Sixteenth Century Research Articles

Bebel, Heinrich. Facetiae: Jokes and Funny Stories from the Sixteenth Century. Ed. and trans. Sebastian Coxon

Bebel, Heinrich. Facetiae: Jokes and Funny Stories from the Sixteenth Century. Ed. and trans. Sebastian Coxon

О некоторых особенностях конструкции и покроя хулагуидских, чагатайских и тимуридских пластинчато-нашивных и пластинчато-клепанных доспехов XIV–XV вв.

Introduction. The paper considers body armor patterns with hidden plates worn by warriors of Hulaguid Iran, Chagatai Ulus, and the Timurid Empire. In contemporary weapon studies, such armor is known as ‘kuyak’ or ‘brigandine’. Goals. The study aims at identifying features of design and cut inherent to some types of Hulaguid, Chagatai and Timurid ‘kuyaks’ from the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries. Results. Comparative insights into archaeological and graphic materials yield a hypothesis there may have existed a special variety of combined ‘kuyaks’ with some plates riveted and some sewn to an organic backing on the inside. Such armor garments could have been used by warriors of Hulaguid Iran in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries. From a historical perspective, such armors could be a variation between thirteenth-century armor garments with sewn-in plates and — ‘brigandines’ with riveted-in plates of the subsequent era. Our comprehensive analysis of written and graphic data also concludes that the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Transoxiana, Khorasan and adjacent territories were characterized by a widespread occurrence of special plated-and-riveted armors combining an armored torso part and a long unarmored skirt. The unusual design resulted from the appearance and spread of a new mail-and-plate hip defense element referred to as ‘dyzlyq-butluq’, which made the heavy armored Central Asian skirts not that relevant. In view of the armors’ distribution area, they can be labeled as ‘Timurid-type kuyaks’. Conclusions. The replacement of ‘Timurid-type’ armors (with riveted-in plates) from combat practices of Central Asian peoples was caused by a change in the local military-cultural tradition in the aftermath of collapses of the Timurid states throughout the early sixteenth century.

Elizabeth J. Petcu. Review of "The Polyhedrists: Art and Geometry in the Long Sixteenth Century" by Noam Andrews.

Elizabeth J. Petcu. Review of "The Polyhedrists: Art and Geometry in the Long Sixteenth Century" by Noam Andrews.

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.

Shipwrecks in the Azores and Global Navigation (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries): An Overview

AbstractThe strategic importance of the Azores Islands resulted in the formation of a vast post-medieval underwater cultural heritage, consisting of shipwrecks and anchorages. This paper will discuss the scientific potential of this heritage through a presentation of the main shipwreck sites, specifically focusing on two historic ports of the archipelago’s central group where archaeological activity has been particularly intense: Angra, on Terceira Island, and Horta, on Fayal Island. The former was the main port of call for Portuguese and Spanish navigation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the latter was an important Atlantic port for British navigation from the end of the seventeenth century onward and for American fleets during the nineteenth century.

Giving the Devil His Diu: Malik Ayyaz, the Estada da India and Reassessing Comparative Naval Power in the Early Modern Indian Ocean

The 1509 Battle of Diu is regularly cited as a definitive example of European naval superiority over the Asian powers of the Indian Ocean. Some authors, like the late Jan Glete, have gone so far as to assert that, after Diu, no Indian Ocean state was ever able to challenge the Portuguese at sea again. Yet these analyses ignore that Portugal’s primary adversary in India, Gujarati governor Malik Ayyaz, not only survived the battle of Diu but also continued to wage a private war against the Estada da India until shortly before his death in 1522. This article examines Ayyaz’s war against Portugal from beginning to end and uses his career as a lens through which to offer a re-evaluation of Gujarati naval strength in the early sixteenth century. Its findings suggest that the conflict between Ayyaz and the Estada da India was ultimately a draw, with neither side possessing a meaningful technological or military advantage over the other.

Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės viešieji notarai XVI amžiaus kryžkelėse: nuo 1512 metų Europos notariato nuostatų iki Antrojo Lietuvos Statuto

The Imperial Notary Ordinance, which began being written in the late fifteenth century, not only further cemented the statements set forth in Ars notariae, but also fundamentally transformed the status of notariat, declaring the notariat a governmental institution. According to the opinion of Notariat experts, this Ordinance that was declared in 1512 is fundamental for having the main professional characteristics of the contemporary Latin notariat. This similarity also outlines the continuity of modern European notariat.Lithuanian society in the beginning of the sixteenth century lived with a notariat that was not fully developed, since, only after receiving the right from the Pope in 1501, public notaries began being nominated in the Vilnius diocese. During the first half of the sixteenth century, the development of notariat was visible particularly in the dioceses of GDL. This was to be expected, knowing that the notariat was established in GDL through the Church. Notariat developed in the secular government only as much as there was cooperation with and participation of diocesal notaries public, by serving in the office of a ruler or a voivod. We can observe a tendency in the beginning of the sixteenth century of secularization of the notaries public – they would switch to service in a purely secular office after leaving the clergy and/or becoming supporters of the Reformation. At the same time, similarly to Poland, in the later half of fifteenth century and onwards, Lithuania saw the rise of notaries with apostolic mandate, which declared the primacy of the Pope’s rule. We think, that the Notary Ordinance of 1512, could have had impact (negative?) to the further development of GDL notariat. Firstly by raising the questions of political loyalty and personal choice in regards to which highest authority to obey – the Pope’s or the emperor’s, ecclesiastical or secular.During research we acknowledge that both the First and the Second Statutes of Lithuania could have been partially influenced by the Notary Ordinance by notaries public participating in their conception. Thanks to them, articles regarding the Roman law have been created. The removal of Latin language as the written language of the courts by the Second Statute was not beneficial to the Roman notariat and a serious challenge to the notaries public and to the further development of notariat in GDL. The New Statute became an opportunity for the secular notariat to form as a legal institute. However, for it to happen there had to be further political decisions in support of it, there had to have been the right conditions and enough time to prepare qualified specialists and for the society to be prepared to trust those specialists.

Realist teachings: a chronology of Tacitism in the northern Netherlands

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to present a chronological overview of the political reception of Tacitus’ works in the northern Low Countries from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century. Most of the types of Tacitism proposed in the introduction are represented in the Dutch context in one way or another. A characteristic of the Dutch Tacitism(s) as discussed here is that they appear to be at the heart of the connections between academia and government in the Republic, and especially in the province of Holland. Together with a fascination for reason of state (whether accepting or rejecting it), Tacitism often carries aspects of style and taste which give it a ‘risky’ fascination that is part of the explanation of its success and influence among selected (predominantly elite) readerships.

Thinking with two heads: The poetics of asat in early-modern India

In early modern India, and particularly South India—from roughly the sixteenth century until the eighteenth—a new literary vogue emerged in all major literary traditions (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Persian). With remarkable salience, we find verses built around absurdity of various kinds and modes. Sometimes it is a matter of pushing the existing literary conventions and figures to an impossible extreme. In other cases, we find a fascination with asymmetry, disjunction, skewed causality, and irrealis or counter-factual linguistic forms. Although such experiments with absurdity have precedents in classical kāvya, the evident consistency and intertextual relations among outlandish poems in this period are very striking, as is the fact that the theoreticians of poetics found it necessary to posit a grammar for them (including for poems based on asat, that is, non-existence or sheer impossibility). This essay explores the forms and logical underpinnings that this fashion for the bizarre assumed; we also offer a tentative explanation for the new trend. The prabandha-based poems of absurdity need to be distinguished from the coded texts known in Kannada as beḍagina vacana and in early Hindi as ulaṭbaṃsi, in which an upside-down or inside-out world is created, the goal being to arrest intellection altogether. We also show the distinction between the poetry of the absurd in the early modern texts and the European Dada movement, which aims at unravelling language and enshrines a principle of pure randomality in the choice of words.

‘That golden sentence of Tacitus’: Tacitean quotation as the medium of political knowledge in Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso

ABSTRACT Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612) provides us with a satirically inflected view of how Tacitean quotation was used throughout the sixteenth century as a medium of political knowledge. A detailed analysis of some Tacitean scenes in Ragguagli will help us to elicit some of the issues underlying the turn to Tacitus in the intellectual climate of the period: the search for truth in a new era of moral relativism; debates about the applicability of ancient maxims to contemporary realities; and the connection between externally acquired techniques and internalized wisdom. In both Ragguagli and Comentarii Tacitus’ characterization of the emperor Galba becomes emblematic of the gulf that can open up between theoretical knowledge and practical understanding. When the same model is used to measure Tacitus’ own unsuccessful tenure of power over Lesbos in Ragguagli, Boccalini presents a case study of how ‘properly’ to make use of Tacitean political insight.

“Fighting Pirates” as a Paradigm

This article analyzes the emergence of the paradigm of “piracy” and “fighting pirates” among the urban elites of the Hanse city of Lübeck in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While recent studies of maritime conflict management in this period have questioned the use of the term “piracy,” this study shows that towns such as Lübeck instrumentalized a discourse on “piracy” to criminalize and marginalize their competitors at a moment of structural economic change. A close reading of the records of the Lübeck Bergenfahrer, a guild of merchants trading to Norway, demonstrates how this concept was mobilized to justify actors’ own violence as a struggle against so-called pirates and thus to stabilize group identities. The notion of “fighting pirates” gradually became a paradigm for urban elites like the Bergenfahrer, representing their social coherence as communities of violence.

Voicing the Veiled: The Sovereignty and Influence of the Mughal Matriarchs

Voicing the Veiled: The Sovereignty and Influence of the Mughal Matriarchs

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.

“What Would We Not Have Eaten?” Animals and Disgust in Colonial Starvation Narratives

ABSTRACT “What would we not have eaten?” Jean de Léry posited, remembering the undesirable animals and foodstuffs he consumed while starving on a ship in the Atlantic in 1558. This was a question rhetorically present in nearly all the starvation accounts in sixteenth century colonization narratives. When colonizers starved in the Americas during their attempts to settle, they reported the hierarchy of animals they ate, from the most to the least “edible,” often arguing that in desperation, one would eat anything at all. However, edibility, like taste, is as culturally constructed as it is physiological. This article looks at these accounts of starvation and presents an analysis of these hierarchies of edibility and disgust as phenomena intrinsically linked with cultural identities and integral to developing colonial thought processes. When Europeans reported eating “disgusting” animals, they said just as much about themselves and their shifting identities as the animals.

Sailing the ocean of nature: Francesca Fontana Aldrovandi in early modern Bologna

ABSTRACT The history of science is increasingly directing its attention to the diachronic examination of women's involvement within spaces dedicated to scientific inquiry. While this field of study boasts rich and meticulous historiography, delving into the sixteenth century leaves the impression of encountering either a noticeable absence of women in the realm of natural history or an underexplored period in this regard. Undoubtedly, within the Italian context of the time, the cultural milieu shaped by the Counter-Reformation further heightened the social challenges faced by women. Notwithstanding these challenges, a noteworthy female figure emerges in the latter half of the sixteenth century – Francesca Fontana, the second wife of the natural history scholar Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). From an overall view of the sources, Fontana seems to assume a pivotal role in the realization of collections and works attributed to the eminent naturalist. This study aims to delineate the role played by Fontana within Aldrovandi's ‘officina naturale.’ By examining the available documents in a chronological order, my aim is to provide insights into the evolution of her education and her practical and technical skills, harnessed in the pursuit of her husband's enterprises and scholarly contributions.

Wanwuyiti and Finding God in All Things: A Comparative Study between Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation and Ignatian Spirituality

It seems that the early Jesuits misinterpreted the key Neo-Confucian terms taiji/li from an Aristotelian perspective in the seventeenth century, thereby leading to a dialogical failure in their initial encounter with Neo-Confucian tradition. What necessitates interreligious dialogue today is a pluralistic stance that deems all religious quests worthy in their own context. Therefore, this paper renews the dialogue between two spiritual traditions, long overdue, by reading two representative texts, side by side, from each tradition on self-cultivation: Reflections on Things at Hand (twelfth century) and The Spiritual Exercises (sixteenth century). The comparison showcases that the notion of “wanwuyiti”, a concomitant of the Confucian ren, is tantamount to a religious imperative for human ethical engagements, and the Ignatian axiom “Finding God in All Things” energizes a spiritual self-transformation to forge an intimate bond with God and the world. While Neo-Confucian cultivation focuses on the removal of desires, seeking to maintain “equilibrium” and “centrality”, the Ignatian exercises foreground commitment to “discernment” and “indifference”. The Neo-Confucians address human and worldly affairs in a procedural manner, with ever-broadening horizons, to establish an orderly society. In contrast, the Ignatian self is directed toward an orderly life to serve, love, and bring ever more to God’s Divine Majesty.

Inside Jesuit Classrooms: Students’ Notebooks from the Austrian Province of the Late Sixteenth Century

Abstract In the sphere of education, early modern Jesuit documents prescribed a large variety of didactical methods. As a result, Jesuit education was perceived as facilitating a dialogue between traditional Scholasticism and humanism or scientific progress. However, complaints from the first half-century of the order indicate that Jesuit schools fell short in terms of their compliance with prescriptive regulations. Indeed, non-Jesuit scholars often considered the order to be conservative traducers of Renaissance scholarship. To assess these contradictory evaluations, this article proposes to scrutinize manuscripts produced by students during their philosophical studies at the colleges of Vienna, Olomouc, and Graz, falling within the timeframe of c. 1580–90. Here, I look to argue that, even before the universal presence of comprehensive Jesuit textbooks, the teaching of philosophy was not only surprisingly unified within the province but new scientific and scholarly developments, including the Gregorian Reform and the debates around Copernican views, were also presented in the Jesuit classroom.

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.

The Reputation of the Anabaptists over the Centuries

ABSTRACT The Anabaptists were condemned in the sixteenth century for theological, social, economic and political reasons, especially after the catastrophe of Münster in 1534–35. Persecution was sometimes intense, though it gradually eased. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, despite persistent memories of Münster, favourable opinion grew. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Anabaptists were still harried for their practice of non-resistance, but praised for their hard work, drawn into the evangelical community of the new world and rehabilitated by historians. In the recent past they have been admired for their pacifism and their pioneering role in a world of religious pluralism.

The Post-Tridentine Controversies at the Louvain Faculty of Theology: The Correspondence between Judocus Tiletanus and Michael Baius (1568)

Abstract Josse Ravesteyn, or Judocus Tiletanus, was promoted as a doctor of theology in 1546, acted as participant in the Council of Trent in 1551, and was appointed as inquisitor-general of the Low Countries in 1559. This temporal triptych alone reflects the precipitous degradation of Christian and civil cohesion in the second half of the sixteenth century and how the responsibilities of theologians accordingly changed. Throughout this period, Louvain, its University and its Faculty of Theology were increasingly called upon to provide their expertise to the various appeasement attempts. Inside the Faculty, Tiletanus was also his colleague Michael Baius’ main theological opponent from 1564 onwards; after the Council of Trent came to an end, the former called upon different levels of authority to have the latter’s works and assertions censured, culminating in Pius V’s 1567 bull Ex omnibus afflictionibus. Seeing however how Baius’ confidence and notoriety were left somewhat unscathed, Tiletanus confronted him directly in a personal correspondence made up of six letters in 1568. This article is the first attempt to determine to what extent the Council shaped Tiletanus’ sense of responsibility as a theologian as well as his relationship with Michael Baius.