solution, implying that the Trinity was not plainly comprehensible to reason, led to further doubt about authority in biblical exegesis, since recusant polemicists denounced the shortcomings of free interpretation while Anglican divines argued that Church Councils were not exempt from mistakes. Relying on Scripture but rejecting tradition, Stephen Nye and other Unitarians promptly exposed the fallacies of the claim that the Trinity was a revealed thing above reason, thereby eliciting different responses from Trinitarian apologists who attempted, ineffectively, to explain the Trinity in philosophical terms. Thus, the dispute of 1686–1687 on transubstantiation and Trinity contributed to triggering the Trinitarian controversy of the late seventeenth century.

King's Lynn and the Low Countries in the Early Seventeenth Century: Maritime Trade and Sexual Scandal

King's Lynn and the Low Countries in the Early Seventeenth Century: Maritime Trade and Sexual Scandal

A possible trachoma cluster unveiling the mist of Le Rôdeur: probes in favor and against an alternative cause of the crew blindness

ABSTRACT In 1819, a puzzling outbreak of infectious blindness afflicted nearly all crew members and African slaves aboard the French vessel Le Rôdeur during the transatlantic slave trade. This paper investigates the etiology of this unique event, comparing different pathogens that cause blindness: Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Onchocerca volvulus; endemic in the African Continent. Reviewing naval medicine since the seventeenth century and eye infection knowledge in 1800, alongside historical records, we explore the singular case of Le Rôdeur’s outbreak. While some clinical features favor trachoma, rapid onset, and progression align with gonococcal conjunctivitis. We suggest both as possible causes, underscoring the intricate intersection of infectious diseases and transatlantic trade.

William Bynum Prize 2023: Highly Commended Overcoming Childlessness: Narratives of Conception in Early Modern North India.

This article discusses early modern North Indian ways of expressing how barrenness could be mapped onto a woman's maternal identity. Scholars have engaged with the historical evolution of women's identities, focusing overwhelmingly on their economic and political potential. This article is the first to use medical and erotological sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study women as procreative agents, and the socio-sexual anxieties prompted by infertile female bodies. Through a critical study of a wide range of medical material, I demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, several transformations in medical discourses can be mapped onto textual transmissions from Sanskrit (and Braj Bhasha) to Persian, as well as between competing but conterminously flourishing medical paradigms, Ayurveda and Yunani. While cures for childlessness have a much longer history, a new genre of 'anonymous' sources, particularly focused on the sexual diseases of men and women emerged in early modern North India. Lastly, my comparative methodological approach to different textual genres will complicate our understanding of early modern medical episteme and its intended audience.

Unlocking the Research Potential of Early Modern Dutch Maps

Working from the GLOBALISE project, we have enhanced access to over 5,000 Dutch maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, renowned for their geographic and historical significance. We have laid the groundwork for enriching these maps with annotations and metadata following the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standards, directly linked to their digital representations from the collection-holding institutions. This approach ensures a FAIR framework for sharing research results and fosters collaborative annotation. We enriched the maps with georeferencing annotations and employed automated tools to extract toponyms and geographic features, enabling large-scale analysis. These annotations open new pathways for exploring understudied historical regions, such as early modern Kerala, and assessing Dutch colonial influence globally. By publishing our data early, we aim to encourage further collaborative refinements, allowing a wider scholarly community to improve and build upon this work. This approach highlights the potential of combining historical cartography with computational tools to empower large-scale geographic and historical research.

Probabilistic tephra fallout hazard maps for Sangay volcano, Ecuador

Sangay volcano (Ecuador) shows a quasi-continuous activity at least since the seventeenth century and has produced several eruptions which affected towns and cities at considerable distance (up to > 170 km). For this reason, despite its remote location, recent efforts were aimed at reviewing its volcanic history, quantifying the occurrence probability of four eruptive scenarios of different magnitude (Strong Ash Venting, Violent Strombolian, sub-Plinian, and Plinian) and the associated uncertainty, and, for each eruptive scenario, estimating the probability distribution of key eruptive source parameters (fallout volume, average plume height, and eruption duration). In this study, we utilize such information to produce probabilistic hazard maps and curves. To this aim, we use coupled plume and dispersal models (PLUME-MOM-TSM and HYSPLIT, respectively) with the application of a novel workflow for running an ensemble of thousands of simulations following a stochastic sampling of input parameters. We produced probabilistic hazard maps for each scenario by considering four ground load thresholds (i.e., 0.1, 1, 10, and 100 kg/m2) and two types of model initialization strategies, based on the elicited total deposit volume and on the elicited plume height, respectively, which produced non-negligible differences. In addition, we produced hazard curves for nine sites of interest from a risk perspective, corresponding to towns/cities potentially affected by tephra accumulation. Finally, we also derived combined maps by merging maps of single scenarios with their probability of occurrence as obtained from expert elicitation. Results indicate that in case of a future eruption, even for a moderate-scale one (Violent Strombolian), probability of tephra accumulation larger than 1 kg/m2 is relatively high (from 21 to 24% considering different model initializations) in the town of Guamote, i.e., the most severely affected site among those tested (43 km W of Sangay). For larger-scale events (i.e., sub-Plinian), the impact of tephra accumulation results to be significant even for the city of Guayaquil (176 km W of Sangay), with probability of tephra accumulation larger than 1 kg/m2 from 3 to 22% considering different model initializations. For maps combining single maps of historically observed scenarios, the probability (% - [5th-Mean-95th]) of having ≥ 10 kg/m2 for Guamote is [4-13-25] as maximum values.

Borrowing from French into Dutch (1500–1899): Testing the diffusion and graduality assumptions

Abstract The paper tests two assumptions in loanword research: the diffusion assumption and the graduality assumption. The diffusion assumption holds that lexical borrowings typically gain in frequency over time and diffuse across the community. The graduality assumption implies that borrowings enter the recipient language as non-integrated code-switches and eventually integrate into the grammar of the recipient language. These assumptions are inherently diachronic and are here tested on historical data. We investigate loanwords from French as found in the Language of Leiden Corpus. This corpus comprises Dutch textual materials related to the city of Leiden. It covers the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was built specifically to investigate the influence of French on historical Dutch, which is sometimes described in terms of frenchification. The corpus comprises 8,767 established lexical borrowings from French. We show that there is scant empirical evidence for the diffusion and graduality assumptions.

Women and the Polish-Lithuanian Army: Between Legal Norms and Everyday Life

The article describes the presence of women in the armies of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These armed forces differed from the European military as there was a small proportion of women accompanying the soldiers. The differences did not disappear until the following century. The duties normally performed by women were fulfilled by ‘camp servants’, and military law strongly fought against any form of female presence, with the exception of soldiers’ wives and tradeswomen.

Aesop’s vomit: or, stomach problems in early modern England

ABSTRACT This essay tracks ideas about the stomach in early modern England and the perceived dangers that its actions presented to the status of the human. The argument moves from the depiction of the belly in early modern drama with its reflection on the vulnerability of human control; through medical ideas about eating and diet and the transformation of food into matter for use in, or expulsion from, the body; and, finally, it ponders the representation of Aesop’s digestive system in The Life of Aesop, a text from the first century CE that accompanied collections of beast fables into the seventeenth century. The essay argues for a re-evaluation of the human in the light of concerns about the stomach, eating and the processes of digestion that can be traced across a range of early modern texts.

Poetic License: Political Education in Hobbes’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad

Abstract Although it is largely overlooked, Thomas Hobbes spent the final years of his life translating Homer’s epic poetry. Despite an overwhelmingly popular extant English edition of the Iliad by George Chapman, Hobbes chose to proffer his own account, often taking great liberties with the source material. Juxtaposed against Chapman’s translation, we see that Hobbes implicitly critiques the political philosophy it commends—a philosophy which disrespects kingly power, misunderstands sovereign authority, and abdicates human virtue. Hobbes sees these elements as corrupting the poetic imagination of England, precipitating much of the unrest we see in the seventeenth century. In correcting and reframing these tales for a new world, Hobbes provides a moral scaffolding for his political philosophy through one of the most widely read classical texts of his time.

Ethiopian Churches Commemorating Military Victories of the Solomonic Kingdom over the Betä Ǝsraʾel (Ethiopian Jews)

During the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, most Jews lived as a minority under Christian or Islamic rule. By contrast, the Ethiopian Jews, the Betä Ǝsraʾel, maintained political autonomy in parts of Ethiopia until the seventeenth century. From the fourteenth century, they were engaged in a series of wars against the Christian Solomonic Kingdom. Following Christian military victories over the Betä Ǝsraʾel, the victors erected churches in the newly conquered lands. Some were built on the sites of battles and over Betä Ǝsraʾel strongholds to commemorate the Solomonic victory. While churches dedicated to historical events are common, those memorializing Christian military victories over Jews are largely without parallel elsewhere. This article provides an overview of what is known about their location, characteristics, and symbolism, and discusses their contribution to understanding the Betä Ǝsraʾel polity.

The codpiece with a charm: coffee and sexual anxiety in 1670s England

ABSTRACT Coffee was an object of both social and political anxiety in 1670s England, culminating in a short-lived ban on coffeeshops in 1675. Claims made in contemporaneous pamphlets, specifically ‘The Women’s Petition Against Coffee,’ about coffee’s possible impact on male fertility need to be taken more seriously than have previously been in existing scholarship. Due to the changes in England’s population levels in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the question of coffee’s impact on reproductive ability would have been relevant to the English public. Given the larger context of the on-going military and trade conflicts with the Dutch, the suggestion that coffee could prevent men from fully partaking in reproduction had ramifications that went into the political sphere, making coffee drinking tied to the future of the English national project.

Reformation religious identities and the fluidities of confessional allegiance: the world according to Sir William Monson

ABSTRACT At some point in the late 1620s or early 1630s, the long-serving naval officer, Sir William Monson, took the time to set down his thoughts about recent history, particularly of the Reformation in the English Church, the success (or lack of it) of the so-called Protestant cause, and of what appeared to him to be a slew of corruption which he associated with an unchecked tendency to puritanism. However, Monson was not just any run-of-the-mill Church-of-England conformist. As his, admittedly, often bizarre and even rambling text made clear, he had internalised some of the sharpest edges of what one might term the ‘Catholic’ account of the post-Reformation. But despite his family’s reputation for having such tendencies, he, it seems, never went into separation. It is, therefore, worth revisiting his words to see how contemporaries in the early seventeenth century could think about their political and religious identity, and how they applied their thoughts in this respect to the political situations in which they found themselves.

EARLY MODERN GREEK LITERATURE - (T.) Korhonen To the Glory that was Greece. Ideas, Ideals and Practices in Composing Humanist Greek during the Seventeenth Century. (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 143.) Pp. vi + 411, ill. Helsinki: The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 2022. Paper, €30. ISBN: 978-951-653-488-9.

EARLY MODERN GREEK LITERATURE - (T.) Korhonen To the Glory that was Greece. Ideas, Ideals and Practices in Composing Humanist Greek during the Seventeenth Century. (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 143.) Pp. vi + 411, ill. Helsinki: The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 2022. Paper, €30. ISBN: 978-951-653-488-9.

The fate of Philologus: learning and prattle in early modern religious dialogue

ABSTRACT This article examines a number of early modern dialogic works – two by Thomas Fuller and William Nicholls in close detail – in which an antagonistic interlocutor is named ’Philologus‘. Finding a classical precedent in the pastiche of ’aliquis philologus‘ in Seneca’s letters, the article traces how the Philologi came to characterise a certain form of ’learned prattle‘, or an erudite verbosity. Moving through popular Tudor satire and moral drama to contentious and confessionalised seventeenth-century erudition, the article shows how as the seventeenth century progressed, the name ’Philologus‘ came to be associated with the practices and abuses of formal, Latinate ’philology‘, in particular learned criticism of the Bible. What appears by the end of the century is an attempt to undercut the more dangerous arguments of philology – in particular those of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza – by associating them with the trope of the ’learned prattler’, whose immoderate word-loving fundamentally compromised his character and scholarship.

Transatlantic genesis: Good Government in the seventeenth century empires of England and Spain

ABSTRACT The article examines the transatlantic exchange of the Republican and Stoic traditions in regard to nation and empire-building in early modern geopolitics and colonial policies by comparing discussions of “Good Government” in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s The First New Chronicle and Good Government (1615) with those in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). I argue that Guaman Poma’s critique of empire (both Inca and Spanish) draws on a strain of neo-Roman republicanism and stoicism in which humanism and Christian morality overlap. The discussion of Milton illustrates the circulation of ideas throughout transatlantic empires during the early modern era, providing context for Guaman Poma's response to colonialism.

Empires of Obligation: Law, Money, and Debt between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1670–1720

During the 1690s, both the English and Ottoman states developed new institutions for longer-term borrowing and reformed their imperial monetary systems. These synchronous but divergent developments present a puzzle that has not been answered by rigidly separate English and Ottoman historiographies. “Empires of Obligation” follows merchants trading between England and the Ottoman Empire to understand how both states responded differently to the challenges of global trade and fiscal crisis. At this time, English merchants were the most powerful European traders in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire represented England’s greatest single market for its woolen textiles, its largest industry. As Levant Company merchants swapped woolens for silk, they also blended international private credit with domestic public finance. They were the largest merchant investors relative to the size of their trade in the Bank of England and helped facilitate Ottoman longer-term public borrowing through the mālikāne system. From within England’s bureaucracy, they also worked to ease global trade through an “intrinsic value” theory of money, the idea that coins represented a government commitment to provide a fixed amount of precious metal. At the same time, the Ottoman state sought to redefine money as an instrument of the state, not a tool of trade. Following merchants who themselves bridged two empires that are rarely compared shows interconnected but divergent responses to the challenges of making money work both within and between states at the end of the seventeenth century.

Introduction: Renaissance humanism and the Venetian empire

AbstractThe articles gathered in this special issue explore the connection between two major historical phenomena of the fifteenth century: the tremendous diffusion of the humanist movement and the triumphal expansion of the Venetian empire in the Eastern Mediterranean and northern Italy. By focusing on the interactions between the political, social and intellectual conjunctures and by adopting a large‐scale perspective at the culturally diverse territories under Venetian rule, the special issue approaches the Venetian state as an interconnected space of scholarly exchange defined by a common but polymorphous political culture. This introduction places the special issue in the context of new approaches in the historiography on Renaissance humanism and the early modern Venetian state. It advances an understanding of Venetian humanism as an imperial phenomenon and highlights the seminal role it played in the establishment of the Venetian political order in the fifteenth century and its influence well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Property Righting: The Politics of Rights Over Land and Labor

This essay focuses on property rights in land and labor, the ways in which they have been entangled since the development of early capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the extent to which they have realized—or failed to realize—desiderata in addition to economic productivity and growth. The definition and enforcement of property rights may reflect the power relations within a society, but their realization depends on state laws and capacities. Transformations of property rights tend to follow changes in the balance of power among elites and in state capacity or occur as a response to effective resistance by those who are harmed or excluded.

Marcello Malpighi's failing health, death, and the remarkable story of his mortal remains.

Marcello Malpighi, renowned as the founder of microscopic anatomy, faced many challenges throughout his life. Among these was his frail health, which deteriorated in his early 40s when he developed kidney stones. He struggled with arthritic pain and heart palpitations, which, along with his renal condition, gradually became worse as he got older. His clinical history and autopsy findings also suggest he may have suffered from hypertension, a disease unknown in the seventeenth century. Toward the end, his declining health was complicated by cardiovascular failure. After he died from a stroke, his mortal remains lay unburied for months due to a dispute over the ownership of the burial place. They were finally entombed but relocated multiple times over the next three centuries. An examination of the bones currently housed in his memorial, conducted on the tercentenary of his birth and critically revisited years later, raised doubts about their authenticity. In this paper, I review the causes of Malpighi's poor health and death and delve into the intriguing story of his mortal remains.